The double-vinyl set of Danny Elfman’s score for Mission: Impossible (1996) will arrive this October from Mondo.com. A preorder is now available.
The movie Mission: Impossible came with a lot of question marks in 1996. Was director Brian DePalma up to the task of helming a twisty franchise-initiating film? Was Tom Cruise, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars at that time, ready to settle down into a reocurring role – something he’d resisted for a long time? And was soundtrack composer Danny Elfman prepared to do something radically different from what he had done before?
Elfman, known for his scores and longtime collaboration with director Tim Burton, as well as his many years as band leader of the group Oingo Boingo, had done scores without his unique musical sensibilities before. However, the stakes for many of those pictures were modest. There was nothing modest about the task of bringing Mission: Impossible to the big screen. Its studio, Paramount, was banking on the film being a cash cow, much like another Paramount property from the Desilu Productions stable, Star Trek.
A bigger task was to co-opt the iconic theme song by Lalo Schifrin – a piece of music so ubiquitous, people who have never seen the TV show or movies know the song – without leaning on it like a crutch. More than twenty years later and five more films in, that initial effort appears to have worked. (Each subsequent film has had different crews, and that includes the music composer.) And to a large extent, the film broke barriers for Elfman, and moved him to even greater heights of opportunity and stylistic creativity.
The vinyl LP is available for preorder at: https://mondotees.com/products/mission-impossible-music-from-the-original-motion-picture-score-2xlp