Music Collection from 80's Japanese TV anime serie Lady Oscar. All music composed by Koji Makaino. Koji Makaino, born in 1948, was one of the most prolific arrangers in Japanese popular music, moving between idol pop, enka and television work; among his many scores, the one for Lady Oscar, in Japan The Rose of Versailles, after Riyoko Ikeda's manga, is the best remembered. The series was produced by TMS and broadcast on Nippon Television across 1979 and 1980, reaching Italy soon after, where its title character became a lasting reference.

Makaino's score works on two levels at once. On the surface it reaches for the period: string melodrama, harpsichord and a romantic, courtly sweep suited to Versailles. Underneath sits the studio language of the late 1970s, electric bass, wah guitar, drum kit and synthesizer, so that a costume drama is scored with the rhythm section of a contemporary pop record. The cues swing between tenderness and high tragedy, following Oscar from the palace guard to the barricades. It is that collision, baroque pastiche over a funk and disco pulse, that keeps this music interesting well beyond its original purpose. Heard now, detached from the screen, the cues carry a strong late-1970s charge, and for a generation in Italy and elsewhere they are inseparable from the images they once accompanied. Instrumental television music of this kind was made to function, not to be studied, which is exactly why it rewards the attention now being paid to it.