Batman to the Rescue

I grew up listening to the music of movies by watching the movies. I wasn't able to listen to film music away from films until I was sixteen, got a job and started to have my own disposable income. I nearly wore out VHS copies of Superman, The Ten Commandments (yeah, seriously; as a ten-year-old), episodes of the late-eighties reboot of Mission: Impossible and today's particular special, Batman. My ears perked up the very first time I saw Batman. I didn't know why it resonated with me so much, but it did. (Interestingly, this is another one of those scores that's been on my regular playlist ever since I bought it in 1994). Perhaps even then I was able to subconsciously connect the gothic nature of both music and image.

So, as with Krull, the folks at La-la-land Records have seen fit to not only release Danny Elfman's complete score to Batman, they were good enough to include a second disc that was the original album release and scads of extras (including one very funny hidden track).

For over twenty years now there's been one cue I've been dying to hear separate from the film. It's the point in the film where Batman comes crashing through the skylight of the Flugelheim Museum Restaurant to rescue Vicky Vale from the Joker (the first time). It's the first truly bold statement of the Bat-Theme on its own, separated from being embedded in another musical context and is performed largely in the brass with powerful accompaniment from the strings and percussion. (You can watch the video here.) Sadly, it sounds like this particular cue was recorded in a hurry. Something sounds..."off" about it. There's a particular moment around 0:15 where the horns sound almost as if they're playing the wrong key. It's either scored badly, performed badly, or both. It's still one of my favorite scores ever and I would like to think it - along with a handful of other scores - was instrumental in the development of my musical awareness.