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It makes you watch the movies in a different way, and you appreciate the scores and soundtracks more, and wish you had what wasn't included. For example, all the music heard in the scenes in Rio in Moonraker would be wonderful to have.
I do wonder if anyone else notices time discrepancies, where frequently, the film version of tracks ends up being slightly faster than the OST version? I've recently heard that PAL DVDs speed up playback slightly, and wonder if that is the issue. To give an extreme example, if I play my PAL DVD of the opening titles of For Your Eyes Only, alongside a Youtube video of the same footage on Blu Ray, my DVD version comes in at least 10 seconds faster, and pitched sharp.
Would appreciate any insights.
Indeed!
From Reddit :
"Since the original show was shot in 24fps, but TVs in Europe play at 25fps, Europian VHS and DVDs actually speed up movies and TV shows and play them at 25fps, which results in a 4% increase of playback speed. Thus a 25 minute episode for example, would be reduced to 24 minutes and would play at a higher pitch. This problem doesn't exist on Blu-Rays and digital services like Netflix and Amazon Prime as newer TVs in Europe can run with variable framerate."
But even then, there are often differences between a "clean" version (in theater, on Blu-Ray) and the released score.
It's funny that you picked FYEO because it's one where the title music is indeed sped up, not just on dvd! I guess this is to match the timing of the title sequence. We know that the title song was re-worked at a late stage so that "For Your Eyes Only" were the first lyrics of the song. Maybe it changed the length of the track a bit and it had to be sped up to gain a few seconds. But that's very speculative.
"Dumping Blofeld" is another sped up track, while the gunbarrel is at normal speed.
So there is no rule and getting to the bottom of this is the path to madness (and we love that). These were analogic days and I'm no expert but I guess slight speed changes could happen while editing a movie, even if unitentionnal.
And then you have alternate takes, where the pitch is the same but the tempo is different, because the track from the CD and from the movie are not from the same take!
(note : speeding up a track without changing the pitch is only possible with modern audio softwares)
One example : A Drop in the Ocean from YOLT. A bit faster in the movie, but same pitch. You can tell it's a different take by listing at the trumpets at the very end, which differ a tiny bit.
Madness, pure madness :p
I find it strangely fun to find all these small changes in the films and I like that other people do too.
I like noticing those changes too, whether they're about pitch or tempo or edits, though only in very select cases do I replicate said changes in the files of my Bond music collection.
:))
Same here. A few years ago I tried to replicate the exact same edits on multiple Bond soundtracks. It's a lot of work, which is fine, but more important the result is not always a great listening experience and sacrifices a lot of music material.
I now only keep edits that are really important / noticeable while casually watching the film. Pre-credits to main titles are a common case, some of them are just too good (LALD, TND...).
I'd be curious to know what kind of changes you decide to replicate ;)
Here are some tracks I have film edits of. Some of them do not necessarily recreate every little change, especially when they were jarring to begin with. They merely copy those changes I felt were interesting and musically pleasant.
YOLT
Fight at Kobe Dock (action part is repeated)
MR
Main Title - Moonraker (shorter intro)
Corinne Put Down (shorter ending)
FYEO
Bond in Spain (shorter ending)
Bond Meets Kristatos (shorter ending)
OP
The Palace Fight (shorter bar before the Bond Theme that plays when the balloon appears)
LTK
Licence to Kill (edited down the version of the song used in the title sequence)
TND
Backseat Pilot (shortened in multiple places)
Escape to Hotel (shortened when Bond escapes the factory, and when Bond hangs up the phone; also included some guitar notes that were barely audible in the album track)
I’d also previously thought that ‘Bond The Stowaway’ was an original cue, but now think it’s part of Mujahadin & Opium and Afghanistan Plan spliced together.
I’m unsure if 'He Got The Boot' is two separate cues; it sounds like part of 'Air Bond' is tracked into a different string-heavy cue when Kamran Shah is trying to evade the Russians, but it could have been written as one cue.
There are a few instances of tracking in the film that I hadn’t picked up on: ‘Kitchen Fight’ when Necros attacks ‘Green Four’ (hero!) at Blayden House is just part of ‘Inflight Fight’, but without the final chords up an octave on the brass. This begs the question, what did Barry originally use to score here? It’s such a pivotal scene, I find it hard to imagine that he agreed to just repeating what he’d scored for the Bond/Necros fight at the end of the film. ‘Death Of Saunders’ also uses ‘Inflight Fight’, again without the repetition up an octave at the end of the phrase.
The title track is an interesting one…I’d always assumed that it was a straightforward edit, removing the bridge and cutting to the final chorus. However, the edit at 2.22 cuts back to the first chorus and at 2.37 it cuts back to the first chorus again, then with a fade (so you miss the call and response of “set your hopes up way too high (the Living Daylights)…living’s in the way we die (the living daylights)” heard at the end of the song and the natural fade they use here. By the way, I think I’m right in saying that this is the only main title in the history of the Bond films that ends on a fade?
Finally, I stumbled across this rather wonderful stripped back version of the title track on YouTube last week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=sc1NoJilaqM
Respect to the band for singing the song in the original key (most artists transpose their music down a few tones when they get older so they can reach the higher notes!). I have the audio in high quality if anyone would like it.
Finally - I could have sworn that the film version of ‘Into Vienna’ was absent from my 1998 Rykodisc CD. Did it creep onto the 2003 remaster as the second half of ‘Approaching Kara’?
As ever, any input is most welcome!
I’ve also been working on the missing music from Goldeneye so hope to post about that soon…