A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" sets its sights on Bear McCreary's Human Target soundtrack

Former Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary's beautifully crafted score cues for Human Target were a highlight of the first season of the Mark Valley series, an enjoyable Burn Notice-like throwback to '80s action shows despite co-star Jackie Earle Haley's weekly overuse of the word "dude" and the fact that Human Target bears little resemblance to the angsty, not-so-lighthearted Vertigo comic book that inspired it.

Most first-season Human Target episodes featured music performed by a 60-piece orchestra (McCreary upped it to 94 for the "Christopher Chance" season finale that guest-starred Armand Assante, Amy Acker and Lee Majors as a predecessor to Valley's title hero, an assassin-turned-bodyguard). This made McCreary's orchestra the largest group of musicians assembled for a TV series in years, a huge leap from the 30-piece orchestra McCreary often conducted on Galactica, the 29-to-34-piece orchestra Shirley Walker and her team of composers led during another made-for-TV DC Comics adaptation, Batman: The Animated Series, and the 37-piece one Michael Giacchino assembled for Lost.

"At the first production meeting we had, even before the pilot, I said we must have an orchestra," said Human Target's first-season showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg in the press release for this month's Human Target soundtrack release. "This show is about an action hero, it's built out of the DNA of the movies I grew up on, Star Wars and Raiders and Star Trek. Those movies don't work without that orchestra."

Human Target, which debuted on Fox as a mid-season replacement last January, will return to the Fox lineup in mid-November (the season premiere was originally scheduled to air earlier this month--that's why the soundtrack release was slated for October--but the network postponed the premiere). However, Steinberg and McCreary didn't return for the second season. Matthew Miller, a writer/producer from Chuck, replaced Steinberg as showrunner, brought along Chuck composer Tim Jones and plans to insert into Human Target more Chuck-style "needle drops" (slang for existing songs), to the delight of a Human Target fan who said in HitFix.com's comments section that "I absolutely hate needle drops. I also love Bear McCreary's music. Human Target in its first season was a great callback to the silly shows of my childhood--The Fall Guy, The A-Team, etc. I don't like Chuck, and I don't like any of these proposed changes. I won't be tuning in for Season 2."

On his blog, McCreary explained his exit by saying "the series is now under new creative leadership, and as a result I have not been asked to return... We are likely to hear a very different musical approach to Human Target season 2, but I hope and trust the series will remain a fun adventure."


McCreary's departure is a disappointing development for fans of the show's Emmy-nominated first-season music like myself, but luckily, McCreary, who's currently busy juggling AMC's The Walking Dead and the Syfy shows Caprica and Eureka, has assembled a whopper of a Human Target soundtrack release. WaterTower Music's digital release of the Human Target soundtrack consists of 160 minutes of McCreary's music from the show, while La-La Land's physical version of the soundtrack on October 19 will contain even more music and encompass three discs.


I've added my favorite tracks from the Human Target album to daily "Assorted Fistful" rotation on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. During one of these standout tracks, "The New Christopher Chance" from last season's cliffhanger, you can hear what Steinberg had in mind when he said his version of Human Target was built out of the DNA of Star Wars and Raiders. "The New Christopher Chance" contains "Katherine's Theme," a romantic motif McCreary wrote for Acker's character. The sweeping theme brings to mind both Han and Leia's Empire Strikes Back love theme and "Marion's Theme" from Raiders.

Tune into A Fistful of Soundtracks to get your Human Target music fix while you wait another few weeks for Jackie Earle Haley to come back and abuse the word "dude."

"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.

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."

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.