Hello everyone and welcome to this week's installment of Cue by Cue.
We're in for a long one again today - just like last week, this cue underwent rebalancing, revisions, and film edits, and also has interesting quirks in some of its releases.
But before we get into all that, let's start with the introduction:
The original cue 2m3 More Little People was scrapped before recording and replaced with its revision, 2m3 Rev More Little People. Then, when the cues before this were rebalanced, this was rebalanced as well, gaining its new and final title of 2m5 Rev More Little People.
Once again, both versions were orchestrated by Herbert Spencer, the original is 52 bars long, and the revision is 56 bars long.
Here's the top of the conductor's scores for the original and revised versions:
The main differences in the revision are as follows:
- new bars A through E replace bars 1-3 of the original
- minor instrumentation changes in bars 4-12
- new bar 12A is inserted between 12 and 13
- minor instrumentation changes in bars 13-16
- new bar 25A is inserted between 25 and 26
So in total that's 7 new bars, 3 removed bars, and 13 modified bars.
Presumably stuff like the additional bars was done due to picture edits (additional footage needing to be scored, perhaps due to a new edit or new footage from the January pickups), I'm not sure about the instrumentation changes.
Now let's listen to the revised cue together:
At 0:00 the cue starts with some hesitant flute material for C-3PO punching R2 awake.
Then at 0:10 the Jawa rhythm returns as the doors open and the Jawas come back. This is quickly followed by the Jawa theme A section at 0:16 for the Jawas looking at all the droids in the sandcrawler.
Then at 0:41 we get some Jawa theme B section for a montage of shots of the Jawas putting the droids on display. At 0:56 there is a reset and slight modification of the rhythm, the montage continues with 3PO and R2 among the droids.
At 1:03 the Jawa theme A section starts again, for the final bit of montage following the first wide shot. As the human characters appear at 1:15, the rhythm starts to fade away, first for some transitionary material at 1:20 (for the first closeup), and then for the A section of Luke's theme at 1:25 as he runs to talk to Aunt Beru.
I always thought this was a wonderful transition into the more human themes of the score. It's also a great way to communicate to the audience that this will be our main character, since the last time we heard Luke's theme was all the way back in the title crawl in 1m2 Star Wars.
After the more full Luke's theme statement at 1:34, we get the slightest Dies Irae reference around 1:47. By "Dies Irae reference" I am specifically referring to the first four notes of the Dies Irae Gregorian Chant, a funeral hymn which is famously referenced in many classical works and film scores. In this score, John Williams uses it as sort of a "fate" motif, it plays during lifechanging moments for Luke, particularly on Tatooine.
The cue ends with some sustained horns that trail off as Owen approaches C-3PO...
This cue is also edited in the film; mainly to add about 5 seconds of music for the sandcrawler establishing shot. For this they just copy pasted the Jawa rhythm intended for 0:10-0:16. It's very curious to me that this was done in editing; it's not like it was a new shot or a picture edit or anything. In fact, the first page of that spotting sheet that I shared all the way back in the Introduction of this series has a note regarding this exact shot: "MAYBE ADD EXT SHOT SAND CRAWLER AT BEG"
It's very strange to me that if the filmmakers wanted music on that exterior shot, and knew so back in the spotting sessions, that they wouldn't have asked Williams to add it during the revision, especially since that shot was filmed during the January-February pickups and would have existed at the time the revision was written, and one of the main things the revision did was extend the opening by a few bars. Regardless, it seems Williams was not told to score that shot, and it was left to Ken Wannberg to edit in some music instead.
This cue was recorded on March 15, 1977, the seventh day of the recording sessions. It was the fourth cue recorded that day, being recorded immediately after last week's cue. This is one of the only examples in this score of two sequential cues being recorded back to back.
Nine takes were recorded, 189-197. Of these, takes 194 and 197 were used for the final performance edit.
As with every cue we've looked at so far, this cue has been officially released on four different albums:
1) In 1977 on 20th Century Records' OST album
2) In 1993 on Arista Records' 4-CD Anthology box set
3) In 1997 on RCA Victor's 2-CD Special Edition set
4) In 2018 on Walt Disney Records' Remastered album (remastered OST rebuilt from scratch from the session masters)
More specifically, 2m5 Rev More Little People can be heard:
From 0:52-end of track 4 "The Desert and The Robot Auction" on the 1977/2018 albums
From 0:52-end of disc 1 track 4 "The Desert and The Robot Auction" on the 1993 album
From 0:00-1:57 of disc 1 track 5 "The Moisture Farm" on the 1997 album.
All releases have clean endings, but only the 1997 has a clean opening. The 1977 is of course a remix.
I noticed as well that the 1993/1997 sets have a very different mix from 1:25-end; the 2018 set appears to have the film mix. The mix is so different that at first I thought it was a completely different take, but one of my friends pointed out that the 1997 and 2018 sets phase if you overlap them in an audio editor (meaning that they share some waveforms), so they have to be the same take.
Regardless, because it's the closest to the film mix I would recommend the 2018 set, except that it doesn't have the clean opening. Ideally you'd want to listen to this cue with a fanedit that splices the 1997 and 2018 sets in order to have the clean opening and the correct mix. The video above uses the 1997 for the first 10 seconds and then switches over to the 2018 set for the rest.
That's all I've got for today, thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any comments or questions. Sorry for having to skip last week, these should be on a more regular schedule for the immediate future.
Next week we'll be discussing 2m6 R-2.