Special Notes:

8-page colour & black & white booklet with liner notes by CD producer Bruce Kimmel / Limited to 1000 copies

Writer / director / producer Bert I. Gordon switched gears from his standard sci-fi schlock output to this kid-friendly fantasy tale of a boy transported back in time to a pirate ship. This atypical project gave longtime composer Albert Glasser a rare chance to score a picture on a grand orchestral scale, evoking the expansive orchestral style of Eric Wolfgang Korngold, for whom he worked as a copyist for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938),

Glasser’s opening is ripe with brass fanfares, rumbling timpani, and little nuances designed to immerse the audience into the classic swashbuckling genre, and although Gordon’s production wasn’t blessed with much of a budget, he did seem to have enough money to shoot the picture in colour, and allow for more musicians (or at least the right combo of musicians with which Glasser could emulate a bigger sound).

Contrasting the film’s heroic theme are short cues for Jimmy, the boy soon to find himself on the open seas with pirates. Glasser’s approach is simple: big brass and percussion for the adult pirates, and lyrical strings, trilling flutes, and modernistic chords to separate the past world from the boy’s contemporary period. Those polar realms are bridged with nuanced cues that largely cover the boy’s experiences with the pirates, and the orchestral colorations address his fears, apprehension, as well as the pirates’ own reactions towards the little interloper.

Glasser’s score is built around a heroic theme, but like Korngold, he spins it into variations that are extremely precise in their mood. “Abu the Genie / The Pirate Ship / Blackbeard” is a perfect illustration of Glasser’s skills, moving from a mystical theme quote to a tense variation anchored around descending figures. Shimmering vibes and dissonant, shrill strings create an otherworldly effect, and the cue eventually culminates with an all-brass grouping for evil pirate Bluebeard.

The score’s midsection is filled with a bevy of action-oriented cues, obviously mimicking the back-and-forth motions of dueling pirates and brief moments of victory, and Glasser’s approach is all brass, percussion, and dissonance to add more tension. The writing style isn’t dissimilar to the delicious clamor found in his music for giant bug attacks, such as 1958’s Earth vs. the Spider.

Kritzerland’s CD makes use of a surviving ¼” stereo tape, and while there’s a rare moment of distortion (the brass in “Katrina Captured” shows some wear around the brass peaks), it’s an excellent presentation of the composer outside of his usual bug-eyed monster realm. The stereo recording captures many nuances like muted brass or the warm vibrato from the string bass, and it’s a pity the composer didn’t record his monster scores in stereo.

Boy and the Pirates was originally released in an edited suite (17:44) on a 1978 Starlog Records LP, and Kritzerland’s disc presents more music (26:02) in chronological order. That said, it’s still a short score, so there’s a bonus suite of material from Gordon’s 1958 cult film, Attack of the Puppet People (6:13), in mono.

The opening section is a gentle contemporary theme statement where lilting violins are gradually surrounded by snarling brass, and it’s noteworthy for the way Glasser creates unease by taking a pretty theme and poking it with disruptive elements. Worked into the atmospheric cue is a Theremin and rumbling percussion (presumably to illustrate the transformation of captured people into little ‘puppet people'), and a short, gentle section that closes the suite and the CD proper.

It’s a pity more material couldn’t have been added to the disc (in his liner notes, CD producer Bruce Kimmel says whatever else survives of Puppet People is affected by serious distortion), but had the disc been packed with other suites and themes samples, it would’ve drawn focus away from the lead score. At 32 mins., this is a brief album, but Glasser’s swashbuckling score never disappoints.

© 2010 Mark R. Hasan