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FACT TREK's Back…& That's A Fact

Horner's one or two bad TREK II notes, if they ever existed, aren't as disparaging as his tendency to directly rehash bits of his recent previous scores onto the later ones barely a year later. He was particularly guilty of this during the '90s....when he saw fit to homage THE PELICAN BRIEF during CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER and APOLLO 13, for example.

His Genesis countdown, as many no doubt recall, was refurbished for ALIENS near its climax. UNCOMMON VALOR also got remixed in moments later.

Maybe it's all part of some immense secret mega-symphony.....
 
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At least Horner only swiped from himself, unlike, say, Joseph LoDuca, whose scores are often imitative of other composers' work to the point of borderline plagiarism. I used to listen to the soundtrack album of LoDuca's Hercules: The Legendary Journeys TV-movie scores regularly, and then I was surprised when I heard extreeeeemely similar music cues in earlier movies like Krull, Clash of the Titans, and Demolition Man. And his main title theme to Sam Raimi's TV pilot movie M.A.N.T.I.S. had an identical melody to Alan Silvestri's Predator theme for the first several bars.
 
At least Horner only swiped from himself
You're kidding, right? Battle Beyond the Stars has straight up lifts from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Wars. The opening of Aliens is Aram Khachaturian's Gayane ballet (as heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and he reused it in both of his Jack Ryan films.

Jerry Goldsmith reportedly once said, when asked about a Horner score "What did I sound like this time?" Horner used soundalikes to Capricorn One more than once.

Nick Meyer called him on his lift from Prokofiev's Battle on the Ice on Surprise Attack and Nimoy had him rerecord his swipe from Romeo and Juliet at the beginning of Stealing the Enterprise (although he left in the swipe when the Enterprise burns up).

These are just the ones I know off the top of my head. Someone played the classical piece that he based the music when Spock lifts the cover off the dilithium chamber that he then re-used for Cocoon and IIRC it was a pretty direct match. I don't remember what it was, someone more knowledgeable might.

I adore James Horner, but these are just things he did.
 
James Horner tended to self-plagiarize as much as Sir Malcolm Arnold did to the point of distraction. I can barely listen to the scores Arnold did in other films because they all end up sounding like derivatives of Bridge on the River Kwai.

Whenever I watch the Superior Firepower documentary on the making of Aliens, I keep thinking Charles de Lauzirika slipped some tracks from Wrath of Khan in there.
 
I loved it when Terence Blanchard deliberately resurrected Goldsmith's PATTON trumpets for INSIDE MAN.

I hated it when Leonard Rosenmann elected to provide us with an end-credit ROBOCOP 2 theme with insipid sung lyrics.

But he DID go all-out high-octane for THE CAR, which was exciting. You can hear most of that in Bakshi's LORD OF THE RINGS, too.:lol:

Drift complete.;)
 
I hated it when Leonard Rosenmann elected to provide us with an end-credit ROBOCOP 2 theme with insipid sung lyrics.

Well, lyric, singular, as it was just "Ro-bo-Cooooop!" over and over. (Which is also true of Carl Johnson's theme to the animated RoboCop: Alpha Commando, except he throws in a "Yeah" at one point.)

Aside from the shrill end-title chorus, though, I think Rosenman's RoboCop 2 score is fairly good.
 
From de Forest Research's report of July 18, 1968, on “In Essence—Nothing" (aka "The Tholian Web") by Judy Burns and Chet Richards.
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Damn, indeed.

As posted to Bluesky.
 
To be fair, calling it "exobiology" is kind of Earth-centric. "Astrobiology" seems more generic, the study of life throughout the stars/space. And it is the preferred scientific term for the discipline today (or at least, Wikipedia redirects "exobiology" to its "astrobiology" article).

This is interesting:
The term astrobiology was first proposed by the Russian astronomer Gavriil Tikhov in 1953.[6] It is etymologically derived from the Greek ἄστρον, "star"; βίος, "life"; and -λογία, -logia, "study". A close synonym is exobiology from the Greek Έξω, "external"; βίος, "life"; and -λογία, -logia, "study", coined by American molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg; exobiology is considered to have a narrow scope limited to the search for life external to Earth.[7] Another associated term is xenobiology, from the Greek ξένος, "foreign"; βίος, "life"; and -λογία, "study", coined by American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his 1954 work The Star Beast;[8] xenobiology is now used in a more specialised sense, referring to 'biology based on foreign chemistry', whether of extraterrestrial or terrestrial (typically synthetic) origin.[9]

Lederberg coined "exobiology" in 1960, so "astrobiology" actually came first, and both were in use by the time Trek came along. So I have to say de Forest was off base here.

According to SearchTrek, "astrobiology" was only used in "Return to Tomorrow" and LD: "Mining the Mind's Mines" (at least in dialogue, though it may have appeared in TOS signage), while "exobiology" was used frequently from TNG onward, and "xenobiology" only appeared a few times from Voyager onward. Memory Alpha redirects "astrobiology" to "Exobiology department," the inverse of Wikipedia.
 
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