All 5 Gerald Fried Star Trek scores ranked
By Mike Poteet
Gerald Fried composed several indispensable Star Trek scores.
Not all Star Trek fans would recognize the face of Emmy-winning composer Gerald Fried, who died last week at age 95. But most, if not all, would recognize his music.
Gerald Fried’s list of credits is long. It includes about 40 films (including five early films from director Stanley Kubrick), 36 TV movies and miniseries—including the epochal Roots (1977), which made a star of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s LeVar Burton—and episodes of 40 more TV series, including Gilligan’s Island and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Fried was also the first and so far only composer to receive an Academy Award nomination for a documentary (Birds Do It, Bees Do It, 1975).
Yet his scores for Star Trek: The Original Series are what Star Trek fans will know best. Although Fried wrote original scores for only five TOS episodes, some of them are among the series’ most popular and enduring installments. And individual cues from Fried’s scores became part of the series’ music library, and can be heard multiple times throughout the series. The Memory Alpha wiki counts 25 occurrences of music by Gerald Fried in TOS, as well as one—so far—in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
To celebrate the life of Gerald Fried and his indelible contributions to the sound of Star Trek, here’s our ranking of his five TOS scores.
“Catspaw” (Season 2, Episode 7)
“Catspaw” isn’t one of Star Trek’s better hours, but the series’ “Halloween episode” does feature some quality musical moments from Gerald Fried.
He provides two snappy, snare drum-heavy settings of Alexander Courage’s fanfare, for instance. The cue “Bones, the Zombie” is a dread-filled death march for McCoy when the good doctor is under Sylvia and Korob’s influence. It got lots of mileage in TOS, often when the show needed menacing music for invaders. For example, it’s the music playing under Nomad’s trips through the Enterprise’s corridors in “The Changeling.”
But much of the “Catspaw” score is the orchestral equivalent of waving your hands around and speaking in a bad Bela Lugosi accent to try and frighten your friends. Cues like “Fog Planet,” “Thicker Fog,” and “Fog Storm” sound more silly than they do scary. And the music by which Sylvia tries to seduce Captain Kirk leans too heavily on wah-wah saxophones to be taken seriously.
Still, Fried’s theme for Sylvia and Korob appears in many inventive variations throughout the score, and his music for the moment when they are revealed in their true form is suitably alien and unsettling—almost enough to distract you from the ludicrous creatures on the screen.