Even years after his passing Alex North is still one of Hollywood's most well respected composers. A leading light in the modernist movement within motion picture scoring, North scored a great deal of the 1960s’ most highly regarded pictures including Spartacus (1960), The Misfits (1961), Cleopatra (1963) and his famously rejected work on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But by the early 1980s his distinct approach to film scoring was considerably maligned in the wake of the minimalist 1970s and subsequent resurgence in strong, homophonic thematic development famously championed by John Williams in his Star Wars scores and, to a lesser extent, his work on Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (1974) and Jaws (1975). Though not a criticism of North's style it did reflect the migration of Hollywood to a simpler, more accessible (and explicitly youth-oriented) approach to film production, leaving little demand for composers whose work erred more on the cerebral.

Director Matthew Robbins' Dragonslayer (1981) had less to do with the resurgence of fantasy cinema and more to do with a post-Vietnam / Watergate mistrust in authority of all kinds and Alex North's musical personality was a delectable match for such material. His ability to disguise his dense thematic ideas in ascending overtones and multiple layers created a timeless yet traditional work worthy of as much discussion and praise as Howard Shore's work on Peter Jackson's overblown Lord of the Rings ego-fest. Often disguised melodic lines for the dragon himself, Vermithrax Perjorative, the villagers, known as the Urlanders, hero and heroine Galen and Valerian, even a playful motif for a magic amulet all combine in a dissonant, intelligent grand symphony that, admittedly, is incredibly challenging to listen to in its entirety. However, while North's Dragonslayer remains one of the least accessible scores of the resurgence in the genre, its life will probably exceed many of those that accompanied it when considering its depth in orchestral ideas and nuances.

North's score might be seen as something of a paradox, with the integration of fairly obscure instruments including log drums, a tack piano and a clavitimbre distancing the listener (and theatre audience) to a great deal of the already intellectualised screenplay from Robbins and Hal Barwood, providing only the Urlanders and Valerian with melodies in any recognisable key. The theme for Valerian, serving the love she shares with Galen and reprised a number of times after its introduction in “Still a Virgin”, is perhaps so recognisably lyrical that its strings and woodwinds almost become the exception to the accepted atonality of the works' majority. The bulk of the score is an overwhelming yet brave tapestry of brutal sonorities and incognizable tempos which was likely a daring and unsettling move by the filmmakers in the eyes of Paramount, though probably less so for their production partner Walt Disney Productions, who had already ventured into less accessible territory with The Black Hole (1979) and had begun production on the complicated visual effects-laden TRON (1982), both musically diverse.

Originally released on LP at the time of the film's release, the score for Dragonslayer was subsequently reissued by Soundtrack Collectors Special Editions in a very limited printing presenting a little more music than the LP program and retaining some of North's album edits. La La Land Records' limited edition of 2010 is a different beast entirely, presenting an anthology of sorts with North's score playing in chronological order and offering a smattering of alternate cues and variations, including an interesting “Dance Montage”, after the main program closes. Jeff Bond's liner notes serve both the film and the score very well indeed and offer far more in the way of discussion and appreciation than this review could, or perhaps should, expound. Bond's highly detailed track commentary, too, is a concise deconstruction of North's considerably diverse instrumentation.