Rainbow Islands

[satoshi_matrix]

I picked up a copy of Rainbow Islands for Famicom recently and you might think I'm crazy, but that game has different music than its NES counterpart! The Rainbow Islands main theme is almost a ripoff of "somewhere over the rainbow"! does anyone else notice this or am I just crazy?

[Profeta Yoshitake]

Oh Hell!
I have never noticed that!
One of my most beloved game has two different versions...
And I have only the NES one...
Gotta get the Famicom version now!!! 

[satoshi_matrix]

Yeah! check out the rom if you don't beleive me. This is seriously odd.

[JC]

I don't find it odd that the two have different music. What I think's weird is that the Famicom version ripped its music from the Wizard of Oz. That sounds like something a pirate company would do. Some of Hacker's games have music they ripped off.

[Kreese]

The Rainbow Islands main theme is almost a ripoff of "somewhere over the rainbow"! does anyone else notice this or am I just crazy?

I've noticed this on the arcade version... I think I heard about it in a radio show about videogame music too...

[satoshi_matrix]

To answer my own question, according to Wikipedia:

Music:

The overworld music from the original arcade release of Rainbow Islands featured a musical motif from the song Over the Rainbow. Due to fears of copyright infringement, the song was replaced with an alternate, unnamed piece of music in many of the re-releases. The emulated version present in the more recent Taito Legends collection keeps the original theme, but the audio channels containing the offending melody line have been muted. Slightly remixed versions have been made for the Revolution port on Nintendo DS (one per each island using the theme).

[michaelthegreat]

Basically, that says it all. Is the famicom rainbow islands like the european or us version?

[satoshi_matrix]

It's got its own music. It's almost certinally some sort of cover of the children's classic "Somewhere over the rainbow" Since I doubt Taito got the license to use i, it had to be changed for the US release.

[michaelthegreat]

ok, thanks for the info! It doesn't completely answer what I was looking for.

I had just heard that the pal version is better than the us version (two player simultaneous play). I was thinking about trying to pick up the pal version, but being a famicom guy, I decided to check into the famicom version to see whether it turned into the US release or the pal.

I hadn't then noticed that taito released both the us and japanese version where ocean released the pal version. That probably answers my question. Maybe I'll look at the roms before I buy, but it looks like the pal version was made separately.