Windfall

Once in a great while, the gods smile upon you.

Very rarely do they ever release complete recordings of scores for purchase. Almost as rarely do they leak bootlegs of those unreleased complete recordings. Sometimes these bootlegs are in the form of “promotional” scores, sometimes they are “DVD rip” scores (i.e. pretty sketchy quality), and sometimes they are actually what you want: every cue that was recorded before being edited into the final cut of the film.

Google all you want, but you won’t find bootleg scores so easily. You have to do some serious digging and cross-referencing. And even then, the source will end up being some pirate who is charging more than what the stores would have charged anyway. It might technically be illegal, but it’s hardly unethical, considering the fact that these scores are unattainable commercially. So yeah, I guess that makes me a pirate, but I would gladly pay for these scores if they were actually released. Besides, I worked darn hard to find them.

I now have—at no cost—the legendary three-disc complete score to Kingdom of Heaven, the three-disc score to Gladiator, and the brief but magnificent original score to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Actually, Gladiator and The Force Unleashed weren’t all that hard to find. The original music for TFU (not the John Williams stuff taken from the movies), totaling less than half an hour, is posted on tracksounds.com for playing, but not for download. For a while, I would go there whenever I wanted to hear it, but I have been quite frustrated by the fact that it wasn’t for download. Frustrated, that is, until I found the real deal here.

Say what you will about the retarded and convoluted plot twist in the story, but the music is stellar. Mark Griskey should have done The Clone Wars, but instead we got Kevin Kiner. Anyway, I’m just here to spread the wealth. Download The Force Unleashed and enjoy!

The three-disc Kingdom of Heaven score is the real treasure, because I have wanted it very badly for a couple of years now, yet had resigned myself to the fact that it did not exist. But I have it now. However, because the download process was almost as complicated as the hunting itself, I can’t just give you a link to it. But I have it now. I have it.

It’s Christmas in November. Seriously, I haven’t been this excited about an aural acquisition since last November, when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: The Complete Recordings was released commercially. You don’t know how long I’ve been looking for this.

And now I have it. It’s mine. My own… myyy preciousss…