Remember that RATT song with the line that goes "I'm sick and tired of talking about good old days"? I've been feeling like that a lot lately but then something comes along that reminds me of things that were happening when I grew up in the 80's. Like this week Sony released an expanded edition of the soundtrack to The Transformers The Movie from 1986. Reading
IGN's review of it brought back a lot of memories of my record collecting days as a kid.
I remember my first movie soundtrack ever was the double LP OST for The Empire Strikes Back that I got when I was around six. We bought that on or around the week of release because I remember getting a gigantic movie poster along with it. That was an awesome set with a big book in the middle with tons of pictures from the movie. The cover was awesome with Vader's head floating against a starry backdrop. I hadn't seen the movie yet and I remember thinking that the Empire was going to rebuild the Death Star into the shape of Darth Vader's head because of the soundtrack cover art. Such a scary looking album was welcome in my childhood record collection, which to that point consisted of 45s by Elvis, Barry Manilow and the Village People.
Album art was a big reason I bought records and at first I felt that CD longboxes sacrificed too much in terms of album cover art compared to the LP sleeves. But it was really cool to have music on little discs so I warmed up to it. I got my first CD two months before I even had a CD player. It was Iron Maiden's 1988 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and I think I got it on CD in 1990. That long box was gorgeous. I loved the Iron Maiden longboxes because of how well they'd crop Derek Riggs's Eddies. The longbox for Fear of the Dark was spectacular. I never got the longbox for Somewhere in Time and I really wanted it above all others because it was fantastic. It is a personal goal of mine to track down all the Iron Maiden CD longbox releases. I really should have grabbed them all when I was a kid but I took it for granted that they'd always sell CDs in long boxes.
Not all CD longboxes looked great, some of them were total ass like my Transformers the Movie OST. I swear to this day that the original release of The Transformers:The Movie OST on CD came in a longbox that had full color art covering every bit of it. I remember it was the movie poster art cropped to fit with Ultra Magnus featured prominently on the front of the box with a dark blue background just like the movie poster. But the longbox I bought must have been a later release because it has the movie art shrunk down with a white background replacing the blue starry sky and it looks all half assed. Maybe my memories are wrong but I swear I saw that and I wish I would have bought it the first time. I don't know if the CD version came out alongside the album and cassette or if it came later. Maybe I'm confusing the movie poster I saw a million times with the CD longbox and there never was a full color longbox. I'm probably misremembering. I don't know.
What I do know is that I found my holy grail of Transformers record collecting back in 1993 when I scored the shaped picture disc single of Stan Bush's The Touch. It's a 45 that's die cut into a cartoony simplified version of Superion's boxart. Back then I didn't care about the Generation 2 toyline so I was getting back into my Iron Maiden record collecting when I found a dealer named
Jack Wolak's Rare Necessities who specialized in shaped picture discs. I did all my Iron Maiden record searching via mail order and in his print catalog he listed this which I didn't even know existed at the time. I don't know if other singles were released off the original Transformers OST but I imagine Dare would be one possibility. I'm hoping that with this new expanded edition there'll be some sort of single release but I doubt it.
I remember my first movie soundtrack ever was the double LP OST for The Empire Strikes Back that I got when I was around six. We bought that on or around the week of release because I remember getting a gigantic movie poster along with it. That was an awesome set with a big book in the middle with tons of pictures from the movie. The cover was awesome with Vader's head floating against a starry backdrop. I hadn't seen the movie yet and I remember thinking that the Empire was going to rebuild the Death Star into the shape of Darth Vader's head because of the soundtrack cover art. Such a scary looking album was welcome in my childhood record collection, which to that point consisted of 45s by Elvis, Barry Manilow and the Village People.
Album art was a big reason I bought records and at first I felt that CD longboxes sacrificed too much in terms of album cover art compared to the LP sleeves. But it was really cool to have music on little discs so I warmed up to it. I got my first CD two months before I even had a CD player. It was Iron Maiden's 1988 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and I think I got it on CD in 1990. That long box was gorgeous. I loved the Iron Maiden longboxes because of how well they'd crop Derek Riggs's Eddies. The longbox for Fear of the Dark was spectacular. I never got the longbox for Somewhere in Time and I really wanted it above all others because it was fantastic. It is a personal goal of mine to track down all the Iron Maiden CD longbox releases. I really should have grabbed them all when I was a kid but I took it for granted that they'd always sell CDs in long boxes.
Not all CD longboxes looked great, some of them were total ass like my Transformers the Movie OST. I swear to this day that the original release of The Transformers:The Movie OST on CD came in a longbox that had full color art covering every bit of it. I remember it was the movie poster art cropped to fit with Ultra Magnus featured prominently on the front of the box with a dark blue background just like the movie poster. But the longbox I bought must have been a later release because it has the movie art shrunk down with a white background replacing the blue starry sky and it looks all half assed. Maybe my memories are wrong but I swear I saw that and I wish I would have bought it the first time. I don't know if the CD version came out alongside the album and cassette or if it came later. Maybe I'm confusing the movie poster I saw a million times with the CD longbox and there never was a full color longbox. I'm probably misremembering. I don't know. 
What I do know is that I found my holy grail of Transformers record collecting back in 1993 when I scored the shaped picture disc single of Stan Bush's The Touch. It's a 45 that's die cut into a cartoony simplified version of Superion's boxart. Back then I didn't care about the Generation 2 toyline so I was getting back into my Iron Maiden record collecting when I found a dealer named Jack Wolak's Rare Necessities who specialized in shaped picture discs. I did all my Iron Maiden record searching via mail order and in his print catalog he listed this which I didn't even know existed at the time. I don't know if other singles were released off the original Transformers OST but I imagine Dare would be one possibility. I'm hoping that with this new expanded edition there'll be some sort of single release but I doubt it.
2 comments:
Dude, that TF record is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I envy you.
It's a pretty retarded thing to be envied for, but if there's envy to be had I'll take it.
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