02-19-2018, 02:37 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-20-2018, 01:21 AM by Cyberlink420.
Edit Reason: Minor factual correction
)
This one's been circulating for a good long while now, but I was kind of surprised to see it wasn't listed on the site anywhere.
The long and short of it is that the soundtrack of the original Turrican for the Commodore 64, composed by Ramiro Vaca, includes two tracks that were lifted almost wholesale from Vince DiCola's score of 1986's The Transformers: The Movie. For illustration, I've listed each Turrican track below, followed by the Transformers track that it was copied from.
The first, the game's title theme (Subsong 2), was based on the track "Escape", which plays during the Autobot evacuation sequence partway through the film.
The second, the ending credits theme, was based on the track "Death of Optimus Prime", which of course is self-explanatory. Unlike the title theme, only a short portion of the Transformers track is used in the melody, and it's been rearranged into a more triumphant and upbeat variation.
To my knowledge, no official acknowledgement of the plagiarism has ever been made, though the music was changed for later ports. However, in 2013, longtime Turrican series composer Chris Hülsbeck actually contacted Vince DiCola himself as part of a Kickstarter campaign for the Turrican Sountrack Anthology series, and DiCola (alongside his longtime collaborator Kenny Meriedeth) ended up contributing a bonus track to the anthology's first volume: an medley of arranged tracks from the movie called "Transformers Medley 2013".
The long and short of it is that the soundtrack of the original Turrican for the Commodore 64, composed by Ramiro Vaca, includes two tracks that were lifted almost wholesale from Vince DiCola's score of 1986's The Transformers: The Movie. For illustration, I've listed each Turrican track below, followed by the Transformers track that it was copied from.
The first, the game's title theme (Subsong 2), was based on the track "Escape", which plays during the Autobot evacuation sequence partway through the film.
The second, the ending credits theme, was based on the track "Death of Optimus Prime", which of course is self-explanatory. Unlike the title theme, only a short portion of the Transformers track is used in the melody, and it's been rearranged into a more triumphant and upbeat variation.
To my knowledge, no official acknowledgement of the plagiarism has ever been made, though the music was changed for later ports. However, in 2013, longtime Turrican series composer Chris Hülsbeck actually contacted Vince DiCola himself as part of a Kickstarter campaign for the Turrican Sountrack Anthology series, and DiCola (alongside his longtime collaborator Kenny Meriedeth) ended up contributing a bonus track to the anthology's first volume: an medley of arranged tracks from the movie called "Transformers Medley 2013".