To Boldy Go Where No Symphony Orchestra Has Gone Before

I've been rewatching TOS for the past few weeks, and it's been extra-noticeable to me this time* how much the music provides evidence of a low budget - even more than the special effects.

This show came out in 1966; it would be another decade before George Lucas and friends would invent the technology to create convincing special effects for cheap. So, I'm really not sure how much different the effects would have been even if they'd had twice the budget.

The music is a different story. In some sense it's Wagnerian, in that different situations have particular themes that get played. However, it isn't that the theme is worked into a new piece of music; they just replay the prior recording. So, you have episode after episode replaying exactly the same incidental music. The suspenseful theme heard during the standoff in The Corbomite Maneuver gets rehashed for Dagger of the Mind and countless other episodes (at least, more than I've bothered to count), which ends up greatly diminishing its suspense.

To contrast this, look at The Next Generation or the other later Star Trek series in which each episode had its own score. They still reuse motifs, but they are newly recorded each time. The music winds up matching what we see on screen much better, enhancing the dramatic effect rather than detracting from it. TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise were all nominated for or won Emmy awards and ASCAP awards related to their music.

Now, sure, certain episodes of the original series would still be kind of goofy even with super awesome music (especially that one with the Space Hippies), but it definitely would have helped. After all, try watching Star Wars on mute and see how ridiculous the dialog is without John Williams' wonderful score.

One more thing: it would also have been good not to spend so much time at recognizable Southern California rock formations.

*Possibly because the last series I went through before this was Batman: The Animated Series, which consistently put a lot of effort into its incidental music.