Wednesday, May 30, 2007

My boxes like my schlong are all very long

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.

2 comments:

Weasel said...

Dude, that TF record is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I envy you.

Evil King Macrocranios said...

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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Evil King Macrocranios was voted king by the evil peoples of the Kingdom of Macrocrania. They listen to Iron Maiden all day and try to take pictures of ghosts with their webcams.