Search - Various Artists - Soundtracks :: Tom Sawyer: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack (2000 Animated Video)

Poor Samuel Clemens! His classic tales of interracial friendship and boyhood adventure have been repeatedly bowdlerized and, more recently, picked apart by the literary correctness police. Now Nashville has weighed in with this dumbed-down musical soundtrack to an MGM animated cartoon adaptation of Tom Sawyer. A slew of gifted young artists are featured here: Lee Ann Womack, Mark Wills, Rhett Akins, Rebecca Lynn Howard, Alecia Elliott, and Bryan White among others. It's just too bad that their talents are mostly squandered on second-rate songs that seem to be little more than musical wallpaper for a threadbare teen romance between Huck Finn and his sweetheart Becky Thatcher. A couple songs do manage to linger briefly in the memory. Ray Stevens's "Injurin' Joe" is inventive and entertaining and Marty Stuart's full-tilt gospel outing on "Leave Your Love Light On" has an intensity that seems out of place here. But most of the rest of the music merely serves to reduce Mark Twain's timeless tale to a goofy, country-flavored teen soap opera. --Bob Allen