Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Themes From The Movies


Okay, I admit, this one is really far afield of this blog's mission statement, but when Power Pal Rockwell Jay Pugglesworth sent it to me I couldn't resist--it looks so fun! I mean, where else are you going to see these five fine examples of 1970s cinema all in one place? I mean, who doesn't remember the stirring theme from The Deep?

Clearly, the sleeve art was done in-house, since it has that...er, loose style that we've come to associate with Peter Pan's art department. This record gives us an idea what a book-and-record set of these movies might have looked like, which is a major tease: just imagine how cool a series of James Bond Power Records could have been!

Also--I've never understood the byzantine nature of music publishing, but how could PP release an album with the Star Wars theme on it when they clearly didn't have the license?


5 comments:

Rockwell J. Pugglesworth said...

I would love to have heard one of the regular Power Records Players try his hand at a Sean Connery impression.

Earth 2 Chris said...

I can do a mean Connery myself. And by mean, I mean bad.

As for the mixed up publishing, I imagine they just got the rights to the music as written, and it was all re-recorded, but I may be completely wrong. But it seems like what usually happens with these compilations.

Chris

Random Joe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Random Joe said...

When a band covers a song they don't need permission but have to pay royalties (an example would be Weird Al, while he doesn't need permission to record his parodies he always asks for permission). In this case PP Records are re-recording the hits making them "cover versions". So they technically don't need a license to do them.

From a random website:

Copyright law also allows for a "compulsory mechanical license" where permission from the original author is not required. In the United States of America, most mechanical licenses are negotiated through the Harry Fox Agency. A mechanical license can only be used after the original copyright holder has exercised their exclusive right of first publishing, or permission is negotiated.

And since this was made in the 70's maybe there wasn't such a thing at the time. Would love to hear some samples from this album, I am sure they are as dreadful as the Peter Pan TV Show Themes record I used to have with Laverne & Shirley and the Good Times Theme.

This is the one I had, it is quite comical today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYt_awCNvcc

click here to see

--Mike B

John Kerry said...

Usually there are different licences for different types of merchandise. Thus Peter Pan could easily get a licence allowing them to do a recording of the theme but not necessarily one to do a story-oriented recording. As well the rights for the music may have been held by the composer rather than the movie producers.

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