Delerue's score in the sequel was much better.

While The Black Stallion is remembered by far as a superior children's film, The Black Stallion Returns is a score that makes the original sound like child's play. Working with Carmine Coppola yielded a decent score, though Ballard was set to cut it to pieces and demand re-writes of that material. The difficulty of working with Ballard's precise musical vision of how the film should sound ultimately caused the composer Coppola to become alienated with the project in its last weeks of rewrites by other composers and musicans. Luckily, for The Black Stallion Returns, director Robert Dalva and veteran French composer Georges Delerue hit it off immediately. The sequel score's overwhelming and consistent presence in the film further proves the score for The Black Stallion as evidence of how not to score a film.

For the original The Black Stallion score, Coppola's material still maintains a majority of screen time, and it is simple but adequate thematic material that struggles to hold the score together. While the ambience he set for the film was carried on by the other musicians who rewrote additional music, the thematic integrity and instrumentation lost its consistency. While all of the music for the film together sounds reasonably similar, the style that director Ballard wanted to have artificially inserted into some of the running and vista sequences doesn't mesh with Coppola's underscore.

Deleure, as per usual, was up to the task, writing a sweeping romantic theme for the boy/horse relationship and some impressive sub-themes for the adventurous desert settings. The title theme is among Delerue's best, which is high praise for a man who made a living out of composing elegant romance themes. He had a knack for writing incredibly enticing and sorrowful themes by doing just this thoughout his career, though there is nothing downbeat about The Black Stallion Returns. The secondary action theme is likewise a brassy affair that provides more diversity in the race sequences in the middle of the film.