We come to it at last, the final poll in our series of Saga polls. With Episode IX now done, John Williams' work on Star Wars film scores comes to a close. Now that we have heard the scores for all nine Saga films, which ones are your favorite? In order to get a clearer picture, I thought it would be fun this time to allow people to pick their top three scores of the Saga. Favorites sometimes evolve over time and we want this poll to stay relevant, so if people want to change their minds in the future, they can change their votes.

 

ROTS and ESB are the easy top two.

Third pick is not so obvious. ANH has an iconic place, for sure, but it's a little dry compared to the more choral, soaring pieces of its successors. ROTJ is too derivative and none of the themes it introduced were that strong or interesting. AOTC has some nice parts but a little muddy and the awful hack and slash editing in the Geonosis section doesn't do it any favors.

In the end, I gotta go with TPM. Duel of Fates, Anakin's Theme and many of the Tatooine segments bump it over the top for me.

Course I would have voted The Clone Wars series over TPM but it's not on the poll and an entire show vs. a two hour movie score is admittedly not a fair comparison.
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Easy for me ... ESB is THE one score to have (at least)

 

The Phantom Menace (Anakin's theme, Duel of the Fates, Qui-Gon's theme, etc.)- it's magical, but with underlying sadness.
Close runner-ups: TESB, ROTJ, ROTS, AOTC
Honorable mentions: ANH, SOLO

 

I gave it a quick vote, which turned out to be one film from each trilogy... I wound up with ROTS, TESB and TROS. Maybe the newness of TROS will wear off, I dunno.

 

Did you vote your top three?

 

Star Wars on vinyl LP.

 

Either Empire Strikes Back or Revenge of the Sith

 

ESB and ROTS are generally my favorites and likely will always be but I also feel AOTC is incrediably underrated with tracks like Jango's Escape, Confertation With Count Dooku and Zam the Assassin and the Chase Through Coruscant being often overlooked.

 

Strange that you would leave out "Across the Stars"
If I had to pick a favorite track from the entire saga, this would be it.

 

Just heard the Oregon Symphony perform Across the Stars on Saturday. Such an amazing piece and definitely in my top Star Wars themes list.

 

Just saw this, sorry for the late reply.

Actually when I mentioned the AOTC soundtrack I kinda of considered "Across the Stars" as a given. I thought some of the other tracks on the soundtrack were severely underrated and wanted to give them a shout out. But yes I probably would consider "Across the Stars" the best track on that soundtrack.

 

Love this old school answer. I like SW, ESB and TPM the most. ROTS too.

 

TPM hands down, not a single track in the movie has a forgettable melody, there are so many minor motifs that are only used once that they probably range in the hundreds.

 

Esb hands down. The chase through the asteroid field and the scenes on cloud City still stand out. Goosebumps for me. Plus when yoda lifts the x wing out of the swamp and the music builds to a crescendo. Gets me every time

 

Empire strikes back. The rebel fleet theme. I am still getting goosebumps on that one.

 

Darth Vadar's Imperial March theme is one of my all time favourites! It's so cool and high energy. In tribute to May the Fourth, I did a piano cover of it! The Force & Imperial March combined. Hope you like it! - Minushi

 

ESB easily.

 

ANH is perfection from beginning to end, and TESB took that and created something more complex, much like the actual film did. For my third choice, I was torn between TPM and ROTS -- the former is such a FUN score and did such an incredible job of introducing us to a new era of Star Wars musically, but I went with ROTS because of the sheer emotional range Williams delivers.

 

A New Hope and The Phantom Menace are my favorites. But I have been listening to The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack a few times. Glad that Disney reissued the original scores from 77-83 on CD and digital

 

I wish they had kept the '97 SE soundtracks on streaming services instead. They were a vastly superior (and much more complete) listening experience.

 

Agreed. It's so weird that the SE scores are nowhere to be found now.

 

Kind of surprised Revenge of the Sith didn't crack the top three. Though we are dealing with a string of masterpieces here, so that makes it hard to get too competitive. There are some tracks from the back half of that movie that rip my heart out, though.

Edit:
Meant to add that I feel like Attack of the Clones has the most interesting variation in textures and tones, though. I think I would commit to that opinion. Lots of cool stuff in that one, not to mention Across the Stars, which is surely Top Three Theme material, even in this saga.