When I clicked on this video I presumed that “reusing” meant having similar melodies or chord progressions as other songs, but still being different songs on a superficial level. I was wrong.
I love how there's so many lies and deception from Tommy that not even these videos or Hbomberguys video are enough to catalogue them all. Also props to Joey for his music. He deserves a lot of credit.
I believe it may have been Todd Dennis after all. Who knows maybe others are due credit as well? So little info out there but starting to get desperate to know the truth. Am a big fan of MDK (1997) and the incredible soundtrack
I always loved the Earthworm Jim soundtrack but something always felt off to me about it. You can usually always tell if you're listening to a Koji Kondo, Grant Kirkhope or Mick Gordon soundtrack for instance and get the feeling that a singular composer has had their fingerprints on all of the tracks regardless of what genre they would delve into. It has their personality behind them. With EWJ however they always felt like disconnected tracks from something akin to stock music library. I used to shrug it off as maybe being part of the zany aesthetic of the game, but with all of the evidence that has been surfacing lately I kind of know in my gut feeling that Tommy Tallarico has probably been a fraud from the start and never wrote anything himself. I hope the names of all of the actual composers for EWJ will finally surface someday so I can thank them for making my childhood great. Especially whoever wrote New Junk City.
Christophe Beck and Tony Bernitech were the composers for the second game (there's also a third, unknown composer). Tony Bernitech did 2 tracks for the first game (the Andy Asteroids theme and Who Turned The Lights Out) but we don't know anything else about who did the other soundtracks.
I've been waiting since seeing Tommy's appalling behavior on the Screen Savers as a teenager for basically the entire internet to turn on him and his absolutely pathetic behavior and prima donna attitude- and now thanks to the lingering stench of the Amico it's finally happening.
I think it was more like "Hey guys, here are the tracks you requested, which are totally original and have never been used before. I even delivered them early, that's how awesome I am!"
@@WhitePointerGaming why do you assume that though, you have no clue. It's true that he lied about many things, but he didn't lie about everything. He still made tons of great music and deserves credit for at least that much
@@herr_crustovsky well the games from which the original music comes from had multiple composers and lots of music credited to him was from other people. At this point its hard to say, he wasn't a complete fraud but he lied about nearly everything
There some stuff i feel are missing they are are worth mentioning. Tommy also reused some of Todd Dennis music in Fugitive Hunter. With source tracks from MDK, Black Dawn, Time Crisis: Project Titan. The supposed "donated" music he did for that Super Meat Boy clone actually been sourced from two games, Spiderman (PS1/N64) and Color Me A Dinosaur. Another thing i want to mentioned i want to bring up. He also reused some tracks for Flip's Twisted World (His final game soundtrack) which had recycled music from Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights.
Don't forget about Messiah (2000) - The track "Satan's Call" is a reused track "Big Bruty" from "Earthworm Jim: Special Edition," but with layered stuff added on top of it. The track "Dark Cityscape" is a reused track "Drench" from "Wild 9," albeit shown in its entirety (as opposed to blatantly looping certain sections of the song to pad out the duration) with the ending part crossfading into nonsensical stuff.
Whoever arranged those songs for Sonic and the Black Knight did a good job. If that was actually you Tommy, be proud, you actually did something that is good.
Black Dawn's credits apparently only list out a Todd Dennis as the guy behind its music. Plus, apparently Tommy's third song that he "contributed" to Black Knight, "The Cauldron", was used in the game Adrenix, which Dennis also worked on. So yeah, Tommy didn't compose anything for Sonic! What a surprise.
@@ezg2000 yeah, I understand people being mad about that, I agree that he's a con and a liar, but I'm just saying that he can simultaneously be that and also a talented artist
I was actually starting to investigate this myself after learning that 2 of his 3 tracks he contributed to Sonic and the Black Knight were reused from the game Black Dawn. I'm curious, how did you find these? Did you just manually go through his catalogue of game soundtracks and listen for the reuses or did you use some kind of tool or website?
So I was just thinking how wild it would have been if Tommy had taken a track from earlier in his career and slapped it onto one of his later works, then BOOM: Black Dawn to Black Knight 🤣
He didn't actually. Tommy blatantly reused a few of Todd Dennis' tracks from Black Dawn (entirely composed by Dennis himself) without his [Dennis'] consent. So those Black Dawn tracks (one of them re-recorded with Jun Senoue) in Sonic And The Black Knight should be attributed to Todd Dennis, not Tommy Tallarico, since Tommy can't compose orchestral music for jack squat.
Basically Tommy feels like everything that was ever published under his company belongs to him and that he can re-use it as he sees fit while claiming he did it. When you think about it, everything Tommy has ever done is profit off of other people's work. Video Game Lives is him profiting off from the music of multiple video game composers, those whose songs are being are being played during concerts. Does Tommy even pay for the rights to use those songs in his orchestra? The Amico was Tommy trying to profit from the legacy and back-catalog of the Intellivision brand and intellectual property. He's just the worst.
Typically everything Tommy does is legal. He owns the rights to these songs so he fan re-use them. He gets performance rights fir video games live too. If someone can sue him he fears them and complies with the law. It is the little guy he though can screws over.
@@turrican3839 I doubt it. The reason Tommy said he "composed" the first Earthworm Jim game was because in reality, he actually re-arranged/enhanced the music in Earthworm Jim: Special Edition on the Sega CD and PC. If anything, the original compositions in the first EWJ game (both Genesis and SNES versions) were obviously composed by Mark Steven Miller (AKA Mark Miller), not Tommy. The only thing Earthworm Jim-related that Tommy actually composed was Earthworm Jim 2 (including the re-arranged/enhanced version of the soundtrack heard in the Sega Saturn and PlayStation versions). So no, the whole notion of "Tommy being the actual composer of EWJ1, but have to use Miller's name in the GEN/SNES versions due to legal reasons, but Miller did handle the SNES port of the music" is another one of Tommy's lies he is trying to spew.
@@GH_EmotionalGuy Well that's new, and it seems a little more suspicious with the sound quality of both games where 2 lacks *a lot* of PCM sample usage where it was desperately needed
He sure is the first american to take credit from other more talented game composers work. Considering a lot of the Black Dawn and MDK stuff were done by someone else name Todd Dennis. The funny thing is, he never got credited in Sonic and The Black Knight instead Tommy took it upon himself and slap his name on the soundtrack. Just for a obvious ego boost. Out of the composers who work for Tommy, i commonly see Todd name on soundtracks in his studio in some games he worked on. That means Tommy might have ghost writers like Hans Zimmer.
Exactly. What's the point of having the phrase: "Music by Tommy Tallarico or Music By Hans Zimmer" yet let unknown or well-known ghostwriters do the lion's share of the dirty work and put their names on the backside that will barely get noticed? Musical Narcissism at its worst of finest. If I was a well-known composer and I have a project to do with a little or big extra help from others, I would put their names and my name on the front of an album to signify that they helped co-composed the music or write additional music. Granted composers like Marco Beltrami and (his friend) Kevin Manthei are guilty of this practice, too (putting their names upfront and have additional composers like (Manthei in the case of Beltrami's scores and) Kevin Riepl on the backside) in addition to not annotating who did which track in the album documentation, but nowhere near as narcissistically blatant and pathetic as Tallarico and Zimmer.
@@GH_EmotionalGuy Tommy tried to steal credit for the first Pac-Man World game he "worked" on. Until the community exposed that and reveal it was composed by Todd Dennis since he was the only composer credited in the game music and sound department with Joey Kuras. I have begin to recognized Todd music style as i dig deep into this. I do actually agree with you on this one.
@@DalekEnclave123 Of course he [Tommy] would steal that spotlight under the name of his "Music Production Company" (which is nothing more than a vanity card): Tommy Tallarico Studios and the end credits to the game did a poor job at assigning proper role names for both Todd and Joey. Either that was Tommy's blatant doing or Namco Hometek's mistake.
@@DalekEnclave123 Speaking of which and I already said this but I'll say this again: There's no way someone will convince me that Tommy did most or some of the work on Black Dawn and MDK as they are completely composed by Todd Dennis himself. It's a shame that Todd's recognition on MDK via album has been overshadowed by Tommy's music producing credit: "Music Produced By Tommy Tallarico." Not to mention, Tommy had the audacity to reuse not only Todd's MDK tracks in Wild 9 without Todd's consent and re-attributed under Tommy's name mind you to make it seem like Tommy did "most of the Wild 9 music" (despite Sonic Mayhem being the actual real (main) composer for Wild 9 and Tommy only made 3 (original) additional tracks for that game [Wild 9]), but he went as far as to reuse Todd's Black Dawn tracks for Sonic And The Black Knight (one of them rearranged with Jun Senoue) without Sonic Team knowing about it, without Todd's permission and he blatantly re-attributed them under Tommy's name. What a lazy hack. Everything Todd Dennis composed in his own musical style doesn't sound like Tommy's music style, since Todd has a background in music education; Tommy doesn't and it shows.
@@GH_EmotionalGuy At the time, i was wondering why the music he claims to "worked" on are strangely inconsistent in terms of style and sound. Until i see the credits for the previous games I mentioned with the exception of Sonic. I do agreed with this, if i have a music company of my own i actually rather credit the talented composers i worked with then actually slapped my name on it. Mainly i don't want the attention. Even Sonic Mayhem did Tomorrow Never Dies soundtrack with Todd Dennis, Tommy slapped his name on the CD album once again. While Joey seem to be working in the industry very well these days. How ever, he did mentioned Todd stopped working on game soundtracks altogether. I am thinking it could be around the mid 2000s When i see reviews for MDK for example, often people mentioned and praising Tommy Tallarico then the actual composer who worked on it. Same case for Sonic as i previously mentioned. This proves that stealing someone else work and they've claimed to worked on it, really hurts the hardworking composers who deserve it more.
Apparently tommy only did the sound for wild 9 like wexs voice but the music was done by steve hefinen. Game probably recycled that many tracks due to development hell and being rushed. Despite all this wild 9 is a great forgotten game and if you liked ewj def give it a shot
Tommy's a dbag but I still have to give him credit because earthworm Jim's music is amazing and still gets stuck in my head everytime I play them. (That is if he even created it)
The first game's soundtrack was actually composed by Mark Steven Miller (of Kid Chameleon & RoboCop Versus The Terminator fame); Tommy only composed the second game's music. The reason why Miller's soundtrack to the first EarthWorm Jim game gets misattributed to Tommy so much is because in reality he actually rearranged Miller's EWJ1 music via Redbook Audio Enhancement on EarthWorm Jim: Special Edition (Sega CD and PC). But Tommy blatantly states that he is the "real composer of the first game; Miller's name was there due to 'legal' reasons." For which I call Tommy's side of the situation a load of Grade A BS, due to Tommy's narcissistic tendency of lying all the time.
@@GH_EmotionalGuy He didn't even compose the second game's music either, Tony Bernitech composed most of the second game's tracks, with Christophe Beck doing 1 track and an unknown composer doing the rest
@@individualised Christophe Beck actually composed 2 tracks, them being Anything But Tangerines and Subterranean. Tallarico composed Continue To Rock and used MIDI files he found on the Internet for classical music pieces
