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Pac Man Fever
CD DetailsPerformer: Buckner Performer: Garcia Edition: Music CD CD Release Date: 1999-06-01 Soundtracks: - Pac Man Fever
- Froggy's Lament
- Ode To A Centipede
- Do The Donkey Kong
- Hyperspace
- The Defender
- Mousetrap
- Goin' Berzerk
Music reviews of Pac Man FeverMusic Review: Is it real or is it................? Rating: 3 StarsI never had the album. Throughout the '70s & into the late '80s I collected 45 rpm's.
I had both 45's from this album, "Pac-Man Fever" & "Do The Donkey Kong".
Thanks to radio along with my own copy, I heard "Pac-Man Fever" to death.
And even though the song never charted, I played my copy of "Do The Donkey Kong" quite often.
I liked it just as much, if not more, as "Pac-Man Fever".
So when I discovered this cd was out I ordered one immediately.
I know it says on the front "Rerecordings", but after listening to those two singles, I'm just not convinced.
If indeed they are then it's the best rerecording I've ever heard.
Back in 1990 K-Tel released a 6-cd series titled "Seems Like Yesterday".
Each cd covered a certain time period. The first three volumes covered the 70's.
They were "Early 70s", "Mid 70s" & "Late 70s". Volumes 5 & 6 covered the 60s, "Mid 60s" & "Late 60s".
And volume 4 was "Early 80s" & included "Pac-Man Fever".
Every one of these six cd's plainly stated on the back incert "CBS Special Products".
And every song on all 6 cd's was a Columbia, Epic, or a lesser known CBS associated single.
This means that K-Tel did put the original version of "Pac-Man Fever" on "Early 80s".
So here's what I'm wondering. Since K-Tel had the rights to the song in 1990,
why would they have to resort to a rerecording just over a decade later?
When I got the cd I immediately listened to the title track & then right after it played it off "Early 80s".
Other than sounding "remastered", I couldn't really tell any difference.
Even the sound effects sounded the same, and I don't know how you could recreate that so precisely.
Plus even though it's been many years since I'd heard "Do The Donkey Kong", it also sounded as I remembered it.
And one last thing. I've been collecting music since the early '70s.
By the late '80s I had over 15,000 45's. I got out of that in '87 & turned around a week later & bought my first cd.
Now I have 9,000 of them.
Now I've seen hundreds of cheap various artists cd's where the performer
has rerecorded his "hit single".
But in all this time, I have NEVER seen an artist rerecord an entire album.
This would be the first. But like I said earlier, I'm still not convinced.
Description of Pac Man FeverThis is a digitally re-recorded version of the original Pac Man Fever album released in 1982 on CBS Records. The album contained 8 songs featuring lyrics and sound effects from the top video arcade games. The new version contains the 8 original songs, original arrangements, original artists (Buckner & Garcia) and original production sound. It also contains a copy of the much desired pattern cheat sheet from the original album packaging. This is the first time this classic album has ever been available on CD. Overcoming one-hit-wonder status is difficult enough, but it's nearly impossible when the hit happens to be a novelty song. So when Buckner & Garcia, the duo responsible for the 1982 hit single "Pac-Man Fever," were asked to do a full-length, they accepted their fate as historical footnotes, offering up an entire album's worth of arcade-inspired pop music. Certainly the video-game craze was one of the defining movements of the '80s (maybe we were shallow back then?), so it's no surprise that Buckner & Garcia sing as passionately about Donkey Kong as Rage Against the Machine do about Leonard Peltier. Best of all for purveyors of Pac, each song includes sound bites from the original arcade game, adding considerably to the nostalgia factor. --Jerald Graff
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