Basil Poledouris

Poledouris studied filmmaking at USC, where he became close friends and classmates with George Lucas and John Milius, initially intending to direct rather than compose before discovering his talent for scoring his classmates' student projects. That early friendship circle proved decisive, with Milius giving him his first major professional break years later.

Composer of muscular, melodic scores, he gave RoboCop his tragic, marching-steel theme — an orchestra for the man, synthesizers for the machine. He broke through scoring Milius's Conan the Barbarian, a bombastic, operatic score that established his reputation for grand, unironic heroic themes, before turning to more overtly satirical material when Paul Verhoeven brought him onto RoboCop.

He later reunited with Verhoeven for Starship Troopers, giving both films a similarly bombastic, unironically heroic musical register that plays as pure counterpoint to their surface-level satire — the music never winks at the joke, which is precisely why the satire lands. He continued scoring films across multiple genres until his death in 2006.