Movie and event soundtracks are a great place to find obscure and rare 80s & 90s pop, hard rock, AOR, and heavy metal songs... and let's just face it, 80s TASC films ("Teen-Age Sex Comedies") were always good for a great sounding soundtrack! Many 80s soundtracks have become increasingly rare. This page showcases my collection. All are original pressings, no CDRs or bootlegs.
This page is here not only as an informational resource, but also as a protection for other soundtrack collectors. As time goes on, more and more of the rarer and more obscure soundtracks from the 1980s are showing up on Ebay as bootlegs or CDRs being passed off as legitimate pressings. You can compare the pictures from my collection below to soundtracks you may be considering purchasing to see if they are legitimate or not. Keep in mind that there are differences between pressings, especially across countries.
Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to determine if a disc is original:
Be wary of listings on Half.com and especially ioffer.com! Those sites are rife with bootlegs.
Never ever pay a premium for a soundtrack without seeing pictures first, especially of the tray card and the disc itself.
A clear giveaway that the disc is fake is if it is supposedly a U.S. pressing and the CD artwork does not show a bar code. All legitimate U.S. pressings from the 1980s and early 1990s would have included a bar code. Some U.K. and German pressings from that era did not (see the picturess of my copies of Risky Business and Cobra).
No legitimate pressings from the 1980s had see-through spines. That innovation did not surface until the 1990s.
With VERY few exceptions, an original pressing from the 1980s and early 1990s is not going to be a picture disc. The disk art on a pressing from that era is almost always one or two colors, with any graphics limited to the record label logo and occasionally a single-color logo from the film itself. If you're seeing full-color photo art on the disc, it's either a reissue, a bootleg, or the soundtrack was never released on CD at the time the movie came out (Heavy Metal is a prime example -- a CD release of the soundtrack postdated the movie by 15 years).
Beware of supposed "Newly digitally remastered" soundtrack reissues that people are selling for premium dollars on Ebay (The "Chromium Edition" of the Fright Night and Wraith soundtracks are prime examples). If it is in fact a legitimately remastered and reissued soundtrack that contains major artists from the time the soundtrack came out, you will be able to find the CD listed on Amazon.com and other bonafide retailers. You should be able to buy it for $13-$16 (if an import, possibly as much as $25), but definitely not $40, $50, or more.
All of the following auctions are examples of bootlegs or CDRs (Adobe Reader required):
Just to be clear: I have no problem with bootlegs per se. I've bought, sold, and traded countless bootlegs over the years. What I do object to, however, are bootlegs being passed off as the real thing to unsuspecting buyers.
Anyway...
I'm always looking for soundtracks that I don't have, that fit the above genres (in other words I'm really not interested in instrumental/orchestral soundtracks from the era, unless they are rock or heavy metal instrumental material -- Dune is a good example of the type of instrumental soundtrack I would include in my collection).
Specific titles I am looking for:
9 1/2 Weeks
An Officer and a Gentleman (1982, Mercury)
Brimstone and Treacle (1982)
Electric Dreams (1984)
Explorers (1985, Varese Sarabande)
Fright Night (original Japanese pressing only)
Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985, Mercury)
Heavenly Kids (Japanese pressing)
Maximum Overdrive
Rock n Roll Highschool (1979)
Tron (1982)
If you have any of the above titles, and are interested in selling or trading them, please email me.