Cues such as “Run Like the Wind”, “Upstaged By a Zebra”, the beautiful “If You Build It They Will Come” and the stirring “Spring Training” at times swell to enormous proportions, but the set-piece finale, comprising “The Big Race” and “In The Winners Circle”, could well represent the best nine minutes of Isham’s entire career to date. The centerpieces of the score are the ‘racing’ moments: training montages, moments where obstacles are overcome, and where victories are sealed. ![]() His score for Racing Stripes is a majestic, triumphant celebration of epic proportions filled to the brim with noble themes, interesting orchestral touches, and a sense of grandeur and majesty rarely heard in the composer’s work. Many people have been longing for Mark Isham to let rip with an orchestra for some time, after he hinted at his potential through scores such as the aforementioned Fly Away Home, The Majestic, and 2004’s Miracle – myself included. Stripes himself is voiced by Malcolm in the Middle himself, Frankie Muniz. Meanwhile (in a reflection of the hit comedy Babe), we also get to see and hear Stripes himself, as he is both helped and hindered on his way by a supporting cast of talking animals – a Shetland Pony named Tucker (Dustin Hoffman), a hyperactive goat (Whoopi Goldberg), a Mafioso pelican named Goose (Joe Pantoliano), and two jive-talking comic flies (Steve Harvey and David Spade). Hayden Panettiere stars as a 16-year old Kentucky girl Channing Walsh, who with the help of her kind but protective father (Brice Greenwood) seeks to fulfill her dreams of riding her pet zebra, Stripes, in races. Obviously, Racing Stripes is in a totally different genre, but this could well be the very score he was describing.ĭirected by Frederik Du Chau, who previously worked as an animator on Quest for Camelot back in the 1998, Racing Stripes is a family adventure film following the fortunes of a zebra who thinks he’s a racehorse. Despite being best known for his jazz-inspired trumpet performances and beautiful orchestral works such as the Oscar-nominated A River Runs Through It and Fly Away Home, he had often in the past professed a desire to write a big, thematic, heroic orchestral score: his “Star Wars”, as he puts it. Considering that 2005 is just a few weeks old, it has already seen a film music landmark: the best score of Mark Isham’s career to date.
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