About a year back, I talked about some movies that would not have been made if it weren’t for Star Wars. That was far from a complete list, of course, so in honor of Episode IV’s 40th birthday (yes, it’s been 40 years, Gen X-ers) I’ve decided to talk about some more. These have a bit of a different theme though. Last year’s post was mostly about effects and film-making techniques. This year, I’m going to talk more about executives and directors and people— movies that literally would not have been made were it not for George’s “silly little sci-fi film”. Many of the films listed here are made by people who were inspired directly by Star Wars, or are films that have a symbiotic relationship with Star Wars (even more so that Star Trek). These are films, ultimately, that people decided to make due to the success of Star Wars, or due to the power of its film-making.
This is still talking about the Original Trilogy, of course.
01/23/2018
My Favorite Film Scores
valeriemclean1919 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alan Menken, Beauty and the Beast, Elmer Bernstein, Elton John, Film, FIlm music, Hans Zimmer, Howard Ashman, Indiana Jones, Inside Out, John Williams, Junkie XL, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mark Mancina, Michael Giacchino, Moana, Music, Opetaia Foa’i, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rupert Gregson-Williams, Stanley Kubrick, Star Wars, The Lion King, Tim Rice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wonder Woman About Film, About Music 0 Comments
So this post came about because a) I have to push back the other post I was planning for today because I haven’t finished the research for it and b) the film I am focusing on for what is now next week’s post has a particularly iconic and important score in terms of film history. I also really don’t care for it. Not to give too much away, it’s a very bass heavy and monotonous score and not very motivic. Well, it has one motif. Still, I started thinking about what I do like in film scores and that naturally lead me to some movies that I really enjoy the music of.
I’ve talked about music in film before. This list is going to cover films with mainly non-diegetic music, meaning that the music is present in the film, but isn’t happening within the world of the characters. All of these films also have wholly original score, save one notable exception– mostly because saying that Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 have great scores is fairly redundant. I also managed to only repeat one composer (no surprise as to who that was though). The films are listed in chronological order as well, because the films I picked really aren’t a fair comparison to rank.
Let’s get started.
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