New TV Scores on CD

Just uploaded are a trio of soundtrack reviews from three fine composers:

- Sean Callery’s 24: Redemption (Varese), released in conjunction with Fox' DVD of the pre-season teleplay.

- Joe Harnell’s The Incredible Hulk: Prometheus, Parts One and Two (Five Jays Music), featuring the complete scores for this two-part arc.

- Bear McCreary’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (La-La Land Records), gathering music from Season 1 as well as material leading towards Season 2.

Coming next: two naughty films.

And imminent: book reviews of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, and Lalo Schifrin: Entretiens avec Georges Michel.



- MRH

Music from TV

Composer Bear McCreary keeps surprising me with his refreshing stylistic fusions and instrumental combinations in film and TV, and La-La Land’s new album features all sorts of giddy cues from the Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka series. This is a long and very fun CD, peppered with plenty of retro eighties sounds reminiscent of vintage synth gear.

Also reviewed is the second Bionic Woman [BW] album from Five Jays Music (limited to 1500 copies), featuring the entire score (plus bonus cuts) from Joe Harnell’s The Return of Bigfoot Part 2. Detractors will likely brand the music as cheesy, but they’re dead wrong about the music by the composer best remembered as the brains who wrote ‘The Lonely Man’ theme from The Incredible Hulk.

Harnell was a very underrated composer who wrote a huge amount of music for TV – and this is one of his best.

There’s a broad generation of ex-kids who watched the Bigfoot episodes (one that aired in 1975 on the Six Million Dollar Man [SMDM], and a 1976 follow-up crossover episode split between SMDM and spinoff series BW) and were totally engrossed in the gripping comic book tale of the famous bionic lovers re-teaming again to A) prove Bigfoot (Ted Cassidy) exists, and B) stop a volcano from exploding and ruining the world.

There’s aliens (Stephanie Powers sporting the biggest hairdo of her career), a magical serum, Lee Majors muttering “Sass…qvatch” while dying, a glowing psychedelic revolving tunnel in a mountain, and a TV remote that saves the world.

How can anyone resist?

Until Universal and the Weinsteins come to terms with the rights of both series, BW and SMDM will still remain unavailable to North American audiences (crappy 2007 BW remake excepted) on DVD.

That leaves us the albums (the first CD being Kill Oscar Parts 1 and 3), and not only is Harnell’s music still immensely evocative of the series, it’s a great fusion of funky orchestral urban jazz. Every theme every fan remembers from BW is here, and the score’s richness certainly leaves one hungry for a third CD (and if they all help convince the lazy parties to coordinate DVD releases of both TV series, even better).



- MRH

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Interim Post Between Hair Pulling

More than 12 hours have been spent this week setting up three computers with three different operating systems - Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP - on three aging computers so each Dodo can talk to each other via Microsoft's 'seamless' networking protocols. The eureka moment finally arrived close to 11pm, and then a new idiocy appeared: Adobe Acrobat Installer popping up and starting up whenever a folder like My Documents is opened, or even a program.

Yay.

So, while the main machine is being scoured with anti-viral, anti-trojan, anti-rabbit rubbish software, I can at least point you to the uploads of late Friday, which include the first two DVD reviews of Anchor Bay's life-sized skull for Masters of Horror Season 2 - Valerie on the Stairs, and We All Scream for Ice Cream - and CD reviews for two great Joe Harnell soundtrack CDs: The Bionic Woman (original series), and The Incredible Hulk.

The Bionic Woman CD feature complete scores for "Kill Oscar" (Parts 1 & 2), and the Hulk CD beholds the series Pilot, plus "A Death in the Family." Many familiar cues that will easily rekindle favourite moments from the classic and cult TV series. Given they're in complete form, it's a fair bet the archives of the late composer may hold further scores, and reinforce his stature as an unsung scoring hero, although sci-fi fans likely know the composer from his fun orchestral scores for the first V mini-series.

Hopefully the server's buggery isn't severe (I'm dreading a needed reformatting and reinstall of XP in September already) and the next reviews will be up within 24 hours: Mark Snow's X-Files I Want to Believe, Dominic Frontiere's The Outer Limits, and CBS Video's DVD release of The Invaders, Season 1 (which Frontiere also scored).

The real tough part is getting used to closely bunched smooshie keys on the laptop (nevertheless, Bless you, MJD). The easy part is loathing Microsoft and pretty much most software manufacturers who've followed Vista's design and have embraced the idiocies of Bloatware

You know, if memory serves correct, Windows 386 was under 14 MB. Ugly, yes. But SMALL.



- MRH