Herman Stein, who has passed away at the age of ninety-one, is beloved by monster fans everywhere, even if they don't know his name.
As a staff composer for Universal Studios in the fifties, Stein toiled in obscurity, working alongside guys like Hans Salter and Henry Mancini, producing individual cues that could be re-used over and over. Universal, alone among major studios of the era, seldom hired anybody to score an entire film beginning to end. They'd just have the staffers crank out generic "romantic cue" or "suspense sting", and credited music director Joseph Gershenson would plug them in wherever appropriate.
Stein specialized in monster music. He wrote the blaring da-Da-DAH trumpet burst for The Creature From The Black Lagoon, which Universal was still using in low-rent science fiction movies in the late sixties. (I always associate it with the Toho/Rankin-Bass collaboration King Kong Escapes, my first exposure to it as a kid.) Stein's noisy brass and shrill strings provided the signature sound accompanying the stark black and white visuals of The Incredible Shrinking Man and It Came From Outer Space, as well as Universal's atypically ambitious This Island Earth, for which he provided the "Normal View" crescendo so memorably mocked in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.
After his uncredited gigs for the big screen, Stein worked regularly scoring episodic TV in the sixties. For those of us who grew up watching old movies and TV shows, he provided the soundtracks to our lives.
