Sunday, July 15, 2007

Sydney Forest, where are you?

I'm surprised I've not watched Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no takkyûbin @ IMDB) since the wife and daughter have been in China. I do need to watch A Mighty Wind and return it tomorrow, so I shouldn't be posting now, but I am. Thinking about Kiki made me think of the new beginning and ending music for the Disney VHS release back on 1 September 1998. (That version was Pan and Scan. On 29 September they released the widescreen and I should have waited. Of course there was also the subtitled widescreen VHS that I didn't get either.)

The songs Soaring, used for the opening, and I'm Gonna Fly, used for the ending, were sung by Sydney Forest. I like the songs in the original Japanese but these are good too. One of the things Disney/Buena Vista did right. (Some of the other musical changes are good too.) Back in 2000, you could order a CD from her site called "Collected Film and Television Works" for $5 that had those two songs and three others by her. The CD is listed at here at nausicaa.net at the bottom.

I went out and using the mp3 search on AltaVista, you can find very good quality (192 k) versions of these two songs:

I'd still like the original CD. Looking over the Internet Archive, her original site http://www.sydneyforest.com/ was up from at least 9 August 1999 to 2 August 2002 - looks like it was registed for 4 years. There is an email sydmail@aol.com, but it just bounced.

Her IMDB page shows nothing since 2004. I wish I could find her site.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

A few years back I tried to locate the Sydney Forest CD and had no luck. I hope you find her. I hope she knows how big her song has become.

Ace

Guy of Mystery said...

Same here! I also tried getting her CD to no avail about 4 years ago. Any links to the other songs on her album?

I also noticed that the mp3 version you have is missing a verse compared to the film version. Any idea what happened to it?

Anonymous said...

The link to Soaring no longer works, sadly.

Anonymous said...

I just added a link to Soaring here.

Anonymous said...

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LHFNF820
works right now for that song

James D. Stringer '13 said...

I REALLY hope you're still here, because she's now selling her albums digitally, as name-your-price downloads. I'm happy, too! http://sydneyforest.bandcamp.com/