I'm with the Band.

A happy 60th birthday to composer Richard Band. I've collected a fair amount of his soundtracks (with more to come, hopefully) and was very nice when I met him a few years ago.

I do wish that he was working more often, charming film music listeners with his fine melodies. When I say 'more often', what I really mean is 'on stuff that people would actually see of their own volition, not under the influence of controlled substances or threat of death'. I mean, Unlucky Charms? Puppet Master: Axis of Evil? Ooga Booga?! If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: Richard Band deserves so much better than to be saddled with his brother's brain farts.

This isn't to say that everything he scored in his heyday was Citizen Kane: whilst looking through YouTube for various projects that Band scored this morning (curiosity and cats, you know?), I happened upon the 'Dream Prelude' sequence for The Dungeonmaster. I've listened to the piece of that name on Intrada's The Dungeonmaster/The Day Time Ended CD I don't know how many times. It's the highlight of the disc and certainly a musical highlight of Band's career. Over time, I read that international prints of the film carried the sequence, but domestic prints did not.

Behold:



Yeah, not too impressive.

For years, I'd imagined a far more compelling sequence to accompany this music. A four-year-old could've concocted something less inert, perfectly shaming the four-year-old the production team clearly employed to write this scene. If this scene doesn't speak to the composer's gifts (pulling musical beauty from literally nothing), I'm not sure what does. To this day, I maintain that if this music got into the ears of the right people, Band could have Brian Tyler's career right now. Oh, well.