James Horner

Horner trained formally at the Royal College of Music in London and earned a doctorate in music composition from UCLA before breaking into film scoring through low-budget genre pictures in the late 1970s.

One of Hollywood's most prolific blockbuster composers, later known for Titanic and Avatar, his sweeping, brass-forward score gave The Rocketeer the unashamed romance of a real 1930s adventure serial. He scored an extraordinary volume of major studio films across a four-decade career before his death in a 2015 plane crash.

His Rocketeer score is frequently cited by film-music enthusiasts as one of his most purely joyful, old-fashioned adventure scores, standing somewhat apart from the more famous epics that dominate his legacy.