The film is presented partially out of sequence; the primary narrative of freeing the bison is interspersed with flashback scenes showing the boys' troubled lives.

"[4] The music for the film was composed by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr. Their score included an instrumental selection titled "Cotton's Dream", which was later rescored to become the theme song of the soap opera The Young and the Restless, produced by Columbia's television division, now Sony Pictures Television.

In late July or early August 1976, when ABC's sports summary program Wide World of Sports produced a montage of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci's routines during the 1976 Summer Olympics[9] and used "Cotton's Dream" as the background music, the song became more popular; it was subsequently released in a re-edited and lengthened form as "Nadia's Theme", the title under which it became best known.

De Vorzon and Botkin Jr. also wrote lyrics for "Cotton's Dream", but no vocal version of it was known to have charted as of August 2017[update].

The theme was released as the B side of The Carpenters' single "Superstar", which reached #2 on Billboard's Hot 100 and #3 in Canada.