It’s always been common practice in film music for the powers that be to edit, track and sometimes replace altogether various cues in any given score. Reasons for such range from the footage being recut at the last minute to the director not liking the music. The digital medium has allowed this editing process to occur more and more frequently in recent years. FSMO’s “Score Restore” column takes short excerpts of important film music that, for various reasons, were not used in the finished film and re-edits them against the picture, allowing you to see and hear the composers’ original visions.

This month, we offer our first James Horner Score Restore, a climactic cue dropped from James Cameron’s Aliens. Strangely, while this piece was deleted from Aliens, it was used two years later in Die Hard. Now you can see how the music was supposed to function in Aliens and check it against not only Cameron’s tracked finished product but the Die Hard version as well!

NOTE: Please be patient, as these files may take a little while to download. Chances are there are a lot of people trying to download at the same time, and that slows things down a bit. Thanks!