No matter what I say, you have to tell me I'm wrong. It never fails.
The facts are what they are. I'm not trying to "get" you, I'm trying to assist you (and everyone else who's interested) by providing fuller information on a subject I happen to know well.
Many of the themes from TAS were reused, mostly in Tarzan and Batman(with Bat-Mite) for animation, and Shazam, Isis and Space Academy/Jason of Star Command for live action.
Well, I think the cues shared between TAS,
Tarzan, Shazam, and
Isis were the ones that originated in
Lassie's Rescue Rangers. As for
Space Academy, I don't recall whether it specifically used any TAS cues; I was listening for them when I rewatched it on DVD, and I think I recall being surprised at their absence. Not to mention my surprise at how little reuse of music between Filmation shows there actually was. I can't blame you for overestimating the extent of the reuse, because I believed the same thing until I actually rewatched the shows. Certainly they tend to have a common style, being from the same composers, so it's easy to mix up what was shared and what wasn't.
And many of the original themes for each show were reworkings of previous themes, which is why you can tell a Filmation show often by the music alone.
If they were reworked, they weren't original, by definition. Certainly Ellis and Prescott were great at taking a motif and developing it in many different ways in different cues; in fact, when I was a kid, their music was the first place where I really noticed that practice. I remember being in my father's car and talking to him and my sister about how impressed I was at the different ways they'd develop a leitmotif (though I didn't use that word) to fit different styles and tempos and moods, only to be told that that was a pretty routine compositional practice.
I can
absolutely recognize a Ray Ellis score just by listening; I even noticed the similarity of his '60s
Spider-Man cartoon scores to his later Filmation work before I even learned that "Yvette Blais" was actually Ray Ellis. But that's due more to his style than to specific melodies. Again, while it's certainly true that a number of cues were reused from show to show, it was less extensive than I used to think, and less common in the later '70s than in the early '70s. And of course Filmation stopped using Ellis altogether once
He-Man came along.
Space Academy, of which Jason of Star Command stole most of their sets and costumes, was infamous for using not only music but sound effects from TAS.
Well, lots of shows shared sound effects. At the time, there were only a few sound-effects companies in Hollywood, and they didn't have huge digital libraries, just shelves full of reel-to-reel tapes. So you heard a lot of the same sound effects all over the place. Pretty much all of Filmation's shows had their sound FX and music editing done by Horta-Mahana, Inc., so the sounds used in those shows came from that library; and Horta-Mahana inherited a lot of
Star Trek sound FX from Glen Glenn Sound when they did TAS, and kept using those sounds in later productions.
And you can hardly say
Jason "stole"
Space Academy's sets and costumes, when it was from the same producers. It was a spinoff, set in the same reality. Star Command was supposedly a secret division of the Space Academy, according to the narration, although it never acted like a secret organization.
The TAS themes were among the most ambitious and best composed themes that they ever did, which is why they were used, reused an overused, up until Filmation itself was disbanded because of the failure of their feature film, Happily Ever After, where many of them were used one last time.
Sorry, but no. I've actually watched these shows within the past few years specifically listening for those cues, cues that I heard countless times as a child and know absolutely by heart. I know where they were and weren't used, and they were not used in remotely near as many Filmation shows as you claim. They absolutely were
not used in any Filmation show after 1982, because Ellis was no longer contributing scores to Filmation. And you
should care about royalties, because every decision in Hollywood is about money, and if a piece of music gets reused, that means its composer gets paid for it. So if your show has one composer and you want to reuse music by another composer, you have to pay extra to use it. Which is why most TV and movie series that change composers also stop using the old themes. Ellis's last show for Filmation was
Gilligan's Planet in 1982. None of his music was used after that, not in
He-Man, She-Ra, Ghostbusters, or
BraveStarr, and certainly not in Filmation's later features. The music for
Happily Ever After was by Frank Becker, the composer for
BraveStarr.
It's got its duds, just like TOS itself does. But it also has some standout episodes. Overall, I'm glad it's part of the Trek mythos.
). And since they were only half an hour long, you could watch more stories in the same amount of time!
