The Soundtrack Show will begin in 5, 4, 3. And now, part three of our look at Superman, the movie.

This is the soundtrack show. Oh, Oh, Welcome back to the soundtrack show. I'm your host David W Collins and this is our third look and listen to Superman the movie.

A film from 1978 from Warner Brothers Pictures, directed by Richard Donner,

with a film score by John Williams.

Today, we're going to start at the beginning of the film and work our way through some of the more inspired

moments in this score that are definitely worth calling out and discussing.

The film opens with a black and white movie curtain within a movie.

As that curtain is drawn back, we hear the Superman fanfare with a solo muted trumpet, but

it doesn't resolve itself or state itself fully even.

Just flutes toying with a dotted Superman rhythm, open-ended.

This is classic Williams.

It's just an echo of what is going to come.

And then after that prologue, we go into the famous opening titles, and the March and

fanfare are fully presented to us, just as they were in George Lucas's Star Wars

the year before. In this way we are being promised a heroic journey. We know what's going to come. If you remember my episodes

on Raiders of the Lost Dark, for example, where the heroic theme is withheld from us in order

to give our lead a sense of moral ambiguity and a slow reveal, this style

is much more in line with the tradition of films like Star Wars. It wets our appetite in terms of where we'll go. We get it here in a very long

opening credit sequence, which, quite frankly, would be tough to sit through after a while

without great music, even with cutting edge title effects

at the time.

As it is in the final cut, it is a showcase for Williams and a gift for any composer a chance to fully establish the score with a

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