Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #601
Written 10/31/96, Revised 5/29/06
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Buy it... on any of the equally qualified albums from the
'Monstrous Movie Music' label if you grew up loving those B-rate
atomic-inspired sci-fi flicks of the 1950's.
Avoid it... if even the greater fidelity in sound quality of these
re-recordings won't satisfy your digital era sensibilities.
Monstrous Movie Music: (Compilations) One of the
sensations of the movie music collecting community in 1996 was the
introduction of a series of "Monstrous Movie Music" CDs that are like
few others ever offered in the genre. The CDs contain re-recordings of
classic 1950's and 60's sci-fi B-classics, including Them!, It
Came from Outer Space, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and
Tarantula, among others. These films are highly unlikely to
attract much attention from modern viewers, but for people growing up in
the age when the atomic bomb was blamed for all sorts of bizarre natural
mutations, they were a staple of Saturday afternoon fun. Hollywood just
doesn't seem as interested in showing giant ants attacking Los Angeles
or a giant octopus (minus a few tentacles, of course, as part of
production cost cutting) attacking San Francisco anymore. The scores for
these films were often anonymous because the nature of the films didn't
attract A-list composers with big studio contracts. Among names that you
will recognize, however, are Henri Mancini and Bronislau Kaper. The
original recordings of these scores have rarely made it onto CD, and
when they do, it's often in muddled bootleg form. The market simply
isn't there. But the "Monstrous Movie Music" albums that first hit
stores in 1996 were a whole new concept. Producers Kathleen Mayne and
David Schecter recognized that part of the glory of these scores existed
in how they were recorded, and not just the compositions themselves.
With most re-recordings in the digital era, the obvious temptation is to
make everything sound bigger and better, with a wet atmospheric mix that
mimics the grandest concert hall. On occasion, some of the scores from
this era and genre in Hollywood have been re-recorded in small snippets
on album already, but when beefed up in size from the usual 30 to 50
performers of the original to a whopping 80 to 100 of a modern symphony,
some of the intimate magic of the originals is lost.
To solve this problem, the husband and wife team of
Mayne and Schecter arranged to have an authentically-sized ensemble
perform significant numbers of cues from these films in environments not
much different from those of the originals. With only a few dozen
performers in some cases, microphones were placed in close proximity
with the players and the stage was restricted to a smaller size. With
Masatoshi Misumoto conducting the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Cracow, a
truly authentic recording has been preserved. In some cases, Mayne
reconstructed the arrangements, though even fans of the films will be
hard pressed to find significant flaws in these interpretations. The
resulting performances are impressive in their loyalty to the originals;
the major difference, of course, being the fidelity of the recording and
the producers' ability to provide cues that that have, in some cases,
been lost in their source recordings. The entire endeavor was a labor of
love for the producers, whose attention to detail in the project was so
meticulous that the booklets for each CD are over 30 pages in length.
Their spirit in serving the film music community was so enthusiastic
that they even suggested that fans send them requests for future
recordings. The original two "Monstrous Movie Music" releases received
considerable acclaim in late 1996 and early 1997, including two places
in the top ten film music albums of the year list from Tower Records'
Pulse! magazine, awards from Cinefantastique (the sci-fi movie
magazine), and significant print in Film Score Monthly. In 2000, the
label would follow with a third album highlighted by
Creature From
The Black Lagoon and in 2006, two more albums in the series would
feature
This Island Earth and
Mighty Joe Young in front of
several other lesser known scores on each album. The production quality
of all the albums, as well as the vintage authenticity for these
recordings, continue to impress, and for fans of the genre these
products have no weakness. It's interesting that ten years after the
initial release of the first two "Monstrous Movie Music" albums, there
hasn't been another group attempting the same kind of faithful
reproduction of lost classics in the history of film scores.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Monstrous Movie Music: ****
- More Monstrous Movie Music: ****
