Sitting here listening to Titanic (which I bought simply for the action music), I've heard The Rocketeer and Don Davis' 1996 TV flick The Beast.

What else is in this score, and what are some more rip-off scores?

Star Trek 2 the Wrath of Khan is a virtual magnet of tidbits and ideas from other scores from Herrmann's Mysterious Island to Goldsmith's Star Trek:TMP, not to mention a few lesser known classical pieces.

Cocoon rips Newman's The Natural.

Alex North's Cleopatra borrows heavily from North's own Spartacus.

Goldsmith's Chain Reaction and Executive Decision are virtually indistiguishible in places.

I remember seeing some low-budget direct-to-video number whose main title was EXACTLY like the opening of Zimmer's POINT OF NO RETURN -- I swear, almost note-for-note.

James Horner's BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS is a near-legendary melange of pretty much every popular SF score of the day, particularly STAR TREK - TMP.

I love THE ROCKETEER's main title, but it always struck me that the theme was just a well-disguised version of "Yellow Rose of Texas." And don't get me started on GLORY or ALIENS.

There are strange little references to PLANET OF THE APES in both STAR WARS and CE3K.

Goldsmith references ALEXANDER NEVSKY throughout SUPERGIRL -- a joke, perhaps, but one I don't get (unlike the "Ride of the Valkyries" joke throughout KING SOLOMON'S MINES.)

And so on.

Also, Star Trek: Insurrection sounds an aweful lot like U.S. Marshalls at times.

The shame of it is, I *DON'T* hate GLORY, even as much of a ripoff montage as I know it to be. I've never heard Prokofiev's IVAN THE TERRIBLE and am frightened to (my best Hollywood friend tells me it's EXACTLY the same). It's bad enough that I already get the references to "Carmina Burana," THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, and possibly even Morricone's THE MISSION (or so a professional composer friend insisted at the time -- I went so far as to play cues from both over the phone to him, and he was nearly frothing about it: "I'm a COMPOSER! I can TELL these things!")

It's a guilty pleasure, I guess. I JUST LOVE THE WAY IT SOUNDS! To quote Mr. Rozsa, "Please don't hate me." I'll give you a free swing at me in Detroit, however.

Horner's:
1) "Titanic" = "Braveheart"
2) "Titanic" Hard to Starboard = Al Bathra from "Courage Under Fire" (every single note!)
3) "Land Before Time" = "Peter and the Wolf" (Prokofiev)
4) All "comic" scores = "Liutenant Kijé" (Prokofiev)
5) All his "Revenge" tunes = "Thunderheart"
6) "Aliens" = "Star Trek III" (Klingon Theme)
7) "Bicentenial Man" = "Deep Impact" (the anoying piano tlim-tlim-tlimmm) and "Braveheart"
etc, etc...

Others:

1) "Batman" (Elfman) = "The Fury" (Williams) - I wonder why he was kept in the project... - and "Hellbound - Hellraiser II" (Young)
2) "Beetlejuice" (Elfman) = "Witches of Eastwick" (Williams)
3) "Prince of Egypt" (Zimmer) = "Generations"'s Nexus Theme (McCarthy)
4) "The Right Stuff" (Conti) = "The Planets" (Holst) altough Conti denies...
5) North re-used his "2001" rejected score on other movies, but most of all in "Dragonslayer"
6) "Gold Diggers" (McNeely) = "Young Sherlock Holmes" (Broughton)
7) "Clifhanger" (Jones) = "Last of the Mohicans" (Jones)
8) "The Peceamaker" (Zimmer) = "The Rock", "Crimson Tide", "Days of Thunder", "Armageddon", "Enemy of the State", "Face/Off", "Speed", etc, etc...

...

Michael -- intending to or not, you hit the central contrast I sense between Elfman and Horner. Horner REALLY DOESN'T CARE -- if he ever did, he certainly doesn't now. (Listen to BICENTENNIAL MAN and tell me this is someone whose principal interest is not his paycheck.) Elfman, by contrast, is as genuine a filmmusic FAN as any of us, and a hell of a musician at the same time. Earlier today I was listening to A CIVIL ACTION, not one of his best ones, but a fun score, and especially interesting for its interpolations of both Thomas Newman and "Madame Butterfly" -- a bizarre juxtaposition, but one only a true and clever composer could have achieved. Even the weakest Elfman scores seem to be informed by a real love for not just music, but FILM music -- while each successive Horner score just feels like "how's the fastest way I can get this done?" I really think I've reached my limit with Mr. Horner -- I'll never buy his stuff blind again, so screwed did I feel by both BICENTENNIAL MAN and FREEDOM SONG.

Wedge, I'll pick up IVAN THE TERRIBLE as soon as I can -- it can't be any worse a disillusionment than when someone else, on this very board, told me that the gorgeous opening from LAND BEFORE TIME (one of my favorite main titles EVER!) was actually Bartok's "Wooden Prince." Although I'll be defiant here and say I prefer Horner's version.

- - -

Batman is a rip-off of The Fury?
Beetlejuice is a rip-off of The Witches of Eastwick?

That has to be the funniest thing I´ve heard all year! Once again, Andre, you have amazed me with your stunning intelligence and incredible knowledged in music!
Impressive!

SFT

NP: Battle of Neretva, Bernard Herrmann

Star Wars: Darth Vader's theme is similar to Williams score to Dracula

Virus: Kinda reminds me of The Hunt for Red October and The Relic

Joseph Loduca: His scores to Xena and Hercules are THE RIP-OFF scores.

I would agree, count me in as well. These rip-off threads appear time and time again in every film score forum... usually, they are full of all kinds of odd assumptions if not downright strange accusations. The entire history of music from Tomaso Albinoni to Alexander Zemlinsky has had composers using melodies, ideas, themes, harmonic progressions, instrumental colors et cetera, et cetera, et cetera from other composers asides from recycling own ideas and material to create something new out of it. That's what composers do. All of them. Very few composers write something that's not in some way or another based on something else. It's the evolution of music. True, some composers - like Arnold Schönberg and John Cage - have made stronger efforts to create something completely original than others. But in film scores originality is far less important than immediacy. It is not the top concern. This is no excuse for real plagiarism, not at all, but as soon as some folks hear eight notes in a sequence they've heard before someplace else they pounce on the composer and yell "stealing!", even though the entire composition may have nothing at all in common with the supposed model. It is ridiculous.

To copy note-by-note (or with little difference) someone's else works and claiming to be orginal is something else...
And being a filmscore fanboy doesn't give anyone else the credentials to do this kind of thing and go unnoticed.

STF: Wanna hear something even more funny? Try "Sleepy Hollow" = "Nightbread" = "Darkman" = "Dick Tracy" = "Batman" = Williams and Herrman and others (only worst).

SFT

Exactly, I am in total agreement with you here, Andre. That's 100% what I meant, too. Of course, now it is a subjective matter as to when one thing goes over into the other. We could now argue about the details of individual scores, but why bother. I give you that there is merrit to SOME of the charges made in this thread, though certainly not to all of them.

NP: Jerry Goldsmith THE MUMMY
(Decca/London)

And thanks Nicolai. You've said it all.

The thing is - you don't know how the film music world works. You don't know why some scores sound like other scores, because you do not have the facts. You just have the finished product to listen to.

And - and this I find pretty important - don't take film music so seriously. It only has one purpose and it's all about delivering a product and getting paid in very short time. Not to write something that will stand the test of time.

And some of you are downright stupid - or so it seems anyway - yelling about ripp-offs jsut because some piece reminds you of another piece, or has a couple of familiar phrases. How many of you know how to compose? Get a real musical education before you start complaining, pretending you know anything about music at all, apart from the things you have learned from listenint to it, or playing the piano as a kid.

Composers are often shoehorned into positions they'd rather not be in -- more or less FORCED to copy a temp track. That happens. Although some composers LIKE having a temp track -- Williams does, and Goldsmith has become more friendly to the concept over the years. (It also allows his pal Joe Dante to inflict THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY on him, no matter what the picture. An old joke of theirs.)

In my own posts, I guess I've been trying to work towards isolating the difference between honest borrowing and outright stealing. I can't get too worked up about the PATRIOT GAMES ripoffs in Graeme Revell's score for HARD TARGET -- that must have been the temp. I DO get irritated when I hear someone with such manifest talent as James Horner just throwing a pile of notes onto a page and basically deciding "it'll all come through in the mix." Composers with equivalent opportunities, in much the same demand (e.g. Elfman, Williams, Goldsmith) do not do this as promiscuously as, for example, Horner. (He's just the most obvious target; there are others whom I respect even less. It's not like I don't own a BIG pile of Horner CDs.)

You imply that this is "only" film music. There is no such thing as "only" when it comes to music. It is probably the most intimate of arts, the most difficult to describe and the most instantly seductive as well. Music is IMPORTANT, no matter who puts it out or how or where it comes from -- and as a consequence, it is also important to recognize when music (as with ANY art) is CYNICALLY done. I'm not talking about doing it for a living, or for money -- everybody needs to eat -- but there's miles of difference between some poor underpaid guy being asked to copy COURAGE UNDER FIRE, and a multi-millionaire who does the same thing almost out of reflex. And it is grossly insulting to suggest that the best -- or even the worst! -- of these composers do not try to reinvent the wheel EVERY TIME they sit down at the blank page. I've known too many professional film composers to believe otherwise. Perhaps with age, the more successful ones get a what-the-hell attitude towards it -- as Goldsmith once said, "I've never shown up at a conducting session without a score, and now I know I never will." Sure, it's partly about getting the job done, but so many of these guys absolutely sweat blood over things that might never be heard. Who knows if it will be or not? Who knew STAR WARS was going to be a hit? Who knew TORN CURTAIN would be rejected (and the rejected score more lionized than the final one?) People thought JAWS was going to be a huge flop, that at best it should've been a Movie of the Week. We can't plan our legacies. The best of us strive to do the best we can. Who wants to be remembered as "that hack who did (fillintheblank)."

The New Yorker article about the Best Score nominees for 1998 (including TITANIC) is more articulate than I will be. I refer everyone to that. (Is it online? Don't know. Knock yourselves out finding it. Cheerio. Mr. Lindahl, you were sorry for being harsh; I don't think you were, and I hope I was not too much so either.)

SFT

I know I was harsh, and I'm not accusing you for being stupid and ignorant. But you have to admit it's true - many people trashing different scores and composers just can't base their opinions on facts. They think something is a rip-off just because the orchestrations or harmonic structures etc remind them of some other piece they've heard, or because a phrase sounds familiar to them. These people should get the facts first.

"You imply that this is "only" film music. There is no such thing as "only" when it comes to music. It is probably the most intimate of arts, the most difficult to describe and the most instantly seductive as well."

Of course, film music isn't just "only" music, but think about why it's written. These composers deliver a product. I'm not saying that film music is more simple than any other music - it certainly isn't - but everything in Hollywood is about making money, and when composers have just a month to compose a score, they just don't have the time to treat it as "real art", to use a stupid term.

So I'm now going to have some fun. I'll leave it to all you people to decide which of the following are rip-offs and which were inspired subconsciously:

Bartok begat Jerry Goldsmith's Freud.

Mahler begat Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo.

Alex North's The Bad Seed begat both Goldsmith's A Patch Of Blue and Elmer Bernstein's To Kill A Mockinbird.

Bach begat North's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? which begat Goldsmith's The Illustrated Man and some of his later TV Movies.

North's "Moon Music" from "Who's Afraid..." begat the opening to Goldsmith's Chinatown.

North's A Streetcar Named Desire begat Leonard Bernstein's On The Waterfront which begat Goldsmith's City Hall and L.A. Confidential.

Something by Benjamin Britten begat Goldsmith's Islands In The Stream.

Goldsmith's The First Great Train Robbery begat...lots by Bruce Broughton.

Lalo Schifrin's The Amityville Horror begat Elliot Goldenthal's Pet Semetary.

Goldsmith's The Wind And The Lion begat Christopher Young's Haunted Summer.

Bartok also begat latish Goldsmith in general which begat early James Horner which begat early Christopher Young.

Ooh, forgot! City Hall and L.A. Confidential which were begatten originally by North then syphoned by L, Bernstein begat late Chris Young (Rounders; The Hurricane).

Now for some funnier ones:
Days Of Wine And Roses begat Goldsmith's First Knight.

Jaws begat...something by Michael Jackson.

Marlene Dietrich begat "Flying Dreams" from The Secret Of NIMH ("Valling in luff again...")

Etc.

One thing I think about a lot: How many combinations of notes are even POSSIBLE? I mean, OF COURSE certain themes are going to sound like certain others ... how many notes are there to go around? Logically put together? It's a tough one. One reason I haven't done much as a composer myself is because I KNOW I don't have anything unique or interesting to say (at least to me -- I could make the same case for a lot of the so-called professionals out there, but as I said, we all need to eat.)

I've heard certain themes, or motives at least, that I KNOW couldn't POSSIBLY have been stolen by other composers -- and yet there they are. (How does a moment from Fumio Hayasaka's great SEVEN SAMURAI translate into a motif from Gerald Fried's wonderful STAR TREK score "Amok Time"? I leave it to you all to make that connection. They're both great and I REALLY don't think Fried was intentionally ripping off Hayasaka -- I doubt Fried even noticed the Hayasaka cue, EVEN ASSUMING he EVER saw SEVEN SAMURAI!)

What a world.

It made a huge difference to me when I learned that one of my favorite musical moments from Star Trek III was from someone else's work. I don't buy into the opinion that film composers are simply commissioned artisans who are delivering "product". Certainly that happens to be the case by and large but that doesn't HAVE to be the case as evidenced by the great works of a handful of truly thoughtful and motivated composers who seem to consistently produce unique sounding scores. In other words it IS possible to work within the medium and rise above the pressures to be repetitive.

Actually, a little part from Goldsmith's Star Trek: Insurrection reminds me of Eidelman's Trek 6 - which again features the main motif from Stravinsky's Firebird (because director Nicholas Meyer imagined that piece of music when telling Eidelman what he wanted) and references to Holst's The Planets (originally, the movie was, like Star Wars to be scored with Holst's work).

Some Williams:
Star Wars of course, has several references to The Planets and Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps ("The Little People").
The fugue from Jaws 2 is VERY similar to "Stars and Trucks" from CE3K.
The americana parts from Superman are similar to The Cowboys.
The "NBC Theme" pops up during the end credits of Indy 3. The "Duel of the Fates" choral motif can be heard in the finale of The Fury. Generally, Williams seems to like those little self-references (some kind of inside joke maybe?). Sometimes a short motif from an older score pops up, and sometimes, a motif from an older score is incorporated in a major theme for a new score. Usually, though, it's not what I'd call a rip-off. I'm quite sure that a short reference to Superman can be heard in Jedi's Endor battle music. I'm sure there are more, I want to check all of his scores for these references when I have the time.

The problem with Horner's Aliens is that while it generally is a quite good score, especially the Trek 2 references are so obvious that I get completely annoyed when they pop up. As I said, most of William's references seem to be more of a little joke for those who know his works. They hardly disturb me.

what several? tell me what in Star Wars sounds like The Planets? I've listened to both pieces so many times now, and I don't hear anything in Star Wars that references The Planets. Is it the dissonant chords in the main title?

the Stravinsky, yes. You hear it in the desert. quite obvious. Rite of Spring is a great piece ain't it?

this just in: Kilar sued by the estate of Carl Orff for plagiarizing Carmina Burana in his Ninth Gate score!