After years of no work, Gerry Anderson and his new business partner Christopher Burr finally managed to raise the cash to do Terrahawks.
Up to this point, all Gerry Anderson productions had been filmed in 35mm. The budget for this series was so low, they had to go with 16mm. Which was a pity because what the camera was filming mostly had the same Gerry Anderson production quality.
Another thing to suffer was the music budget. Richard Harvey had to do all the music on a synthesizer — compose as well as play it.
It was not Gerry Anderson’s finest hour in terms of series music.
Here is the original Terrahawks music:
And this, arranged by Richard Harvey himself, is what it should have been with an orchestra:
Who knew it was ever meant to actually sound like that? Who would even guess it could sound like that?
And now let’s contrast the series theme in visual context:
Update: A DMCA takedown leaves only this as an example of the end titles:
Hearing that orchestral version made waking up today worthwhile.
Bonus! CGI Zeroid:
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
You can really hear the Dallas influence in the orchestral version
The background music and sounds were created digitally using samples and resampled synths, using Fairlight cmi and the Synclavier linn drum and ssl console, they were Not cheap instruments, they were the cutting edge.
The sample playback sounds like vocals and stravinsky orch 5 all sound good to me, better than that overblown natural orchestral version, the Terrahawks theme music sounds exactly how it should have sounded.
Powerful, exciting rousing and modern for that time, The 1980s was about moving on thankfully, about innovation and being more modern than ever before because we could make music and sequence it digitally as well as analog tape etc, and technology musically moved Very very quickly on at those times as sample rates etc improved 6 months on month year by year.
I’m glad Richard harvey had the good sense to record the sound track as he did, the sounds used in terrahawks be it the theme or the background atmosphere sounds are all superb if you listen closely and properly quite contemporary, he soundscaped very cleverly and quite unusually.
I worked with him and frankly it pisses me off at how people Now, accuse people of being ‘old fashioned’ in the earlier part of the 1980’s because it isn’t to your aural taste and seems so long ago but every thing wasn’t merely ‘synthesized’ we were using samplers actually..
Make no mistake, richard harveys music and recording techniques were first rate and very ahead of the times for all those music pieces, it wasn’t just electronic, it was digital sample playback for the most part, (except for some analog simmons drum overdub parts synth brass and bass) and he recorded all this on a very expensive SSL console with computer control, hardly low budget by anyones good music making standards, then or Now.
But the thing is, nowadays I’ve heard better stuff done with GarageBand! Also, given the magnificence of the orchestral version, I can’t help thinking that Gerry could only afford demo tracks that were done on synths.