Halley’s Comet – The Complete Adventure (Click to download the album)
In 1986, Halley’s Comet made its regularly scheduled flight around the sun. I was six years old at the time and way into anything outer space, so I was pretty stoked. However, I, like most people on the planet Earth, could not see the comet that year. Read the wiki if you’re curious why. Long story short: conditions were shit for seeing Halley’s Comet in 1986. So a lot of people’s “once in a lifetime” chance to see the famous interstellar object shrank to “never in a lifetime.” Unless you were Emperor Hirohito. He apparently lived long enough to see it twice.
The closest I got to seeing the comet was watching Arnold and family on Diff’rent Strokes see it.
Anyways, I do remember the hype. The hype was real. It was all over the news, and we talked about it in school. So the fact that a record like this exists does not surprise me in the least. Halley’s Comet: The Complete Adventure is a 1985 Canadian release that was no doubt quickly cobbled together to cash-in on comet hype.
Side one of the record features some pretty threadbare narration about the comet, the history of its sightings on earth, and some overly flowery and optimistic ideas about what our planet might be like when the comet makes its next flyby in 2061, all while some wonderfully 80s synth music plays in the background
Side two of the record features the same music as the first side, but with the narration removed, so you can rock out with your comet out to the latest hi-tech electronic bleeps and blops that mid-range 80s keyboards had to offer. Some would probably write this music off as cheesy or corny, but I enjoy it quite a bit. It’s one part Yanni, one part Tomita, and one part Tangerine Dream (albeit nowhere near as good as any of them, obviously). This could easily be slowed down and distorted into vaporwave, I’m sure.
The narration on side one was by Don Francks, who was a Canadian actor, musician and voice actor. Most notably for anyone around my age, he was the voice of Boba Fett on the Star Wars Droids cartoon (and possibly on the Star Wars Holiday Special). He was also Sabertooth on X-Men. His daughter, Cree Summer, continued in his footsteps and has become an incredibly successful voice actress. She’s Elmyra on Tiny Toons, and also voiced Penny on Inspector Gadget.
His narration here is fine, as I said before, there’s not much to it. It reads like a NASA brochure about the comet, hitting all the basic points as quickly and plainly as possible.
I find the music a lot more interesting. It was composed and performed by Don Horsburgh. He has no credits to his name on Discogs, but he works as a stage music director and composer in Canada, mostly Alberta. According to this page, he’s worked on some pretty big shows too, including Canadian productions of Billy Elliot, Mamma Mia!, Sweeney Todd, and Mary Poppins. I wonder how often he takes out the keys and lets loose some newage jams.
The record was produced by a man named Jim MCKenna, a name that is far too common and plain for Google to be of any help whatsoever. There is a politician with that name in Canada, but I doubt he’s the same person.
And that’s about all I can find out about the record! Another blog shared this same record a few years back, and their copy came with a star chart that they helpfully scanned, so check that out if you’re interested (I think I enjoy the record itself more than that writer). The album has no barcode or spine number. The only identifying marks on it at all, is the stock number “PAM-080.921899” on the record label. Because of that, Discogs credits the album’s label as “PAM.” I would take that with a grain of salt, however, because Discogs also credits the album artist as “Halley’s Comet” and I’m fairly certain the comet itself had nothing to do with this release. Unless Halley’s Comet provided Don with the keyboards. God only knows how this thing was distributed. Was it solely for educational institutions? Mail order only? Who knows!
Enjoy! Maybe I’ll have another post up this year? Regardless, that’s four posts with music this year, which is the most I’ve managed to put on this site since COVID, I think. So I’m gonna take that as a victory.
As I said before, comments on this site are broken as fuck, so if you have something you’d like to share about this record, reach out to me on Bluesky!