Conan and Kull...it's the music!

I'm sitting on the train watching the original CONAN THE BARBARIAN on my laptop, the sound of battle and the thunderous roar of Basil Poledouris’s soundtrack coming through the headphones, when an interesting tidbit of information came into my head. Supposedly, when John Milius was making the film way back in that mythical time known as the ‘80’s (when hair bands roamed the planet and Dungeons & Dragons remained very much the beloved underground phenomenon it sadly no longer is…shed a tear now) he was looking for a soundtrack. Dino de Laurentiis, the producer, wanted to use pop music to accompany all the slashing and hacking (given the state of the art back then, one can only cringe) but Milius held out for a full orchestral score, eventually hiring Basil Poledouris to write it (and yes, I’m copying this from Wikipedia.) The result, needless to say, is film history – the music takes a good fantasy film and elevates it to legendary status. It makes the movie as much as Ahhhnold’s muscles, and today is citied in film schools one of the finest examples of motion picture scoring…

Which leads me to point number two, another film based on a Robert E. Howard character that came out in 1997, KULL THE CONQUERER. Now, as films go, it was neither great nor mediocre. Kevin Sorbo was the man at the time because of Hercules, sword and sandal flicks were big thanks to the success of Gladiator. I saw in the theater, was pleasantly amused, and didn’t see it again. Today no one remembers it. The soundtrack for that film was basically all heavy metal riffs of the sort you hear at WWE events. It worked at the time, but no one cared five minutes later. But…if the producers for Kull (who were probably working with a bigger budget that CONAN) had chosen to spend some green on an actual orchestral, maybe KULL would have been more than a pop cultural blip?

Music makes the film like the suit makes the man. One of the films is remembered, and the other…isn’t.