The following article was shared with paid subscribers a month or so ago.
Since last week was the 42nd anniversary of ST-TMP, I thought I’d share with everyone. Also, it includes Christmas related content so Ho Ho Ho and all that.
Hope you enjoy - and have a very happy holiday season.
It's hard to know how actual children react to the new Star Trek Prodigy trailers. Can there be a sense of excitement for them, of anticipation for a new show in a franchise that, honestly, most of them have never seen, let alone heard of? As more experienced fans, we can only hope the show will become a gateway for them, a first step into a larger world of adventure.
When I was a kid, just a bit older at the time than Prodigy's intended audience is now, I was practically drooling to experience a brand new adventure coming soon to a theater near me: Star Trek--The Motion Picture.
"It will startle your senses," Orson Welles promised in the movie's ubiquitous TV ads, "challenge your intellect, and alter your perception of the future - by taking you there."
I saw the film several times that winter, bringing a note card with me on my final visit in order to write down as best as I could the Klingon phrases uttered in the opening sequence. I carried that card in my wallet for decades.
And while I never did become a Klingon language scholar, one element of the film startled my senses more than any other, starting on Christmas day, 1979.
I still remember coming around the corner, my younger brother running slightly ahead, to see how many packages we’d find beneath the tree. And there were a good number. But what stood out to me were the two presents slipped into the tree itself, resting within the branches. They were squarish and flat and they were quite obviously LPs. And I knew they would be for me.
I was the only one in the house who cared about music. My parents had a small eclectic collection of old folk and jazz records that they seldom touched. On Sunday mornings we’d listen to 8-track tapes of the Kingston Trio and John Denver and Neil Diamond, but the rest of the week belonged to TV. Except in my room, where my love of music and TV combined.
I’d always had a fondness for movie and TV music. When I got my first cassette tape recorder, the first thing I recorded, from a broadcast radio station, was Deodato’s jazzy instrumental interpretation of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
The second thing I recorded? The theme from The Time Tunnel TV show, captured by carefully placing the tape recorder’s built-in microphone next to the TV speaker. The rest of that first cassette tape was filled with more TV theme tunes, including Lost in Space, The Rockford Files, and Gilligan’s Island. Also, part of a commercial for Kit-Kat. It was difficult to make precision edits back then. Several years later I graduated to recording the audio from full episodes of Star Trek, Space: 1999, and Man From Atlantis. But I didn’t own any TV or movie music that I hadn’t recorded on my own.
My first 45 rpm record was “Last Train to Clarksville” by The Monkees. The first LP I bought, at age 10ish, was Close to You by The Carpenters. I remember struggling to decide between that and Olivia Newton-John’s If You Love Me Let Me Know, ultimately choosing The Carpenters because I’d heard of three songs on that album (“Close to You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”) but I only knew two songs from Olivia’s (the title song and “I Honestly Love You”). So Close to You it was.
Then I discovered the existence of soundtrack albums.
The first arrived in a box of cut-outs — unloved remainders returned unsold from the retailer to the distributer, the cover punched with a hole (or sometimes a big notch) in the top left corner, then sold at a deep discount in lesser-class department stores. The price was practically nothing, probably a dollar when most new releases retailed for six or seven. In this particular cut-out bin I found LPs that contained music from movies. Some I’d heard of but never seen — Earthquake — some I’d never seen OR heard of — Oklahoma Crude. But one I’d both heard of and seen: Westworld. Granted, I’d only seen the edited version on TV — I was still a kid — but I’d loved the movie, loved the concept and figured I’d probably like the music. Cowboy robots! It must be great! Right? I convinced my mother to spend the dollar.
The album turned out to be not exactly what I expected — some odd electronic stuff mixed with period appropriate music and an admittedly fun whistled track called “The Western Warble.” I later used that one as the “theme song” for my own “radio station,” QQQQ, whose “programs” were recorded directly on cassette by me and played for an audience of one: also me.
Anyway, that was pretty much it for a couple of years, until 20th Century Fox released a mid-budget kiddie space pic called Star Wars.
That double album was everything, totally breaking open the world of movie music to me. Soon after, I picked up a cut-out of the James Bond movie Live and Let Die. Then I started visiting actual record stores and drooling at the variety of scores available, if you were prepared to shell out full retail prices. Soon I owned Close Encounters and then Superman — The Movie and Battlestar Galactica and so on, until, in 1979, the success of Star Wars led to the rejuvenation of the franchise that was my first true love.
I grew up watching Star Trek reruns on TV after school. This was the early seventies when the 79 syndicated episodes became staple viewing for kids and college students all across the country. Achieving a level of popularity never seen during its original 1966–69 run on NBC, the show spawned a thriving convention scene, a Saturday morning animated revival, and scores of books and toys. But what fans really wanted — and Paramount executives eventually decided to deliver — was a return of the series. Star Trek II, as the continuation show was to be called, would be the bright shiny centerpiece of a proposed Paramount TV network. Until the success of Star Wars caused Paramount to aim their sights higher.
Star Trek — The Motion Picture was an event, the culmination of ten long wilderness years when Star Trek grew from an embarrassing footnote buried in NBC’s Friday night lineup to syndicated late-afternoon time filler to a genuine pop culture phenomenon. And I loved it.
Loved. It.
Especially the music.
So when I slid those two Christmas gifts out of the tree in 1979, I was all but sure one of them would be the Star Trek — The Motion Picture soundtrack.
Unwrapping the first one resulted in a pleasant surprise — John Williams’ over-the-top music for Steven Spielberg’s over-the-top comedy 1941. It would turn out to be an album that my parents actually enjoyed hearing.
But the other one was the grail, the one thing I truly wanted for Christmas that year (besides a Darth Vader mask which, at forty bucks, was never going to happen). I soaked in the Bob Peak cover art, that beaming rainbow spectrum with Kirk, Spock, and Ilia’s faces materializing within. I slid the LP sleeve out of the jacket only to find a present tucked within — a large photo of the movie’s gorgeously revamped version of the starship Enterprise. The angle was a little weird — couldn’t it have been a little more definitively a side view so we could see more of the front of the ship? — and it was slightly smaller than the size of the album cover, so much smaller than the folded poster included in the Star Wars soundtrack. But those nitpicks didn’t much matter. I now owned a photo of the movie version of the USS Enterprise and within a day I had stapled it onto my bedroom wall (somewhere near the Tom Baker as Doctor Who poster and the fold out Space:1999 Eagle blueprints I’d pulled from an issue of Starlog magazine).
The inner sleeve itself was made of a thicker paper than those of the Star Wars LPs, and contained full color stills from the movie. All of the stills, however, were just a bit odd: a shadowy profile shot of Ilia, the bald Deltan navigator; Kirk and Spock with their backs to us, Dr. McCoy in a shadow; a shrieking Chekov; another shadowy shot of our heroes standing on the hull of the Enterprise; two characters contorted in the transporter chamber, but pictured without the movie’s special effects, so the actors are disarmingly clear as they suffer torturous pain; and, finally, a photo of Vulcan elders standing in front of Spock who, you will be unsurprised to learn, has his back to us.
The flip side of the sleeve is a rogues gallery of aliens, all from species we’d never seen before. Unfortunately, they looked pretty much like costume/make-up test shots or just very lazily staged trading card photos. So a mixed bag for sure.
But the music itself?
I dropped the needle, sat back, and let the adventure begin.
The first Star Trek movie failed to impress most critics and even left the devoted fan base feeling underwhelmed. Forty years later, the film has a fair number of vocal defenders while still harboring a reputation as being one of the “worst” of the 13 Star Trek films produced since 1979.
But if there’s one thing critics and audiences agree on, both then and now, it’s the quality of Jerry Goldsmith’s score, which almost single-handedly saved the movie. As Preston Neal Jones writes in his oral history Return to Tomorrow, “Star Trek’s score is arguably its single finest component.” And 40 years later, the original soundtrack album is still a fantastic listen.
The deep, percussive opening bursts grabbed me immediately. BOM BOM. Those two opening chords were full and expansive, almost the exact opposite of the gentle tinkling opening of the TV Star Trek theme. This was a new venue, a new beginning, a new sound. Star Trek was back, better than ever.
The elevated budget and higher expectations of ST-TMP led to the hiring of Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith. A trained modernist, Goldsmith’s career included the otherworldly atonal percussion that defined Planet of the Apes, the echoplex military brass of Patton, and The Omen’s hymns to Satan that won him an Oscar. Just prior to ST-TMP, Goldsmith brought his expertise at creating unnerving outer space atmospheres to the now classic Alien. What would a dedicated modernist do on a thoughtful, big budget epic?
Starting by rejecting the TV show’s bongo-inflected theme, Goldsmith crafted a more romantic approach to Star Trek that not only redefined the franchise, but helped usher in a new way of scoring outer space. “I think this spawned a whole genre,” film composer David Newman, who played violin on the score, says in the liner notes of LaLaLand Records’ excellent 3 CD release of the score. “Jerry had this style of triadic movement going and slow harmonies changing and deceptive cadences that became the kind of space atmosphere that got done after that.”
Yet even as he crafted soaring, spiraling melodies and a march that would ultimately become forever identified with the franchise (especially when it became the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation), Goldsmith brought his innate sense of musical innovation to the score. Along with a full orchestra, Goldsmith composed parts for synthesizers, electronic clavichord, a geometrically laid-out series of tubes called the tubulon, and an 18 foot long piece of aluminum strung with five strings and played by hitting it with an artillery shell — the Blaster Beam. “Jerry called [the score for ST-TMP] a concerto for beam and orchestra,” says beam inventor Craig Huxley — who, coincidentally, guest starred in two episodes of the original series.
For me, the score can best be described by the tagline of the film itself: there is no comparison.
As perfectly as it fits the film, Goldsmith’s music also obtained a peerless presentation on LP, one of the first recorded digitally, executive produced by the legendary Bruce Botnick, whose credits include work with The Doors, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones as well as hundreds of other Goldsmith scores. The ST-TMP soundtrack album remains a beautiful work in its own right, a layered, virtual tone poem that’s been continuously in print in numerous formats — including two separate expanded editions — since 1979. Goldsmith was always a master at creating music that was arguably better than the films themselves, and on ST-TMP he created a masterpiece.
“Even at the time, I knew this was serious, modernist classical music being written,” says Bruce Botnick. “I still hear it and it makes me shiver.”
I, too, can still get chills from tracks such as “The Enterprise,” the slow-building and ultimately soaring musical accompaniment to the great spaceship’s big screen introduction. Finally the TV show that defined my childhood had come of age.
Despite many failed cover versions of the theme (by the likes of Bob James, Maynard Ferguson, and Meco), Jerry Goldsmith’s music’s continues to influence the Star Trek franchise, including its triumphant return in the first season finale of the Picard TV series. And I keep spinning the album.
I brought out my now vintage LP earlier today. It’s filled with hiss and crackles and a nice, recurring pop earned from being played so often over the years. From the haunting opening of “Klingon Battle” to the beauty of “Ilia’s Theme” to the swirling majesty of “The Meld” (a track I’d like played at my funeral, please), this music continues to move me. Even more than The Carpenters, even more than my beloved Star Wars, Jerry Goldsmith’s music for Star Trek — The Motion Picture lives inside my very soul, still fueling my inner adventures.
There is no comparison.
Thank you for reading.
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I will likely be taking the rest of the year off. In the meantime, love long and prosper, friends. Love long and prosper.
See you next year.
Happy Holidays to you Neil! This quote: "It will startle your senses," Orson Welles promised in the movie's ubiquitous TV ads, "challenge your intellect, and alter your perception of the future - by taking you there" could just as easily apply to my favorite sci-fi travel movie:
Back to the Future (1985), which also has tremendously wonderful music ♥️:
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/the-best-time-traveling-movie-of