Thought you’d encountered the worst movie musical ever when Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees starred as ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ in ’78? You ain’t seen nothin’, Billy Shears — a pronouncement applicable to this misbegotten mishmash in myriad ways, considering it was pulled from theaters after two weeks in late ’76, rarely to be witnessed since.
For reasons I really ought to turn into a memoir, I maintain a deeply abiding and psychologically unhealthy passion for music and movies from 1979-80, my 10th year on this mostly blue marble.
I grew up between the two golden ages of Disney animation, when less-loved creations like ‘The Rescuers’ (’77) and ‘The Fox and the Hound’ (’81) portended a protracted slump from which the studio wouldn’t emerge until ‘The Little Mermaid’ leapt ashore at the end of ’89.
Some years ago, not long after we met, @kajigger and I started collecting these limited picture-disc pressings of soundtracks from classic Disney animated films alongside Pixar treasures and a few recordings related to Disneyland attractions (see my third post in this series, from Nov 26, for evidence of that). Our tally of titles is pushing two dozen; they’d make an eye-grabbing display if we ever framed ‘em.
My #SoundtrackSunday timing with this one has proven fortuitous. Not long after I discovered Elmer Bernstein’s richly detailed classicist score finally had been pressed as a 2LP gatefold package — which I immediately acquired — I then realized Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s tragic romance is streaming until the end of this month on the Criterion Channel. (Gift idea for film friends: a yearlong subscription.)
Took a look at the trailer for this early Taylor Hackford thriller, as well as the oft-aired video for Phil Collins’s Oscar-nominated, Grammy-winning title ballad, to see if that might jar any memories of actually having seen this loose ‘n’ lusty remake of Jacques Tourneur’s film noir masterpiece ‘Out of the Past.’
File this one under Soundtracks to Shows I’m Unlikely to Ever See alongside David Byrne’s backdrop for ‘The Catherine Wheel’ and his interludes dubbed ‘The Knee Plays’ and probably any quality productions of Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ or ‘Chess,’ the musical composed by Tim Rice and the men of ABBA that gave the world ‘One Night in Bangkok.’
First: yes, I have decided aural replicas of long-demolished Disneyland attractions qualify for installments of #SoundtrackSunday.
Now that I’ve undertaken this #SoundtrackSunday project, do I wish I’d started my A-Z rundown of those we own a month earlier, so that this second installment could have appeared shortly before Halloween? Maybe a little.
I’ve long considered contributing cinematic wax to the weekly roundup that is #soundtracksunday, hosted by (who else?) @soundtracksunday.