The OT music will always be a classic, but I feel it is aging somewhat, especially ANH.  I can hardly listen to most of ANH anymore except for the main theme, the Death Star battle, and Leia's theme. 

Personally, I disagree with this sentiment completely. Star Wars is my favorite soundtrack of the six. I feel that it works flawlessly on two levels: both as music in itself, and insofar as it develops and exegetes the emotional mood of the film. As much as I enjoy the prequel soundtracks, I'd rather listen to the Star Wars score any day.

gobalicious said:

I feel ANH is aging somewhat...

Perhaps because ANH was written to sound like Classical Music?

walking_carpet said:

timdiggerm said:

Yeah, he might be thinking of when they used the Trade Federation theme to introduce the clone troopers in AOTC. Terrible decision, I thought.

im referring to the temple raid in ROTS; its the same music that was meant for the arena scene.

people complain that yoda's theme and the corsucant night-chase was shoved into the droid factory sequence in AOTC, but this was even worse. 

have you heard the original music for that scene? (The Droid Factory)

There was a youtube video that had the original edit of the droid factory scene (no threepio losing his head, original music etc.) but the guy lost his account, and now the video is lost,  I'll try to figure out how its supposed to play out, and then I will post a video of it.

timdiggerm said:

I'd really like to see the original cut of AOTC, in which Williams' score for the ending wasn't butchered.

This is one of my main gripes about the prequels. I enjoy them but feel that the sound/music editors too often tracked in old music unnecessarily. I can't help but attribute some of those stupid ass decisions to Ben Burtt.

The only thing that I actually LIKED about the prequels was the score, although I would say the the OT has a little more "feel" to it in terms of music like in the binary sunset scene.

FrederikOlsen said:

In fact, the Order 66-scene is the only scene from the PT that actually moves me, to the point where I might even shed a tear or two. Even if George's direction and editing during that scene are uncharacteristically brilliant, I've narrowed the reason for this down to the score. It's an incredibly emotional piece of music, and that's what John Williams does at his very best. Makes me sad over the deaths of the most two-dimensional of characters.

This isn't the video I promised but....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIYa-AzJRa0&feature=channel_video_title

A lot has been said here already but just to pile on - I love John Williams' scores for Star Wars, probably more than I love the films themselves. The scores to 'Star Wars' and especially 'Empire' are my favorites of all time, and that's including Howard Shore's scores to LOTR, which is saying a lot. And while I don't think Williams ever matches his late 70s/early 80s efforts, he's had a few gems since in Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, and Harry Potter. (Catch Me If You Can was fun, of course, but limited by the type of movie that was.)

As for the prequels...while each film introduced a great new theme or two (TPM: Anakin's, Trade Federation, Naboo, and of course Duel of the Fates; AOTC: Across the Stars, ROTS: Battle of the Heroes) and usually had a few unique, memorable cues (TPM takes the cake here) the scores as coherent entities overall suffered by poor storytelling and lackluster characters on Lucas' part. Last minute re-edits probably didn't help either - just look at how great the reconstructed TPM score is! (It's the only one that begins to approach the classic scores of yore.) Then of course, there's the fact that Lucas redid the turn of Vader in pickups - considering that such a huge story decision was done so late in the process, it's pretty amazing that the music for that scene worked just fine. (Or not. I haven't seen Episode III in a while and don't even remember if the music in that scene was relevant or simply subdued. That would never happen for the originals!) Anyway, all things considered, Williams did a pretty good job, even if there weren't many memorable cues and none of the prequels had a proper, original end credits suite. 

Probably the most annoying single thing, besides the chore that is listening to the AOTC score, and the post-facto butchering of TPM, is the shoehorning in of the 'Through The Window' cue from 'Empire' into the Yoda vs Palpatine fight. It makes absolutely no sense from either a story perspective, a musical perspective, or a film perspective. By which I mean: the two fights do not parallel each other in the slightest, neither emotionally nor from a plot perspective, the presence of the music here is jarring and out of place considering what we're hearing for the rest of the film, and the matching up of the cues/beats with the characters actions in the film, which were just spot on in Empire, is nonexistent in the ROTS scene. Annoys me to no end...and you KNOW this was a conscious decision by Lucas too; it's inconceivable that Williams would be responsible for something like this. (On the other hand, it's kind of cool to hear a second 'official' rendition of that iconic cue. Still, not worth it IMHO.)

^bilditup1

George looks like a real miser in your avatar.

DavidBrennan said:

...I can't imagine many people seriously thinking the PT scores were bad.  I mean, how many movies nowadays have truly powerful, memorable core melodies?  Not very many at all...

The OT had an unusually good score, the PT may very well have a better-than-average score but it's not like that's a very high hurdle.  Better than average can still be bad (even very bad) in my book, because average is godawful.  I would describe the PT score as dull and uninteresting, "bad" isn't quite the right word.

georgec said:

^bilditup1

George looks like a real miser in your avatar.

LOL, it's about time to retire it. It's from a guest appearance on The Colbert Report from 2005 or 2006 in response to something Colbert said. Was pretty hilarious at the time, but right now George is just creepy.

I agree that in today's scores, walls of sound without a coherent theme or melody have become the norm, and by that score the prequel scores are better.  But just like the films they're based on, I think it's also OK to lament what they could have been, as well as some of the poorer decisions/deficiencies compared to the earlier scores. Maybe that's not totally fair, because I regard the Empire score to be the greatest, ever, but this thread invited the comparison. Besides, this is the Internet! Fair, shmair

By the way, in case it wasn't obvious, the cue I'm referring to from Empire is from the scene where Vader is force-chucking things at Luke and he goes, er, through the window

I would describe the PT score as dull and uninteresting, "bad" isn't quite the right word.

 

 I think that about sums it up. There are a few memorable cues, but they are sparsely populated among a mostly 'meh' ocean. In Empire, except for maybe the first few tracks, it ain't like that. But again, not the fairest of comparisons