The few of you who know me personally will recall that I was helped into film music by my father. He died when I was six and a half, but he left me a legacy of VHS recordings off TV, mostly of classic films (particularly westerns, swashbucklers, and children's films). That's why you have this 24 year old who's much more passionate (in general) about anything Golden Age than modern film music.
Well, over the past several weeks I've been going through all of my father's old tapes kept at my parents' home (my mother remarried four years after my father died) because my family is moving and they need to downsize. A lot of these old tapes need to be thrown away, which is mostly okay because most of the films are available on DVD (some only on VHS, DVDr, or DVD from a different region like the example in this post...just noticed it on Amazon.co.uk). Some of the films (like Black Patch...yep, I got started on Goldsmith from the beginning of his film career!) have apparently never been released, so I'm going to have to find a way to transfer them to digital for posterity.
One of the films falls mostly in the "children's" category and is something of an oddity: A non-Disney combination animated and live action (mostly just for star Richard Harris) adaptation of Gulliver's Travels. (I thought it was completely unreleased from checking IMDb, but just checked as I was making this post and it's available on DVD overseas.) The film's kinda strange at times, and kinda bad at times (IMDb sadly rates it 4.9), but most of the time I find it incredibly enjoyable, from Harris's good-natured performance to the fairly well done (especially for kids) political machinations of Lilliput. The score has stayed with me all these years since my childhood and was one of the rare few I had not researched. Turns out it was composed by Michel Legrand, of all people, and to show you all that it's worthy of a release (how about it for Kritzerland, Bruce?) I thought I'd post a sample of it that I found on YouTube:
It opens with a brief fanfare for the king of Lilliput but soon moves on to the meat of the score -- an orchestral sequence for Gulliver removing the enemy ships from their harbor. At the end of the clip is another musical sequence highlight: a song version of Legrand's main theme for the film, when the Lilliputians celebrate and thank Gulliver for what he's done.
There are many other good parts of this score, but I couldn't find them on YouTube. Have I got anybody interested though? I wonder if tracks for this survive...
John Barry was suppose to score this film but dropped out.
Here's the story:
Gulliver's Travels (1972)
Peter Hunt mentioned in an interview that Barry and Black had written a substantial amount but when the film went into financial hiatus, and was effectively locked up, the whole project got shelved. When the finance came back, Hunt contacted Barry and Black, but Barry had withdrawn his music by then.