Monday, August 17, 2009

The Judge Dredd trailer music is like Jerry Goldsmith's two-minute Ramones song

In this 1999 photo, Jerry Goldsmith tells a UCLA film music class that if you ever run into one of those record company execs who are responsible for those 'Music from and Inspired by...' collections of songs that aren't even in the movie, feel free to kick the shit out of him.
I included the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's out-of-print performance of the late film music legend's kickass theme for the much-maligned 1995 Judge Dredd feature film's trailer in one of this month's A Fistful of Soundtracks mini-playlists. I've also cobbled together the trailer theme and some photos of Goldsmith at work as a conductor for my not-so-active YouTube channel--it's the first video I ever made on Adobe Premiere, which I've used since 1999 to edit together anything I record for AFOS. At under a minute, the hard-hitting, energetic theme is way too short. A film composer who's got the brass ones to tackle Goldsmith ought to take this too-brief Goldsmith masterpiece and write an expanded concert version.

Most listeners' first exposure to the Judge Dredd trailer theme was the trailer itself, but I first noticed the theme when it was used in the 1997 Lost in Space teaser trailer, where it wasn't drowned out so much by gunfire noise and a shouty Sylvester Stallone that you could barely hear Goldsmith's music.

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