I'm back with a bit with something a bit different for this feature, which I really had in mind all along. While movie tie-in toys/ collectibles are awesome, it isn't the end of the scope of my collection. Whether it's movie soundtracks, novelizations, "making of" books and documentaries or tie-in fiction, my answer is "yes to all", and I was thinking of covering the artifacts I have accumulated on this blog even before I started reviewing movies here. Today's specimens are among the most hard-fought of my acquisitions, the soundtrack of one the greatest or at least weirdest fantasy films of the 1980s, Krull.
As covered in my movie review, Krull was a big-budget fantasy epic produced in parallel with films like Conan the Barbarian and Clash of the Titans. The production included a score from James Horner, fresh off of doing the soundtrack for Wrath of Khan. The soundtrack would go through its own strange saga. From the evidence at hand, there was a contemporary release mainly on vinyl. However, the main CD release was in 1992, almost a decade after the movie came out, while a giant-sized 2-disk version is dated as late as 2015 per Discogs (my main resource on these things for some time). Because movie studios are inherently evil and also apparently opposed to actually making actual money, none of these albums have been made available for digital purchase. In fact, the only digital track of any kind to come to my attention is a cover of the main theme and opening on an album called Cinemagic 30.
All of this makes a soundtrack CD about as difficult to obtain as the glaive from Krull (except the CD actually does something). Prices usually start in the $40-50 dollar range. As an extra frustration, there's a version out there (possibly a direct copy of the LP) that has only 8 tracks, two of which are less than 3 minutes long. I have also seen listings I found suspicious for the 2-disk version at especially low prices. I initially thought these had to be bootlegs of some kind, though I also considered the possibility that someone had found a big load of backstock that couldn't be moved fast enough. After double-checking the year as I write this, it's now clear that this version isn't even that old, so the latter could well be true.
For my personal adventure, I finally went looking for the Krull soundtrack very early this year. I first tried a listing on Amazon that I covered most of the price of with bonus points. Of course, it turned out to be the short/ abomination version. I followed up that purchase with a 1990s CD that had reprinted the soundtrack version of the main theme (yes, they left it out), and ended up with about 50 minutes of music that I pieced together on my mobile devices for listening on my travels. Here's pics of the CD insert and track list.
After a little time listening to this, I decided I wanted more, but not necessarily a lot more. I thus set my sights on the "single disk" version. The prices were still consistently steep. I finally went with an offer from the UK, which of course meant extra in shipping, but it still cost less than any other offer. It came with 16 tracks, a total of about 80 minutes. Here's shots of what I got. I love the line "light years beyond..."
...Or beyond a truckload of hallucinogenic drugs, which is really more impressive.
I got the CD right before the end of March of this year, which turned out to be a few weeks from when I was ordered to start working from home. I had to come up with my own setup quickly, and that included getting music I could play as long as possible. I also figured out quickly that using newfangled voice commands weren't going to work when I had to talk to people, while dealing with ads on a certain video site was only slightly less obnoxious. I set up first a CD clock radio, and then a new (very cheap) CD boombox. What I ended up listening to almost exclusively was the Krull soundtrack. It might not seem quite as great listened to over and over again, and even 80 minutes isn't a lot in the course of a whole work day, but it's been holding up, and hearing "The Ride of the Firemares" start up is always a good morale boost. At any rate, that's all for now; more to come!
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