Shuki Levy - Musical Voice of 1980's Cartoons
 

I was surprised to find that Shuki Levy, the composer behind many of my favorite childhood shows, has an official site that's loaded with the full versions of his many, many cartoon theme songs.

I had no idea that all of the music from these old favorites was composed by the same person, and the site is a great bit of nostalgia for the golden era of Saturday morning cartoons and delightfully cheesy 80's synth. I'd recommend the site to everyone, and if anyone has any ideas about how to download the songs, feel free to post it.

Shuki Levy's Official Site

Some of the shows represented:
He-Man
She-Ra
MASK
Inspector Gadget
Super Mario Bros. Super Show
X-Men (1992)
Spider-Man (1994)

Yeah, I'm a big fan of his Mysterious Cities of Gold soundtrack.

Also, I think he only composed the theme songs for many of those.

Wow, that's a nice find. Shame the COPS theme isn't on there tho :( But damn, this brings back some memories. And I'm loving the extended MASK theme :D

I'm a big fan of his work in older cartoons...Those old cues for Heathcliff and Captain N (which included several VGM mixes...back in 1989, that was pretty mindblowing to hear arranged VGM) still hold water and are a big reason those shows are still so damn watchable nowadays. I recorded several of them onto my old tapedeck (same one I recorded VGM with) I didn't know he did Kissyfur, X-Men or Inspector Gadget, but that's pretty awesome.

There's this one triumphant fanfare of his that was used in a bunch of different shows. Anyone know which one I'm talking about? The one instance I know for sure it was used was the Wombatman episode of Captain N, when Wombatman is using the "Wombat-Rope" to get him and Kid Icarus into Mother Brain's lair.

Unfortunately, I think most people know of him through his lackluster score to the original Dragonball Z. Which, on top of being boring, had the dubious honor of replacing the original music. Oddly, his page marks DBZ as "1989", which was the Japanese release...It didn't come to America with new music until 1995.

Some, yes, but Levy often wrote the music for the entire run. His work on Inspector Gadget was even put onto a super-rare LP. It looks like he wrote a lot of cues at the beginning and then the producers used them as library music, inserting it and cutting it to fit.
I was disappointed by that too, but after a little research I found out that Levy only wrote the incidental music. The theme was composed by Haim Saban, who appears to have worked with Levy a lot, often writing themes while Levy did the underscore. The COPS theme is on YouTube, though, if you really need the fix.

That's probably because Inner Circle wrote that song.

WHATCHOO GONNA DO

I researched about them quite a lot in the past (since I live in France and am a fan of old animes, heh), and it's confusing to know what those 2 did exactly. Haim Saban is usually only referred as a producer but is still credited in the music credits as if he and shuki actually worked together. Also, to name a single example, the music of Ulysses 31 is sometimes credited to "Haim Saban & Shuki Levy" and sometimes to "Ike Egan & Denny Crockett" ... That's only one of several examples I encountered.

Wow. There's some stuff here that really brings back some nice memories from my childhood. I loaded that X-Men cartoon theme and felt like I was 12 again.

Nice find. :P

(I just scrolled down and saw Video Power... wasn't that that VG Game Show where players played NES against each other for a chance to run through that maze and grab as many games as they could?)

Yeah, I'm one of the few that wasn't repulsed by Digimon's us soundtrack which I believe to be his doing.

Didn't he end up rewriting a lot of Escaflonine stuff though...?

I'll have to agree with you there. I didn't even know M.A.S.K. had an extended opening theme, but its still definetely cool.

I can't wait for them to release a licensed boxed set of that series, because its one of my favourite 80's cartoons of all times.

To the person that found this, definetely a great find.

I wish he release the full music of MASK& RGB music in cds though.

Sorry for the necromancy, but I've finally found a way to download the raw music files from this site, and thought that I'd best share them. The music is encoded as .MOV files at about 160 kbps--not perfect, but probably as good as it's going to get. I'm going to rip all the tracks later tonight and get them all tagged and pretty.

But for now, here's a sample: the extended MASK theme.

Power Rangers, man.

Yes, yes, of many different varieties.

The tagging took a little longer than I thought it would, but here are the songs if anyone wants to get their nostalgia on: Send big files the easy way. Files too large for email attachments? No problem!