So, not too long ago, I believe it was Shin Hibiki who made me aware of Jim Figurski's amazingly awesome Kickstarter project. Another fan named Grimbot had previously done a great job of piecing together music from the G1 DVD's, but that was only the first step. The recordings were pretty rough. Jim raised enough money to buy some decent sound editing software to try to clean it up and create a truly soundtrack-quality version:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342576182/grimbots-soundtrack-restoration
So, let me say that I have always loved the music from G1. Johnny Douglas and Robert J. Walsh are my personal heroes. I hum the tunes constantly (and now, thanks to this music restoration project, I also dream about them) and I've wanted to see an official soundtrack release for years. Many, many years ago, I even tried to teach myself how to use a MIDI composition program because I was going to write MIDI versions of every theme. I am not a musician and I know nothing about such things, but such is my love for the background music in Transformers that I was prepared to trudge through it somehow. It never materialized, of course, but my love for the music remained.
I jumped into this project wholeheartedly. I offered my services and was prepared to help identify which themes appeared in which episodes. The way the soundtracks were recorded, the dialogue was on one track and the music and sound effects were often combined together on a separate track. This means the dialogue can be isolated and removed, but oftentimes the music is marred by the sounds of laser blasts or footfalls. An encyclopedic knowledge of the music really is required, since it's sometimes necessary to pluck the same music track from three or four episodes and combine pieces together to finally arrive at a copy of the music without sound effects ruining it.
I discovered very quickly that my memory is flawed. Slightly, not deeply, but even slightly is a bothersome problem. I know the G1 cartoon very well, and I can usually cite numerous episodes and scenes in which a specific piece of music is used, but I can never guarantee that it's a complete list. I keep e-mailing Jim with messages like "This music appears in 'More Than Meets the Eye' part 2 and 'Fire in the Sky' and I'm not aware of any other instances" and then two weeks later I remember it's also in "War of the Dinobots." I know Jim is working super hard and putting in some long hours towards making this restoration a success, because he doesn't want to let his Kickstarter backers down.
So what I decided to do was just dig through every single episode and document precisely which themes show up in which episodes. Then we would have a complete list to work from and I would not be relying on my unreliable memory circuits. Of course, this necessitated giving the themes names. Grimbot assigned names to all the ones he archived, but what I have discovered is that his archive was not complete. He was pretty exhaustive for the first season, but as soon as I hit the second season, I found that I was having to invent names for themes left and right because these new tunes were popping up left and right that never got archived. The "Cold Slither" instrumental theme was even missing, and that's one of my favorites!
(As an aside, I have determined that the music editors probably didn't know the themes by heart. Most likely, they picked which music track would be played during which scene based on the theme's name, or perhaps by a description of mood assigned to the theme by the composer. For instance, I think the music that plays at the very beginning of "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1 was the "Mystery" theme for the first season. The theme that plays when the Decepticon Welcoming Committee approaches Wheeljack and Bumblebee is the "Emergency" theme. When you keep these ideas in mind, it's easy to see why specific themes were chosen for specific scenes.)
I have discovered so many new things about the show in documenting the music (and I'm only about a third of the way through). I was always vaguely aware that the show eventually started to use music from G.I. Joe, but now I can tell you precisely when it happened (it began with "Changing Gears"). The sound library was pretty limited when the pilot episode was produced (there were only about 20 distinct themes used for "More Than Meets the Eye") but new music was being written for the show all the time, and by the end of the first season the sound library had ballooned to over 60 separate themes.
Something which absolutely floored me is how many themes were borrowed from other series. Yes, incidental music from G.I. Joe was borrowed for Transformers during season two. I've also long suspected that the romantic theme from "Money is Everything" was borrowed from the Jem cartoon, though I've never actually screened the entire Jem series to prove it. In the interest of making this restoration project as complete and accurate as possible, I sought out a webmaster who appeared to be an expert on the Jem cartoon and finally got confirmation of my theory. He also suggested I look into the old Spider-Man cartoons (there were two of them, one from 1967 and another from 1981) and Incredible Hulk (1982) as well as Dungeons & Dragons (1983), whose score was also composed by Johnny Douglas. I was aware of the Spider-Man connection already but I didn't know just how deep these threads ran. I was only aware of a few isolated examples (the Hulk's growls being used for Unicron in The Transformers: the Movie; the groovy disco theme from "Auto-Bop" appearing in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends).
There are 13 episodes of Hulk and 24 episodes of Amazing Friends and 27 episodes of Dungeons & Dragons and 52 episodes of the 1960's Spider-Man. That's, like, 42 hours of cartoons to sit through, but I was prepared to do it. For the good of the project. I was furiously downloading episodes and archiving them on my hard drive and researching which episodes were available on DVD. I've watched only a handful of them and I'm already finding so-called "Transformers" themes that predate their first appearance in G1 by several years. This completely blows my mind. And I'm really surprised that it's not common knowledge in the fandom. This is the year 2015 and I'm making huge discoveries about a cartoon from 30 years ago. Nobody at all knew that Transformers borrowed music from Dungeons & Dragons? Really? Is this like the animation model for Optimus Prime showing up in G.I. Joe BEFORE the first episode of Transformers aired? Again, how did nobody know about this until I just blindly stumbled into it?
So here I am, staying up late every night and typing away, taking note of the time index and the totally made-up-names for these themes, half of which I've had to invent myself. Example: In "The Core," there's a short heroic theme at time index 3:49 that we literally only hear one other time in the show (during "Surprise Party" when Ultra Magnus tells Sky Lynx to fuel up). Then at 5:07 we hear the "Battle Stations" theme (from G.I. Joe) but the ending has been artificially extended to fit the length of the scene. Then at 6:10 we hear a new theme that hasn't popped up anywhere else in the show up to this point; it's missing from Grimbot's archive, so I tentatively entitle it "Destruction" and make a note to listen for it as the show progresses. 6:45 has "On Patrol," a theme I named that we heard in "City of Steel." I'm getting to know the music so well that I can hear a single note and I know which track it's from. At this point I've screened 30 episodes and I've already identified 26 themes that Grimbot never ripped from the DVD's.
I'm already seeing mistakes that Grimbot made, and minor things that I want to fix because they bother me. Sometimes during the course of the show, one theme begins just as another is ending, but he's got them both archived as one track with a single name. At first, I was using names like "Stop the Decepticons I" and "Stop the Decepticons II" to differentiate them but after a while I started assigning names that I liked better. Some of Grimbot's names were very scene-specific (he named one of them "Factories Are Busy," from the narration at the beginning of "Divide and Conquer," but that theme showed up several times before and after this episode so it's not a factory theme specifically). Jim gave me free reign to assign new names to the themes, because unless we can get some kind of confirmation from Johnny Douglas what they're actually called (and don't think I haven't written to him and asked), made-up names are all we've got.
So, it's at this point that Jim e-mails me and tells me the scope of the project has gotten far too large. He was anticipating being done in two or three months, and he's got Kickstarter backers he wants to keep happy. I was the one who told him that all the music that Grimbot archived in a folder called "G.I. Joe" was actually Transformers music too (he was unaware of this), and I was the one who told him that there are many more themes that Grimbot never accounted for (we were both unaware of this). I've tried to do as much legwork for him as possible in identifying themes and making it easy for him to find them, but he's at a point where he just wants to remaster what he's already got on his plate, call the restoration project over, and move on with his life. I can't say I blame him.
He did mention that it would not be extraordinarily difficult for me to pick up the reins. He said he's prepared to send me all his sound files (he's ripped the soundtracks from all the Rhino DVD's I lent him and separated them into six channels) and all I would have to do is edit the music together the same way Grimbot did. A piece from this episode, another chunk from that episode, and the ending from yet another episode. I actually feel fairly confident that I could do this. I have the sound editing experience (in addition to doing voices, I also mixed all the sound effects and music for Radio Free Cybertron's much-maligned parody of The Transformers: the Movie) and I have the encyclopedic knowledge of the music that would be required (I campaigned repeatedly to get Jim to fix the erroneous edit that Rhino made to the music they used in their animation restoration extra on the bonus disc of season one, because they slipped in ONE EXTRA NOTE and it BOTHERED ME SO MUCH). What he said he was willing to do was continue to remaster the music in his spare time as I was able to piece together complete recordings.
This is not a project I was expecting to do. I was very comfortable operating in the capacity of a helpful assistant, but for me to take over is somewhat daunting. However, I've already made the work very easy for myself in documenting precisely where every piece of music can be found on the show. If he sends me music channels free of dialogue, piecing them together in sequence should be a snap. (Of course, a most complete list would also include G.I. Joe. I do have the episodes on DVD but I don't know if I'm prepared to screen the entire show. It's only my insane love for Transformers that's enabling me to slog through all of G1. It's one thing when I'm watching the show for fun, or even when I'm taking screen captures. In dissecting the show so methodically, I don't think I'll ever be able to look at it the same way again. It's no longer a cartoon show, but a concurrent string of many twenty- or thirty-second music clips set to animation.)
At some point I may ask for help. It is my very strong suspicion that episodes of Dungeons & Dragons and Spider-Man and such will have more complete themes than the short snippets we sometimes hear in Transformers. The very short "Teen Dance" theme from "Megatron's Master Plan" part 2 ("Laserbeak wanna cracker?") can in fact be heard in its entirety in the very first episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends episode "Triumph of the Green Goblin," for example. If anybody has the series on DVD, I would need to borrow it and probably send it to Jim so he can extract the music channel from it. It's possible I might have to do this for The Incredible Hulk and Dungeons & Dragons, too, but I'm not even at a point where I know for sure.
I almost want to ask people to help me watch some of these other shows. I've never sat through the entire Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, but I liked it as a kid and I bought a DVD with nine episodes on it a while ago. I would probably benefit from having seen it. On the other hand, I have absolutely no desire to watch a Spider-Man cartoon from 1967.
I thought about just washing my hands of this whole business and going, "Well, if you're out, then I'm out, too." Really, though, this is something I've wanted to see done FOREVER. It used to be that the closest we'd ever get to a soundtrack was Rik Bakke's site where he had little ten- or twelve-second snippets of music without any dialogue. That was great, and I loved it, but it wasn't a soundtrack. The technology finally exists where we can do it, and do it not just half-assed or reasonably well, but extraordinarily well. Being a part of this is really exciting, but it's also exhausting. I've put every other project on hold (generic character profiles, writing e-books, painting toys) so I can devote all my energies to this. I haven't been this jazzed about a project in a long time. I feel like it's worth it in the long run, but I just hope there are enough fans out there who feel the same way. I already have all the music permanently burned into my brain, so I don't think I'd put forth all this effort if it was just for me. It's just such a mind-boggling amount of work. I could probably have screened two more G1 episodes just in the time it took to write this post. That's all I think about now.
I'm worried about hitting burn-out and struggling to get through to the end. I can usually tell that a toy will take four or five days to paint, or that an e-book will take six months to write, but I have no idea how long I'm going to be immersed in this project. I may be looking at a year's worth of labor or more; I have no idea. It's so weird that this is what my life has become suddenly.
Right about now I wish I'd heard about this project back in September, and maybe I could have just pledged my five or ten dollars and felt like I was doing my part. Of course, I probably would have gotten involved anyway, and I'd likely be in exactly the same boat.
Give me some feedback about this so I know I'm not completely alone in the Universe!
Zob