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All time shows: Boston Crusaders


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The first Thanksgiving was in Plymouth, Massachusetts so let's do Boston this week.

What are your top 1-5 all time Boston Crusaders shows?

(Optional) What are your 1-3 least favorites from them?

You can go into as much or little detail as you like but please please try to keep things positive.

For a quick recap in case you missed it and/or want to add your contributions:

Week 1- Cavies- 2006 the Machine is the favorite and 2012 15 min of fame is the least favorite.

Week 2- Jersey Surf- 2012 Bridgemania favorite

Week 3- Blue Knights-1994 Trittico for bras band favorite. least  2001Blue Toons

Week 4- Spirit of Atlanta- 1980 favorite

Week 5- Carolina Crown- Favorite: 2015 Inferno; Least Favorite: 2017 ...It is

Week 6- The Mandarins- 2017 inside the ink for favorite.

Edited by ThePlanets
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  Favorites from the Boston Crusaders:

    2017...... " Wicked Games "

    2000...... " Red "

     2013...... " Rise "

     2009...... " Core of Temptation "

    2002........ " You Are My Star "

                  Honorable Mention..... 2008" Neocosmos " ;  2003 " Bravo "     2010" Thy Kingdom Come ";   ... 2004"Composition of Color"            2001" Harmonium ".

                 Ok, but just not my cup of java: .... 2014." Animal Farm " ( did appreciate the edginess and the boldness with the show theme however )..... 2016" Quixotic ".

                                       

 

     

 



 

Edited by BRASSO
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 2000...... " Red "

2017...... " Wicked Games "

     2013...... " Rise "

2010" Thy Kingdom Come

    2002........ " You Are My Star "

               

 

honorable mention to 1990 and 1999

                                       

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1 hour ago, ThePlanets said:

The first Thanksgiving was in Plymouth, Massachusetts so let's do Boston this week.

What are your top 1-5 all time Mandarin shows? 

So, the Mandarin"s have relocated to MA and are now part of IAM?  The BOD have done it once again!

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Yah, Bahston!

Favorites -

Red (2000) - mostly familiar favorites.  Bolero, of course, is hardly breaking new ground, and Clifton Williams's Symphonic Dance No. 3 was the closer the year before as well as 2000.  For me, though, adding Con Te Partiro and the singing (along with the many, many callbacks to Bolero to tie it all up with a bow) is what elevated this from a good show to a classic.  They brought the house down all season, and again at Finals.  It didn't trailblaze artistic ground, and the battery sometimes seemed to vanish, but man, oh, man was it drum corps at its "in-your-face...plus emotion!" best!

Wicked Games (2017 (thanks, Ghost!)) - honest to goodness, I did not see this show at all until Finals night.  Ho-lee cow!  This show had everything.  Musically, adding Chris Isaak worked brilliantly, giving modern life and sound to an otherwise fairly standard classical repertoire.  Visually, the "moments" kept coming fast and furious through the whole production.  Besides of course the ending fire, my personal favorite was the tenor solo with the noose around the one guy that kept twisting all of them to different angles.  My wife and I both kept saying, "did you see that?!?" to each other the entire time, and it's been a looooong time since we have been caught quite that flat-footed by any show. 

1993 (no title) - this show won't make any "Best" of Boston, but it's definitely a favorite.  The 1994 corps had a much tighter and mature brass sound, but... '93 got the better music.  Russian Easter Overture was a great opener for that era (honestly, probably a bit too vanilla these days), and their music from Scheherazade filled out the production to wonderful effect.  I would highly recommend this to anyone who likes to hear a corps play a great design of good arrangements played well.

Conquest (2015) - musically, the show only jumped out at points for me, in particular the opening Game of Thrones intro along with the magnificent singer in the ballad.  Visually, the stage provided some awesome set-piece moments and the flags gave a flow to the whole program.  But together, the whole thing just *works.*  Every time it comes up in my audio or video playlist, I'll stop what I'm doing and follow along.  Definitely a "greater than the sum of its parts" production.

Honorable mention -

Quixotic (2016) - I never thought an "old school" concept like this would work in modern DCI, but they pulled it off.  While the back half of the program seemed to suffer from both design and performance fatigue, the opening is absolutely brilliant, and they totally pulled off Man of La Mancha.

Not-so-favorites -

Animal Farm (2014) - I got what they were trying to do. I just didn't like it.  Boston has always programmed very fan-friendly sorts of shows, and this strayed from the formula a bit.  The audience noticed.  Did love the uniforms though...

Rise (2013) - ...speaking of straying from the formula, this was a ... nice? ... show, but I kept feeling like they put this one a little too far from the grasp of the audience.  You can tell there's *something* going on with it, but whatever it is, they made it too subtle to be easily understood...

The Titans (2012) - ...then, of course, are the times that the concept is good, squarely aimed at the audience, but the music selections ended up neither helping nor hurting. 

We will not speak of -

Revolution (2011) - "there isn't enough material in Les Miserables to fill out an 11-minute program."  Sure thing, buddy.  :lol:

Mike

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1. 2000 - I absolutely love this show

2. 2003 - Great sequel to 2000

3. 2008 - It's the Matrix, and the drill was great!

4. 1999 - Welcome to Finals!

5. 2017 - They burned people at the stake! (I assume that was pretend though)

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52 minutes ago, Ghost said:

So, the Mandarin"s have relocated to MA and are now part of IAM?  The BOD have done it once again!

Lol thanks for catching that. I copy and paste week to week and missed changing the name there

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Important caveat: for most of my time following drum corps, Boston has felt (to me) like...well, like "generic drum corps show X." They've been fine, solid shows, but nothing truly spectacular. This is probably just my own personal bias working against them, because I enjoy the shows...there's just not really been anything to make them particularly "special" for me. That said, there are a few exceptions, and I present most of them below. I should really heavily underscore that all of this is my opinion and perception of things, and is not meant to ascribe anything to the corps itself, motive-wise (mostly relating to my least-favorites).

Favorites in chronological order:

2000 (RED): such a delightful show to listen to! Wrapping Bolero back in at the end (so getting the good parts of Bolero, without all the needless repetition), the snippet of Carmen...the singing. It all just worked.

2009 (The Core of Temptation): best use of electronics in the first year of having them available (the apple bite). I still occasionally shudder thinking about the horn toss. And the "Bacchanale" while lying down on the field worked SO well.

2013 (RISE): different color palette! Shifting color palette during the show. Good musical selections!

early season 2014 (Animal Farm): when it first came out, this felt like it was Important, as drum corps shows go, and calling out what had happened. And the G7 set was pretty dope.

2017 (Wicked Games): One of two shows in this set that really falls into the "generic drum corps show X" boat I mentioned up top (with 2013). Very well executed (great singer!), and a show that, if any corps were going to do it, Boston would be the one, but...shrug I guess just kinda...there for me.

Least favorites, in no particular order:

2015 (Conquest): for a 75th anniversary show, it was...well...bland. The banners never quite worked the way they wanted them to, the story never quite conveyed well...just kinda there.

2016 (Quixotic): just didn't work as a show. It's a testament to the members that they scraped into Finals, because that was nowhere close to a Finals-level design for them.

late-season 2014 (Animal Farm): this may be off because 2014 is the one year that I had the season pass (we miss you, Fan Network), but by the time Allentown rolled around, the premise of the show had gotten stale.  Like, at first it worked as a "yeah, we're telling it like it is and sticking it to them!" but by the end of the season it felt like "really? you're still going on about this? Still?"

And the finals week changes didn't help, either. "Oh, you're now making the subtext that we all got on first viewing because the meaning was plain as day text (literal text, in the case of the narration) because it wasn't clear enough?" "Oh, now you've put the DCI logo on your flags to try and convey your point even more?" "Oh, now you're whining about the baby powder thing because the rule was correctly applied? Come on."

Animal Farm was a great early season show. But the kids couldn't march it, and rather than clean the dirt, things that made the show decidedly worse/whinier were added in.

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