Bruce Broughton was right at the start of his "family movie" scores when he did The Rescuers Down Under in 1990, an unsuccessful sequel to a Disney film that most people had forgotten anyway.  Most surprising is that instead of the predictable kiddies's songs, Disney went "all score" and so Broughton was given a chance to prove his colours.  (This was only just after they had rediscovered their winning musical formula with The Little Mermaid).

The movie might be set in Australia, but being the type of film that it is, broadly speaking Broughton gave it the fairly standard, timeless animation score (save for a few bits of Aboriginal-ish material).  I'm somewhat surprised that instead of the broad strokes you may expect from a composer like Broughton, he used instead an almost Carl Stalling-like approach - when someone falls over, the music falls over, and so on.  This results in the music being fairly bitty, with so much dancing around from one style to the next that you might lose attention.  Of course, Broughton is far too good for it to ever become unmusical, but even so it's not a style I favour, even for this type of film.  The most overtly comic scoring is in "Message Montage", while the next cue has a brief break from the orchestra for some electric guitars - odd, but fun.

The album was released at the time of the film, but as with so many Disney albums, quickly went out of print and became a collector's item.  Well, the good news is that they decided to re-release it in 2002 along with a few other albums (including Alan Silvestri's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) - so you can pick it up again, should you desire, for now at least.  As a somewhat dubious "bonus" they tacked on three disposable songs from The Rescuers at the end - I'd rather have had more score, but never mind.  (And somewhat bizarrely, Broughton's name is mentioned nowhere on the outer packaging - though the album art designer is.)

Overall I would say this is a highly-competent and frequently enjoyable piece of music, but in common with Randy Newman's Pixar scores, can make for a slightly frustrating listen on album.

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