© 1998 Lawrence Tuczynski

Box Front Cover Photo	Box Back Cover Photo

Title	Film Music of Akira Kurosawa
CD Label	Futureland
CD Number	TYCY-5637-41
Music by:	Various
Recordings	Stereo/Mono
Number of discs	5
Year of release/manufacture	1998

OVERALL REVIEW

This is a very nicely done 5 CD box set. There are no jewel cases here, the box and CD sleeves are made of cardboard. The box measures approx. 5 3/4" x 5 1/4" x 1.5" thick. Each CD sleeve has an inner paper (rice paper?) sleeve to protect the discs from scratching. Included in this wonderful set are 2 booklets. One booklet is about 100 pages long and is filled with Japanese writing. The second booklet is 192 pages long and filled with many black and white photos from the various movies.The price of this set, considering all you get, wasn't too bad either. I bought my copy from Footlight Records in New York City for $114.50. I must admit I am very unfamiliar with most of the movies represented here. I have seen a few of the movies (Seven Samurai, Ran, Rashoman, The Hidden Fortress, Stray Dog & Yojimbo) and read a little about some of the others. Each disc's track titles seem to be the titles of the movie they are from and each track consists of a suite of music from the film. What do these movies have to do with Godzilla? Nothing really except that Masaru Satoh who did the music for several Godzilla films and other monster films also did several of the scores to these movies. Several of these movies also have fantasy elements to them. If you've ever seen the US movie "The Magnificient Seven", then you have seen an Americanized version of "Seven Samurai". The US movie is almost identical to this Kurosawa film only instead of Samurai the movie has a western setting. "Yojimbo" (means Bodyguard in English) was remade as Clint Eastwood's "A Fistful Of Dollars". George Lucas says that "The Hidden Fortress" inspired some of the story in "Star Wars". I have listened to these discs twice now and am very impressed with how well done this set is and impressed with most of the music (each CD will also have a review when you click on their image below). The one disc that doesn't do well as stand alone music is Disc 1 for a couple of reasons. One is that most of this disc has a lot of background noise, clicks and tape hiss. This is to be expected considering the source material is from the mid 1940's to the early 1950's. Also many of the tracks on this disc have movie dialogue making the music somewhat hard to hear. The other 4 discs don't suffer from these problems and sound clear and of high quality.

Booklet #1	Booklet #2

Disc 1	Disc 2
Disc 3	Disc 4
Disc 5

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