Bless the Beasts and the Children is a 1971 movie based on a novel by the same name.

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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.  In the summer of 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 they used "Cotton's Dream" as the background music, the song gained popularity and was subsequently released in a re-edited and lengthened form as "Nadia's Theme", a title under which it became best known.

 

For their work, De Vorzon and Botkin were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song and  for the Grammy Award for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or a Television Special. 

 

The film's soundtrack also contains its theme song, performed by The Carpenters. It is a different vocal take than their version on "A Song for You" and has  vibes replacing the oboe in the introduction.  

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They performed the song on the Academy Awards show.  The song did not win the award.

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Found a second copy of this at a thrift store in November 2020 for $1.  "Had" to buy it.

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