The end of the trilogy, Return of the Jedi, has been unfairly dismissed as cutesy and ill-conceived.
The original album was 74 minutes of music (from a total of 88) out of film sequence for an optimal listening experience. 10, and the infamous disco version by Meco Monardo at the top of the charts). and got two recordings of the main theme in the U.S. With winning musical cues like the brassy Rebel fanfare, Princess Leia's gorgeous theme, the wearily noble Force motif and the classic main title, it's little wonder that Star Wars won an Oscar (Williams' third of five), a BAFTA, a Grammy and a Golden Globe, sold platinum in the U.S. Its complexity and longevity earned it a coveted double-LP status when it was first released. Williams, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, created almost an orchestral wall of sound with the score to the original Star Wars.
Read on after the jump.and may the Force be with you. In honor of Empire's 30th anniversary, join our Friday Feature in looking at the 33-year release history of Williams' classic scores to the Star Wars trilogy.
Not surprisingly, then, these three soundtracks have seen a great many releases over the years.
Those themes were eminently hummable, playable by everyone from your high school marching band to symphonic rockers Epica. His evocative themes - which owed a debt to Holst and Wagner as much as Erich Korngold or Max Steiner - radically shifted film music trends back to lush symphonic tunes (after a decade of pop-oriented fare like The Graduate). Part of that success, it must be noted, lay in the musical score written by film composer extraordinaire John Williams.
But whatever the merit of such reviews nowadays, there are many around the world who love Star Wars.Īnd why not? Sure, the series has come to represent everything wrong about overmarketed, overblown popular entertainment (i.e.: the prequel trilogy, the ridiculous cartoon series that airs on television today), but those first three movies - Star Wars (1977), The Emprie Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) - were solidly plotted, action-packed space tales with colorful characters that weren't overshadowed by the dazzling visual effects. The New York Times gave this film - easily the most watchable of the three Star Wars movies - a largely negative write-up. But let's not kid ourselves here: when Empire first came out, it was not seen as the masterpiece it is now.
Much has been written about what the movie did for the Star Wars trilogy as a cultural force (no pun intended), for sequels in general and so on. It was three decades ago today that The Empire Strikes Back was released.