Given that, it's no surprise that the nice folks at Monstrous Movie Music decided to put out an all-Harryhausen album, comprising re-recordings of some of his best-known movies, like Mighty Joe Young and Twenty Million Miles to Earth, along with material from the rarely seen Irwin Allen fiasco The Animal World. The lion's share of the space here is given over to Mr. Joseph Young, and no wonder. Not only is the film one of Harryhausen's best, but Roy Webb's score is also outstanding. As before with Monstrous, the music here is all of recent vintage in that it is faithfully recorded from the original scores. The production, using close-miking, a technique that may have originated with the Beatles' savvy producer George Martin, is nothing less than excellent.

Modern film scoring techniques were coming into favor around the time MJY was made, eclipsing earlier "Mickey-Mousing" that had music rising in pitch as an actor ascended stairs and so forth. But as this follow-up to King Kong was essentially a live-action cartoon, composer Roy Webb opted to adopt the older approach.

Of the many cues presented here, most are very short, rarely passing two minutes in length, and several—notably most of the "fanfares" introducing the strong men with whom Joe plays tug-of-war in the film's nightclub scene—are no longer than seven seconds, though in the movie they occur one after the other and thus sound practically seamless.

Clash of the cymbals, if not the Titans

The music here isn't particularly subtle, but it is nonetheless effective. MJY makes good use of "Beautiful Dreamer," the old Stephen Foster classic, as being Joe's favorite song. Aside from this very recognizable melody, much of the other music works quite well and has its own personality. For example, the nice descending scales in cue 6, "Joe and the Lion," performed on xylophone, are reminiscent of some of the figures in the Time Bandits score. And the four-note "creature" theme used throughout Twenty Million Miles to Earth is quite effective in a creepy, retro way.

Speaking of TMMTE, the soundtrack is actually quite complicated. It opens strongly, with "Schneer's Emblem and Heaven," which, though it boasts ethereal passages on harp, piano, vibraphone and flutes, is actually partly tracked in from the 1941 romantic comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Cue 2, "Pa Warns Rudolph," is tracked in from Anna Lucasta, despite its appropriately more ominous timpani and low woodwinds. Originally scored for a scene in which Pa Lucasta drunkenly confronts the houseguest Rudolph, the cue functions here as TMMTW's main title music!

The final score sample is also the shortest, and probably the least interesting. The Animal World is represented by only one track, composed by Paul Sawtell. It consists of two cues, "Survival" and "The Ceratosaurus." It somehow manages to sound like Irwin Allen, which might not be surprising, since Allen was a micro-manager who provided plenty of "direction" to composer Sawtell, who had worked with him on a number of projects. There's plenty of bombastic brass and strings, but xylophone, piano, trumpets, French horns, strings and woodwinds do help vivify the personalities of Harryhausen's stop-motion dinosaurs.

Also on this disk, Ray H's debut as a musician! He provides cymbal crashes on cue 15 of MJY, "Beautiful Dreamer," as performed in the aforementioned nightclub scene.