Beetlejuice (CD - 1988)

All Danny Elfman tracks are DDD while the 2 Belafonte tracks are AAD.

Magic always happens when Danny Elfman teams up with director-producer Tim Burton. BEETLEJUICE represents this team's second outing together, the first being 1986's PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. Elfman has a knack for combining classical motifs with pop and ballroom dance to create bouncy yet mildly creepy scores. BEETLEJUICE is no exception. Elements of waltz and samba are heard throughout the album, but they are warped to sound like dance lessons for the dead. Drawing heavily on Bernard Herrman's creature motifs from the 1960s, Elfman effortlessly blends the macabre with carnival amusement. Echoes of PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE can be heard throughout many of the action cues, especially through the use of harp, strained violin, and heavy piano. However, those cues that feature ominous tuba passages truly give this tale of love and bio-exorcism schizophrenic life.

Danny Elfman provides one of his most quintessentially Elfman-esque scores for one of Tim Burton's most quintessentially Burton-esque movies, Beetlejuice. The film's dark yet sardonically funny "Main Titles" is among Elfman's all-time best moments, bustling along with a dark joie de vivre (or is it joie de morte?) that defines the spooky fun of both this movie, and his collaboration with Burton. The score's stylized world also includes the ironically perky "Travel Music"; "Incantation," a tensely percussive cue that unfolds into exaggerated brass and ghostly vocals and organs; and the eerily pretty but still whimsical "Lydia Discovers." The tip-toeing pizzicato strings and pianos, and the theatrical brass, organs, harps, and percussion that appear on every track -- most definitively on tracks like "Enter...The Family / Sand Worm Planet" -- underline the film's live-action cartoonishness, with the music's hyperactive shifts, and the addition of Harry Belafonte's "Jump In Line" and "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" just adding another layer of quirkiness to the whole thing. A perfect mix of silliness and spookiness, Beetlejuice remains one of Elfman's most consistent scores. ~ Heather Phares minimize