Back in 2010 La-La Land Records released their comprehensive expanded score for Batman (1989). You can read our overview and extensive review. The CD set featured the entire film score as well as a few unused tracks. Among these was a track labelled "Joker's Muzak" - which seemed to have more resemblance to the love theme motif.

Thanks to the release of Omni Music Publishing's sheet music for the entire score (read my review here) we now know that "Joker's Muzak" is infact called "The Truth". The sheet music includes Danny Elfman's own cue notes, so we now know that the track was supposed to play during Bruce's visit to Vicki's apartment.

Elfman's notes state that Bar 2 says [Cut Door], Bar 4 says [Opens] and the last Bar in the score, which is Bar 18, says [Bruce Pushes Vicki].

Now, for the first time, you can watch the scene with the score mixed in - as was the original intention!

So, where did the name "Joker's Muzak" come from then? La-La Land Records producer Neil S Bulk clears up the mystery:

"When we were producing the La-La Land album, we didn't have access to the printed score. We did have very crude dot matrix printed spotting notes from 1989, that weren't the most detailed.

The Batman spotting notes gave a description of a scene and a running time. For "The Truth" the spotting notes indicated 10 seconds followed by "Joker's Muzak" which was closer to the running time of the cue we had so we went with the info available.

Since no music appears in reel 10 until the Percy Faith recording of "Beautiful Dreamer" it was another reason why we thought this cue would be "Joker's Muzak". This wasn't done haphazardly. It was an educated guess made with all of the facts available at the time." [forum]

What do think? Is the scene now better with the score or were they right to drop it from the finished film? Leave your comments below