Hello and welcome to this week's installment of Cue by Cue.
Today we're going to be listening to 1m1 Main Title, the first John Williams-written cue heard in the film.
Technically before this we get to hear the 20th Century Fox Fanfare, but I'm not giving it its own entry since it isn't Star Wars-specific and wasn't written by Williams. I didn't even mention it during the last film, but I'm mentioning it here now because while the original film just tracks in a pre-existing recording, The Empire Strikes Back uses a new recording made at the ESB sessions and conducted by Williams. Every future Star Wars film through the prequels will use this same recording for the Fox logo.
Back to the main title - for The Empire Strikes Back the filmmakers opted to rerecord the title crawl music from the original film. Unfortunately, I don't have the production sheets used for this recording - so I couldn't tell you if a new handwritten score was made or if they just recorded off of the published suite like they did for later films.
What I can say is that they likely recorded 69 bars - bars 1-67 were copied from either the original score or published suite from the first film, with a new bar 68 written for an early ending. It's possible that this ending is an additional bar or two, I'm just basing the length off of the Live-to-Projection concert sheets which segue into the next cue at bar 69.
With all that out of the way, let's listen to the cue together:
As mentioned above this cue is basically a 1:1 rerecording of the first 2/3 of 1m2 Star Wars from the original score. The speed and sync is a little different and there are some performance differences but otherwise the music is the same.
At 0:00 we hear the first crash of the brass for the Star Wars logo, and we get a brass lead-in to our first Luke theme statement at 0:07. In the original film this would've synced with the start of the first paragraph, but here it doesn't actually sync with anything.
Luke's theme is repeated at 0:16, followed by the B section at 0:26. In the original film the B section would've synced with the start of the second paragraph, but here it starts in the middle of the first.
At 0:49 the A section returns, with one last statement at 0:58. The return of the A section would've synced with the start of the third paragraph in the original film, but here it begins a bit late.
Luke's theme climaxes at 1:07, and followed by some ascending strings, some ascending brass, and then giving way to some calming woodwinds to set the stage for the coming adventure. Thus, the cue ends....
As mentioned above the Empire Strikes Back recording doesn't follow the intended sync from the first film. This could partially be blamed on the addition of the "Episode V The Empire Strikes Back" text where the original film didn't have an episode name, but given they rerecorded the cue and the rerecording doesn't sync with the original they easily could've fixed up the sync points if they really wanted to (or changed the speed of the crawl to match the music). I'm not really sure why this wasn't done.
In the following year, 1981, the original film would be rereleased with the "Episode IV A New Hope" moniker and its title crawl would be altered so that the music no longer syncs with it either. Unfortunately this was never fixed in the Special Editions and is still out of sync to this day.
This cue is used in the final cut exactly as intended with no edits or alterations, a rarity for this score.
As mentioned in the introduction post for this series, I don't have a recording log for ESB so I can't tell you confidently on which day this was recorded (or what take numbers), but I would guess it was one of the later cues recorded in January - based primarily on the photo of the 24-track master tapes where it's on the same tape with other cues recorded in late January.
It would also make sense that the title crawl was one of the last things recorded because it's one of the least important cues - if absolutely necessary they could've reused the crawl music from the first film.
This cue has been officially released on four different albums:
1) In 1980 on RSO 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, 1m1 Main Title can be heard:
From 0:00-1:30 of track 1 "Star Wars (Main Theme)" on the 1980/2018 albums
From 0:00-1:30 of disc 1 track 1 "Main Title" on the 1993 album
From 0:00-1:30 of disc 1 track 2 "Main Title" on the 1997 album.
Every release has a clean opening but no releases have the clean ending. The 1980, 1997 and 2018 releases of this cue are all remixes. The 1997 set is additionally brickwalled. For these reason I can only recommend listening to the 1993 set for this cue.
Additionally, all releases of this cue play at the wrong pitch/speed, although this can easily be corrected in an audio editor:
1980 set has to be sped up by 0.600 to match film
1993 set has to be sped up by 0.173 to match film
1997 set has to be sped up by 0.400 to match film
2018 set has to be slowed down by -0.460 to match film
The video above primarily uses the 1993 cue, with a clean ending taken from the 1983 radio drama (1:39-1:50 of episode 8). This radio drama section needed to be slowed down by -0.271 to match the film. Additionally, this section was buried under dialogue and sfx, but I was able to get it completely clean using an AI stem separation tool.
That's all I have for today, thanks for reading! Feel free to leave any comments or questions.
Next week we'll be listening to 1m2 The Imperial Probe. See you then!