This is an item that took years to track down for my soundtrack collection, and the history of Starfleet Command – and its rarity – is a story unto itself. Bearing the slightly inaccurate legend “Award-winning music from the composer of numerous TV series and Star Trek movies, Ron Jones” (Jones never scored a Trek movie, and over half of the CD’s music was composed by someone else), this CD is the soundtrack from the hit computer game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. But what’s with the rarity? Surely anything bearing the Star Trek name would be mass-marketed to a fault, wouldn’t it?
In 1998, indie label Sonic Images (started by Christopher Franke of Tangerine Dream and at the time best known for its ongoing series of Babylon 5 “episodic” CDs, each containing the entire score to just one show), won the license to give the Starfleet Academy soundtrack a general release. And around the same time, Sony was prepping its nicely remastered and gorgeously packaged re-release on CD of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture soundtrack, which had been out of print for several years.
But there was one other thing that happened in 1998 that nixed both of those releases: Paramount wanted to give priority to marketing the then-upcoming Star Trek: Insurrection. The studio told Sony and Sonic Images to hold their releases back; Sony later released The Motion Picture 2-CD set in 1999 (which worked better anyway, as that was the film’s 20th anniversary), but Sonic Images’ license was not renewed by Paramount. The label had a warehouse full of pressed CDs, and wanted to renew the license and release that inventory. But Paramount wouldn’t budge – and so Starfleet Academy‘s soundtrack, for most, never saw the light of day.
Rumors abounded about the cause of the cancellation, including the possibility that Rick Berman, who had input into Star Trek product licensing, nixed the release to retaliate against former Star Trek: The Next Generation composer Ron Jones’ less-than-flattering comments about his time on the series. Whatever the reason, the only copies of Starfleet Academy that made it into the public’s hands came in the form of premium offers, a limited edition run of the game which included the soundtrack CD, and advance copies of the CD sent out to video game and music journalists ahead of the Sonic Images release. With its cutscenes starring William Shatner and George Takei, and its lush musical score composed and conducted by someone who had actually been connected to the franchise, Starfleet Academy was something of a big deal at the time. Thus ends the tumultuous story of the soundtrack’s premature demise.
Where the music itself is concerned, the first ten tracks will be familiar to those who fondly recall Jones’ music from the first four seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. His signature sound is sweeping, nautical, and dramatic, paying homage equally to the Star Trek film scores of James Horner and the late, great Jerry Goldsmith and melding those sensibilities nicely. Some of the passages of Starfleet Academy’s musical score are very reminiscent of Jones’ fourth-season Next Generation episode The Nth Degree, and it’s all great stuff – the sort of adventurous bombast that became verboten on the TV series, and yet makes the soundtrack for this computer game sound like a legitimate entry in the movie series.
Jones protegè Brian Luzietti provides the remainder of the music for Starfleet Academy, and while it’s interesting to hear someone attempt to reach toward the same style, some of Luzietti’s tracks don’t quite have the “oomph” of Jones’ music. Then again, that’s probably also a side effect of hearing the music outside of its intended medium – these things would probably 
go unnoticed buried under the layers of sound effects and pre-recorded dialogue that typically accompany a computer game from the 1990s. Luzietti is at his best when he’s doing his own thing and not trying to meet Jones halfway stylistically, and some of his tracks are quite listenable indeed – and legitimately Trekkish, with throwbacks to the Alexander Courage fanfare for the original series.
- Starfleet Academy Theme (4:07)
- Surrounded (2:22)
- Evasive Maneuvers (2:22)
- Exploring The Unknown (1:57)
- On The Edge (2:49)
- Crew Introduction (1:50)
- Red Alert (2:49)
- On To Victory (2:22)
- Discovery (1:59)
- No Way Out (2:22)
- To Stop The Vanguard (3:41)
- Personal Problems (0:40)
- Romulan Suicide (1:04)
- Kirk’s Briefing (1:19)
- Venturi Suite (3:03)
- Sneaking Instincts (1:21)
- The Vanguard’s Plans (1:35)
- Log – Looking Grim (1:04)
- Log – Mission Accomplished (1:04)
- Log – Situation Normal (1:05)
- Thoughts Before The Briefing (1:38)
- Forester – Captain Of The Enterprise (4:00)
Released by: Interplay Productions (1998 Sonic Images release cancelled)
Release date: 1997
Total running time: 46:44