Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Battle Of The Planets Incidental Music


Battle of the Planets, or La Bataille Des Planetes, was originally called Gatchaman in Japan, but was imported to the USA and other countries as BOTP off the strength of Star Wars.  Sort of a great cartoon, with the main villain, Zoltar, being a strange being who could switch between being a man and a woman.

On the import tip, new animations were created to include a control deck where a robot and his robotic dog could narrate and discuss the goings-on of our heroes.  7-Zark-7 was modeled for R2-D2 and I think 1-Rover-1 stands on his own as one of the worst/best characters from that period of animation.

So here are two instrumentals.  The one above is The 7-Zark-7 Theme.  It is exactly the kind of music I'm always hoping to unearth when I buy random vinyl.
















This is a smaller bit of Dramatic Tension, BOTP style.  Use it in your next adventure serial, kids!



I got this record while I was in France.  A huge portion of the '45s I got came out of the collection of two little girls from the 80's - the Legay sisters, Céline and Claire.  They signed each record.  I think Claire signed them all, because the hand-writing looks the same and Claire seemed to be older because in addition to some kids records, she also had tagged some New Wavey ones.  In comic book collecting, if these were actually old and valuable, what I found would be a pedigree - a specific collection of comics from one place, with markings made either by the owner or the place that they would buy it from.  In some cases these pedigree markings have made the comics far more valuable.

The record had a full storybook that went with the audio.  An odd and nice touch that I found not only on this record, but on other records, even from different companies - was that on the last page of the storybook, they printed a coloring book image for a kid to get crazy with.  Just one, to end it.

Here's Céline's take on 1-Rover-1.  A genius approach to coloring outside the lines.