Friday 10 January 2014

Vintage Trailer Music Score - Jonathan Elias - Back To The Future & Explorers

These days, most movie trailers will either pick a generic Media Venture style score track with the obligatory big brass drone sound and plenty of choral voices.

In the 1980s however, there seemed to be a bit more mystique to the trailers, especially the teaser trailers.  There was no actual footage shown, and the music in the end was completely different to the styles used in the actual movies.

Some examples are Back To The Future and Explorers, both given teaser trailer music by Jonathan Elias.




Explorers ended up with a Jerry Goldsmith score, whilst Back To The Future ended up with an Alan Silvestri score.

A possible example of where Silvestri could have gone with an electronic score is by listening to "Flight Of The Navigator".

It would definitely have been interesting to have had a full electronic score for Back To The Future, but in the end the Silvestri score was perfect.

Jonathan Elias started off doing many trailer scores and these ones seem to stand out, as they are both similar and have a signature electronic arpeggiated sound very similar to the Tangerine Dream sound of the era.

Many have been mistaken such is the distinctive synthesizer sound, that its quite easy to mistake it for a Tangerine Dream piece, but these are both composed by Jonathan Elias.


These days Jonathan Elias does not like to discuss his 80s synthesizer score period (it seems he did not like it!), but he did give a few great scores such as Tuff Turf and Vamp amongst others.