What's the first movie soundtrack you loved?

I could chalk it up to being young and impressionable and skip ahead to something that I discovered during the mid-’90s soundtrack boom, but let’s set cred aside and be vulnerable for a moment: I have many happy memories of riding around in my parents’ minivan listening to The Bodyguard soundtrack. Not the entire soundtrack; most of the time we’d just listen to side A, a six-song run of Whitney Houston at her schmaltzy ’80s best, then rewind the tape and listen to side A again. Sorry, Joe Cocker, but you can’t compete with a bunch of 6-year-olds bopping to “I’m Every Woman” in the backseat of a tan Chrysler on their way to tap-dancing class. [Katie Rife]

My mother inflicted the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack on me as a form of religious education, and I wore out my play-and-read version of as a child, but Grease was the first movie record I went out and purchased just for myself. My friends and I played all four sides of the double album in the summer of 1978 endlessly, acting out as many dance moves we remembered from seeing the movie as many times as our parents would take us. We favored John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John duets like “Summer Nights” and original-for-the-movie “You’re The One That I Want,” blithely repeating words we were much too young to be repeating, like, “You know that ain’t no shit / We’ll be getting lots of tit” in “Greased Lightning.” Looking back at the movie, as fun as it was—with the familiar 1970s theme of glorifying the 1950s—and as irrepressible as a lot of these songs were, there’s a lot that didn’t age well (“Did she put up a fight?”). We didn’t know what “lousy with virginity” meant either. [Gwen Ihnat]

The Ghostbusters II soundtrack had me before I even left the theater: The first time I saw the movie, I leapt out of my seat at the sound of Bobby Brown’s “On Our Own” and danced down the aisle, mimicking the dorky steps that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson do under the end credits. I can’t say how long it was before my family owned “On Our Own” and Ghostbusters II’s other attempts at recreating its predecessor’s marshmallow man-sized hit of a theme song, but like Katie’s Bodyguard cassette, I remember the tape doing heavy minivan rotation, occasionally relieved by the summer of ’89’s other movie music heavyweight: The Little Mermaid. Like the psychoreactive substance oozing beneath the surface of New York City in the film, I still have strong reaction to “”; it’d be years, however, before I realized that Elton John isn’t singing “” on side two. [Erik Adams]

This is one of those AVQ&As where I need to be completely honest and say the first soundtrack I loved was for the 1997 motion picture Spawn, which had the extremely 1997 idea of pairing up a bunch of rock bands with electronic acts to produce what history has darkly dubbed “rocktronica.” Some of these pairings are still sort of interesting—Butthole Surfers and Moby, Soul Coughing and Roni Size, why not—while others, like Stabbing Westward and Josh Wink, transport you immediately to the darkest aspects of the late-Clinton era. But you know… some of it still kind of works, like the loud-quiet-loud dynamics of Marilyn Manson’s collaboration with the Sneaker Pimps. Anyway, look: , I read the comic books, I listened to the soundtrack, rocktronica is bad and so was this movie, but if you’re going to listen to a rocktronica album, you could do worse than this one. : Satan! Satan! Satan! Satan! [Clayton Purdom]