In honor of its 40th Anniversary, Intrada presents an all-new edition of one of founder Doug Fake's personal favorite soundtracks. The score is not only an important part of Jerry Goldsmith's large body of work, but also Intrada's formative years. First Blood initially appeared as the inaugural release of the Film Music Treasury series, an early version of the Special Collection. In assembling that release, Goldsmith and engineer Len Engel re-sequenced the original Regency album and located one extra track not previously released, using the ¼″ two-track mixes made in 1982 for the LP. However, the ¼″ masters were plagued with an interesting anomaly: though identified with the widely-used professional Dolby A encoding process, they did not possess unique tones identifying the Dolby encoding that allows for calibration of playback machines. In lieu of those critical tones, the original engineers addressed by reducing the inherent background hiss using equalization techniques, and attempts to rectify these anomalies were less than satisfactory.
In 2010, Intrada located the multi-track session masters—complete and intact—every channel, every reel, every take. For the first time, all those interesting little bars that Goldsmith deleted to create his initial record could be restored within the full-length cues just as they were originally written and recorded. A brand-new presentation was created, uncut and intact, with newly mixed and re-mastered sound. However, in spite of Intrada's best efforts at the time, there still resulted an interesting anomaly—the tape speed was off and the music played a bit faster than intended. Additionally, some assemblies still eliminated a few of those aforementioned bars. For this new edition, Neil S. Bulk used Fake's stereo mixes and rebuilt the score and original soundtrack album from the ground up, addressing the speed issues and including a few unassembled extras so one can now truly hear everything. Some track titles have been adjusted to reflect their official cue sheet names. GRAMMY-nominee Mike Matessino mastered the album featuring new cover art by Stéphane Coëdel.
With 2025 being Intrada's 40th year releasing soundtracks, the Intrada team felt a truly definitive First Blood would be an important way to mark not only the occasion but present another opportunity to celebrate Doug Fake.
