Wild Wild West: Great Film Themes Soundtrack CD

Although the 51 tracks on this mini-history of great Western film, radio, and TV themes would have fit onto two CDs, the producers deliberately spread the material out over three discs in a "Texas-sized' gesture as theatrical and exaggerated as the genre itself. Disc one is a tribute to classic cowboy flicks made between 1959 and 1968. These include Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, Hang 'Em High, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the epic Once Upon a Time in the West. Disc two opens with a stylistic anomaly: the compilers chose the hip-hop theme from the 1999 blockbuster film Wild Wild West rather than the original music from the television series of the '60s. Disc two crawls backwards through various Westerns of the 1990s -- Maverick, Unforgiven, and Dances with Wolves -- then skirts the 1980s altogether, plunging back into the '70s with a trippy Moog synthesizer workout from My Name Is Nobody. This chronologically inverted portion of the package ends with two masterworks from 1957: The 3:10 to Yuma and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Disc three is a panorama of historical performances. The theme music from Shane comes across like some sort of hormonal epiphany, the BB Band knock out "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," B.J. Thomas sings "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" (a great example of a foolish pop song somehow working its way into a cowboy flick), and Marilyn Monroe oozes "I'm Gonna File My Claim" and "The River of No Return." Other incursions involve Roy Rogers, Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, and Frankie Laine, whose handling of "Rawhide" borders upon S&M. Altogether a pop culture compendium of considerable importance, despite the album cover, which looks like it was painted by an 11-year-old. ~ arwulf arwulf

Hang 'Em High/Maverick/Bonanza 3 CD Set