First Four ‘Clone Wars’ Episodes Now on DVD+Review of Soundtrack

The first four episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, (‘Ambush’, ‘Rising Malevolence’, ‘Shadow of Malevolence’, and ‘Destroy Malevolence’), are now available on DVD. The disc is called Star Wars: The Clone Wars - A Galaxy Divided. A full season one box set with extras should be available later on. To coincide with the DVD release, here is my review of the soundtrack from the movie below:

Review of Kevin Kiner’s Score for Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

By E. Corrado

Kevin Kiner’s score for Star Wars: The Clone Wars manages to keep the feel of the music by John Williams of the original Star Wars movies, yet all the music still has a new unique stamp on things.

John Williams’ Star Wars Main Theme is woven into this well put together tapestry of adventure, modern rock styles and world music. As Kevin Kiner said in our interview with him back in November, (here), George Lucas had wanted every planet to have it’s own feel, e.g. an African sounding planet, or an Egyptian sounding planet, etc.. His research into the different kinds of world music is evident here.

In track five of the Official Movie Soundtrack, ‘Obi-Wan To The Rescue’, you can here the electric guitar rock sounds, yet they still allow the orchestra to keep in charge of things. Contrast this with track seven, ‘Jabba’s Palace’, and you can clearly hear the musical contrasts in the score. Many of the battle sequences sound very classically action/suspense/sci-fi, all the while fitting in seamlessly with the rest of the score. Track 21, ‘Scaling The Cliff’ reminded me of Back To The Future - just the notes at the beginning of the track...

Kevin Kiner was nominated at the 36th annual Annie Awards for his score for the second episode of the TV show, ‘Star Wars The Clone Wars: Rising Malevolence’. While he did not win this nomination, he was up against very strong competition in Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer & John Powell’s score for The Secrets of the Furious Five, which took home the award.

I think this score, for both the movie and TV series, has succeeded in keeping with the original Star Wars styles, yet bringing in new flavours of sounds. Whether or not you like this animated version of the Star Wars world, this CD is worth picking up if you see it. The music is very good and entertaining. Also, the tracks all flow together quite nicely, considering that this has a very large amount of the score from the movie. The movie is approximately 1 hour, 38 minutes long, and this CD has a running time of 1 hour, 7 minutes, and 23 seconds. Some of the tracks seem to flow right from one to the next, as though they were together in the movie, but just divided into two seperate tracks here. It’s a nice action score that’s fun and easy to listen to.

The Star Wars: The Clone Wars soundtrack was released August 12th, 2008 in stores, and August 16th, 2008 on iTunes.