"Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds! Lawrence?": La-La Land reissues Danny Elfman's classic Batman score with additional cues

It's a great week to be a fan of the Batman movies. Christopher Nolan confirmed that Christian Bale will reprise his impression of Froggy from The Little Rascals for their third Batman installment together, and La-La Land Records announced yesterday that it's releasing an expanded reissue of one of my all-time favorite film scores, the rousing 1989 Batman score by Danny Elfman (his third feature-length score for the director he's worked with the most, Tim Burton). That score was a revelation for those of us who were more familiar with Elfman's Oingo Boingo joints than his film music or whose only exposure to his original scores was the Boingo-esque music he composed for the Sledge Hammer! opening titles, Beetlejuice and Midnight Run (I hadn't seen Pee-wee's Big Adventure yet). The Batman score introduced to us a whole new side to the man behind "Dead Man's Party," "Little Girls" and the Weird Science theme.

The two-CD set will debut as an exclusive goodie at La-La Land's booth at next week's San Diego Comic-Con shortly before the label makes it available to everybody on July 27. The reissue will contain an hour and a half's worth of previously unreleased material. Even the brief library music-style cue Elfman wrote for the Joker's Smilex commercial will make it to the expanded edition. The tracks I'm looking forward to the most are rejected cues like an alternate version of the main title theme.

I wonder what the Goddamn Batman would have to say about this eagerly anticipated release on his Twitter page. He'd probably tweet (in two parts, of course), "Threw away Robin's Twilight soundtrack CDs from the CD changer to make room for the never-before-released workout music Elfman wrote for me. Robin, your Twilight CDs are melting inside the Batcave furnace if you need them."

The Batsuit, back in the days before someone with a nipple fetish ruined it.