Hello and welcome to this week's installment of Cue by Cue.
Today we're going to be listening to 9m6-10m1 Insert Bar 57.
This insert is 18 bars long and was orchestrated by Angela Morley. As we briefly discussed last time, this insert was written after the atonal part of the original cue was rejected by the filmmakers.
Here are the tops of the sketch and orchestrated score:
Now let's listen to the insert together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHJUubKieKA
At 0:00 the insert begins with some brass rerecorded from the original cue, followed by some harp and the start of a sad rendition of the love theme at 0:06, which continues throughout the entire insert.
The theme is played such that phrase end at certain sync points, such as:
- the two brass bits for the zoom into Leia at 0:10,
- the next phrase for the continued machinery at 0:13
- the crash for the wide shot at 0:19
- the next phrase at 0:26 when the slab falls and Leia reacts to it
The love theme finally ends at 0:44 when the sorrowful brass kicks in for Lando inspecting the carbonite block up close. This section is again rerecorded from the original cue.
The sorrowful brass fades out as the Imperial officer walks up to Vader. Thus, the cue ends...
This insert is mostly used as intended in the final cut. No picture edits appear to have been made after scoring, although the entire insert wasn't used. Notably the first 13 seconds were dialed out and replaced with silence. The ending segues back into the original cue as intended. No other music edits were made for this insert.
Since I don't have a recording log I'm unsure what day this insert was recorded, but based on the take numbers it was likely recorded in late January. I'm also unsure how many takes were recorded, but according to the sketch the performance edit uses take 261.
This cue has been officially released on two different albums:
2) In 1993 on Arista Records' 4-CD Anthology box set
3) In 1997 on RCA Victor's 2-CD Special Edition set
More specifically, 9m6-10m1 Insert Bar 57 can be heard:
From 2:34-3:36 of disc 4 track 17 "Carbon Freeze/Luke Pursues the Captives/Departure of Boba Fett" on the 1993 album
From 3:21-4:17 of disc 2 track 7 "Carbon Freeze/Darth Vader's Trap/Departure of Boba Fett" on the 1997 album.
Neither release has a clean opening or clean ending, but both releases have the correct film mix. I was able to rip the clean opening from the Crimson Empire audio drama (part 2, 16:18-16:21), and I was able to rip the clean ending from the ESB radio drama (episode 2, 21:50-21:59). The ESB radio drama played this cue at the wrong pitch/speed, and I had to speed it up by 9.35%. Additionally it had narration over it, which I removed with MVSep.
The album sources also both play at wrong speeds:
The 1993 set needs to be sped up by 0.300
The 1997 set needs to be sped up by 0.300
For the video above I used a speed corrected copy of the 1993 set with the clean transitions from the Radio Drama and Crimson Empire. I used the 1993 set for this insert because it actually contains more of it.
Because the 1997 set plays the original bit first, it skips over the opening brass when it fades to the insert, using the original cue's brass earlier instead. Since the 1993 set fades to the insert at the correct time, it uses the insert's brass instead of the original cue's. This meant it was easier to splice the clean opening from Crimson Empire into the 1993 set rather than the 1997 set. They both fade back to the original cue at the same time.
One last interesting thing with the album edits - for whatever reason they both splice away from this insert back to the original cue about a second earlier than the film does, as a result it's not actually possible to recreate the film edit using the album unless you supplement with the unreleased ending from the radio drama. I remember years ago when I tried to make an isolated score edit for Empire Strikes Back I really struggled with this transition because I didn't realize that the insert splice points were different.
Actually, there was some misinformation for a while on JWFan about what this insert even was. Back in 2009 when John Takis first posted the ESB cue list (https://jwfan.com/?p=4092), he posited that the 1993 set had the unedited cue and that the 1997 set used the insert as an extension, meaning that the love theme was part of the original cue and that the atonal bit was the insert. This was incorrect, but a lot of people on JWFan understood this to be the case as recently as a couple years ago when I first worked on my isolated score edit. It was only upon reviewing the sheet music myself and discovering the clean transitions in the Tom Voegeli audio dramas that I realized this assumption was wrong.
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 another of my favorite cues, 10m2 Luke Pursues the Captives. See you then!
