The Secret of NIMH (1982) Expanded and Remastered Soundtrack [2xCD]

Intrada presents the long-sought after expanded edition of The Secret of NIMH (1982). While Intrada’s previous edition was slightly expanded, it still came up short around 8 minutes of score due to missing elements. Since that previous release, MGM was able to locate the original 35mm stems that included their own stereo audio music tracks of everything as heard in the film. CD Producer Chris Malone took these new elements and blended them with the rest of the score to create the expanded program including all the bits for which collectors have been pining. As with Intrada’s First Blood album, the first disc presents the score in film order, removing much of the album assembly that Goldsmith had prepared for the original album. Disc 2 includes Goldsmith’s original album program as he assembled it to preserve all the creative decisions that he made. It’s never sounded better. The CD features new cover art by Stéphane COËDEL and an additional Tech Talk by Roger Feigelson.

It’s no secret now that Goldsmith took the scoring assignment under the condition that he could score the feature like a live-action film. “As I told the producers, if they wanted a Disney-like, synchronize-every-cut type of score I couldn’t do it. I wanted to score it as a live-action film, and they agreed.” The score features as many as eight different themes for the film’s major characters and situations. As the composer described it: “They go from pure romanticism to impressionism, everything. It’s sort of an animated Peter and the Wolf, but it all hangs together cohesively. It’s a much more conservative score than, say, Omen or Outland or Alien or even Poltergeist, but it’s still diversely styled, musically, and it all seems to tie together very well.”

In the film, two stories run in parallel. Mrs. Brisby is a widow, and one of her four children, Timothy, is sick with pneumonia. She is desperate to move her home away from the farmer’s fields, where it will soon be destroyed by plowing, but her family can’t move while her son is ill. The second story involves a group of rodents—rats and mice—being held at a facility run by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). After experimental drug treatments alter the rodents’ DNA and render them intelligent, they escape—with the help of Mrs. Brisby’s husband—and form a colony underneath the farmer’s lawn. Because Mr. Brisby is killed while drugging the farmer’s cat, Dragon, he is a revered figure to the rats, who eventually help Mrs. Brisby and her family move their home.

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