The Blue Max soundtrack CD set
La-La Land Records, 2014
To film music fans, The Blue Max may be one of Jerry Goldsmith's most beloved of his many fine film scores. It's certainly one of the earliest of his large-scale works. Considering its revered status, it's no surprise that the score had seen several soundtrack releases over the years, with the most recent debuting just a few short years ago and quickly selling out.
This new release from La-La Land featured a fresh remastering and restoration of both the original LP presentation and bonus tracks of previously unreleased music. Since the album would sound much different than any prior CD edition, it was important the album have a much different look and feel as well.
To that end, the album's executive producers were hoping to spotlight the French grande poster seen above (both before and after extensive retouching and cleanup), on the new soundtrack's booklet and cover, as many of the previous soundtracks had relied on the more common U.S. one sheet artwork.
Likewise, rather than use the more familiar sans-serif logotype featured on much of the original marketing posters here in the U.S. (and likewise used on previous soundtrack CDs) I discovered the splendidly Germanic logotype below on an old paperback tie-in edition of the Jack D. Hunter novel on which the film was based.
Shown above are several of my original cover roughs. Note that both covers B and D spotlight the familiar cockpit artwork of U.S. posters (and used prominently on virtually every previous soundtrack release) while cover C uses the familiar sans-serif title treatment of the same U.S. posters discussed earlier.
This all-new edition of The Blue Max can be purchased at
http://www.lalalandrecords.com/BlueMax.html.
You can also read an in-depth interview with one of the album's producers, Neil Bulk, here:
http://tracksounds.com/specialfeatures/Interviews/interview_neil_bulk_2014.htm
