Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology

Background

The Anthology release was assembled and edited by Ford A Thaxton, and was produced by Nick Redman. The liner notes were written by Lukas Kendall of Film Score Monthly. Originally, the intention was to release a definitive collection of all of the music from the original trilogy films, with five discs covering the complete scores to all three. Unfortunately, the project when through development problems (including the master tapes for The Empire Strikes Back going missing), and once Lucasfilm started talking about doing a Special Edition release, the project was almost cancelled entirely. This led to the planned fifth disc being scrapped.

Of the music that was released, the first three discs were sort of like rereleases of the original OSTs, but with a few microedits undone. The tracks were also reordered to better reflect the order of the music in the movies, and for Return of the Jedi specifically, much more music was released than was on the original album due to the original OST only being a single LP. The fourth disc was made entirely of previously unreleased material, scattered in a seemingly random order. The releases were not definitive, still missing music heard in the films, and in one case even music that was on a previous album (parts of [6m3] This is Not a Cave and [9m3] Putting Threepio Together were used on the original ESB OST, but the cues were not included at all on the Anthology set). Also, in the cases of Star Wars and Empire, this set marked the first time the original Eric Tomlinson mixes were released, as opposed to the John Neal remixes that were used on the original OSTs.

During assembly of the album, the original paperwork describing the takes selected by Ken Wannberg for the performance edits had gone missing. This resulted in Thaxton having to guess which takes were the right ones solely based on comparing with the film. Further, he was only given a week to assemble each disc. As a result, many wrong takes were selected for several cues, specifically affecting cues from the original Star Wars film.

For the original Star Wars, all cues were sourced from fifth-generation (or later) 2-track tapes that contained the finished Tomlinson mixes of every take recorded of every cue.

For The Empire Strikes Back, cues were sourced from disintegrating four track 1/4 inch tape copies containing the edited Tomlinson film mix on three channels, with the fourth channel for synchronization with the film. These poor condition copies were used as the first-generation 24-track masters were missing at the time the Anthology set was assembled. Unfortunately, the tapes they used were incomplete, and because Polygram refused to locate their OST masters, Thaxton was forced to source some cues directly from the original Polydor CD. Yoda's Theme is one of these cues, and it's likely that there were others as well. Further, other cues not on the 4-track tapes had to be sourced from 35mm film stems edited by Ken Wannberg, these included [4m2] The Rebels Escape Again and [6m2] Yoda's Teaching. Two cues had their channels mistakenly reversed on the set: [3m2] Leia's Instructions and [11m3] Chewie Chokes Lando, both on disc four.

For Return of the Jedi, cues were sourced from 2-track tapes that contained the performance edits of the finished Tomlinson mixes. Cues that could not be located on these tapes were lifted from the original Polydor CD, which also used the Tomlinson mixes (unlike Star Wars and Empire). Tracks that came from the Polydor CD include "Han Solo Returns", "The Return of the Jedi", "Parade of the Ewoks", "Luke and Leia", "The Forest Battle", and "Ewok Celebration / End Credits".