More Christmas Tunes

Scrooged was not the only limited release soundtrack I received for Christmas. Not even the only Christmas-themed movie soundtrack, actually. I also received La La Land Records' new 2-disc soundtrack for Gremlins.

Jerry Goldsmith has always been one of my favorite composers. Perhaps my favorite, actually, because he never really got the award love he deserved, winning his only Oscar for The Omen, despite over a dozen nominations and a career that spanned decades and a heap of great movies.

Gremlins is an interesting fusion in his catalog. Indeed, the movie itself is an odd fusion, a surprisingly dark and violent movie masquerading as family Christmas fare. The music is definitely evocative of some of the scores Goldsmith wrote for other, more conventionally tense or horrific movies -- Alien and Outland in particular. But it also comes in the middle of the 190s, in a period where many composers had decided to try incorporating what those crazy new synthesizers could do.

Consequently, Gremlins is a soundtrack with one foot firmly in orchestral and the other dipping perhaps a bit too far in the synthesized. I say a bit too far only because of the inherent limitations of the technology at the time; it all sounds a bit goofy. (Much like the soundtrack for the original The Terminator -- released the same year as Gremlins -- sounds when compared to the also-synthesizer Terminator 2 released early in the 1990s.)

Still, the score itself is solid. Much of what I praised in Danny Elfman's Scrooged work is true here for Jerry Golsdmith. There are rousing action pieces for Stripe and the other Gremlins, soft and emotional pieces for Gizmo, and a sprinkling of Christmas standards over the whole. It's kind of interesting to compare and contrast the two scores, to see how two different composers handled movies that in some ways incorporated many of the same ingredients.

People who don't love Jerry Goldsmith as much as I do might not be quite so gung ho about the Gremlins release. And even I have to question the release of a 2-disc set, whose second disc recreates the sad original soundtrack released decades ago and featuring mainly pop tunes from the film. In short -- this one won't be for everybody, even among the film score nuts. But if you like Goldsmith, it's one you shouldn't skip.