Attach the block: Black Mirror: White Christmas imagines a cold future where people can be blocked in offline relationships like on Twitter

Goddammit, Black Mirror! Why do you have to be so amazing? Black Mirror isn't just the best anthology franchise currently on the air. It also contains some of the craftiest sci-fi storytelling on TV in 2014, as exemplified by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker's feature-length Black Mirror: White Christmas, a delightfully twisted piece of non-traditional holiday entertainment that premiered in the U.K. on Channel 4 last night. White Christmas, which guest-starred Jon Hamm and a couple of Game of Thrones alums, Oona Chaplin and Natalia Tena, feels more like a feature film than a typical Black Mirror episode, which is why I'm writing the title in italics instead of in between quotation marks.

I've written about Black Mirror before, after it was added to Netflix in America, and as someone who stubbornly refuses to become a smartphone zombie like the male smartphone zombies in my family, I just love how much twisted and subversive fun the show has with exploring the dark side of technology. Want to live inside your phone? Well, you get your wish, but you have to part with a little thing called free will. Want to block your significant other from your marriage or any future interactions you have with him or her, just like how you can block some anonymous troll on Twitter? Well, here's the tech to block that bastard, but that person's going to be driven so crazy by being blocked that the bastard will come back later to murder your entire family.

I'm making it sound like Black Mirror is the kind of completely technophobic piece of shit Michael Crichton used to crank out. But the writing in the six previous Black Mirror episodes and White Christmas is more nuanced than that. Black Mirror's attitude isn't "Technology is evil." The show's attitude is more like "People are evil and fucked up, and when they have all this technological power in their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Not every gadget on the show is a detriment. There's one gizmo from the show I'd want to have, and that's the digital drawing board Hayley Atwell uses to create illustrations and graphic designs in "Be Right Back." But as for all the other gadgets, they seem appealing at first because of the immense power they give their users--like the "Entire History of You" device known as "the grain," which allows people to record everything from their workdays to their bedroom sessions with an implant in their skulls--but then they lose their appeal for me because of the horrible mistakes Brooker's characters make with these devices.

The first and third segments in White Christmas' triptych of interconnected horror stories about technology made me notice that there are never any healthy romantic relationships on Black Mirror. They all end badly. (At times, Black Mirror feels like the serious sci-fi version of many of Aziz Ansari's more recent stand-up routines, which have been based on extensive research he did about how much technology has changed relationships and romantic interactions.) Mankind's inability to contain its greed or keep its addiction to technology in moderation poisons everything, especially relationships. Even the original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Brooker, was less cynical about relationships impacted by machines. When William Shatner and Patricia Breslin escaped the clutches of Satan's fortune-telling machine at the end of "Nick of Time," you knew their marriage was going to turn out okay. That's never the case with any relationship on Black Mirror.

The star of Mad Men, who portrays in White Christmas a futuristic dating coach who, of course, is unable to control the horrible outcome of one such ill-fated relationship, is the Kendrick Lamar of both American and British TV. He appears on everything. (Oh, look, he's on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret! Now there he is on Parks and Rec, as the only employee of Leslie Knope's who's more incompetent than Jerry!) In White Christmas, I like how Brooker and director Carl Tibbetts got Hamm to tap into his comedic side, as seen in countless comedy podcasts, his 30 Rock guest shots and Bridesmaids, instead of doing nothing but brood a la Don Draper for the entire Christmas special (all the brooding during the special is left to Rafe Spall as a man who receives the aforementioned "block" from his girlfriend, who's played by Salem star Janet Montgomery). Hamm's so skilled at both anchoring Brooker's stories and injecting levity into them (his unreliable narration is the funniest part of the first White Christmas segment) that had Brooker wanted to go old-school instead and have a host introduce each story on Black Mirror, Hamm would have been the perfect Black Mirror host/narrator.

As a viewer of several comic book-inspired shows that are attempting to build shared universes of their own by dropping one reference to either the source material or a sister project after another (with his giddy habit of giving criminals colorful villain names that are the exact same names as their DC Comics print counterparts, Cisco from the CW's The Flash should be called "Mario Sue," as in "mare-ee-oh"), I'm getting kind of Easter-egged out. White Christmas is full of Easter eggs that reference previous Black Mirror episodes--at one point, Spall is seen flipping through TV shows that were featured in "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Waldo Moment," as a sort of stocking stuffer from Brooker, in addition to this whole feature-length Christmas present he's written--but I don't mind those Easter eggs.

The possibility in White Christmas that all these Black Mirror stories take place in the same universe is interesting, and it reminds me of how the '90s version of The Outer Limits used to take its most well-received episodes and create sequels to them or intertwine those episodes' self-contained continuities with other episodes' continuities. In fact, Black Mirror is essentially an Outer Limits for the age of Google Glass and digital footprints, but better, stronger, faster. And--despite not containing any bug-eyed monsters or Cronenbergian creatures--scarier.

Both seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix. There haven't been any announcements yet regarding Netflix making White Christmas available to American viewers. Parts of White Christmas are reminiscent of the sci-fi-tinged Batman: The Animated Series episodes "His Silicon Soul," in which a neglected robot clone of Batman believes he's the real Batman, and "Perchance to Dream," in which Bruce Wayne wakes up to discover his parents were never murdered. Excerpts from the late Shirley Walker's superb score from "Perchance to Dream" can be heard during "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" and "Hall H" on AFOS.

Batman: The Animated Series turns 20 this week, so "AFOS Prime" celebrates its Knightly brand of stylish action and dashing score music

I got so busy producing a weekly vlog that nobody watches and has become a little less fun to work on that I almost forgot that 20 years ago this week, Batman: The Animated Series debuted on Fox on September 5, 1992 with an episode about Catwoman ("The Cat and the Claw, Part I") to whet the appetites of viewers who had seen Batman tussle with a much kinkier version of Selina Kyle in Tim Burton's controversial Batman Returns over the summer.

The B:TAS crew was more subtle and clever than Burton about sneaking adult content into their version of Batman. Without attracting the attention of parents' groups and conservatives--the wet blankets of America--like Burton did in Batman Returns, the B:TAS crew got away with sneaking in elements like a giant vagina attacking Batman, which producer Bruce Timm claimed was unintentional, and a lesbian couple: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy (maybe B:TAS got away with so much also because it was kind of under-the-radar compared to Burton's movies, which were exposed to a larger international audience).

B:TAS is a show I dug so much as a high-schooler and is one of the few shows I tried to collect DVD box sets of (and never finished doing so) back when I was employed, I could afford to buy DVD box sets and people actually bought DVDs. Because of its 20th anniversary, A Fistful of Soundtracks' "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks will begin streaming several selections from La-La Land Records' recent second volume of B:TAS' well-crafted score cues next week.

I think I've spoken enough about the original music on the show ("Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack: A Walker to remember" from December 2008 and "A little Knight music: The second Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack from La-La Land is even better than the first" from a couple of months ago), so I want to say a few words about the show itself. Both B:TAS and another animated Fox show, The Simpsons, ignited my love for smartly written animation and made me want to write for animation or comics someday. On-screen, Doctor Who star David Tennant once memorably told '80s Doctor Who star Peter Davison--both in character and as a fan of the Davison era of the show--that "You were my Doctor." In a similar fashion, a certain generation of viewers considers Adam West to be their Batman. Though West was a great comedic Batman, Kevin Conroy's take on the Dark Knight remains my favorite on-screen incarnation of the character.

And as us admirers of B:TAS celebrate the show's 20th anniversary, we're not just celebrating two decades of terrific animated TV by the likes of Timm, Eric Radomski, Alan Burnett and Paul Dini and staffers who passed on after the show's run like composers Shirley Walker (whose B:TAS work Bear McCreary frequently cites as a major influence on his TV scoring career) and Harvey R. Cohen and director Boyd Kirkland. We're also celebrating two decades of Conroy's voice work as Batman. I never expected the Julliard-trained Conroy to continue to voice Batman about a decade and a half after B:TAS stopped production, but there he still is, pretending to rough up motherfuckers as the Dark Knight in DC Animated Universe feature films and video games.

Kevin Conroy (Photo source: Esquire)

Though West underplayed his Batman quite well, and Michael Keaton managed to bring an interesting stamp to both the Bruce Wayne and Batman halves of the character despite the massive constraints of his difficult-to-walk-around-and-act-in costume, Conroy, who was far from a comics fan, outdid both West and Keaton by rethinking how the character spoke on-screen.

"As soon as [the producers] described his schizophrenic lifestyle, it bugged me," recalled Conroy to Esquire recently. "I thought, Wait a minute, he is the Bill Gates of Gotham. He is the most eligible bachelor. Everyone knows who he is. And he puts on a cape, and no one recognizes him? Come on."

Conroy, one of 75 actors who auditioned for the part, decided to give Batman two slightly different voices, "fundamentally altering the legacy of a comic book he had only passing knowledge of," as Ali Taylor Lange wrote in the Esquire piece on Conroy. As Batman, Conroy opted for raspy, mysterious and dashing--because of that badass voice, guys like me wanted to be like him, while many of the show's female viewers ended up wanting to do him--while in businessman/philanthropist mode as Bruce, he came up with a more relaxed voice, but without sounding too foppish or cartoony.

There's more to that dual-voiced reading than raspy-vs.-relaxed though. The psychological homework that Conroy did to distinguish his take on the character was as well-thought-out as all the other aspects of B:TAS that elevated it from standard Saturday morning superhero fare to an unconventional and sophisticated superhero cartoon that appealed to adults.

"If he sounds that different, where does the voice come from? It has to come from the pain," said Conroy to Esquire. "I decided that the Bruce Wayne persona, the public persona, is the performance, and the Batman character is who he is when he is most natural. When he's putting on the cape, he is becoming himself."

A little Knight music: The second Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack from La-La Land is even better than the first

As Christopher Nolan wraps up his immensely popular live-action version of Batman with next week's release of The Dark Knight Rises, La-La Land Records is revisiting the "dark swashbuckler" sound of the Nolan movies' small-screen predecessor, Batman: The Animated Series, with the label's second collection of the landmark show's score cues by the late Shirley Walker and her staff of skilled composers.

In 2008, when La-La Land released the first B:TAS soundtrack (highlights from this two-CD set can be heard during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "AFOS Prime" block), I wrote, "Though this release is loaded with over two hours of music, it's missing Walker's memorable Catwoman theme from 'The Cat and the Claw, Part I,' the first B:TAS ep that ever aired, Carl Johnson's lively score from the excellent 'Beware the Gray Ghost' ep with special guest voice Adam West, and [Michael] McCuistion's Lawrence of Arabia-style epic score from the 'Demon's Quest' two-parter, which gives me hope about a Volume 2 from La-La Land."

Volume 2 is finally here--the first few copies are being sold at La-La Land's booth at this weekend's San Diego Comic-Con before the four-CD set becomes available on Thursday--and cues from "The Cat and the Claw," "Beware the Gray Ghost" and "The Demon's Quest" are indeed on the album. After taking a look at the abbreviated Volume 2 track listing that the World's Finest fansite posted on its blog, the batch of B:TAS eps that are represented on Volume 2 is more impressive to me than the first volume's, even though one of those eps is the abysmally animated and extremely kid-friendly "I've Got Batman in My Basement," widely regarded as the series' worst ep and derided by lead B:TAS showrunner Bruce Timm, who told Cinefantastique magazine in 1994 that "I can't even watch ['I've Got Batman.'] It's the epitome of what we don't want to do with Batman."

"The Cat and the Claw," "Beware the Gray Ghost" and "The Demon's Quest" are joined on Volume 2 by series high points like the Emmy-winning Mr. Freeze revamp "Heart of Ice," "Feat of Clay," "Almost Got 'Im" and "Harley and Ivy," an ep that's even more popular than "Heart of Ice." Penned by "Heart of Ice" writer Paul Dini, the sharply written first-time pairing of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, who are referred to in Dini and Chip Kidd's 1998 coffee table book Batman: Animated as "the Thelma & Louise of the supervillain set," was so popular it spawned a 2004 DC miniseries from the trio of Dini, Timm and their fellow New Batman Adventures and Superman: The Animated Series staffer Shane Glines and tons of steamy Harley and Ivy fan art by Glines and many others.

Glines recently posted his character designs from a Harley and Ivy animated series that failed to get off the ground in the early '00s. You'd have to be either really, really stupid or brain-dead to say no to a Harley and Ivy animated series.

Maybe the person who said no to the Harley and Ivy spinoff is the same network executive who rejected "Harley and Ivy" as the first ep to air during B:TAS' brief run on Fox's nighttime lineup in the middle of its first season.

"We wanted ['Harley and Ivy'] as our first prime time show, and Fox was going to run it. Then a Fox executive saw it and said, 'What the hell is this? Batman's not in this episode. He's only in it at the end? The whole episode is two girls running around in their underwear. There's no boy appeal here,'" recalled Dini to Cinefantastique in 1994. "I said, 'Well maybe not any boys you know.'"

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn in a scene from B:TAS' "Harley and Ivy" episode that's too unappealing for boys (Photo source: World's Finest Online)

The largely comical and nicely crafted score for "Harley and Ivy" was provided by Walker, McCuistion, future Justice League main title theme composer Lolita Ritmanis and Peter Davison, a different Peter Davison from the British actor who starred as The Fifth Doctor on Doctor Who. The late Boyd Kirkland, who directed "Harley and Ivy" and came up with the fan-favorite scene where the duo responds to a car full of douchey catcallers in classic Gotham Girl fashion, was proud of the layout work on "Poison Oakey" and her new sidekick (and possibly lover) that was done by the Japanese studio TMS, one of many foreign studios that Timm's creative staff farmed out the animation work to.

(Photo source: World's Finest Online)

But sometimes, there were episodes that didn't meet the B:TAS staff's expectations like "Harley and Ivy" did. When "The Laughing Fish," which is also part of the second album, came back to Timm's crew with animation by the Korean studio Dong Yang that Timm found to be underwhelming, he turned to Walker and asked her to do with her score what Dong Yang failed to accomplish with the kind of animation Timm wanted for his more-menacing-than-usual vision of the Joker in "The Laughing Fish."

(Photo source: World's Finest Online)

"I asked her to make ['The Laughing Fish'] sound like a horror film. Not a forties Boris Karloff film, but like Aliens or The Exorcist, with really dissonant, nonmelodic music," said Timm in the Batman: Animated book. "At the time I had just read a piece about Psycho and it never dawned on me before, but there are no woodwinds or brass in that film. The entire score is done with strings. And I started thinking that might be kind of a neat thing to do with this show, just play everything stripped down and haunting.

"There's a full symphonic orchestra in there, but a lot of the earlier cues are just moaning violas," continued Timm. "From the first moment the Joker shows up, even though he's acting funny and wacky, Shirley has the strings doing something really strange. They're not playing his silliness, they're playing the underlying threat of what he's doing. It kicks the scene up a notch in terms of tension. It's one of our most unusual scores and it works really well."

Timm's simpatico working relationship with Walker and her composing team was a reason why the music on B:TAS was so effective, even when it wasn't present in several scenes.

"In animation, it's real typical to want the music to be there to sort of cover up the holes and make you feel like there's no air and no space," said Walker to Cinefantastique in 1994. "I think part of the visceral success of the Batman show is the fact that we put you on edge by making you uncomfortable with silence occasionally. It sets the show apart from a lot of the cartoon music that's being done."

Shirley Walker

Even though through my copies of Warner Bros.' B:TAS DVDs, I can easily check out the B:TAS scoring team's work on "Harley and Ivy," "The Laughing Fish" and the other Fox-era eps that are represented on the La-La Land compilations, it's much nicer to be able to hear the cues in their purest form, sans sound effects. Volume 2 also comes with eight different versions of the opening and closing title themes for B:TAS, which was the first of WB Animation's various Batman series (the next series will be the CG-animated Beware the Batman, which I, a Pinoy viewer, am especially looking forward to because the Dark Knight is being voiced by Pinoy actor Anthony Ruivivar from Third Watch). As a fan of Timm's "Dark Deco" take on Batman, I can't wait to get my slightly dark but not-quite-Deco mitts on Volume 2, another musical memento of a classic show that raised the bar for both small-screen American animation and small-screen animation scoring.

March Madness March of the Day: "Theme from Human Target" by Bear McCreary

"Bear McCreary's Christopher Chance theme is as important to that character as the Raiders March is to Indiana Jones, the Imperial March to Darth Vader, or Jerry Goldsmith's 'It's A Long Road' theme for the Rambo character," said a Human Target fan in an online petition where he called for Fox to bring back Jonathan E. Steinberg and the Walking Dead scorer as the showrunner/composer duo on Human Target during its second and unsurprisingly final season.

Although it bore little resemblance to the terrific and psychologically complex Vertigo master-of-disguise comic it was based on, the much more straightforward TV version of Human Target, particularly in its first and best season, was an enjoyable action drama in the vein of Burn Notice and Leverage. But it was far more globally minded than the confined-to-Miami Burn Notice (shot on location in Miami) and the confined-to-Boston Leverage (shot in Portland, Oregon, which poses as Boston and other cities, much like how Human Target's Vancouver homebase was disguised--a la the comic book version of Chance--as San Francisco and other locales). So in the music department, Steinberg, who once said his globetrotting and martial arts-heavy version of Human Target was built out of the DNA of the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones films he grew up watching, encouraged McCreary to think big and epic.

"The real thrill of scoring Human Target comes from the unprecedented creative freedom I’ve been given to create the kind of sweeping, thematic and adventurous score largely absent from both the small and large screen in recent years. And while the heart of the score is old school, its [sic] not a throwback or a parody," wrote McCreary in his blog post about working on Human Target's pilot episode. "My goal was to create a continuation of classic orchestral scores, not a regurgitation of them."

McCreary's score music, from the 33-second main title march that trumpeted Chance's heroics to the themes he wrote for each love interest or villain, sounded superb. It was reminiscent of the dashing-sounding work of the late Shirley Walker, whom McCreary idolizes, and her staff of composers on Batman: The Animated Series, and it was accomplished on an amazingly large scale, despite a limited network TV budget (snowy Vancouver as not-exactly-snowy SF... again?!). Human Target's first season featured music performed by a 60-piece orchestra or larger, like in the series highlight "Christopher Chance," both the last episode before Steinberg and McCreary's exit and the last good episode (other than a Steinberg-penned second-season ep that reunited Mark Valley's eccentric and remorseful assassin-turned-bodyguard with Lennie James' unrepentant thug Baptiste, his ally-turned-nemesis-turned-ally).

One thing I enjoyed about the first-season Human Target opening title sequence, which evoked Human Target's comic book roots and was produced by the highly esteemed Imaginary Forces title design studio of Mad Men fame and directed by Karin Fong, was how it was animated and edited to the rhythms of McCreary's classy and cinematic-sounding march.

"This perfect timing between music and images was achieved because I actually wrote the music first, months in advance, and delivered it to the animators as a guideline," wrote McCreary at the beginning of his Human Target stint. "This combination of imagery and ballsy orchestral music make [sic] a bold statement, that this series is going to be something special. Chance is not your typical action hero and his music is not your typical electronica-inspired TV scoring. The title promises that you are about to watch a movie."



The ballsy orchestral sound lasted only one season. This was due to Human Target becoming a victim of showrunner musical chairs, one of many aspects of the TV industry I'll never fully understand. Tim Jones did decent work as the original score composer for one of Human Target producer McG's other action shows, the more comedic and soapy Chuck, but when Jones replaced McCreary on Human Target, his efforts paled in comparison to McCreary's. Jones' much less epic Chuck sound was wrong for Human Target, as was the whole Chuck-ification of Valley's show that was spearheaded by Steinberg's replacement, Chuck veteran Matt Miller, in Human Target's second season (why do the words "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" come to mind?).

In Human Target's second-season opening titles, Jones' theme briefly references McCreary's Chance theme at the beginning, but it morphs into this strange and unengaging beast that doesn't match the movements of the mostly unchanged opening title graphics. It's emblematic of Jones' less epic approach, which was the opposite of what McCreary said he wanted to achieve with his music for Chance.

Jones' theme is so out-of-place in the opening titles that "Human Touch" by Rick Springfield--who starred as Chance in an earlier and much more short-lived TV incarnation of Human Target--would have been a better replacement.

Five favorite expanded or limited-edition score albums of 2009

Manigong Bagong Taon. This is the only year-end list I will do because I hate doing these year-end things. Selections from all five of the following CDs can be heard during "Assorted Fistful" on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.


5. Big Trouble in Little China (La-La Land)
The cheesy end title song, in which director/composer John Carpenter does his own singing, hasn't aged as well as the rest of Carpenter's score or the movie itself, which remains subversive for giving its Asian American characters a chance to shine as the heroes of the piece for once in a genre that still doesn't care for Asian American protagonists (and no, Jackie Chan doesn't count as an Asian American lead, shitbird).

4. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (La-La Land)
La-La Land followed up the long-overdue Batman: The Animated Series box set with an expanded version of the score from the show's 1993 feature-length spinoff. Before Christopher Nolan came along, the Bruce Timm incarnation of Batman was the definitive screen take on the Dark Knight. Batman: The Animated Series was also beautifully scored by the late Shirley Walker, who provided music for Phantasm that's both powerful and playful (the choir is actually singing backwards pronunciations of the names of Phantasm crew members and orchestrators).

3. The Split (Film Score Monthly)
I was on a Donald E. Westlake kick during the summer because of the release of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter and the debut--in any format--of an unknown and very sampleworthy Quincy Jones score to a forgotten 1968 Jim Brown flick based on The Seventh. Say the following five words--"caper movie score by Q"--and I'm there, baby.

2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Film Score Monthly)
One cool thing about FSM's reissue of the Khan score is that it gives listeners the option of hearing the film's end title music without Leonard Nimoy's voiceover, an element of the 1982 Atlantic release that annoyed those who prefer not to hear dialogue during score albums. Also, it's nice to finally have the complete score. Somewhere, Ricardo Montalban's smiling.(*)

(*) I hate that Flanders-esque catchphrase from Fantasy Island. It's mostly because a former co-worker I couldn't stand liked to say "Smiles, everyone, smiles" a lot.


1. Bullitt (Film Score Monthly)
FSM also stands for Fulla Surprises, Man. Sometimes, I won't visit the FSM site for weeks, and I'll miss announcements like the debut release of Lalo Schifrin's Bullitt score as it was heard in the film (Schifrin's 1968 and 2000 re-recordings of his score, one of which is included on the CD, are both decent, but I always preferred the way the score originally sounded in the film). I didn't know about FSM's Bullitt CD until a couple of weeks ago and immediately snapped it up. The Bullitt score is my second favorite Schifrin film score after Enter the Dragon. The main theme has been covered so often that it's a shame the original rendition hasn't been available on CD until now.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm score to get expanded reissue from La-La Land

Dammit, soundtrack labels, you need to stop releasing so many terrific score albums. My depleted-by-the-recession savings account can't take it.

I caught the following exciting bit of soundtrack news on the FSM Board:

La La Land will start taking orders on the following CDs next Tuesday, March 24 at 12 noon PST for the following titles:

BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM - score by Shirley Walker. This is the first release in our new line of EXPANDED ARCHIVAL EDITIONS. This cd features the complete score along with a few bonus tracks. It is limited to 3000 units. Retail Price: $19.98

And while we're at it, can we also get a Mask of the Phantasm special edition DVD with a remastered picture and a Batload of extras, like an Alan Burnett/Bruce Timm/Eric Radomski/Andrea Romano commentrak and the 1993 Mask of the Phantasm HBO First Look special that's currently on YouTube? Batman & Robin got better treatment on DVD for crying out loud.

Related posts:
"Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack: A Walker to remember"
"Five favorite expanded score albums or box sets of 2008"

Five favorite expanded score albums or box sets of 2008

5. Superman: The Music (Film Score Monthly)
This staggering eight-disc set compiles the scores from all four Christopher Reeve Superman movies and contains a beautifully designed mini-book filled with exhaustive liner notes. The expanded discs of the Ken Thorne scores from Supermans II and III were probably the main reason why Superman completists dove into savings that they otherwise reserve for their mortgage payments for their Luthor-owned condos in order to pay for this pricey set ($120!). I never liked Thorne's scores (the orchestra budget in II and III was clearly slashed, so Thorne's rearrangements of John Williams' music sounded tinny and undernourished). For me, the real previously unreleased gem of the set was the disc containing Ron Jones' energetic and underrated music from Ruby-Spears' decent '80s Superman animated series. Jones' Superman cues sound like the cues he later wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Best of Both Worlds" two-parter, which TNG showrunner Rick Berman reportedly disliked because he preferred the music on his show to sound boring.


4. They Live: 20th Anniversary Edition (AHI)
Obey. Consume. This expanded release of the bluesy score from John Carpenter's sharpest and cleverest post-Thing flick is your God.


3. Blazing Saddles (La-La Land)
The only previous times any of the music from Blazing Saddles was made available were when Elektra/Asylum included three songs from Saddles on the 1978 High Anxiety soundtrack LP and when "I'm Tired" made its CD debut on Rhino's 1998 Warner Bros.: 75 Years of Film Music box set. The release of the cues from John Morris' short but fantastic score to the Mel Brooks classic--another one of my favorite movies--was long overdue. All the major cues are on there, including the Count Basie Orchestra's performance of "April in Paris," which is to black cowboy music what Jay-Z's "Roc Boys (and the Winner Is)..." is to black superhero music.


2. Shaft Anthology: His Big Score and More! (Film Score Monthly)
FSM's Shaft set marked a couple of milestones: the first-ever release of the film versions of Isaac Hayes and J.J. Johnson's score cues from the first Shaft installment (the 1971 Enterprise/Stax soundtrack album was a re-recording) and the CD debut of Gordon Parks' Shaft's Big Score soundtrack. Though the release was actually sent to the pressing plant for manufacturing three weeks before Hayes' death, it ended up being the illest way to honor his memory.


1. Batman: The Animated Series (La-La Land)
Unlike previous superhero cartoon shows, B:TAS didn't recycle the same four or five score cues or repurpose creaky old library music. Shirley Walker, one of the few female composers in the business, and her B:TAS team composed an original score for every episode. Their use of a full orchestra made other animated action shows look like that pathetic El Mariachi musician character who prefers a synthesizer over bandmates. Sadly, Walker didn't live to see the release of her lovingly crafted music from B:TAS (before her death in 2006, only her score from the Mask of the Phantasm spinoff movie was released). She would have been thrilled about La-La Land's two-disc set, which is dedicated to her and compiles scores from 10 B:TAS eps, including Harley Quinn's debut ep, "Joker's Favor" (pictured above). I've been a fan of B:TAS since its 1992 premiere, so I've waited 16 years for a release like this. I never said thank you, La-La Land. And then La-La Land will probably say the following in that Batrasp that sounds like a cross between a whitened-up Keak da Sneak and a Muppet: "And you'll never have to."

AFOS: "Yule Log" playlist

Happy holidays.

This week, I'm streaming the 2005 Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Yule Log" (WEB71), which consists of music from holiday-related movies and Christmas TV specials.

This is a reedited version of "Yule Log." I removed from the episode a Crash score cue by Mark Isham and a Family Stone score cue by Michael Giacchino and replaced them with Shirley Walker's cues from Batman: The Animated Series' "Christmas with the Joker" episode. The "Christmas with the Joker" tracks are part of La-La Land Records' new two-CD B:TAS set, the perfect Christmas present for anyone who's a B:TAS fan.

Ep WEB71 airs Monday and Wednesday at midnight, Tuesday and Christmas Day Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, and Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.

1. Danny Elfman, "What's This?," The Nightmare Before Christmas, Walt Disney
2. Vince Guaraldi Trio, "Christmas Time Is Here (vocal)," A Charlie Brown Christmas, Fantasy
3. Cowboy Timmy, "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo," Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics, American/Columbia
4. Joel, Crow and Tom Servo, "(Let's Have) A Patrick Swayze Christmas," Clowns In The Sky Vol. 1, Best Brains, Inc.
5. Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara and Danny Elfman, "Kidnap the Sandy Claws," The Nightmare Before Christmas, Walt Disney
6. Michael Cohen, "The Hebrew Hammer Theme" (from The Hebrew Hammer), thehebrewhammer.com
7. Danny Elfman, "Introduction (Titles)," Edward Scissorhands, MCA
8. Badly Drawn Boy, "I Love NYE," About a Boy, ARTISTdirect/Twisted Nerve/XL/BMG
9. John Ottman, "The Fair/Main Titles," Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, La-La Land
10. Michael Kamen, "Gruber's Arrival" (from Die Hard), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration, Varèse Sarabande
11. Thurl Ravenscroft, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" (from How the Grinch Stole Christmas), How the Grinch Stole Christmas & Horton Hears a Who!, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
12. Dick Shawn, "Snow Miser" (from The Year Without a Santa Claus), A Classic Cartoon Christmas, Too, Nick at Nite/Sony 550 Music/Sony Wonder
13. George S. Irving, "Heat Miser" (from The Year Without a Santa Claus), A Classic Cartoon Christmas, Too, Nick at Nite/Sony 550 Music/Sony Wonder
14. Shirley Walker/Lolita Ritmanis/Michael McCuistion, "Nutcracker Suite Medley" (from "Christmas with the Joker"), Batman: The Animated Series, La-La Land
15. Shirley Walker/Lolita Ritmanis/Michael McCuistion, "Pie in Batman's Face/Dangling Hostages Saved/Deck the Halls" (from "Christmas with the Joker"), Batman: The Animated Series, La-La Land
16. Badly Drawn Boy, "Donna and Blitzen," About a Boy, ARTISTdirect/Twisted Nerve/XL/BMG
17. Mick Jagger and Joss Stone, "Lonely Without You (This Christmas)," Alfie, Virgin
18. Leon Redbone & Zooey Deschanel, "Baby It's Cold Outside," Elf: Music from the Major Motion Picture, New Line

Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack: A Walker to remember

As a fan of Batman: The Animated Series, I've waited 15 years for the score cues from the groundbreaking show to be released on an album. Now the wait is finally over, thanks to La-La Land Records' Batman: The Animated Series score compilation, which the label released as a limited edition two-CD set on Tuesday (a week after Warner Bros. Records double-dipped the Dark Knight soundtrack with additional score cues). I'll be adding some of the music from La-La Land's release to rotation on A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" block.

Modeled in tone after Tim Burton's somber-looking, dark-humored Batman films but much more faithful to the comics, Bruce Timm's B:TAS was the first American superhero cartoon show that felt cinematic. B:TAS writer/producer Paul Dini, who scripted the landmark, Emmy-winning Mr. Freeze revamp "Heart of Ice," says in the soundtrack liner notes that the show's crew constructed each episode like a mini-movie.

The B:TAS crew must have heard Peter Bogdanovich's anecdotes about how Samuel Fuller mentored him during the making of the low-budget 1968 thriller Targets ("Never think about limitations! Only think about what you want!") because like Fuller, they clearly didn't let a TV budget stop them from doing what they wanted. They brought a cinematic approach to everything, from the way they paced the dialogue--B:TAS' minimal and terse dialogue was different from other superhero cartoons, especially the '90s Marvel shows, like Saban's X-Men and Marvel Films Animation's Spider-Man, which had nonstop, hurriedly delivered, Speed Racer-ish dialogue--to the original score music. Unlike past superhero cartoons, B:TAS didn't recycle the same four or five score cues or repurpose creaky old library music. Shirley Walker and her team of B:TAS composers, which included Lolita Ritmanis and Michael McCuistion, composed an original score for every ep and used a full orchestra at a time when most other animated action shows relied on chintzy-sounding, cost-saving synthesizer music.

Danny Elfman's B:TAS main title theme, a reworking of his own brooding and dashing-sounding main theme from the Batman movies, set the tone for the show's "dark swashbuckler" sound. Walker, who conducted Elfman's 1989 Batman score and worked for him as an orchestrator, wrote a new eight-note theme for the Batman character that sounds equally thrilling and kickass. It eventually supplanted Elfman's theme in the opening titles when Warner Bros. Animation made B:TAS into a feature film (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm) and then brought the show back to the airwaves under a new title, The Adventures of Batman & Robin.

Walker and her composers crafted a different motif for each villain. Mr. Freeze was accompanied by a mournful waltz (which can be heard during the 14-minute "Gotham City Overture," track 1 on the first disc), Two-Face was represented by an eerie soprano recorder melody ("Harvey's Nightmare/Dent's Soap Box" and "Bruce Wayne's Nightmare/Two-Face Remembers"), and the Penguin received a lumbering brass theme to match his bluster ("Birds of a Feather").

The Joker is such a beloved adversary that Walker gave him not just one but two motifs, a carnival-style melody and a secondary "Fanfare for Rocky"-style crime spree theme that was used only during the "Last Laugh" ep. The liner notes refer to the Joker's "Last Laugh" crime spree theme as "a hip-hop jazz theme," but it doesn't really sound like hip-hop. It's a middle-aged white person's idea of what they think a hip-hop beat sounds like. As an FSM Board poster says, it's more rock/funk than hip-hop. Still, Walker's "Last Laugh" theme is a lot of fun, and like all the other cues, I'm jazzed to finally have it on disc.

After a solid film and TV score career that saw her alternating between the Timmverse and James Wong/Glen Morgan productions (Space: Above and Beyond, Final Destination), Walker died in 2006 and didn't live to see her B:TAS material get the kind of release that La-La Land has devoted to it. Though this release is loaded with over two hours of music, it's missing Walker's memorable Catwoman theme from "The Cat and the Claw, Part I," the first B:TAS ep that ever aired, Carl Johnson's lively score from the excellent "Beware the Gray Ghost" ep with special guest voice Adam West, and McCuistion's Lawrence of Arabia-style epic score from the "Demon's Quest" two-parter, which gives me hope about a Volume 2 from La-La Land.

The final track on the La-La Land album is a fitting tribute to Walker, in which she gets to finally speak, via an archival recording of her explaining her eight-note Batman theme and playing it in different variations on the piano. The subtle differences between each variation--like when Walker alternates between a somberly played second half of the theme and a more uplifting second half--are incredible. They show how much care was put into the music and the show itself.