: (Hans Zimmer/Trevor Horn) Reportedly the
first idea for a film that director Barry Levinson had ever wanted to
make,
was a dozen years in the making and just a few weeks
in the crumbling. Hailed as a shining star right before its opening in
1992, the movie teamed Levinson once again with Robin Williams (the
wildly successful pairing from
), Joan
Cusack, and Michael Gambon as an evil "General" (long before stepping
into the role of Dumbledore after the death of Richard Harris in the
Harry Potter franchise). But despite a stunning array of colors and an
equally intriguing set of socio-political ideas,
failed
miserably in its task. It's tale of a family battle over an idyllic toy
factory, a struggle for control of the manufacturing focus between the
benevolent son (Williams), who wants to continue the wholesome nature of
the business, and the militaristic uncle (Gambon), who has grandiose and
insane visions of producing violent, dangerous toys of war. There are
really too many parallels and sub-plots in
to discuss;
themes of espionage and domestic terrorism surely keep the film from
being recommended to children, and Levinson's reasons for making the
picture are still unclear decades years later. The lack of narrative
cohesion in the film leads to a mesmerizing and confusing overall
experience, a problem compounded by the music chosen for its soundtrack.
A series of new age-related avenues were explored in
, with
Enya's dreamy "Ebundae" perfectly summing up the cloudy but distantly
optimistic atmosphere of the story. Levinson had found success in his
work with composer Hans Zimmer for
in 1988, and the
budding composer was asked to provide an extension of Enya's then-super
popular new age sound (along with the vague Celtic tones that often came
with it) in his largely electronic score for
. Like the film,
however, Zimmer's contribution (produced with long-time arranger and
associate Trevor Horn in what was perhaps his most significant
collaborative project in the formative years leading up to the Media
Ventures enterprise) would suffer from a similar lack of purpose or
direction in its development of anything more than a vague atmosphere of
emotional glaze.
Zimmer and Horn split the composing duties on
Toys,
with a handful of other artists contributing to the eclectic sounds of
the score and its adjoining songs. Generally, Zimmer seems to have based
his approach to the music on the joyful atmosphere of Robin Williams'
vision of what the toy factory should be. While seeming to wander
aimlessly at times, the composer contents himself in extending a
friendly hand in the pleasant tone of the score. The opening and closing
song, "The Closing of the Year," begins with a matronly lullaby that
extends into a performance by a children's choir. The popularity of this
song has been surprisingly strong in successive decades, artists such as
Placido Domingo and Sarah Brightman performing it live in concert for
years to come. An elegant, orchestrally backed opera piece serves as
"Alsatia's Lullaby," with a tragic heart (appropriate for Cusack's
character) and beautiful melody. Zimmer goes on to create a primary
theme for the score itself; "Let Joy and Innocence Prevail" contains the
recurring melody that holds the emotional scenes of the film together.
Its simple, easily digestible rhythms and, once again, pleasant tones
are offered in a five minute suite of Media Ventures-styled easy
listening. Some of these ideas from "Let Joy and Innocence Prevail"
(especially with a flute or other real-life solo instrument in the lead)
would resurface in an increasingly mature form in
Beyond Rangoon
two years later. Perhaps the more interesting cues in
Toys for
the majority of Zimmer collectors are those that accompany the sinister
side of the story. The Nazi-like march devised for "The General," with
many darker ideas foreshadowing
The Peacemaker, is one of
uncomplicated minor key alternations in grand electronic style (one that
could easily terrify a young child!), with synthesizers programmed to
such harsh extents that one might wonder if Vangelis was in the room at
the time of recording. Another cue featuring consistent snare use is
"Battle Introduction," in which the good toys, in their impending battle
with the evil toys, are stirred to heroic deeds by a
Rocketeer-like trumpet theme and a Scottish spirit of bagpipes
that further stretches the imagination in the score's unfocused scope.
Reprises of these themes resurface throughout both the film and
commercial album, making the actual total time of unique score material
quite minimal.
Although the Zimmer contributions to
Toys
described above remain interesting, if not at least average in quality
for the composer, the film and its album takes a distinctly sour turn in
the plethora of auxiliary material recorded or adopted for inclusion.
Aside from Enya's yawn-inducing song (by no means a better entry in her
career), listeners also hear a touch of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1 at
the very opening and a Tori Amos performance of "The Happy Worker," a
piece arranged by Trevor Horn. Many of the more bizarre elements in
Toys are indeed the work of Horn, who also, along with Bruce
Wooley, writes another pop-like, distortion-laced song, "Workers," for
enhanced punch. They also co-write "The Mirror Song," a centerpiece
number in the film that has an equally toxic pop-culture effect on the
film and album. The hideous dance number "Welcome to the Pleasuredome"
(mixed with snippets of score from the battle sequences) is another
regrettably noisy cue, although this one has at least become the theme
song of a well-known professional wrestler in Japan since its appearance
in
Toys. The reprise that closes out the album further dilutes
the product with more pop wailing and disintegration of Zimmer's music
into an attempt to further tap into mainstream appeal. When you put all
of this material together, whether considering the film or album, you
get a curious sense of dissatisfaction that seems built to frustrate
Zimmer collectors more than the mainstream. The album for
Toys
was clearly aimed away from score collectors, partly because of the
obnoxious non-score material throughout but also due to the inclusion of
a few snippets of dialogue over score tracks, too. Ironically, one of
the guilty pleasures of the commercial album is Grace Jones' possibly
creepy vocal performance of Zimmer's title piece, "Let Joy and Innocence
Prevail." Many movie-goers will recognize Jones, the tall and sleek
African-American model in
Conan the Destroyer and
A View to a
Kill (and a popular icon, interestingly, in the male homosexual
musical community) as an actress, but her raspy singing voice tells the
story of
Toys with a distinctly grisly touch of fantasy. You
can't help but cringe when you hear her ferociously perform the lyric
"...for I am fearless" at the 3:46 mark. Instead of being comforted by
her performance, you hear the person who Arnold Schwarzenegger deemed as
the only female co-star who was "too tough" for him, and her tone is
thus a bizarre fit for Zimmer's fluffy instrumental backing.
Overall,
Toys is a wildly incongruous and
curious failure. It's one of those rare Zimmer works that sold so well
on album in stores that you saw it overflowing in used-CD bins for a
decade, and yet you rarely ever heard the score discussed in film music
venues. Almost entirely shunned by score collectors,
Toys is a
venture to be explored with care if you are an enthusiast of the
composer's superior early music, for it could either irritate you
greatly with its diversity or become a guilty-pleasure mainstay of the
portion of your Zimmer collection dedicated to this electronic period.
Relief for fans of Zimmer and the concept came with the release of the
second volume of the composer's "Follow Your Dreams" compilation albums
in 1997. The series of two albums was supposed to be followed by a
third, but that never happened, and there has always remained debate
about whether Zimmer had a hand in helping this source material escape
into the secondary market so that bootleggers could produce these and
subsequent Media Ventures "promotional" compilations. As one could
expect, the bootleggers immediately took the score-only cues from those
compilations and added them to the salvageable material from the
commercial album and created a shorter, but score-centric presentation
of
Toys. The first "Follow Your Dreams" album, sharing time with
Mark Mancina's early scores, was the source for the instrumental
backgrounds for "The Closing of the Year" on these immediate bootlegs.
From the second compilation album came four additional cues from
Toys, all of which being original Zimmer, non-song work. An
extended recording of "The General" without dialogue, a version of
"Battle Introduction" also without dialogue, the larger instrumental mix
of "Let Joy and Innocence Prevail" under Grace Jones' performance, and
an instrumental version of the opening "The Closing of the Year" song
are all available on that album in excellent sound quality.
Unfortunately, this bootleg still has Trevor Horn's more unlistenable
pop material sprinkled throughout, so be forewarned that you may
encounter challenging passages no matter which route you take with
Toys. If you desire the bootleg, then it probably wouldn't hurt
to also find the commercial release because of its historically
reasonable used price (as low as $1.00). That said, if not for the
operatic theme for Alsatia, your best material from
Toys is that
which appears on "Follow Your Dreams, Volume II." Still, the entire
package yields frustration because of how it was compiled for the film,
so be sure of your convictions in regards to early Zimmer music before
taking the plunge on this one.
@Amazon.com: CD or
Download
- Music as Written for the Film: **
- Music as Heard on the 1992 Geffen Album: *
- Music as Heard on the 1997 Bootlegs: ***
- Overall: **
| Bias Check: |
For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.84
(in 121 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.96
(in 298,225 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
