Projects of the Nerd

Wow - have you just dodged a bullet. I just scrapped four paragraphs detailing the progression of the Star Wars soundtracks from screen, to LP, to CD to CD to CD.

The short version is this: The LPs came out with the movies. They were generous (well, the first two were) but incomplete. And many of the tracks were out of order and mixed up with other cues. Eventually we got more or less ALL OF THE MUSIC, in the right order on nice double CD sets. Any music not on there was just MISSING. GONE.

Now I want my "wrong" soundtracks back. The original Star Wars LPs were reproduced on CD. So I have those. But Emprire only got a single CD release, so half of those cues never made it to CD. So I'm taking my ESB CDs and remixing the missing tracks from those. With the aid of track listings and times, I was doing them from memory. "The Heroics of Luke and Han" - Starts with Luke escaping the Wampa, little bit of music not used in the film of Han looking for Luke in the snow, segue to Han and Leia fleeing Echo base. Voilà! But there are a few that escape me. The Departure of Boba Fett is kind of a jumble. I think I'm close, but the track times are off by like 20 seconds.

Friends to the rescue! One friend has the original LPs, another friend has a turntable hooked up to his 'puter! So I will have guide tracks! Yay!

It will be interesting to see how close my "from memory" tracks get.

As a post-script, I'm amazed that some of these trasitions were originally done with tape. I don't understand how people mixed music before computers.