As I watch the trailer for the A-Team, and get excited whenever I hear the theme music, I think about what great music can do for a film. To me, the ultimate musical composer for movies is John Williams. Think of the Superman, Star Wars or Raiders themes, and how they instantly remind you of them music and get you in a certain frame of mind. The music from Rocky is the same way. And it's not just that we associate the music with the movie, and any music would have worked, because I think of music from movies like Spiderman (not a fan of Elfman) and Dark Knight and neither has exciting music that gets me going like the others.

I like Elfman in his correct context, like the Tim Burton movies. He was not appropriate for Spider-Man, which should have been rock music start to finish.

I think John Williams made Spielberg's career, and I think the score to Star Wars was underrated in terms of its contribution to the success. I know people credit the score highly, but I think it had more to do with the film's appeal than we can even imagine, in hindsight.

Elfman's best soundtrack was Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

There are few movie scores that I listen to for pleasure, but one is A Clockwork Orange by Wendy (nee Walter) Carlos. Much of which wasn't written by her, but consists of adaptations of familiar classical pieces.

I quite like the soundtrack to The Dark Knight, very moody and exciting.

The theme song to Star Trek: Generations is majestic and fantastic, same with the Rocketeer

Amen. Same with Superman.



I don't know if I could even recognize TDK's theme but if you enjoy it, that's great. The other two, I need to listen to again.

I used to love Elfman's scores more than anything.

These days, the mania has settled down, but I still love his scores for "Big Adventure" and the first Batman film. The music he did for "Nightmare Before Christmas" is my favorite film work of his.

"Beetlejuice" had a great opening theme as well.

Alan Silvestri's music for "Back to the Future" was a brilliant part of that film (and the sequels).

"Superman" is my favorite of the iconic John Williams scores.

I don't get as much into film scores as I did as a younger lad, but I really am digging a lot of the stuff Michael Giacchino does. (Examples: "The Incredibles" and the JJ Abrams "Star Trek.")

Ennio Morricone

Let me correct myself. Elfman is a fine composer but for the superhero films, he hasn't done anything memorable.




All good stuff.

Not even the first Batman one? That would probably be #1 on my "Memorable" list.

Beyond that, yeah, I'd probably agree. (Although if we were to expand the discussion to TV themes, I did like Elfman's opening song for the Flash series back circa 1990.)

Not for me. I hear it and I don't get excited at all however if i heard the Williams scores, my skin tingles.

It's not nearly as popular as his score for the first one, but my favorite Elfman score is Batman Returns. So much cool, witty, and spooky stuff going on there. I will agree though that Elfman's other superhero work has been pedestrian at best.*

I'm with Ross, as well, on the Dark Knight music. It's just great stuff.

*Except for his theme for the Flash tv series. I enjoyed that.

Also, all due love and respect to John Williams---his work on the Star Wars was fantastic. The only film in the series where I can't recall a single memorable music cue is Episode II.

However, I would take Jerry Goldsmith's 5 scores for the Star Trek movies over the Star Wars scores. Not the movies themselves---except for First Contact, Goldsmith pretty much scored the worst films in the series---but the music. The soundtrack for TMP alone belongs in every film music lover's collection, but I love the music for Final Frontier and First Contact almost as much. Even the opening music for the otherwise thoroughly mediocre Insurrection is lovely. And no one made the Trek fanfare sound more majestic than Goldsmith. Throw in the best theme music of any of the Trek shows (in my opinion) with Voyager, and Goldsmith really did the Trek franchise proud.

Goldsmith is great. IIIRC, he did the music for "Gremlins," which is another all-time favorite movie theme for me.