Let's be very clear: What we have here is not culled from the original session tapes. These are entirely new recordings, supervised under the helm of composers and arrangers William Stromberg, his wife Anna Bonn and film-score archivist John Morgan. But this music, performed on the orchestral setup envisioned by Hermann and played with what comes across as sheer delight by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, is going to win the hearts of lovers of imaginative film around the world. And it won't take 80 days, either.

The 1961 motion picture, freely adapted from Verne's novel, was produced by Charles H. Schneer and directed by Cy (Zulu) Enfield, with Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion special effects adding the icing on the cake. But it is arguably Bernard Hermann's music that makes the film unforgettable. Just hearing it now, all these years later, is enough to give the listener a vivid sense of excitement.

Harryhausen and Hermann had a great track record together by the time this film went into production. They'd done The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and would go on to make Jason and the Argonauts, arguably their best. But not to this reviewer's mind!

Hair-raising soundtrack

In MI, Hermann makes extensive use of two main themes, a fanfare in C-sharp minor ending with dynamic cymbal crashes and an ascending line in D minor, and a third, a variation of the second, played on woodwinds. All three of these are introduced into the first cue, named, with Hermann's typical lack of titling imagination, "Prelude." But if your hair doesn't stand right on end when you hear it, then you're as inhuman as that giant crab the castaways fight.

These themes get played out in a number of orchestral settings, varying in tone and tempo but tending toward the dramatic and thrilling. Just listen to the way the seventh cue, "The Balloon 1," resolves! Many of these cues blend seamlessly into one another, so that the effect is rather like a suite. The themes get a lot of attention, but it isn't as if the maestro doesn't vary his approach from time to time. Cue 41, for example, "The Attack," is a purely percussive exercise (cut from the film), leading into another restatement of the main theme, augmented with bells and thundering, rolling tympani as the D-minor theme follows. The atmosphere is of waves crashing on a shore, with the water receding.

Space does not allow me to go on as extensively as I'd like about this disc. Suffice to say that it deserves a place on the shelf of every fantasy film fan. For their debut releases, Tribute Film Classics has also issued a re-creation of Fahrenheit 451 along with MI. Both discs have bonus cues that were shortened or cut entirely from the films. The F451 disc also includes the score for "Walking Distance," a Twilight Zone episode. An embarrassment of riches for Hermann fans!