Top Shelf Library Contains Wing Commander Music (July 23, 2017)

[Bandit LOAF]

On Friday, we shared the Royal Marine Bands playing the Wing Commander movie overture… and then we got to thinking: just how do you license music from Wing Commander, anyway? Investigation revealed that FOX Music handles licensing songs from composer David Arnold. The overture recieves two listings: one for the original soundtrack and one for a 2006 library of production music. That's right: it's another previously unseen CD that includes Wing Commander music! Top Shelf Library is a five-disc set of film music that includes the Wing Commander overture on disc 3 ("Action/Epic/Heroic.") This is an example of library music, which is where movie productions source non-original music. If, say, someone cutting a trailer or making a commercial wanted to use the track, they would pay FOX and take it from this disc. The process is digital today, but until the early 2000s involved actual libraries of CDs, like those pictured here. We've sourced our own copy, and will post a digital copy of the track when it arrives!






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Original update published on July 23, 2017

 

[Worf]

It's a well known fact that movie trailers often feature the soundtrack of another movie. Perhaps the most recognizable one was the original 1987 Robocop trailer, which featured the Terminator score. Sometimes lesser movies were also used - I remember having the TV on in the background and wondering why it was playing the Waterworld soundtrack - some other movie decided to use it for the trailer.

This is because the score for a movie is often not complete when you need a trailer, so you hope to find something suitable in the soundtrack library to use. Sometimes, they'll re-cut the trailer with score from the movie in later editions once it becomes available, so you might only hear it once in the teasers and then it's gone forever.

Being a soundtrack fan, I have noticed this a lot. Sadly, I was too lazy to actually record down which trailers featured which music. I can't even definitely tell you for sure if I heard the WC overture in a trailer. I've just heard so many it's blurs itself.