Edward Scissorhands - Elfman's beautifully lyrical score continues to shape film scores and TV commercial scores even today.

Backdraft - The genisis of the Media Ventures sound.

Dances With Wolves - Barry's lushly romantic take on the west transcended Hollywood impressions of what a western score should sound like while striking a chord with the public.

Basic Instinct - Goldsmith's score single handedly defined the sound for the entire suspense genre of the 90s.

Schindler's List - John Willams' score was too good to imitate yet the haunting concerto that is this score seemed to open the way for the deeply reflective ambient scores of the later decade.

I'd add, after buying it on DVD this past weekend, TOTAL RECALL. Zimmer and his pets owe it all to this, the greatest of all action scores in my opinion. The action score genre was never the same afterwards, again, for better sometimes and for worse too.

Graeme Revell has made half his career out of copying ALIENS. Kind of a shame what he's turned into, since his breakthrough score (DEAD CALM) was so original and promising.

Now a bunch of them are copying the MV guys (who are shaping up to be a kind of in-house auto-copier themselves). I remember hearing, to my absolute astonishment, a direct-to-video movie that took Zimmer's POINT OF NO RETURN main title almost note-for-note. I mention this by way of wondering what the next big surprise is going to be. I find it heartening that Carter Burwell is working more and more often, and Christopher Young's career is starting to shape up ... Burwell's sound might be a bit too eccentric to break through in a major way, but I think Young has the chops to make the big breakthrough. It has to be the right picture, though. We'll just have to wait and see.

would like to add Williams' "Nixon". Many other composers started writing surreal, more textured and modernistic scores after that one. '

And the theme continues to appear in countless trailers.

I'll say that every single Horner score since Sneakers has had moments that sound like Sneakers. There MIGHT be ONE score that doesn't have a quote from Sneakers, but I don't think so. Don't have The Perfect Storm, but maybe that's the one to break the streak.

Everything actiony that James Newton Howard writes sounds like Just Cause/Outbreak (listen to the generic action cues on The Devil's Advocate, Dinosaur, and Stir Of Echoes, and you'll hear either one of them).

And regarding Braveheart, I agree, with the reservation that Legends Of The Fall provided more than a little influenza.

Shaun

NP----Gladiator (man, if this were original, it'd be effective as hell for the "Barbarian Horde" sequence)