Tunes for Toons: A Cartoon Music Primer

by NEIL STRAUSS

"If you can write for animation," said Hoyt Curtin, composer for classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons from The Flintstones to Scooby-Doo, "you can write for anything." Cartoon music is among the most engaging and experimental forms of twentieth-century music, exploring the more outrageous extremes of instrumentation, rhythm, and nonmusical sound. It is a genre in which rapid tempo changes, unusual instrumental effects, experimental percussion, post-modern quotation, shock chords, and musical genre-shifting are de rigeur. From the warped takes on Liszt and Rossini that occur when a fly lands on a conductor's nose to the free-jazz solos that certain animated animals play on the heads of other animated animals, the laughs lie in perverting the sounds we've come to expect from concerts and canines. Just try watching a classic Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny cartoon with the sound off, and see how flat the jokes fall.

The history of this music has rarely been told, for the sole reason that it wasn't until recently that cartoon music was even considered a viable genre unto itself. Cartoon music, for the purposes of this primer, is score — orchestral or instrumental accompaniment — as opposed to the circle-of-life songs of Disney films, the pop hits that fill some big-budget film features, and the tongue-in-cheek parodies that populate The Simpsons. Born in the 1920s, cartoon music experienced its golden years in the 1940s and '50s, before television studios increased the workload, lowered the budget, and, with the advent of synthesizers, eviscerated the art.

Interestingly, many of the more modern avant-garde musicians who have been drawn to cartoon music, like John Zorn and Sun Ra, have their roots in improvisation. This makes sense, because many of the early composers for cartoons started out as improvisers themselves, playing organ and other instruments to accompany silent movies.

Perhaps one of the most important chance meetings in cartoon music history occurred in the early 1920s at the Isis Theatre in Kansas City, where Carl Stalling, then a film accompanist and conductor, first encountered Walt Disney, who was just beginning his involvement in film. After Disney left for Hollywood and began producing cartoons, the two renewed their bond (originally created over their shared excitement about combining music and film) and Stalling was soon given the first two silent Mickey Mouse shorts to score. The job was a perfect fit for the wildly talented Stalling, and he was quickly hired as the studio's first music director.

In the meantime, Max Fleischer at Fleischer Studios was experimenting on a more in-depth level with adding music to cartoons. The studio's "Song Car-Tune," Oh Mabel (1924), introduced the infamous bouncing ball, which landed on the appropriate lyric to a popular song in time to the music (which was played by the theater accompanist) for audiences to sing along to. The "car-tune" received such an enthusiastic response at its first screening that the theater manager rewound the short and showed it again. A few shorts later, Max Fleischer was introduced to Lee de Forest, who had developed Phonofilm, a method of recording sound on the edge of motion picture film. (Incidentally, the instructional film on the use of Phonofilm was animated. Thus cartoons played an integral part in the advent of sound in film). Fleischer fell in love with the idea and produced the first theatrical film of any kind with a synchronized soundtrack, My Old Kentucky Home, in 1926. Subsequently, he added sound to his earlier bouncing-ball films, many of which featured Koko the Clown. These were the first theatrical releases of sound films, predating even Warner Bros.' first live-action motion picture with a music track, Don Juan (which preceded 1927's more famous Jazz Singer by more than a year).

Even Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio beat Disney to sound with its first Aesop's Fables series film, Dinner Time (1928). Terrytoons claimed to be the first studio to prescore its cartoons. Working with brilliant Terrytoons composer Philip A. Scheib, the studio's animators drew frames to fit his scores, which were recorded in one take.

The advent of sound solved a problem that plagued composer Paul Hindemith, a Felix the Cat fanatic who composed a score for Felix at the Circus, which he attempted to premiere at the Baden-Baden festival. Much to his chagrin, the machine selected to synchronize his pianola roll with the film projector malfunctioned and the composition was subsequently lost.

Determined to keep up with the competition, Walt Disney traveled to New York to work on his first actual sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie. At Cinephone studios in 1928, the well-known...