I noticed some folks on our message board discussing the 2003 Thunderball CD (with the expanded track list, which I put together for EMI) and trying to figure out how much is still unreleased.
I don’t know if this will make matters better or worse, but here are two pages of notes I found from my work on that project:
Forgive my rather obnoxious, cursory notes (“zzzzzzzz”) and my terrible handwriting. The cue sheet (and, I presume, the written scores, which are long lost) have no titles, only numbers (the British protocol for cue nomenclature).
There’s probably around 20 minutes of still-unreleased music. Some cues (like 11M4) we only had on a poor-sounding 2-track master—while a few seemed to be missing altogether. And some cues I abridged in the bonus tracks, in order to get more “good stuff” into limited playing time.
The most interesting unreleased bit is an early version of the “Street Chase” based on the “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” theme instead of the “007” theme—how Barry approached the film’s action music before the title song was changed from “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” to “Thunderball.” It looks like I called this “10M1 Alt” on my sheet.
As always—I have no idea as to any plans to re-release this material. (I wrote about this before.) It would involve MGM, Universal Music and Eon Productions needing to sort out a license to one of the boutique CD labels. Which I hope they do, but it’s like the stars need to align. They truly did align in 2002–03 for the expanded CDs...and I was always a bit frustrated that they couldn’t have aligned just a little bit longer.
Sorry I can’t do more. I would love Thunderball to be released properly on a 2CD set. And I share the passion people have for this material!
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