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Tunes For 'Toons - Music and The Hollywood Cartoon
Tunes For 'Toons - Music and The Hollywood Cartoon
Michael P. Roth
and Sukey Garcetti
have endowed this
imprint to honor the
memory of their parents,
Julia and Harry Roth,
whose deep love of music
they wish to share
with others.
MUSIC AND THE HOLLYWOOD CARTOON
DANIEL GOLDMARK
Goldmark, Daniel.
Tunes for ’toons : music and the Hollywood
cartoon / Daniel Goldmark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-23617-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Animated film music—History and
criticism. I. Title.
ml2075.g65 2005
781.5'42—dc22 2004025268
FIGURES
1. Carl Stalling 11
2. The cloverleaf in Fast and Furryous 27
3. The Swooner Crooner 29
4. The Fifth-Column Mouse 34
5. Mouse Warming 37
6. Bugs Bunny Rides Again 42
7. Dancing in Bugs Bunny Rides Again 42
8. Getting out of town in Bugs Bunny Rides Again 42
9. Scott Bradley at Harman-Ising in the late 1930s 46
10. The flower and the weed in Dance of the Weed 56
11. Out the window, in Solid Serenade 65
12. Heading for the sink in Solid Serenade 66
13. Tom’s disguise in Puttin’ on the Dog 70
14. The dog’s head gets around in Puttin’ on the Dog 71
15. Paul Whiteman crowned king in production
sketches for King of Jazz 82
16. Cannibals/natives dancing in production sketches
for King of Jazz 83
17. Louis Armstrong and the band playing in I’ll Be
Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You 86
18. A native becomes Armstrong in I’ll Be Glad When
You’re Dead 88
ix
x ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
TABLES
1. Mouse Warming cue sheet 38
2. Bugs Bunny Rides Again cue sheet 40
3. Music in What’s Opera, Doc? 147
MUSIC EXAMPLES
xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xv
xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have made a better decision than choosing to pursue grad-
uate work at UCLA, where the faculty and my colleagues shared my ex-
citement about new and interesting topics. David Ake was the first grad-
uate student I met on my arrival, and my respect for him as a colleague
and my affection for him as a friend continues to grow. Within my first
quarter of graduate school I gave my first “real” paper on cartoon mu-
sic at a meeting of the Royal Music Association at Royal Holloway, Uni-
versity of London, where I met a future colleague and close friend, Mai
Kawabata. Durrell Bowman was my Simpsons co-conspirator; I could
always count on him and Louis Niebur to join me for a meal or a drink
when we had to stop work. Charles Garrett came to the program just as
I began to slip into the haze of late-night writing, but fortunately I got
to know him well enough to find in him a stimulating colleague with an
especially fine wit.
While the entire faculty of the Department of Musicology saw my work
at one time or another, Robert Walser, Mitchell Morris, and in particu-
lar Susan McClary helped me see this project to its completion. Susan
taught me how to formulate questions that I could often barely articu-
late, and then showed me how to tear those questions apart to develop
new ones. Her love for teaching and her unmatched abilities as a writer
and editor made her the ideal mentor, both then and now.
Other friends and colleagues in academia have encouraged me by vet-
ting drafts and providing useful feedback. Jeff Smith and Tim Anderson,
from the world of film and media studies, have been wonderful advo-
cates for my work. Neil Lerner has been encouraging me and my research
practically from the day this project began. Marty Marks’s scholarship
in film music gives me a goal for which I can continue to strive. And Clau-
dia Gorbman’s remarkable grasp of issues regarding film and music con-
tinues to inspire me.
The animation community (that part consisting of animation histori-
ans in particular) is remarkably small and close-knit, and I feel especially
fortunate to count many of these people as friends. They have supported
my work and this project for many years.
My first contact with the archival side of Warner Bros. cartoons came
through the very helpful folks at the USC Cinema-Television Library, in-
cluding over the years Stuart Ng, Bill Whittington, Noelle Carter, Leith
Adams (at the Warner Bros. Corporate Archive), and the ever-present and
indomitable Ned Comstock.
Jerry Beck’s love for animation is infectious. He has provided me with
introductions to dozens of people, has made himself available for ques-
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii
tions and requests, and has supported this work without fail. Michael
Barrier, Greg Ford, and Mark Kausler have been generous to a fault in
sharing their time and considerable resources with me. The knowledge
possessed by these three about popular culture and specifically about an-
imation always keeps me on my toes.
Alf Clausen, Steve and Julie Bernstein, and the late Richard Stone
shared their experiences as cartoon composers with me. I was thrilled to
find in Rich Stone someone who obsessed on Carl Stalling as much as I,
and was glad to have the chance to get to know him before his much too
early death in 2001.
Other people in animation who contributed to this project include
Leonard Maltin, Mark Langer, Ray Pointer, Will Ryan, Linda Simensky,
Steve Schneider, Keith Scott, David Gerstein, J. B. Kaufman, Rob Clam-
pett, and Howard Green. Chuck Jones gracefully granted me several in-
terviews in the early 1990s.
I also received encouragement, help, or inspiration in various ways
from Yuval Taylor, Chris Ware, Irwin Chusid, Robb Armstrong, Richard
Leppert, Ivan Raykoff, Gordon Haramaki, Rudy Behlmer, Meg Wilson,
Phil Brophy, Todd Doogan, and Neal Flum.
My time as a librarian and archivist at Spümcø animation gave me an
invaluable chance to work in the animation industry and meet dozens
of creative folks who simply love cartoons. I learned a great deal from
working with John Kricfalusi, who has a passion for classic cartoons un-
matched by anyone I’ve ever met, while Vincent Waller became a wonder-
ful mentor for many years.
For all but four months of my time in graduate school I had the in-
credibly good fortune to work, first freelance and eventually full-time,
at Rhino Entertainment in West Los Angeles. Besides being a truly “great
place to work,” it enabled me to meet many talented writers, artists, and
self-professed music geeks. My co-workers in editorial taught me a com-
pletely new approach to writing (and critiquing writing) about music,
and have permanently changed my approach to writing and teaching for
the better. They include Julee Stover, Vanessa Atkins, and Steven Chean.
Among other Rhinos (and friends) who helped this project in its devel-
opment are Rick Brodey, Dee Murphy, Bob Carlton, and Thane Tierney.
Thane in particular has been utterly selfless, spending hours discussing
everything from cartoons to folk rock, and made the ultimate commit-
ment by reading this book in manuscript and deftly guiding me through
some tricky issues.
I did not know what to expect when I moved to Tuscaloosa to take a
xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1
2 INTRODUCTION
that not only had I gleaned knowledge of classical music (Rossini, Liszt,
Brahms, von Suppé, and others) from watching cartoons on Saturday
mornings, but I had learned other styles of music as well. I soon realized
I had a working familiarity with songs from no less than a dozen genres
or traditions, among them classical, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood film
musicals, folk songs from America and around the world, Viennese opera,
and nineteenth-century American parlor songs, particularly the work of
Stephen Foster. This project thus began as I tried to satisfy my curiosity
about how much music I had learned from cartoons; it quickly blossomed
into a full-scale investigation of music’s role in animated cartoons, with
a special emphasis on how cartoon music could embody cultural mean-
ings. I decided to focus initially on what is often called the Golden Age
of Hollywood cartoons (those shorts produced by animation studios for
theatrical release from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s), because these
cartoons had given me such a broad and eclectic introduction to music;
I later expanded my scope to include all forms of animation.
Having an interest in cartoon music by no means leads directly to an
actual study of that music. For most of their existence, animated shorts
and animation in general have typically been viewed as devoid of any in-
tellectual import whatsoever. The close relationship between comic strips
and cartoons, and the frequency—observed by the film historian Kristin
Thompson—with which “animated film narratives . . . drew upon fan-
tasy, magic and traditional stories as a motivation for stylization,” en-
couraged film critics in the 1920s and ’30s to see animation as directed
solely at children and led to “a trivialisation of the medium.”1
Cartoons are also typically lumped together as a self-contained genre
because they happen to have been created through the same process: an-
imation. Yet even if we narrow our focus to just the output of the most
prominent animation studios from the 1930s to the 1960s, we find a
WHY CARTOON MUSIC? 3
never seems to exceed the bounds of the author’s discipline. The film
studies–based writings take little account of any actual music, and the
few musicological essays seldom offer more than simple biographies en-
livened by some musical examples. Neither approach considers much
of the history of the animation industry or examines its production
methods.
A telltale sign that cartoon music is seen as a poor relation to film mu-
sic is the application of film music terminology to cartoons. Such dichot-
omies as source/underscore, diegetic/nondiegetic, and iconic/isomorphic
can be very useful in discussions of the music in live-action films. They
all in some way gauge the degree to which music stays within the tradi-
tional bounds of the narrative. That is, the audience usually knows
whether or not the music is coming from within the story or diegesis (thus,
nondiegetic music is perceptible not to the characters on screen but only
to the audience). Occasionally these terms can be helpful for analyzing
particular situations in cartoons, but they fail to take into account that
music is far more integral to the construction of cartoons than of live-
action films because the two forms are created in completely different
ways. I therefore find such terms of limited utility.
Surviving evidence regarding music in films made before synchronized
sound was developed indicates that cartoons received much less atten-
tion than features. Cue sheets and specially created scores—today of great
interest to film music scholars—were created for cartoons only under the
most extraordinary circumstances, and we thus have few substantial clues
about how cartoons might have been accompanied. In his 1920s hand-
book, How to Play the Cinema Organ, George Tootell includes “‘Car-
toon’ comedies, such as those of the famous Felix, though in these more
opportunity is offered for the exercise of the musician’s wit. The organist
is recommended to extemporise accompaniments to cartoon comedies,
which are always short and concise, and offer scope for witty extempo-
risation; it is not too much to say that a skillfully accompanied cartoon
can often be the most popular item in the programme.”4 Tootell focuses
on cartoons as occasions to display wit and perhaps skill, rather than
discussing how music in them might be used to establish mood or define
character. Edith Lang and George West’s accompaniment guide of the
same era offers similar advice, although it devotes an entire chapter to
music for live-action comedies and animated cartoons.5 The connection
between cartoons and comedies is borne out in Erno Rapée’s Encyclo-
pedia of Music for Pictures (1925), which contains lists of appropriate
songs for use in hundreds of situations. The sole entry relating specifi-
WHY CARTOON MUSIC? 5
Clearly some cartoons, like most early feature films, were distributed to
theaters with “special scores.” Though none of these has survived, other
tangible examples of early cartoon music exist: for example, PianOrgan
Film Books of Incidental Music, Extracted from the World Famous
“Berg” and “Cinema” Incidental Series, comprising seven volumes in the
1920s, included five pieces under the heading “Animated Cartoonix.”
In 1926 the Cleveland-based music publisher Sam Fox printed Loose
Leaf Collection of Ring-Hager Novelties for Orchestra. The second of
ten pieces in the collection, “Funny Faces,” bears the subtitle “A Com-
edy Sketch (For Animated Cartoons, Eccentric and Acrobatic Dancing,
Etc.).” These same pieces were included in Sam Fox’s classified catalogue
three years later; a four-volume collection of music from the same com-
pany in 1931 bore the title Incidental Music for News Reels, Cartoons,
Pictorial Reviews, Scenics, Travelogues, etc. and contained works by Ed-
ward Kilenyi, L. E. DeFrancesco, J. S. Zamecnik, Harry Read, and sev-
eral others.8 Cartoons in this period certainly were accompanied by mu-
sic, but the form was not yet taken seriously. Indeed, the perception of
cartoons solely as comedies limited their scores’ potential before it even
had a chance to develop.
Most books and manuals from the 1930s on film music make some
mention of animated cartoons, still grouped with comedies and other
short subjects. Walt Disney’s cartoons are most frequently used to ex-
emplify “good” scores, no doubt in part because the association of the
Disney name with animation had become so ubiquitous. This international
fame explains why, for instance, in Film Music (1936) Kurt London dis-
cusses only Disney’s music in the section “Sound Cartoon Films” before
6 INTRODUCTION
ics that range from the application of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of sound
to Disney cartoons to how the technological limitations of early sound
affected the cartoons’ music in the early 1930s.13
In many ways the responsibilities of cartoon music resemble those
taken on by traditional film scores: establishing the setting, drawing the
audience into the story, providing the viewer with additional informa-
tion about a scene, telling the viewer how to feel at any given moment,
and vitalizing the “lifeless” pictures of the film. This last point is partic-
ularly important for animated drawings, whose figures—unlike those in
live-action films—were never alive to begin with. The medium of anima-
tion requires that music for cartoons be conceived and constructed differ-
ently than traditional feature film music. We can best see these differ-
ences by examining two issues: who helped to establish the paradigmatic
sound of Hollywood cartoons, and how music was used to enhance and
intensify cartoons as a whole.
Tunes for ’Toons thus presents a set of case studies rather than an all-
encompassing history of cartoon music. And my key questions lead me
to focus on two broad ideas: genre and compositional style. I discuss the
methods of Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley, in my opinion the two most
influential composers of music for theatrical cartoons, at the one studio
where each had the most historical significance. For Bradley, that studio
is necessarily MGM; for Stalling, a choice is possible. While some, with
reason, might select Disney, arguing that his work there in 1928 and 1929
defined the entire field for years to come, I concentrate on Warner Bros.,
where he came into his own as a composer and where he wrote close to
one new score every week for more than twenty years.
Carl Stalling’s extraordinary influence on cartoon music as a whole
suggests a host of possible avenues to explore, including his relation to
mickey-mousing; the original music he wrote for each score that succeeds
in mickey-mousing the action with its unexpected and unique melodic
lines and instrumental choices; his collaboration with his arranger (and
eventual successor), Milt Franklyn; and the role played by his experi-
ences with Disney and Iwerks in preparing him for Warner Bros. Here I
take up the most pressing topic, particularly in the eyes of his critics:
Stalling’s employment of popular songs in his scores. I thus examine why
their use was so frequent if not pervasive, how those songs became a mu-
sical language through which Stalling could tell stories, and how his par-
ticular style colors our understanding of the Warner Bros. cartoons.
Scott Bradley, whose approach was diametrically opposed to Stalling’s,
provides the ideal foil. Bradley’s formal training in composition and his
8 INTRODUCTION
Tunes for ’Toons is far from objective or definitive: I have a very specific
and relatively narrow agenda in mind. I focus on Carl Stalling and Scott
Bradley because I believe that they helped establish the public’s notion
of what cartoon scores should sound like. Both men had well-defined
ideas about what they wanted their music to convey, yet this desire for
self-expression constantly pitted them against the Hollywood produc-
tion system. Their chief obstacle was their limited opportunities (if any)
to create a dialogue between the music and the visual components of the
film. Stalling overcame this hurdle by using popular music to comment
on the scores, while Bradley wrote music so specific to the animation that
the cartoons often seemed to become animated ballets. Stalling and
Bradley provide the most compelling case studies for this book, in part
because of their musical influences and opposed approaches to scoring.
My discussion of classical music and jazz also reflects my interest in these
genres, and my particular fondness for cartoons that are scored exclu-
sively within them. Any apparent neglect of other studios—Disney, Lantz,
UPA, and Fleischer, among others—by no means implies that I think them
unworthy of discussion. I know that I am only scratching the surface of
what remains to be investigated, and I hope that the reader will take away
from this book a sense of the endless possibilities for future research. No
matter which cartoons we choose to look at, the significance of the mu-
sic in those cartoons has changed—not only because audiences have
changed but also because animation and our culture more generally have
evolved and been transformed over the past fifty years. The music in the
cartoons still provides meaning, but we must repeatedly rediscover what
that meaning is.
1
Carl Stalling and Popular Music
in the Warner Bros. Cartoons
The name Carl Stalling has appeared on movie and television screens
for more than seventy-five years. His work as a composer for Holly-
wood cartoons was apparently headed for the same fate as practically
all film music: heard but never widely recognized for its creativity and
originality. That changed two decades after his death in 1972, when Greg
Ford and Hal Willner produced The Carl Stalling Project (1990–95),
two CDs of Stalling’s music taken from his time at Warner Bros. (1936
to 1958). The discs sold surprisingly well for a niche release; the first
of the two discs actually appeared briefly on the Billboard album chart.1
As a result, a new interest in cartoon music began to emerge in the early
1990s. Through the CDs, Stalling (see figure 1) suddenly became visi-
ble to animation fans who had never before thought about him or his
work for the cartoons. More important, people began to realize how
much contemporary cartoon music—on television, in theaters, and
online—models itself on the sound of the Warner Bros. cartoons (which
has indeed become the standard in the field), a sound that Stalling de-
veloped and systematized. As a musical director for cartoons produced
by Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, and Warner Bros., Stalling had years to de-
velop and eventually perfect his approach to relating music to what he
saw taking place in each cartoon he scored. It seems sensible to begin
my discussion of Hollywood cartoon scores by looking at the career
and composing style of the one person who had the greatest impact on
the field.
The most characteristic feature of Stalling’s cartoon music is his heavy
reliance on popular songs. As a film accompanist he learned to use songs
to amplify the on-screen story; he carried this approach with him into
10
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 11
the animation world, where he combined short original cues with songs
arranged for whatever instruments the studio could afford. The vast col-
lection of popular songs Warner Bros. owned offered him more musical
options than he would have at any other time in his career. But not every-
one agreed with his style; the Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones once
remarked that “Stalling was good at writing his own music, but he seldom
did.”2 Several of Stalling’s colleagues saw him as a talented composer
who relied too much on the stories evoked by the titles of popular songs
to help him formulate scores for cartoons. Yet it was these songs that en-
abled Stalling to illustrate the on-screen humor on an entirely separate
narrative level from the actual animation, and his strategies eventually
became identified with the Warner Bros. style. This chapter examines how
the two sides of Stalling’s personality as a composer—the humorous side
and the practical side—came together in each score through his use of
popular or precomposed music.
12 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
The year before taking that job in Lexington, Stalling had seen The Great
Train Robbery (1903) and decided he had to be “connected with the
movies in some way.”3 He worked at the Isis Theatre in Kansas City, Mis-
souri, in the mid-1920s, playing afternoons and evenings and conduct-
ing the orchestra from either the piano or the organ. As the orchestra
leader, Stalling chose music to accompany the features; for shorter films,
including newsreels and short comedies, he would improvise at the key-
board.4 If we can judge from the advertisements printed in the Kansas
City Star for the Isis (often referred to in the ads as “Isis the Irresistible”),
Stalling had extensive experience playing for cartoons in the theater. Each
ad highlighted the feature film showing that week in large type, while
smaller letters at the bottom listed other “Added Attractions”; these reg-
ularly included “Carl Stallings [sic] at the Hope Jones organ,” playing
for, among other items, “Felix, Comical Cat,” (Aesop’s) “Fables,” “Our
Gang Comedy,” and even “Alice Comedy”—a reference to the “Alice in
Cartoonland” series created and produced by a young filmmaker from
the Kansas City area, Walt Disney.5
Stalling met and befriended Disney in the early 1920s, when Disney
was producing short animated commercials for the Newman Theatre.
Disney had moved to California in 1923 to produce animated cartoons,
but he stopped in Kansas City in 1928 with finished prints of two Mickey
Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho, which he left with
Stalling to score. (Contrary to popular belief, Stalling did not score Steam-
boat Willie, the first cartoon Disney produced and released with syn-
chronized sound that same year.)6 Stalling proceeded to write the music
for nineteen more cartoons for Disney until early 1930, when he left the
studio at the same time as Ub Iwerks, Disney’s collaborator and primary
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 13
animator in his studio’s early years.7 Stalling worked for a short time at
the Van Beuren animation studio in New York, where, he recalled, they
“didn’t have anything for me to do”; he left the same year to join Iwerks
at his new animation studio in California. He was with Iwerks on and
off for six years, occasionally going back to Disney as an arranger and
a pianist; he played the piano for Practical Pig in Three Little Pigs (Dis-
ney; Gillett, 1933) and arranged the scores for numerous other shorts.8
After Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, another Iwerks alum, recommended Stalling
to the producer Leon Schlesinger, in 1936 Stalling moved to his new job
at Warner Bros.; he worked there until his retirement in 1958.9 Before
he began working for Warner Bros., his experiences as a composer work-
ing in Kansas City had already informed his idiosyncratic method of scor-
ing sound cartoons.
Medleys of old time hits can supply valuable material for the
scoring of comedies.
Erno Rapée, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures ([1925] 1970)
Insight into how Stalling (or any accompanist) might have approached
silent cartoons and live-action comic films in the 1920s is offered by
contemporaneous film music manuals, particularly Edith Lang and
George West’s Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures. In the section
“Animated Cartoons and Slap-Stick Comedy,” Lang and West recom-
mend that
The player should learn to recognize, and be able personally to enjoy, the
fun of the comic situations depicted on screen. Nothing is more calamitous
than to see “Mutt and Jeff” disport themselves in their inimitable antics
and to have a “Brother Gloom” at the organ who gives vent to his peren-
nial grouch in sadly sentimental or funereal strains. . . . If the “point” of
the joke be missed, if the player lag behind with his effect, all will be lost,
and the audience cheated out of its rightful share of joy.10
In this advice, the authors spell out one of the most basic duties of ac-
companists as storytellers: they must not only know where and when
the comedic moments will occur within a picture, they also must cue
the audience to those incidents. Any competent film accompanist would
be expected to know enough to draw the audience’s attention to im-
portant moments in the story. Every film genre requires its own approach;
14 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
for comedy scores, Lang and West rather appropriately suggested a sense
of humor.
Regardless of genre, what musical vocabulary should be used to en-
hance the story of a film? Many collections of music for film accompa-
nying that were published in the 1910s and ’20s worked on a system of
reducing each scene in a film to a one- or two-word description, which
would suggest a variety of musical analogues to accompany the scene.
If the titles of these pieces—such as “Hurry No. 2,” “Indian Dawn,” and
“In the Stirrups”—did not indicate their purpose clearly enough, then
the brief characterizations beneath their titles would reassure any skep-
tical musicians that they had chosen an appropriate piece.
One handbook developed later in the silent era by Erno Rapée worked
on the principle of the signifying possibilities of a single descriptive phrase:
Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists offered accompanists
hundreds of familiar melodies in a volume indexed under headings of mood
or subject matter, including “Wedding,” “Hurry,” and “Fire-fighting.” A
properly trained accompanist, as the media historian Tim Anderson
points out, needed at any given moment to quickly present an appro-
priate musical analogue for the emotion or “adjective” on screen; Rapée’s
volume and others like it made such connections between the drama
and its score almost immediate. But relying on an adjective created new
problems, because the adjective, “like music, refers to no one specific
thing.”11 Such simplified approaches had practical advantages, but they
could also lead to scores consisting of only a few melodies. Lang and
West advised accompanists against falling into the musical rut of using
the same “lively tune that must serve all cartoons, comedies and jokes,
invariably and indiscriminately,” especially because “in the cartoons and
in the comedies all sorts of other emotions, besides that of plain hilar-
ity, may come into play; there may be sorrow, doubt, horror and even
death.”12 A committed theater musician would be familiar with a wide
spectrum of materials providing a wealth of musical options. Any ac-
companist interested in keeping the audience involved would certainly
vary the melodies used throughout the afternoon or evening (not just
in an individual picture), adding constantly to the musical and emotional
range of the show.
While standard accompanying fare for movies included original mu-
sic and arrangements of light classics, contemporary popular songs gave
composers new and interesting tunes to work with. Popular music related
to movies dates back to the late 1910s, when the “title song” was born.
The licensing fees required by the American Society of Composers, Au-
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 15
thors and Publishers prevented most theater musicians from using ASCAP-
represented tunes (that is, until an agreement was finally reached in 1926),
but it was clear that using popular music in films could be highly profitable
for the publishers, the producers of the film, and the songwriters.13 If a
song were tied to a feature, as “Rosemary” was to the film Abie’s Irish
Rose (1928), the accompanist could play the theme song as the movie was
shown, and perhaps the audience could even sing it before the screening
began. Such promotion or plugging would drive up sheet music sales, in-
creasing the song’s popularity and encouraging other people to see the
movie, which in turn would fuel more sheet music sales, and so on.
For the accompanist, using popular songs was a way to become known
as a hip bandleader, as Lang and West note: “This part of the show [i.e.,
comedies] is admirably adapted to the introduction of all sorts of pop-
ular songs and dances. The player should keep in touch with the publi-
cations of popular music houses, since it will repay him to establish a
reputation which will make the public say: ‘Let’s go to the Star Theatre—
you always hear the latest tune there.’”14 With both theaters and ASCAP
blessing the presence of popular songs in film scores, accompanists like
Stalling had few restraints on the music they used. The musical vocabu-
lary as defined by Rapée’s handbook (and by Lang and West, who had
their own lists broken down by category) became far richer once current
songs were added. Such an expansive musical palette enabled accompa-
nists to create entertaining programs week after week. Anderson men-
tions that many composers would “create and play to the specific cul-
tural needs and demands of the audience”;15 Stalling surely would have
done the same.
Let’s suppose, however, that Stalling, for the sake of a truly funny take
on a film, purposely chose music that went against the grain. That is,
what if the idea linking the music and the image led to its own gag, which
itself relied on recognizing the song’s words as inapposite in the context
of that moment of the film? Stalling probably caught on to this practice
early in his career, and it became his trademark as a composer. Such ac-
companists were called “film funners,” and the film historian Charles
Berg describes their “stock in trade”: “a mischievous sense of humor
which exploited practically all films for their comedic potential regard-
less of the film director’s intentions. The film-funner would, for exam-
ple, accompany a dramatic scene where burglars are craftily entering the
heroine’s home with the strains of the romantic love-song, ‘Meet Me in
the Shadows.’” Berg also notes, “While the practice was approved of
because of the title’s or lyric’s relevance and the pleasure the audience
16 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
rights on songs featured in their own films, profiting from the publish-
ing, licensing, and sales of sheet music, performances and recordings, and
radio airplay.23 Schlesinger no doubt understood the money that could
be made by exploiting the studio’s song catalogue in new media forms,
particularly those that, like cartoons, would emphasize the recent ad-
vances in sound. Warner Bros., at essence a producer of feature films,
took an early step toward corporate synergy by integrating two of its
secondary concerns: music publishing and short subjects.24
Practically all the cartoon directors had harsh words about the re-
quirement to use the Warner music catalogue. Friz Freleng recognized
the practical reasoning behind the plan: “We had to put two singing cho-
ruses in every cartoon, the idea being that if people heard something they
liked in the theatres, maybe they’d go out afterward and buy the song
sheets.”25 But the main flaw was obvious, as Bob Clampett pointed out
as he recalled his early days creating Merrie Melodies: “We’d have a great
story going along, but then we’d have to stop and have the singing cho-
rus.”26 Tex Avery was far more blunt in his evaluation of the conse-
quences: “We were forced to use a song, which would just ruin the car-
toon. You’d try like a fool to get funny [during the song], but it was seldom
you did. . . . Finally, when Schlesinger let us get by [without using the
songs], the cartoons started picking up.”27 Perhaps Chuck Jones was the
most succinct: “It was a pain in the ass.”28 Whatever their feelings about
it, the “song per cartoon” rule ensured that the music was the star in the
earliest Warner Bros. shorts, as each short featured an on-screen perfor-
mance of a Warner-owned and -controlled tune.29
As the directors make clear, a song’s appearance almost always meant
a full-scale performance, bringing the story to an abrupt halt—especially
if the song began in the middle of the cartoon. Showcasing the featured
song in a musical number was an interruption that prevented the narra-
tive from building toward a dramatic climax of any sort, as any dramatic
tension that had developed would dissipate immediately. We cannot be
sure exactly how much this mandated approach contributed to the emer-
gent Warner Bros. style, but we can see that several of the directors adapted
their gag writing to accommodate the policy, a shift that in turn affected
how Stalling constructed his scores.
The Warner Bros. cartoon division underwent considerable internal
upheaval in the mid-1930s. Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, the two men
who first brought animation to Warner Bros., parted ways with Schle-
singer over a contract dispute in 1933, only to begin producing cartoons
for MGM the following year. Most of Harman and Ising’s creative staff
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 19
never waited until the picture was done. Often he’d compose right from
my bar sheets, writing music to the action I indicated. And later he might
say, “Hey, could you make this bang (or whatever sound effect it was)
come out on the beat?” And if it worked better musically that way, I’d
change it. . . . I did everything in phrases of fours and twos, so Carl could
follow it. If a character walked, I’d put down the steps, evenly, and he
would write the music to those steps. I’d never leave him in the middle
of a beat or the middle of a phrase. If I had a cat run across the room, I’d
figure out how many steps that cat was going to use; I then set it up so that
if the cat paused or some sound effect was needed, it happened on the beat.
I didn’t write any of the music, but I did write the phrases and the rhythm
for Carl.
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 21
story, its setting, and, most important, the gags involved, he could de-
cide what songs might mesh well with the narrative. Not everyone at the
studio approved of such a scoring style, however; several of the direc-
tors criticized Stalling’s repeated use of certain songs for particular kinds
of scenes. They also expressed concern that he depended heavily on pop-
ular songs rather than writing original music, choosing the tunes in what
they saw as an uncreative and even clumsy attempt to make a connec-
tion between song and gag, and perhaps to engender some humor by jux-
taposing the visuals and inappropriate music and thus create an entirely
new gag (in the true “film-funner” fashion). Chuck Jones reminisced
about Stalling:
He was a brilliant musician. But the quickest way for him to write a musi-
cal score—and he did one six-minute score a week—was to simply look
up some music that had the proper name. If there was a lady dressed in red,
he’d always play “The Lady in Red.” If somebody went into a cave, he’d
play “Fingal’s Cave.” If we were doing anything about eating, he’d do “A
Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You.” I had a bee one time, and my God if
he didn’t go and find a piece of music written in 1906 or something called
“I’m a Busy Little Bumble Bee.”39
song’s lyrics, but simply the minimal information supplied by the song’s
title. Not surprisingly, this system of musical allusions places a certain
premium on well-known songs. After all, if the song is unfamiliar to the
audience, then they will fail to grasp the specific way in which the song’s
title relates to the scene it accompanies.”44 This means of communicat-
ing with the audience through the music suited both Stalling’s use of rel-
atively short cues and the studio’s preference for quick gags. The viewer
has to recognize the music as something not original, and possibly re-
lated to the narrative on more than just a “meta” level; if he or she doesn’t
know the song at all, then the music simply illustrates the scene.
That Stalling composed cartoon music allowed him a great deal of cre-
ative freedom. One- or two-reel films, including cartoons, comedies, news-
reels, and short musicals, were less prestigious than full-length features,
in part because their brevity led to smaller production budgets. Because
of their relatively low status, such films could freely play with the con-
ventions of feature films; after all, shorts “were not necessarily governed
by the same aesthetic roles and conventions” as features.45 Tim Ander-
son points out that early film accompanists always had a choice between
sticking with a film’s “master narrative” and offering “narrative inter-
ruptions, disorder, and sidetracks that exhaustively investigate, discover,
and create new meanings and spectacles.”46 That is, the real allure of ac-
companying was the film composer’s freedom to tell a story. Stalling’s
willingness to push against the boundaries of comprehensible humor
in his scores makes sense in this light. The Warner Bros. cartoons did all
they could to stretch generic story lines (as exemplified by Disney) until
all was topsy-turvy. Because Stalling had no particular reason to uphold
a story’s master narrative, he could create new meanings for the songs
without worrying that they would detract from the cartoons.
In the notes to the first volume of The Carl Stalling Project, Will Fried-
wald remarks that audiences detect the musical puns Stalling sets up, even
if the melodies have been reduced to a handful of notes, because they rely
“on the collective unconscious which, after having followed enough of
Bugs Bunny’s episodic adventures, unknowingly makes the connection
between the few bars of the motif Stalling sneaks by and the idea put
across on screen.”47 Stalling may have relied heavily on favorite melodies,
and he definitely used distinctive timbres for special scenes, but his mu-
sic never stole attention from the visual action or the dialogue unless the
story called for it. In the 1930s and 1940s, theater audiences (except at
kiddie matinees) saw only one new Warner Bros. cartoon per week, and
so few people would have noticed any continuity between the songs
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 25
Stalling cited and their corresponding gags. It thus seems unlikely that a
“collective unconscious” played a significant role.
The most serious obstacle to appreciating Stalling’s references is sim-
ply the passage of time. The cultural language he relied on has changed
over the past sixty years, and melodies recognizable to some in the 1940s
have been forgotten today. The availability of cartoons on home video
and on the Cartoon Network enables children and adults alike to see a
(limited) selection of Warner Bros. cartoons over and over again. Yet the
repeated hearings of Stalling’s stock melodies mean nothing if their his-
torical significance has faded. I cannot help wondering if Stalling em-
ployed such songs to create yet another level of humor in the cartoons,
to be understood and appreciated by the connoisseur of obscure music;
as Smith says, such scores provide, for those who know the music, “a
secondary frisson of pleasure in our recognition of its unexpected apt-
ness to the scene it accompanies.”48 Stalling’s frequent use of the song
“A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You” would have had a humorous
edge for those who recognized it. A secondary gag from the same song
would surface when it appeared in contexts in which one character was
trying to eat another (as in Along Came Daffy; Freleng, 1947): the title’s
implied “eating with you” becomes “eating you.” If Stalling did make
these musical gags for his own amusement, his attitude was remarkably
similar to that of the Warner Bros. directors, many of whom claimed to
have written their cartoons to please themselves. Chuck Jones, for in-
stance, declared in 1988: “We never made films for adults, and we never
made films for children. We made pictures for what I suppose you could
call a minority. We made pictures for ourselves, and we were lucky be-
cause the producers never knew exactly what we were doing.”49
The film critic John Tebbel raises yet another concern about Stalling’s
style: not that the musical pun could not be understood at all, but rather
that people would misunderstand it. He argues, “A skewed link between
the visual and the music can be a problem. In Fast and Furryous (’49),
the first Road Runner and Coyote, the demon bird uses a free-way
cloverleaf—a potent, fresh image of the time—to elude his pursuer. Stall-
ing fields the chestnut ‘I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.’ While ac-
curately paraphrasing the camera angle, the music’s boisterous optimism
contradicts the emotional content—bewilderment—of the scene.”50
Tebbel’s interest in issues of postwar industrialism that appear in Fast
and Furryous dominates his analysis of the scene. He takes quite seri-
ously the content of the song, which works not as a comment on the
scene’s “emotional content” but rather as a quick gag about the high-
26 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
way cloverleaf. The setup to the gag confirms this: the Coyote has donned
a pair of “Fleet Foot Jet Propelled Tennis Shoes” in order to chase the
Road Runner at his own pace. Since both can now move with preter-
natural speed, Jones naturally takes the two onto the highway—an es-
pecially appropriate choice in the late 1940s, when interstate highways
began to pop up around the country to the delight of those who rel-
ished a fast drive—where the Coyote can give chase at full speed. Stalling
uses a minor theme in Smetana’s “Dance of the Comedians” from The
Bartered Bride for the freeway chase, a theme he used repeatedly to ac-
company the hyperspeed of the Road Runner. Jones shows the chase
from a near side perspective for two seconds before switching to a far-
off side view and then to an even more distant overhead shot, reducing
the two animals to dots on the road (see figure 2). When they reach the
freeway, the two animals are mere spots moving seemingly at random
on a three-leaf cloverleaf.
This gag again illustrates the bisociative process that Smith describes.
Two different references are made at once: as the characters race around
the highway cloverleaf (with three loops), the song that refers to the four-
leafed plant is heard. Because Jones’s intended joke focuses on the high-
way, not the music, it loses nothing if no one recognizes Stalling’s refer-
ence. Jones himself uses this joke in the 1952 cartoon Operation: Rabbit.
Here, instead of chasing the Road Runner, the Coyote—“Wile E. Coy-
ote, Genius”—must contend with Bugs Bunny’s wise guy jokes and gags
throughout the picture. At one point, after outsmarting Wile E.’s pres-
sure-cooker-on-the-rabbit-hole plan, Bugs walks away, singing “I’m
looking over a three-leaf clover that I overlooked be-threee . . .” Like the
musical pun in Fast and Furryous, this play on words comes and goes in
a moment; the audience’s ability to grasp it depends on whether they are
paying attention and whether they know the song.
These examples demonstrate that Stalling’s sense of humor often de-
termined what song he might use for a specific visual gag; frequently, he
took advantage of a unique moment in a cartoon’s plot to slip in a song
whose title referred ironically to the narrative. The animator and histo-
rian Milt Gray asked him about this technique:
Gray: Many times, you used the music to tell the story. In “Catch as Cats
Can” (1947), Sylvester the cat swallowed a bar of soap and was hic-
cuping bubbles, and the music was “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”
Did you make up those gags yourself, or did the directors help you
with that?
Stalling: It happened both ways.51
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 27
FIGURE 2 The cloverleaf in Fast and Furryous (Warner Bros.; Jones, 1949).
Creating a gag with its melody was often only one of a song’s uses in the
score. In most of the above examples, Stalling employed the melody for
more than just the five seconds needed to set up and execute a gag. By
choosing the proper meter, tempo, and orchestration, he could make a
song sound like anything from a dirge to a fox-trot, fitting the chosen
tune to the mood of the scene at hand.
For instance, in High Diving Hare (Freleng, 1949), Bugs is a carnival
barker trying to gather an audience to watch the spectacular diving of Fear-
less Freep. Yosemite Sam, a huge Freep fan, enters the carnival tent with
his guns blazing, yelling “Bring on Freep!” At that moment we hear a knock
on the stage door: it’s a telegram from Freep, who has been delayed be-
cause of rain. As Bugs reads the telegram, Stalling uses the chorus to the
Tin Pan Alley song “April Showers,” played on a solo trombone. Rather
than ending the tune there and moving on, Stalling includes most of the
song’s chorus, switching to strings and winds. Even though the initial gag
has passed, the song can still underscore the scene, especially since little
action is occurring: Bugs is merely explaining to the audience that Freep
will not appear. Stalling lets the cue continue because Bugs’s explanation
to the audience is an extension of the initial gag with the telegram. Only
when Sam barges onto the stage in anger does the music change.
Stalling did not always rely exclusively on the contemporary music that
Warner Bros. could provide him. He frequently drew on the music of the
bandleader Raymond Scott, especially for unusual tunes. Scott, who was
born Harry Warnow in 1909, began leading a small jazz ensemble (the
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 29
sic’s rhythm. The same tune can also portray the unstoppable progres-
sion of fate. In Early to Bet (McKimson, 1951), a cat bitten by the gam-
bling bug repeatedly loses at cards to the farm bulldog and must pay the
penalty after each loss. Stalling uses “Powerhouse” while the dog sets up
each of the cat’s elaborate penalties; in this case, the melody’s inexorable
forward motion signals the inescapability of the impending punishment
(usually a beating). Scott’s music enabled Stalling to go beyond the prac-
tice of choosing a song simply for its title. Given the highly descriptive
nature of these tunes—we might even call them musical caricatures—
Stalling did not have to depend on the viewer’s preexisting knowledge.
The tunes could (figuratively) speak for themselves.
the first Warner Bros. cartoon series), The Opry House (Disney; Disney,
1929), and The New Car (Iwerks; Iwerks, 1931). The last two, scored
by Stalling, both use the same melody for their “Jewish” gags: “Khosn,
Kale Mazl Tov” (“Congratulations, Bride and Groom”), a song from the
operetta Blimele, written (in America) by Sigmund Mogulesko and
Joseph Lateiner in 1909. The song thus came into the hands of popular
(and Yiddish) performers in the midst of vaudeville’s heyday, a circum-
stance that may help explain its popularity; moreover, Yiddish popular
music was then a thriving business. The klezmer scholar Henry Sapoznik
has shown that “Khosn, Kale Mazl Tov” was a huge hit among the Jew-
ish and gentile communities alike in New York, and before long it was
known “as ‘the’ clearly identified Jewish tune.”59
The song’s easily recognizable melody (see music example 3) even
showed up in semi-secular songs—as Sapoznik points out, Eddie Can-
tor’s 1920 vocal version of an Original Dixieland Jazz Band hit, “(Lena
Is the Queen of ) Palesteena,” featured “a four-bar paraphrase of
Mogulesko’s ‘Khosn, Kale Mazl Tov’ plopped into the middle of the
arrangement” as a “Jewish mile-marker”; a reference to it also ap-
pears in the 1942 song “The Sheik of Araby” by Spike Jones and His
City Slickers. The cartoons Laundry Blues, scored by Eugene Ro-
demich, and Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, which has no composer credit,
use “Khosn, Kale Mazl Tov” as well. The cue sheet for Betty Boop’s
Big Boss lists the song as “‘Mazel Tov’—Traditional Jewish Melody”
and states that the song is in the public domain. The song’s popular-
ity and strong association with the Jewish community probably led
the cartoon’s composer to believe that it was simply a traditional Jew-
ish tune with no known provenance; as Sapoznik puts it, “‘Khosn, Kale
Mazl Tov’ soon became one of several token Jewish tunes, and its au-
thorship was quickly forgotten.” 60 Perhaps the long-standing percep-
tion of Jews as an ethnic and not a religious group allowed them to
be categorized by their strange and unusual music, much like peoples
with roots in Africa, Asia, or any other ethnic background fertile for
stereotyping.61
Race and gender also received special attention. A fairly limited num-
ber of songs served as the musical indicators of scenes or cartoons deal-
ing with gender, mainly because comparatively few cartoons took on this
issue. Throughout the Warner Bros. cartoons, the de facto gender is male,
so any character resembling a female (in drag or in reality) receives spe-
cial musical indication. “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” “It Had to Be You,”
or “The Lady in Red” all help identify a typically brief encounter with
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 33
such a character; it is also possible that with such tunes—unlike his use
of “An Angel in Disguise,” a song employed in two different cartoons in
which characters dress up to resemble angels—Stalling might have been
trying to create irony in cross-dressing sequences.
Music for stereotypical black characters was usually drawn from jazz
tunes, or at least arranged in a jazz idiom. Such music reinforced the no-
tions of primitivism and hedonism that some then associated with the
African American population. Songs such as “Sweet Georgia Brown,”
“Swing for Sale,” and “Nagasaki” appear often, performed by on-screen
jazz bands or underscoring a walk-on by an urban black character. For
a depiction of the Old South, plantation songs by Stephen Foster (“Old
Folks at Home,” “De Camptown Races,” and even “Massa’s in de Cold,
Cold Ground”) or Daniel Decatur Emmett’s “Dixie” or Henry Clay
Work’s “Jubilo (Kingdom Coming)” would suffice. Like other cartoon
stereotyping, the imagery that accompanied these songs gives them the
visual impact—and offensive overtones—that makes them especially
memorable. (We’ll return to race in cartoons in chapter 3.)
Foreign nationalities were also identified with specific pop songs. Par-
ticularly during World War II, America’s foreign friends and foes alike
had to be identified quickly by music in the numerous cartoons that dealt
with wartime topics. German and Japanese characters were subjected to
complete and utter humiliation as often as possible in Warner Bros. car-
toons (and those of all other studios, for that matter). In scoring Japanese
soldiers or any aspect of Oriental culture, Stalling most often used stereo-
typical pentatonic melodies, and occasionally songs such as “Nagasaki”
and “Chinatown, My Chinatown.”62 In The Fifth-Column Mouse, a cap-
tive mouse brokers a deal with the resident house cat: the mouse’s ro-
dent brethren will wait on the cat hand and foot in return for his not eat-
ing them. As the cat explains this idea to the mouse, his speech becomes
unintelligible; we hear only a series of hard consonants meant to evoke
German. Immediately thereafter, the cat momentarily grows large buck-
teeth and speaks in Japanese-sounding pidgin English (see figure 4). Dur-
ing the brief German interlude, the bass instruments play a menacing cho-
rus of “Ach du lieber Augustin,” and Stalling scores the allusion to a
34 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
theme song for the Merrie Melodies series, beginning with the cartoon
Boulevardier from the Bronx (Freleng, 1936).
His first score for Warner Bros., Porky’s Poultry Plant (which was
Frank Tashlin’s first director credit at Warner’s as well), shows that
Stalling adjusted quickly to having a large instrumental ensemble at his
disposal.65 He did not take advantage of the music his new position af-
forded him, however, as he used nothing from the Warner Bros. music
catalogue. The score uses winds, brass, and strings; the instrumentation
is particularly noticeable at the cartoon’s climax, when Porky battles a
group of buzzards for a hapless chick that the scavenging birds have stolen
from Porky’s chicken farm. Stalling uses a Zamecnik cue, “Furioso #2,”
to underscore an air-battle sequence clearly inspired by World War I
dogfights.
By 1938 Stalling had full command of the music available to him
through Warner’s publishing concerns; for instance, The Isle of Pingo-
Pongo (Avery, 1938) contains thirty-nine individual cues, which break
down as follows:
Harms-Witmark-Remick song 18 cues
Public domain piece 10 cues
Original Stalling underscore 8 cues
Ad lib drumming 3 cues
From that time until his retirement, Stalling seldom wrote a score that
totaled fewer than twelve cues of original and published music. Judging
from the extant materials, Stalling apparently constructed a rough cue
sheet for each score, listing the song’s title and composer(s) and indicat-
ing whether the song was in the public domain; original cues would be
labeled “Original A,” “Original B,” and so on. When the cue sheet was
typed up, Stalling would add names for the original cues (usually indic-
ative of the screen action), and he or someone else would look up and
record the publishers of the other songs.66
Chuck Jones’s cartoons for Warner Bros. often were inspired directly
by music, whether Tin Pan Alley (One Froggy Evening, 1955), classical
music (Baton Bunny, 1959), or opera (What’s Opera, Doc?, 1957). One
of Jones’s trademarks as a storyteller is his fondness for pantomime, which
can be traced back to his first days as an animator in the mid-1930s and
which invites a highly interactive musical score. Admittedly influenced by
Disney’s character-driven shorts of the 1930s, Jones began directing car-
36 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
toons for Warner Bros. with Sniffles, a super-cute mouse in the Disney style.
Jones emphasized facial expressions and physical reactions as much as (if
not more than) the dialogue. As he developed as a director, Jones became
in effect a physiognomist, telling entire stories through the character’s fea-
tures and body language and eschewing dialogue. Years later, Jones de-
scribed his method: “In principle, we usually tried to tell our stories through
action rather than words. My first films as director were too wordy, but
I learned not to use dialogue when actions would suffice.” 67
Many of Jones’s shorts emphasize the story visually, drawing attention
to facial expressions and reaction shots in place of dialogue. In cartoons
that tend toward the pantomimic, the music can play an even more promi-
nent role in telling a story. Stalling’s music informs the audience about
the action at hand, providing a functional replacement for the dialogue.
The 1952 cartoon Mouse Warming perfectly exemplifies this technique.
A boy and girl mouse, living in the same human house, try to get to know
each other while simultaneously attempting to avoid Claude, the house
cat.68 The cartoon’s opening sequence—in which the girl mouse and her
parents move into their new home (see figure 5)—tells the story through
the cues alone. The music cue sheet for Mouse Warming is given in table
1 (with my description of the screen action in the far right column). We
can see that Stalling scores roughly the first minute of the cartoon mainly
with songs whose titles describe the action. Since the cartoon has no di-
alogue, Stalling could freely tell the story however he liked through his
musical choices, though the audience may or may not catch the allusions.
His choice of songs sets up the love story; but once the cat interferes,
Stalling can no longer rely just on song titles. He returns to “L’Amour
Toujours L’Amour” as a love theme later in the cartoon as the two mice
finally have their date (the boy mouse having disposed of the cat, with
the help of the household dog).
Jones eventually solidified his preference for pantomime with the Coy-
ote and Road Runner. This series, which began in 1949, came closer than
any other Warner Bros. cartoons to delivering a recurring story line based
solely on a chase, like that displayed in the Tom and Jerry series at MGM.
Jones alone directed it until 1962. His chases were not only consistent,
they were practically done by the numbers. The resemblances in Jones’s
cartoons go far beyond the recurring characters and the absence of dia-
logue. He proclaimed that “all comedians obey rules consistent with their
own view of comedy.” Thus, he developed strict rules to establish the
boundaries in the Road Runner series: no dialogue (they are only animals,
after all); all action must take place in the desert (the natural environ-
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 37
ment of the animals in question); gravity is always the coyote’s worst en-
emy; and “the road runner must stay on the road—otherwise, logically,
he would not be called road runner.”69
The series consists mainly of “blackout” gags: that is, jokes that have
a fast set-up and punch line, followed by a quick blackout on screen be-
fore the next gag begins. For the Coyote, this means that each successive
ploy or contraption he devises inevitably disappoints him. Only rarely
will anything from early in the story come back to haunt the Coyote,
though such returns, when they occur—for example, a trap that the Coy-
ote sets up in an early gag is not used then but later backfires on him—
38 STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS.
Time
Selection Composer (min.sec) Action
note: The original cue sheet contained another column, “How Used”; all these selections are used
as background instrumental cues.
Time
Selection Composer (min.sec) Action
Time
Selection Composer (min.sec) Action
note: The original cue sheet contained another column, “How Used”; all these selections are used
as background instrumental cues.
(see figure 8). Stalling matches our surprise with a striptease version of
“Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” completely changing the tone of the previous
scene. Here again we see the advantage of Stalling’s cue-by-cue style,
which enables him to easily follow the unexpected plot twists and gags
in the cartoon narrative.
STALLING AND POPULAR MUSIC AT WARNER BROS. 43
Before interest in Carl Stalling’s music surged in the late 1980s, most of
the critical writing on music and cartoons focused on one composer: Scott
Bradley.1 The authors tended to revere Bradley’s composing style, par-
ticularly his preference for writing original music, and thus implicitly
praised his disdain for using popular music. Today, Bradley’s name has
joined those of long-forgotten film composers, while Carl Stalling has
become the cartoon composer to be lauded and imitated.
Yet Bradley had held his position of prominence in the industry for
decades. During his almost twenty-five years of composing cartoons for
MGM (1934–57), Bradley not only made a name for himself as a com-
poser but also developed a unique composing style that became highly
influential in his own time and afterward. Though the stories of the
MGM cartoons are often quite generic, they have a unique signature:
violent action sequences combined with Bradley’s illustrative approach
to scoring. The penchant for extreme cartoon violence appears to have
originated at the MGM studio during a time that America was involved
in an unprecedented global conflict. As a result, Bradley developed a tech-
nique for musically describing and rendering violent physical action.
Each formulaic story began to echo the last, but Bradley further adapted
his style to complement the narrative and to hold the audience’s atten-
tion while not resorting to music that somehow caricatured the action.
In considering Bradley’s music, we must examine how it confirmed or
contradicted the audience’s notions of the cartoon world. What did it
contribute to the overall experience of watching a cartoon? Was Bradley
able to warn us, through the music, of an impending collision before it
happened?
44
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 45
BRADLEY’S BACKGROUND
Bradley recalled in an interview that he started his professional life as a
musician working as a composer and conductor in a Houston theater,
and then moved to Los Angeles in 1926 and “went into radio.”2 He be-
gan making a name for himself on the concert scene in Los Angeles in
the early 1930s. His extant concert works from this period include “The
Valley of the White Poppies” (1931); “The Headless Horseman” (1932),
an “episode” for orchestra based on Washington Irving’s “The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow”; and “Thanatopsis,” a cantata for soloists, chorus,
and orchestra. Bradley conducted the Los Angeles Oratorio Society in
the premiere of “Thanatopsis” at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los
Angeles on 17 March 1934.3 The critic for Pacific Coast Musician com-
pared “Thanatopsis” to Honegger’s “King David” (the other work on
the program) and wrote that it “is conservative enough to those who value
musical beauty and comprehensibleness above a surfeit of dissonances,
contrapuntal extravagances and effects.”4 In naming what Bradley ap-
peared to be avoiding, this review makes a strangely accurate prediction
of what his cartoon scores would become—highly dissonant, contrapun-
tally labyrinthine, and rife with special effects.
Fifteen years later, when the musicologist and composer Ingolf Dahl
interviewed Bradley at MGM, Bradley devised an autobiographical
“memo” for him:
METRO GOLDWYN MAYER. INTER-OFFICE COMMUNICATION.
TO: Dahl SUBJECT: Dis-a and dat-a FROM: Bradley. Born. . Russelville,
Arkansas (but not an “Arkie” I hasten to add). . Studied piano, private
instruction. . organ and harmony with the English organist Horton
Corbett. . Otherwise entirely self taught in composition and orchestration. .
fed large doses of Bach, which I absorbed and asked for more. Conductor
at KHJ and KNX in the early thirties. . entered the non-sacred realm of
pictures in 1932 and started cartoon composing in 1934 with Harmon-
Ising Co. [sic] Joined in 1937 . . . have so far been able to hide from them
the fact that I’m not much of a composer. Personal: dislike bridge, slacks
and mannish dress on women, all chromatic and diatonic scales, whether
written by Beethoven or Bradley. Also, crowds and most people (and
especially biographers). Favorite composers: Brahms, Stravinsky, Hin-
demith, Bartok. This will be boring to most everyone, so cut it as short
as you wish. Signed: Scott5
Though Bradley told Dahl that his first experience in animation oc-
curred in 1934, very early cue sheets (in the ASCAP cue sheet files) place
46 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
the music seriously, he could make the cartoons more enjoyable and give
the viewer a greater appreciation for their artistry. He told an interviewer
early in his tenure at MGM, “I set about to work out musical scores that
would add significance to the picture, that would be musically sound and
would be entertaining. How well we have succeeded is for the public to
say.”14 Unfortunately, success in these efforts required that he overcome
two widely accepted beliefs: that cartoons could only be funny, never se-
rious, and that film music should be experienced and not “heard.”
Bradley often took the opportunity to predict what the future of car-
toon music would be or, more accurately, should be. He declared in 1937
that “his ideal for cartoons is the complete discarding of dialogue and
the use of the orchestra as a means by which the desired sound effects
are arrived at.”15 Over the next dozen years, Bradley continued to put
forward his idealized concept of the cartoon in which the story and mu-
sic would have equal narrative significance—an animated form of Wag-
ner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, or complete artwork. His first known descrip-
tion of this ideal form appeared in a 1941 essay, “Cartoon Music of the
Future” (reprinted in appendix 2). Its requirements included
In Film Music Notes three years later, Bradley expressed the hope that
future animation would “be adapted to pre-composed music. We have
only to imagine a Debussy composing ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ as the
basis of such a picture, to visualize the importance of music in cartoons.”17
Optimistic as he seemed, Bradley knew he faced an uphill battle. In
the traditional methods for producing animated cartoons, the underscor-
ing music was created only after the story, if not most of the animation,
was completed. (Exceptions to this rule included Disney’s Silly Sym-
phonies and the Fleischers’ Song Car-Tunes, which were prescored with
a song around which the directors crafted the animation.) And Bradley
was likely alone in his desire to record his scores without relying on a
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 49
click track (which provides a beat for the musicians and conductor to
follow) or other synchronizing device used by the film industry that en-
abled the sound editor to record the music in sections and then seam-
lessly assemble the entire score, along with added sound effects and any
dialogue, into a complete soundtrack.
Bradley had more leeway in pursuing his goal of writing original mu-
sic with “a new type of orchestral tone color.” As his own music became
more experimental and adventurous, Bradley began to see cartoons as a
site for more unorthodox approaches to orchestration. He also seemed
less intent on changing the entire animation industry—just his corner of
it: “If I have anything to say about it, cartoon music of 1946 will be pro-
gressively modern . . . orchestration in enlarged chamber music style . . .
with a total elimination of the Spring Song sort of cliche. . . . Cartoons
are ‘made to order’ for modern music and may well prove to be an im-
portant proving ground for this kind of scoring, thus becoming a leader
instead of the red-headed step-child of motion picture music.” 18 In a 1948
Sight and Sound article on cartoon music in which he was liberally quoted,
he continued to express his hopes that others would follow his lead: “Only
cartoons give the picture composer a chance to hear a composition of 6
to 7 minutes’ length almost without interruption. . . . I wish that our con-
temporary masters would take interest in cartoon work. For men like Cop-
land, Bernstein, Britten, Walton, Kodaly, Shostakovich or Prokofieff it
would be a very fruitful experience. Their contributions would certainly
advance the cartoon as a genre.”19 The interest of such a “master” would
justify and validate Bradley’s own years of toil. Perhaps the contributions
of a big-name composer would raise the public’s consciousness of car-
toon music even if his own attempts failed. Although he achieved few of
his stated goals in his cartoon scores of the 1940s and 1950s, he could
still derive considerable satisfaction from writing music for the stories he
received that was as evocative and interesting as possible.
In his attempts to legitimize cartoon music, Bradley made himself
known as an innovative film composer in the Hollywood film commu-
nity. He took lessons with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (probably in
orchestration and counterpoint, techniques for which the Jewish émigré
from Italy was well known), who worked on staff at MGM in the 1940s
and taught a host of other aspiring composers, including Nelson Riddle,
André Previn, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams.20 According to the
bassoonist Anthony Christlieb, a fifty-year veteran of Hollywood film
orchestras, Bradley was also an avid concertgoer. He liked to attend con-
certs of “music of every sort. He was a regular member of the audience
50 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
at the Monday Evening Concerts, which was unusual for film composers
except David Raksin and Hugo Friedhofer.”21 The Monday concerts,
known also as the “Evenings on the Roof” series, featured the music of
contemporary composers; they thus provided a perfect forum for some-
one like Bradley, who was keen on staying informed of all the latest mu-
sical innovations.
Bradley also began writing cartoon-inspired suites for concertgoing
audiences. Several of these works, including a suite on his music for the
Happy Harmonies short Dance of the Weed (Ising, 1941), were based
directly on scores he wrote for MGM. Bradley’s Cartoonia suite (1938)
seems to have been inspired by the prevalent themes and motifs he en-
countered as a cartoon composer rather than by a specific cartoon. This
piece received a fair amount of public attention, particularly in South-
ern California,22 and was performed on numerous occasions by major
orchestras in San Francisco, Houston, and Los Angeles. No less eminent
a musician than the original conductor for Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
and Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, Pierre Monteux, conducted the premiere;
another sixty performances took place throughout Southern California,
“as part of the Los Angeles High School Music Education Program.”23
But as the years went by, Bradley’s concert output dried up almost en-
tirely as he focused on his work at MGM.
conflict—that had succeeded for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, while still
retaining the dialogue-free settings inspired by slapstick and vaudeville
comedy. In contrast, the cartoons of the Warner Bros. directors delighted
in humorous and witty dialogue for practically every recurring character
(except the Road Runner and Hippity-Hopper, the giant “mouse”). Carl
Stalling’s music thus worked as part of the Warner Bros. cartoons’ tra-
ditional mise-en-scène structure of dialogue, images, sound effects, and
music, while Bradley’s music enjoyed a more privileged position, gener-
ally sharing the stage with only the animation and sound effects.
The division of sonic space into dialogue, sound effects, and music (in
descending order of importance) is a structure endemic to Hollywood
filmmaking. No composer could escape the influence that sound effects
had on the cartoon score. In fact, in describing the “cartoon music of
the future,” Bradley does not call for the elimination of sound effects.
Perhaps he realized that they were ubiquitous not just because of popu-
lar convention but because they were integral to the cartoon soundtrack.
Bradley seems to have incorporated as many sound effects as possible
into his scores and thereby controlled, at least occasionally, the balance
between two of the three elements of the soundtrack. Such musically
based sound effects frequently made unnecessary the common device of
a separate nonmusical sound effect to double or supplement the action
in question.
Like most other cartoon composers, Bradley initially (from 1934 until
the early 1940s) had no say in a cartoon’s plot development unless the
cartoon dealt with a musical subject or featured a musical performance
as a key story element. Bradley had little input into the cartoon’s narra-
tive, nor into its timing, pacing, or other aspects that related to the mu-
sic. Ingolf Dahl captured Bradley’s predicament: “The cartoon, being a
very extrovert and direct form of entertainment, needs the reassuring di-
rectness of symmetrically constructed music. But how to supply this when
the direction has crystallized the form of the film entirely outside of mu-
sical considerations?”24 Such a production process, though typical of
practically all Hollywood films, put composers at a disadvantage by se-
verely limiting their involvement with the larger project, but Bradley made
the best of the situation. Once the visual narrative was complete, he would
create a score that danced around the visuals, accentuating the action,
adding to the mood, and enhancing the story in any way he pleased, for
the directors, Harman and Ising, seldom interfered. Bradley could fill in
the blanks in the narrative with the score, interweaving the music as
closely as possible with the action without having to heed predetermined
52 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
notions of rhythm and pacing. His efforts to match the pacing and quick
changes in the action help explain why his scores are often melodically
less flowing and more angular than those of others.
When Hanna and Barbera began directing, the scoring procedure
changed, though they were no more likely to interfere than Harman and
Ising had been. Joe Barbera’s chief task in any Tom and Jerry cartoon
was to determine the timing for all the gags, which he would write down
on detail or “bar” sheets. This blueprint of the cartoon not only had space
for notes on the action, sound effects, and any possible dialogue but also
included two music staves per page for scoring the scene. Once all the
other pertinent information had been notated, Bradley would receive the
bar sheet and use it as his guide as he began to compose. He thus worked
on each score earlier in the production process than with Harman and
Ising, and from the early 1940s onward his music became more closely
fused with the genesis of each cartoon.
As we have seen, Carl Stalling’s style, particularly in his scores dur-
ing his first decade at Warner Bros., tended to favor active scenes with
active music. Stalling would underscore sequences that unfolded at a
moderate pace with a chorus from a pop song, not seeking to explicitly
synchronize the music to the action at hand. Bradley instead treated mo-
ments when visual action was slow or absent as opportunities for mu-
sical creativity. Recognizing when the story’s pulse began to fade, Brad-
ley would enliven the music, thereby enhancing its prominence in the
soundtrack and maintaining the cartoon’s momentum. These differences
again relate to the studios’ approaches to storywriting. While the (ver-
bal) gag-driven nature of the Warner shorts was well served by Stalling’s
method of shifting constantly from one song to the next, the MGM
cartoons, and especially the Tom and Jerry shorts, were a progression
of reactions. Bradley carefully supported each story’s ever-rising level of
aggression until the cartoon’s action and music simultaneously reached
a violent explosion.
When scoring a chase sequence (for example, the Coyote chasing the
Road Runner), Stalling normally chose a piece that reinforced the pre-
conceived rhythm of the scene. If the chase moved quickly, then the mu-
sic would keep pace, calculated so that the regular beats of the under-
score emphasized the visual and aural synchronicities. Bradley refused
to let the action—particularly in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, every one
of which involved a chase of some sort—shackle his creativity. The ac-
tion did not necessarily dictate the musical pacing or style. Beyond
fulfilling their practical obligation to constantly feed the cartoon’s for-
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 53
best opportunity to write within these parameters came in the Happy Har-
monies short Dance of the Weed (Ising, 1941), for which Bradley
prescored and recorded the music, much like a symphonic poem, before
the cartoon was animated.33 A simple love story, the cartoon portrays a
clumsy male weed (who looks like a teenage rube, with a single tooth and
acne) and a serene young female flower, a ballerina whom the weed finds
dancing gracefully with other flowers. Rejected by all the other plants,
the weed makes for the flower, who at first shies away (see figure 10). But
when an errant gale blows the two into dangerous territory, the weed dig-
nifies himself by protecting them both from a three-headed snapdragon,
and the cartoon ends with the two happily united.
At the Film Music Forum in Los Angeles in 1944, Bradley showed
Dance of the Weed and spoke about it to the gathered audience:
In this instance, the usual procedure was reversed, and the entire music
score was composed and recorded before the story was written. I believe
this is the first attempt to give the composer a break, and is, of course, the
ideal way from our own selfish viewpoint. You will note that the music in
the opening scenes is in the manner of French Impressionism. The ballet
of the flowers is a waltz movement in which the themes of the little weed
and the wild rose are combined. Later the terrible snapdragons (who
menace w. & f.) are represented by bassoons and basses, while strings
and woodwinds play a different theme in the high register. I hope you
will notice that we use neither saxophones nor trumpets in the orchestra.
However, we use three horns and two trombones.34
As Bradley indicates, both the weed and flower have their own themes
(see music example 4). The score progresses much like a ballet, as the
music both characterizes the lovers and compels their movements. The
weed’s theme develops until he sees the flower, at which point her melody
takes over the score. After their encounter with the snapdragon, the two
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 57
EXAMPLE 4 Scott Bradley, themes for the weed and flower from Dance of the Weed.
themes come together briefly; the story ends with the weed’s wistful
melody. We cannot escape the feeling that the entire story is choreo-
graphed to the music rather than reacting to it more spontaneously, a
notion furthered by our (and the weed’s) first sight of the flower, danc-
ing in a balletic fashion.
This precomposed cartoon score is unique, but the music does not jus-
tify Bradley’s feelings that the typical scoring process should be reversed,
mainly because it never establishes a substantial connection with the ac-
tion. The simple love story, taking place among anthropomorphic plants,
is not enough to support a particularly engaging drama or comedy. Still,
in the complete absence of dialogue Bradley’s music is free to tell the story,
and thus he is able to satisfy at least one of his desires. After the car-
toon’s premiere, a reviewer predicted: “As Ravel was commissioned by
Diaghilev to write his Daphnis and Chloe Ballet music, this music, too,
may, with the new attitude on the part of orchestra directors over the
country toward the native born composer, bring a call to Bradley to fur-
nish scores of this highly interesting work for concerts apart from the
picture.”35 Indeed, Dance of the Weed joined the Cartoonia suite as one
of Bradley’s concert pieces based on his cartoon music. Perhaps it was
better suited to be a purely descriptive piece of music than a cartoon ac-
companiment. If Dance shows us anything about Bradley, however, it is
that his dreams were remarkably close to those of Carl Stalling. Both
men endeavored to work on cartoons in which the music took on the
role of storyteller rather than lurking in the background. But while
Stalling convinced Disney of music’s worth and helped create the Silly
Symphonies, Bradley had no such luck with the Happy Harmonies. Yet
the Tom and Jerry series, which with few exceptions (most in the first
five years of its existence) had no dialogue, allowed Bradley free rein in
58 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
We can see that Hanna hoped that audiences could read the cartoons as
outrageous fun, while at the same time admitting that for him and Bar-
bera, the humor came from seeing a character taken (often literally) to
pieces. Tex Avery had a similar view of physical violence. Though not a
60 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
director on the Tom and Jerry series, Avery did work that profoundly af-
fected the notion of violence and extremes in all Hollywood animation.
He too held that something “impossible” could not be perceived as truly
dangerous.
We thought it was funny. I mean, a fellow could get hit in the head and
stand there and have his whole body crack and fall in a pile and his own
hands would get up and scoop it all up and put himself back together
again. We found that you can get a terrific laugh out of someone just
getting demolished—as long as you clean him up and bring him back to
life again. It’s exaggeration to the point where we hope it’s funny. Because
we hope the audience will say, “Well, it could never happen to a guy like
that. All this shit could never fall on a guy.”41
In the 1950s, the critic John Culshaw traced true violence in anima-
tion to the cartoons released during and especially after World War II,
pointing specifically to Tom and Jerry (obviously without foreseeing the
heights to which cartoon violence would rise in the future). A devoted
Disneyophile, Culshaw did not believe that the Disney cartoons (which
he used as a benchmark) were violent, interpreting all the violence prop-
agated by Mickey Mouse himself in the early 1930s as slapstick-style fun-
ning. The only violence that matters for Culshaw is violence done to the
body; and even though in Tom and Jerry cartoons the bodies are those
of animals, he insists on the human basis of the stories. Believing that
violence for its own sake in the Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons had
replaced the charm of the Disney cartoons (which then had to match the
violence of their competitors), Culshaw tries to demonstrate the (d)evo-
lution in our concept of what’s funny. “The nature of the violence is
shown exactly,” he complains, “because now it seems to have an enter-
tainment value; tails are pulled off, legs broken, heads scalped, bodies
mangled.”42 As the quotation from Avery attests, the barbarous extreme
of a take itself became the joke; to keep that joke fresh, the directors had
to surpass the existing limits with each new cartoon.
Jerry typically engages in the most extreme physical violence possi-
ble, using it even when less brutal tactics might produce similar results.
In recognizing that the effects can exist only in the animated world, we
concede (albeit implicitly) their utter impossibility in the real world. This
observation may offer an insight into the cartoon universe: while some
directors retain a modicum of “reality” (usually regarding basic laws of
physics and thermodynamics), Hanna and Barbera—particularly under
Tex Avery’s influence—do not, and they thus see nothing wrong with
constantly going to extremes. The bigger the set-up for a violent act, the
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 61
bigger the laugh. Audiences know that such violence cannot exist in re-
ality, and they laugh because of its outlandishness. But how we should
construe such humor remains an open question. The art critic Dave
Hickey provides one interpretation, recalling how he and his childhood
companions perceived the impotent violence portrayed in cartoons:
What we did not grasp was just exactly why the blazing spectacle of lawn-
mowered cats, exploding puppies, talking ducks, and plummeting coyotes
was so important to us. Today, it’s clear to me that I grew up in a genera-
tion of children whose first experience of adult responsibility involved the
care of animals—dogs, cats, horses, parakeets—all of whom, we soon
learned, were breathlessly vulnerable, if we didn’t take care. Even if we
did take care, we learned, these creatures, whom we loved, might, in a
moment, decline into inarticulate suffering and die—be gone forever.
And we could do nothing about it. So the spectacle of ebullient, articulate,
indestructible animals—of Donald Duck venting his grievances and Tom
surviving the lawn mower—provided us a way of simultaneously acknowl-
edging and alleviating this anxiety, since all of our laughter was premised
on our new and terrible knowledge that the creatures given into our care
dwelt in the perpetual shadow of silent suffering and extinction.43
For Hickey, then, such violence was attractive not only because watch-
ing animals taking a beating and bouncing right back was fun, but be-
cause it helped him and his friends grapple with their fears and concerns
about their approaching responsibilities as adults. Others may have dif-
ferent explanations, but this is not the place to determine why Tom and
Jerry are so violent or to trace the effects of their actions on their audi-
ence; my point here is that the violence did not begin with them. We can
also see now that Hanna and Barbera fully recognized the violence in
their cartoons; after a while, it became a trademark of the series and even-
tually the studio. Its relation to the music remains uncertain, however.
Clearly, Bradley’s music enhances the action and, by extension, the vio-
lence. But is there something in the music that is redolent of violence?
Does the music enhance or add to the violence? Or perhaps Bradley’s
zany sounds are there to remind Hickey, his friends, and all of us that
what we are watching is, indeed, a cartoon, even as enough “realistic”
sound (including music) punctuates the blows and flayings and explo-
sions to convey a feeling of reality.
It satisfied two of his demands for the perfect cartoon of the future, mak-
ing this series as good as anything Bradley would ever get his hands on.
First, the music would not have to rely on a single rigid tempo, but would
change according to the needs of the cartoon (as the musical director saw
them), a practice Bradley seemed to have perfected early on. Second, Tom
and Jerry did not speak (as Bradley proclaimed, “fantasy is best portrayed
without the irritating presence of speaking voices”). On the downside,
the stories did revel in the kind of slapstick-based physical violence that
Bradley disdained—he had hoped instead for “stories of great beauty and
artistic (not arty) value. Think of ‘Pelleas and Melisande.’”44 When asked
if either Hanna or Barbera ever evinced particular preferences for musi-
cal styles, Bradley replied: “Yes, to a certain extent—Joe [Barbera] espe-
cially liked contemporary music. Bill [Hanna] was the only director in
the studio who knew anything about music. I had no interference from
Bill. As time went on, Bill and Joe let me have the complete say about
what music to write. Tom and Jerry never spoke a word.”45 While he may
have complained about the monotony of chase cartoons, Bradley did not
master his treatment of them until the 1940s. The chase music in the Happy
Harmonies was often agitato orchestral music, without many points in
the music to tie it to the action. Bradley thus developed a new style speci-
fically to heighten the effect of the chases he scored so often.
Two Hanna and Barbera cartoons from the 1940s, Solid Serenade
(1946) and Puttin’ on the Dog (1944), provide an excellent overview of
Bradley’s techniques. The first involves a short chase sequence in the mid-
dle of the story. The cartoon begins with Tom singing to his cute kitty-
cat girlfriend, having tied up the vicious bulldog that lives in the yard.
Playing on a double bass, Tom serenades his girlfriend with “Is You Is or
Is You Ain’t My Baby?” Jerry, sleeping beneath the house, resolves to put
an end to Tom’s caterwauling. After he hits Tom in the face with two
pies, the singing stops, and Tom chases Jerry through the house until Jerry
unties the bulldog, who then begins chasing Tom. Insofar as it includes
both original scoring and popular melodies, here in the form of Tom’s
extensive on-screen vocal performance, this cartoon typifies Bradley’s
experiences with the series.
In his exploration of film sound, the French film theorist and com-
poser Michel Chion offers us a practical tool for understanding a fun-
damental component of Bradley’s scores. Chion uses the term “render-
ing” to describe sounds that “convey the feelings or effects associated
with the situation on screen,” as opposed to those that literally repro-
duce what might actually be heard in the real world. Essential to an evoca-
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 63
FIGURE 11 Out the window, in Solid Serenade (MGM; Hanna and Barbera, 1946).
ble-edged gesture: the slow glissando helps render Tom’s physical skid-
ding to a halt, while the final chord, played by the brass and woodwinds,
alludes to the last time we heard that timbre—when Tom’s performance
of “Is You Is” ended abruptly. This sound reminds us (and Tom) of the
one bit of unfinished business that awaits him just off-screen, and as the
brass and woodwinds suddenly swell on the soundtrack we get a sense
of Killer’s growing anger.
Though MGM had a far smaller musical library than Warner Bros.,
its years as the leading maker of musical films in Hollywood gave it the
rights to popular songs on which Bradley regularly drew, including “Over
the Rainbow,” “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “The Trolley Song,” “On
the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe,” “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,”
and “Manhattan Serenade.” This repertoire was useful for punctuating
the story at appropriate moments with a musical gag; yet, as I mentioned
above, he disliked the practice of citing or incorporating preexisting
melodies. The possible associations that might occur to someone hear-
ing a familiar melody were anathema to Bradley. Because he actively and
intentionally sought to invest his music with its own meaning as it re-
lated to the cartoon, he saw no reason to rely on the musical knowledge
of the audience. And since no one in the 1940s foresaw the syndication
and spread through mass media of Hollywood cartoons during the sec-
ond half of the century, Bradley could not assume that anyone would see
or hear a Tom and Jerry cartoon more than once or twice. The music
had to get its point across on its first hearing.
He therefore devised a compromise: he drew on the comfort and fa-
miliarity of recognizable tunes to signal a moment of importance in the
plot: the appearance of a dramatic set piece, usually a slapstick or gag
routine. When Bradley’s orchestra plays a pop tune in the big band style,
it almost always coincides with some visual comic shtick.54 Tom and
Jerry’s slapstick chases, like those in most cartoons, draw from vaude-
ville routines. The cartoons often shift gears seamlessly; in one moment
the story is moving forward, and in the next Tom is setting up or react-
ing to a gag.55 All aspects of the story and mise-en-scène in cartoons can
potentially come to life in the diegesis; there is no formal transition into
slapstick mode, as the generic expectation of animated cartoons is that
anything can happen. By incorporating a popular melody into his score,
Bradley creates an artificial performance space in the story where the char-
acters can act out their shtick. Rather than distracting us from the visual
narrative, the tune bubbles to the surface within the story’s emotional
trajectory, thereby informing us that a dramatic shift has occurred.
68 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
The twelve-tone scale used in this scene creates a new sound for chase
music, a chase in which something is askew (see music example 5). Bradley
employs a compositional process that is typically highly ordered and or-
ganized to convey a sense of confusion and bewilderment. The disem-
bodied head making its own way across the yard is, by itself, an unset-
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 71
tling image (see figure 14). Bradley repeats the scale immediately—moving
it from the piccolo to the bassoon—for the real dog that is following in
the head’s wake, since this dog also knows that something is amiss. Bradley
denies both the head and the audience the comfort and familiarity of a
melody with an obvious periodicity that fits into a single key. Because it
lacks a tonal center, we don’t know where the phrase begins or ends; it is
an apt musical metaphor for a head that, by all accounts, should be life-
less without its supporting body, yet still walks on its own. Bradley doesn’t
make a fuss over using such an avant-garde scale, a reference that most of
his audience wouldn’t appreciate in any case; for him, it is just another
way to make a cue sound unique as well as effective. Of course, when
Tom playfully tugs and pulls on the bulldog’s head in the mistaken belief
that he has seized hold of Jerry in the mannequin head, he moves us into
another comic routine and Bradley therefore brings back the same tune
he had used earlier, “That Old Feeling.”
The amount of violent action in these cartoons further justified
Bradley’s stylistic choices, as John Winge observed: “For years Bradley
has been using [the Twelve-Tone System] too, as probably the only com-
poser in his field. ‘The Twelve-Tone System,’ he says, ‘provides the “out-
of-this-world” progressions so necessary to under-write the fantastic
and incredible situations which present-day cartoons contain.’ . . . He
has noticed, of course, that post-war cartoons are displaying a partic-
ularly great amount of violent action, super-speed, and cruel, sadistic
72 BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM
dozens of cartoons for Avery but also because the latter’s fame as a di-
rector reached its height at MGM. As Barrier notes,
Bradley and Avery—one of the least cynical of directors—did not get
along. “Tex Avery didn’t like my music,” Bradley said. “We disagreed
a lot on what kind of music was appropriate for his cartoons. His ideas
on music were so bad that I had to put a stop to it. [In every picture
he wanted ‘Home Sweet Home’ and all that corny music.]” . . . Exactly
what happened, or what it meant, is not clear; but Bradley’s music was
never as obtrusive in Avery’s cartoons as it was in many of the Tom
and Jerry cartoons.66
Indeed, the adjective “obtrusive” neatly sums up the conflict between the
two men: Bradley clearly wanted to use the same scoring style he had
provided for the Tom and Jerry shorts, yet Avery’s narratives consisted
largely of sequences of blackout or spot gags—jokes that quickly came
and went, held in place by only the thinnest of story lines. His musical
taste leaned toward shorter cues that could properly highlight each gag,
accentuating one punch line before moving on to the next. No doubt Av-
ery’s five years working with Carl Stalling at Warner Bros. fostered this
musical preference, as Stalling’s quick-cue practice seemed perfectly
matched to Avery’s gag-upon-gag approach. The director’s supposed re-
quest for music like “Home! Sweet Home!” lends credence to the sus-
picion that he had become used to Stalling’s style of using popular tunes
to coordinate the gag with the score.
Bradley’s claim to have “put a stop” to Avery’s musical ideas suggests
that he wrote what he pleased for Avery’s cartoons. Indeed, in 1948 he
boasted, “In a recent cartoon, Out-foxed, I wrote a short four-voiced
fugue on ‘3 [British] Grenadiers’ with the little tune ‘Jonny’s Got a Nickel’
serving merrily as the counter subject. Cartoons usually do without fugue,
but here it fits the action. Musically spoken, you can get away with al-
most anything in pictures if the score only captures the ‘feeling’ of the
sequence.”67 When we look at Avery’s MGM cartoons, we can see that
Bradley had to compromise in order to keep him happy: the composer
did occasionally briefly cite familiar melodies (“Dixie,” “Be My Love,”
“Sweet and Lovely”), but the music in the later Avery cartoons comes
almost entirely from Bradley’s own hand, carefully constructed so as not
to rouse the director’s ire. Bradley clearly enjoyed the thought of getting
away with slipping a fugue into one of Avery’s cartoons. Yet he was well
aware that he could get away with doing what he pleased only so long
as the music fit well into the sequence. And even music that fits is not
necessarily discernible: given the amount of dialogue in many of Avery’s
BRADLEY’S (VIOLENT) MUSIC FOR MGM 75
cartoons, the music has little chance to be heard except when it punctu-
ates visual gags with brief cues or quick stings.68
Avery’s distaste for Bradley’s music not only frustrated the composer,
it also gave him little reason to expand his musical vocabulary on the di-
rector’s behalf. This lack of understanding between the two men seems
particularly tragic because of the nature of Avery’s cartoons. They ex-
ude decadence: Avery always used the most exaggerated and outrageous
solution he could devise, even when a gag might normally call for a sim-
ple reaction. The media critic Norman Klein refers to Avery’s cartoons
as a place where “utter impossibility is defied again and again.”69 Such
fantastic takes might have given Bradley numerous opportunities for ex-
perimentation. Indeed, both Avery and Bradley saw each cartoon as a
chance to break the industry’s conventions for stories and music, estab-
lished by less adventurous animation studios; but while their ideas for
change seemed compatible, their personalities were not. If only they had
possessed similar ideas about music’s role in cartoons, Avery might have
had more complementary music scores for his shorts, and Bradley might
have believed he had found a challenge finally worthy of his abilities.
I can only ask, what music? The t.v. cartoons of today are 95% dialogue,
and the music is rarely heard at all, unless sound effects may be called
music.”73 At the turn of the millennium, little has changed, although a
few composers for television cartoons, such as Alf Clausen (The Simp-
sons) and the late Richard Stone (Animaniacs), have begun to take
Bradley’s techniques more seriously, appropriating his ideas for their own
use. Bradley’s scores, in stark contrast to those of his colleague at Warner
Bros., could be at times intentionally crafty and abstruse and at other
times remarkably simple. The true complexity in Scott Bradley’s music
arose from his care in placing his cues against the rest of the cartoon
soundscape, avoiding the need to resort to “Jerry-mousing” while treat-
ing his music as seriously as any composer could.
3
Jungle Jive
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
By the early 1920s, a new style of music had worked its way north from
New Orleans and begun to infiltrate numerous forms of popular culture
and entertainment, including fiction, art, and classical music. Within only
a few years, jazz permeated the collective musical culture of America,
from recordings and live performances to films focusing on the nature
of jazz itself. Cartoons got caught up in the craze as well, and they be-
came an especially potent site for spreading the sound of jazz nation-
wide. Within two years of the Hollywood sound revolution, cartoons
began appearing with such titles as The Jazz Fool (Disney; Disney, 1929),
Jungle Rhythm (Disney; Disney, 1929), Jazz Mad (Terrytoons, 1931),
Jungle Jazz (Van Beuren; Bailey and Foster, 1930), and Congo Jazz (War-
ner Bros.; Harman and Ising, 1930), each with a different stylistic ap-
proach to the sound of jazz. The review that appears as this chapter’s
epigraph shows how entrepreneurs marketing cartoons attempted to cash
in on the “swinging” qualities of a short to interest potential buyers.
Jazz would have a featured role in hundreds of Hollywood cartoons,
inspiring stories and enlivening performances in shorts from every studio.
As the public’s reception of new trends in the music changed, Hollywood’s
approach to the music and the imagery associated with jazz evolved over
time. Cartoons produced in the beginning of the sound era afford us a
valuable means of understanding how the general public may have viewed
77
78 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
jazz and its practitioners. Likewise, shorts from the 1940s and 1950s show
these same perceptions changing as jazz continued to develop.
These cartoons take great pains to portray the music and those who
played it, yet they cannot move beyond the level of base generalizations,
for “even those cartoons ostensibly celebrating jazz by featuring it on
the soundtrack” resort to the use of stereotypical images and racial con-
ceits. Barry Keith Grant further notes the power of cartoons: “in their
reliance on exaggeration and simplification in both imagery and narra-
tive, cartoons speak a clear, simple language, like the large capital let-
ters on children’s blocks.”1 Such stereotypical depictions may not have
been intentionally malicious, but we must at least consider that possi-
bility in interpreting such virulent expressions of racism. My main in-
terest here, however, is the way in which the music is used to construct
the story or contribute to the cartoon as a whole. Because jazz has such
resonant societal meanings and associations, we cannot separate the mu-
sic from the culture it has come to represent. As jazz and African Amer-
ican cultural forms in general have been simultaneously condemned and
co-opted in America through the years, we should not be surprised that
the figures caricatured in the cartoons discussed in this chapter are just
that— caricatures composed of nothing but stereotypical attributes.
Rather than credit the achievements of these musicians, the cartoons re-
duce even the most brilliant, creative artists to mere racist punch lines.
Thus, while my goal is to examine the different workings of jazz in
cartoon scores, the issue of race and representation—and the deplorably
racist effect of the imagery—will always be present in some way as well.
Although we cannot ignore the visual representations of jazz musi-
cians in these cartoons, we must pay attention to the music, which func-
tions simultaneously as the inspiration for the narrative and as the ex-
plicit source of the rhythm and pacing of each short.2 As we will see, over
time jazz played an increasingly important role in the medium, until it
came to touch practically every Hollywood cartoon score. To understand
why film composers found jazz’s characteristic sound particularly use-
ful, we should begin by examining common attitudes toward jazz as a
musical genre in the 1920s.
Jazz Band—The only way to imitate a jazz band is to hear one of these
unique organizations. There is no way of describing it. Each and every
player must hear these peculiar effects for himself and then imitate them
according to his impression thereof. The general idea is to have one hand
play the tune, while the other hand “jazzes” or syncopates around it, the
pedals performing the drum and bass parts. The ability to lift your audi-
ence’s feet off the floor in sympathetic rhythm is the truest test; that you
will distress the ears of really musical people goes without saying, but you
will not distress their sense of rhythm. This rhythm on your part must be
perfectly maintained, no matter what stunts you may perform with hand
and feet.3
portraying jazz as “the trophy the white hunter brings back from
Africa.”8 My own interpretation is closer to Gabbard’s: the film’s un-
derlying goal is to establish how and why Whiteman deserves the title
“King of Jazz,” and how could that better be accomplished than by im-
plying that he introduced the music to the very people most strongly as-
sociated with it?
While the question of how someone as mainstream and pop-oriented
as Whiteman could claim to be the King of Jazz is fascinating (Russell
Sanjek called Whiteman a “press agent–anointed king”),9 I am more in-
terested here in how the music and imagery used in the opening cartoon
support this claim. Like the remainder of the film, which relies mostly on
mainstream pop tunes, the animated sequence presents jazz as Whiteman’s
group preached it to their audiences: band arrangements of current Tin
Pan Alley hits and jazz melodies.10 Songs used or referred to in the car-
toon’s score include “Music Hath Charms” (Tin Pan Alley), “The Camp-
bells Are Coming” (Scottish folk tune), and a snatch of Rhapsody in Blue,
George Gershwin’s jazz-infused work, which is featured in a later seg-
ment of the film.11 In a quick gag, probably not lost on the audience in
1930, an elephant sprays a monkey with water, angering the tree-dwelling
primate into throwing a coconut that hits Whiteman on the head, effec-
tively “crowning” him as king (see figure 15). The tune to “The Aba Daba
Honeymoon,” another Tin Pan Alley song whose chorus begins “Aba daba
daba daba daba daba daba said the chimpey to the monk,” can be heard
during the monkey’s very brief appearance.
“Music Hath Charms,” first performed in the film during the open-
ing credits (sung by Bing Crosby, then one of Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys),
receives the most attention in the cartoon’s narrative. The animated
Whiteman plays the song for an attacking lion who, instead of mauling
the bandleader, gets caught up in the jazzy rhythm and changes from
savage beast to swinging cat.12 The instruments heard during this scene,
including violin, rhythm guitar, and bass, typify the swinging sound
produced by Whiteman’s orchestra and others popular in the early 1930s.
As jazz, Whiteman’s music did not come close to the hot sound then be-
ing produced by such leaders as Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong. For
most white listeners, however, Whiteman’s music was fresh and even
slightly dangerous in its appropriation of black musical styles. Whiteman
succeeded because his audience perceived him as “taming” jazz’s “sav-
age impulses”; that is, he used just enough of the innovative sounds of
the hot jazz bands to excite his listeners safely.13
Walter Lantz, who directed the animated sequence in King of Jazz,
82 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
FIGURE 15 Paul Whiteman crowned king in production sketches for King of Jazz
(Lantz, 1930). Courtesy of the Institute of the American Musical.
recalled that contrary to usual practice, the score was recorded before
the animation was created.14 During the scoring session he wished to set
up a system to help Whiteman synchronize the music to the animation,
but the musician saw no need for any aid. Whiteman said, according to
Lantz, “‘Let me tell ya, sonny, I can keep a rhythm on anything. . . . So
you tell me how long the picture’s going to be—three minutes, four min-
utes, whatever—and I’ll give you the rhythm you want.’ ‘I said we wanted
four minutes,’ Lantz continues, ‘and I’ll be darned if he didn’t beat this
thing out. It came to four minutes at 2/12 [two beats per second, or one
beat every twelve frames].’ ”15 The music works well for the short se-
quence. Because Lantz had the music recorded in advance, he could
animate the sequence so that the movements of Whiteman’s animated
counterpart and of the animals he encounters in the jungle would be un-
derscored. But the sequence’s musical argument (if any) is that the mu-
sic heard in the jungle usually consists of folk tunes and Tin Pan Alley
songs, in neither case music produced by Africans.
Despite its setting in “darkest Africa” (as the film’s host, Charles
Irwin, describes it), Africans have a remarkably small role in the se-
quence. Natives appear on screen for less than ten seconds, as they dance
to the beat of the music, casting tall shadows on the wall behind them
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 83
(see figure 16). At the end of the musical phrase, however, the figures
strike a frightening pose, jumping on tiptoe, sticking out their tongues,
and bulging out their eyes. Barry Keith Grant notes that we also see
dancing “a black rabbit—‘a jungle bunny’—enjoying the music.”16 The
bunny is actually Oswald the Rabbit, a character owned by Universal
(producer of King of Jazz) that Lantz had begun animating the previous
year, and therefore a logical candidate for a quick cameo in a major fea-
ture film.17 Like Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Warner Bros.’ Bosko, Os-
wald had an appearance and mannerisms modeled on blackface per-
formers from vaudeville and elsewhere. He remained a caricature, for
details rendering the true complexity of African life would have compli-
cated his representation and thus undercut the fiction.18
Like Whiteman’s use of jazz, Lantz’s depiction of Oswald was help-
ing to create new forms of mainstream white entertainment relying on
(white-constructed) codes meant to represent black culture. As is true to-
day, such racial stereotypes and clichés were common then in many forms
of entertainment.19 In his history of black images in cartoons, Henry
Sampson describes the narrative trends in animated shorts’ use of black
characters: cartoons that take place on the stereotypical antebellum plan-
tation or in the jungle and cartoons that depict vaudeville or minstrel
shows all date back to the era before synchronized sound.20 White au-
diences began seeing jazz as nearly synonymous with black culture by
the 1930s, and its influence extends to many of the cartoons that Sampson
examines.
Stereotypes figured not only in the stories and design format of the
cartoons but also in their scores. Particular songs that originated in min-
strel shows or vaudeville routines came to signify black culture. Although
84 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
such famous songs as “Zip Coon” and “Jim Crow” seldom appeared,
others that were almost as well known took their place in sound cartoon
scores.21 The song “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Ben Bernie, Maceo
Pinkard, and Kenneth Casey is an unusual example, as it frequently de-
notes moments in the Warner Bros. cartoons when race and gender in-
tersect. This song was used only twice prior to Carl Stalling’s arrival at
the studio. Its repeated appearance thereafter is thus attributable not just
to its presence in the Warner catalogue (the studio had acquired its orig-
inal publisher, Jerome Remick) but also to Stalling’s predilection for us-
ing song titles to guide his scores—in this case, the title refers specifically
to an African American woman. Such songs may have functioned well
as recognizable melodic cues for individual black characters; at the same
time, the rhythms and textures of jazz provided the sound that most often
signaled to white viewers the stereotyped black community and its cul-
ture.22 Perhaps the most chilling conclusion we can draw from the persis-
tence of such songs is that cartoons are, in many ways, a natural exten-
sion of the minstrel show. Just as Mickey and his black-faced, white-gloved
brethren carry on the tradition of the minstrel figure, so their singing and
dancing give new life to the same old tunes. Where but in cartoons can
we today hear the plantation songs of Stephen Foster and other songs
popularized on the minstrel stage? Minstrelsy never really died—it sim-
ply changed media.
ers constructed a story that made the performance of the song the cen-
terpiece of the short. That the song’s title usually was borrowed for the
cartoon’s title was just one way in which such cartoons helped publicize
a performer’s work.
The Fleischers also responded to local influences of the Manhattan
music scene in their choice of performers: they combined themes from
their own lives as middle-class, secular Jews in New York with their no-
tions (cultural, musical, etc.) of African Americans, funneling all these
raw materials into a popular representational form— cartoons.25 Their
earlier success with the Song Car-Tunes was owed to their use of Tin Pan
Alley tunes and nineteenth-century popular songs, styles familiar in the
city on vaudeville and other stages. The proximity of the Fleischer stu-
dio to premier music venues, particularly the uptown clubs in Harlem
that featured artists such as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and
Cab Calloway, clearly shaped their creation of cartoons in the nascent
jazz era. The aura of danger and excitement that surrounded jazz, espe-
cially during the Harlem Renaissance, likely added to the attraction.
Nathan Irvin Huggins describes it: “How convenient! It was merely a
taxi trip to the exotic for most white New Yorkers. In cabarets decorated
with tropical and jungle motifs—some of them replicas of southern
plantations—they heard jazz, that almost forbidden music. It was not
merely that jazz was exotic, but that it was instinctive and abandoned,
yet laughingly light and immediate—melody skipping atop inexorable
driving rhythm. . . . In the darkness and closeness, the music, infectious
and unrelenting, drove on.”26 Lou Fleischer, the brother in charge of mu-
sic for the studio, remembered going to the Cotton Club to listen to Cal-
loway so that he could choose the songs that might work well in a car-
toon.27 The performances themselves no doubt gave the writers at the
studio ideas for future cartoons. They could easily have taken the num-
bers they had seen onstage and, if they had chosen to view them from
the contrived primitivist perspective then dominant, created stories that
blended the performers’ music and the visual trappings of the clubs with
the animators’ ideas.
Amiri Baraka points out that whites eagerly engaged with the new
black music that offered such a novel image of America,28 desiring to ex-
perience the sensual overtones ascribed to “primitive” music. By visiting
clubs in Harlem and even by viewing cartoons, whites could gain access
to something they felt implicitly lacking in their lives: the freedom and he-
donism believed to be characteristic of a simpler, more instinctual society
(an idea alluded to by Professor Patterson). By couching the featured songs
86 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
within the stereotyped narratives that shaped the musicians’ live acts, the
Fleischer cartoons enabled moviegoing audiences around the country to
experience an even more fantastical version of those narratives—narratives
previously enjoyed by a few nightclub patrons in New York City. Just as
they had done while attending live stage shows with blackface perform-
ers, white audiences could watch blacks in these newer performance ven-
ues and hope for what Huggins calls “the possibility of being transported
into black innocence.”29 The cartoons that simultaneously presented the
ideas of jazz and primitivism also (in a tone mixing envy and condem-
nation) emphasized the stereotyped notion that blacks live their lives with
careless freedom.
Louis Armstrong and his band make their sole appearance in a Flei-
scher cartoon in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You (Flei-
scher, 1932). Like most of the cartoons in this series,30 the film opens
with a sequence of live footage following the title cards; it features Arm-
strong and his band performing before moving on to the animated story,
thereby both giving the audience the opportunity to see the actual mu-
sicians and providing Armstrong with valuable publicity (see figure 17).
But rather than performing the title song right away, Armstrong and his
men play another piece (“Shine”) that segues neatly into the background
music for the animated sequence.31 The audience must watch what
amounts to half the cartoon before Armstrong begins the title song; it is
a clever strategy on the part of the studio to keep viewers’ attention on
the characters, and a technique that has parallels in the Warner Bros. style
of story construction.
The story centers on Betty Boop and her companions, Bimbo and
Ko-Ko, as they explore the depths of the African jungle. They inevitably
become involved in a chase with some natives, which culminates in the
performance of the title song. As Bimbo and Ko-Ko try to give the slip to
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 87
makes her vulnerable to the visceral temptations of jazz that I have al-
ready mentioned. Betty’s presence also exposes her to black men, who,
stereotypically, want to make off with and possess white women, a char-
acteristic of “bucks,” as Donald Bogle defines them in his history of blacks
in film: “Bucks are always big, baadddd niggers, oversexed and savage,
violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.”34 In the jazz cartoons
with black musicians, Betty almost always ends up being chased by the
animated representatives of jazz—Cab Calloway in Minnie the Moocher
(Fleischer, 1932) and The Old Man of the Mountain (Fleischer, 1933),
Don Redman and a bunch of other literal “spooks” in I Heard (1933),
and natives in I’ll Be Glad, a trope that perpetuates cultural myths about
rapacious black males. To be sure, Betty is pursued by men in many of
her cartoons; but the issue of race complicates the chase by making her
a forbidden object of desire.
By locating Betty aurally in a jazz world, the cartoons also place her
in the ideological world of black music. The dark jungles represent jazz’s
supposed primeval origins, while the caves that appear in all three Cal-
loway cartoons work as metaphors for the urban source of jazz, Harlem
nightclubs.35 The portrayal of these exotic locales in cartoons provided
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 89
white audiences with a safe outing to a strange and unusual world, much
like a visit to the Harlem clubs. As Huggins remarks of the clubs, “It was
a cheap trip. No safari! Daylight and a taxi ride rediscovered New York
City, no tropic jungle. There had been thrill without danger. For these
black savages were civilized—not head-hunters or cannibals—they would
not run amok.”36 Several other features of these cartoons made them at-
tractive for white viewers. Not only were audiences transported to far-
away lands, but the humorous and fantastical sight gags that character-
ized the Fleischer style also removed the aura of danger from Africa and
even made it somewhat laughable, especially because they painted a de-
humanizing image of African natives. Such portrayals could naturally be
extended to the urban American black, who could become less (or more)
fearsome to white audiences through such caricatures. Their experience
of the forbidden music of Armstrong or Calloway as a soundtrack to the
journey created an additional level of excitement.
This cartoon appeared in theaters just before Armstrong began to be
criticized by other jazz musicians and the black population in general.
With his wide grin, affable nature, and questionable repertoire, includ-
ing his ongoing use of the song “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,”
Armstrong was accused of striking the pose of a “tom”37—a stereotyp-
ically friendly, nonthreatening male black—in order to please white audi-
ences and ensure his popularity in the entertainment world. The cartoon
also came at the very beginning of Armstrong’s film career (according
to Gabbard, only one feature film, unfortunately lost, predates I’ll Be
Glad When You’re Dead).38 Armstrong’s early films show how others
portrayed him in what many saw as a less than honorable fashion. The
Fleischers were no different, as the cartoon’s creators applied to his im-
age as a black performer almost every conceivable stereotype of primi-
90 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
special emphasis in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, as both have their
visages transposed with those of jungle natives.
Another take on primitivism and jazz is offered by the Warner Bros.
short The Isle of Pingo-Pongo (Avery, 1938). Set on a remote island, the
cartoon consists mostly of travelogue-type narration and blackout gags,
many of which involve Egghead, the character that eventually became
Elmer Fudd.40 About halfway through the cartoon we meet the inhabi-
tants of Pingo-Pongo, almost every one of them tall and black, having
excessively large feet and lips and a striking facial resemblance to the is-
land’s wild animals. The omnipresent tour guide chimes in: “As we near
the village, we hear the primitive beat of jungle tom-toms. We come upon
a group of native musicians, beating out the savage rhythm that is as
old and primitive as the jungle itself.” After the establishing shot of four
musicians—four black natives squatting in front of four drums and beat-
ing the familiar “ONE-two-three-four” rhythm—the quartet suddenly
jumps up and does a western-style performance of “She’ll Be Comin’
’Round the Mountain,” complete with yodeled responses to each line of
the second verse. The unexpected (perhaps absurd) use of an American
popular tune creates the humor here, especially since “She’ll Be Comin’”
is not as “old and primitive as the jungle itself.” We have clearly been set
up to expect something in a far less familiar vein. The black natives singing
in a western harmony style adds a further sense of irony to the gag.
The narrator’s line about the “primitive savage rhythm” leads the au-
dience to connect jazz and the jungle, a connection driven home in a later
scene that portrays a “native celebration.” Several male-female couples
dance a short minuet, perfectly synchronized and with arms upraised, to
imply refined, proper style. This presents yet another of Avery’s comic
juxtapositions of contemporary cultural conventions with the mores of
the jungle dweller. Suddenly a short, squat native (clearly meant to be
92 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
Fats Waller, as can be inferred both from his size and from his singing
style) announces the next song, a rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown”
with Waller and four natives (in black tie) representing the Mills Broth-
ers singing around a period radio microphone (see figure 21). The
dancers respond, predictably, with movements that are much less refined
and more stylized.41 The startling performance by Waller and the Mills
Brothers is the showstopping musical cue of the short: the brothers per-
form all their characteristic tricks of imitating instruments with their
hands, while Waller scats his way through a chorus of the song. The num-
ber ends with a final chorus played by a native orchestra on modern jazz
instruments. The cartoon’s penultimate cue further confuses the musical
construction of the story: when the narrator tells us it is time to bid fare-
well to Pingo-Pongo, the melody of “Aloha Oe,” typically associated with
Pacific islands (particularly Hawaii) slows down the momentum from
the previous song. This conflation of white-constructed primitive attrib-
utes indicates that another stereotype is at work here: all peoples cate-
gorized as “primitive” look and act the same.42
In both films examined here, the music of African Americans, por-
trayed as “contemporary savages,” quickly changes from stereotypical
jungle melodies (beating drums) to a much more modern and swinging
sound, though one still understood to be primitive in origin. The Flei-
scher and Warner Bros. cartoons were not alone in fostering images of
the emergence of jazz from the savage hinterland; all the major studios
reproduced and circulated this prevalent stereotype of jazz’s origins.43
Juxtaposing African American jazz musicians and a primitivist perfor-
mance of uncivilized music, urban Americans and uneducated savages,
creates a fictive identification that serves only to stereotype. Given such
manipulation, we have to ask ourselves whether we are hearing the mu-
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 93
sic and the social history embedded within it, or simply what we want
to hear. All the studios helped perpetuate such myths; for some, jazz rep-
resented a total lack of civilization, while others moved the jazz sound
into rural and urban settings as well.
(chorus)
[Cab Calloway and his orchestra]
If your rhythm’s been too dreamy [echo] and you like your trumpets
screamy, [echo]
That’s when you should call to see me, [’cuz] I’ve got SWING FOR SALE.
If you think a waltz is horrid, and you like your rhythm torrid,
‘Till it makes you mop your forehead, I’ve got SWING FOR SALE.
[Mills Brothers]
Rhythm is what this country needs, for years and years, I’ve said it.
When you buy from me, it’s C.O.D., I sell swing but not for credit.
FIGURE 24 Cab Calloway and his band and Louis Armstrong in Clean Pastures.
turns purple), together with the vocal hand and mouth effects employed
by the Mills Brothers (see figure 24), convinces the Harlem pleasure
seekers to sing and dance their way to the promised land.
Clean Pastures’ climax (like that of its theatrical predecessors) evokes
the spirit of a revivalist camp meeting, complete with the promises of
96 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
cites an article from 1939 in which the Warner Bros. cartoon producer
Leon Schlesinger claimed that “the phrase ‘De Lawd’ was cut out of the
cartoon and that the censors wanted to eliminate the halo over the head
of a Negro angel.”51 Michael Barrier provides more information, de-
scribing Clean Pastures as “one of the few cartoons to run afoul of the
Production Code. The Code required rejection of any film that was a bur-
lesque of religion, and the Code’s administrator, Joseph I. Breen, con-
demned Clean Pastures as exactly that. In a letter to Leon Schlesinger,
Breen cited the portions of the film set in an ersatz Heaven called Pair-
O-Dice, and said, ‘I am certain that such scenes would give serious offense
to many people in all parts of the world.’”52 Unfortunately, Breen’s letter
does not specify what in the scenes he perceived to be sacrilegious. Pos-
sibly the offense lay in their depiction of blacks not only as denizens of
heaven but also as the angels who ran the place. Angels are stereotypi-
cally pure, saintly, and, most important, white—in their vestments as well
as their race. The censors apparently did not like the idea of a heaven
filled with people who were, according to the cartoon, gamblers, dancers,
drinkers, and, above all else, jazz fans. Clean Pastures also resembled The
Green Pastures in its manifest image of a black heaven; this image may
have elicited some of the critiques of the cartoon. The notion of black
men, women, and children—or, as Bogle calls them, “angels with dirty
faces”53—living their (after)lives in the same heaven as white folk, por-
trayed in the feature film through its southern recharacterization of Bible
stories, possibly appeared in Clean Pastures even more threatening to
white viewers.
Musically, the story features several Warner Bros.–owned songs, includ-
ing “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “I Love to Singa,” and the extended version
of “Swing for Sale.” The score here supplies both the foundation for the
98 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
story and the driving force behind the animation. Even in sequences in
which no performers are visible, the animation still moves precisely with
the music; for example, the righteous bound for Pair-O-Dice two-step
their way up toward heaven in time to “Oh! Dem Golden Slippers,” led
by Calloway and Waller.
Clean Pastures inspired the Warner Bros. cartoon Tin Pan Alley Cats
(Clampett, 1943), which also conveys a highly moralistic message in sug-
gesting that jazz is the music of disorder and decadence.54 In this car-
toon, a cat (Fats Waller caricatured once again) must choose between
the musically square cats in the Salvation Army, playing “Gimme That
Old Time Religion” outside a seamy nightclub, or the hot tunes produced
inside. Having chosen the latter (in his words, “Well, wot’s de mutta wit
dat?”), Fats shows off his musical skill on the piano by blazing through
the opening chords to “Nagasaki,” which are taken up immediately by
the whole nightclub. Finally, a scatting trumpet player literally blows
Fats out of this world, landing him in a bizarre netherworld filled with
fantastic creatures (see figure 26).55 Transported into a universe seem-
ingly created from the excesses of jazz, Fats cannot make any sense of
it: voices speak to him from nowhere, and its creatures—including a
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 99
The dwarfs also join in with So White, as they all sing a brief chorus of
“In the Army Now” (earlier in the film).
However, the performance in the film that is most important, and most
closely tied to the imagery Clampett created, is given in the final scene.
Having eaten the poison apple given to her by the Mean Old Queen, So
White is, as the dwarfs say, “out of this world! She’s stiff as wood! She’s
got it bad and that ain’t good!” Only Prince Chawmin’ and his “dyna-
mite kiss!” can awaken her—yet he cannot. As the prince tries and fails
numerous times to wake the girl, a few notes on a solo trumpet under-
score each impotent peck; they progressively weaken and wobble as they
slowly ascend the scale. After the prince gives up, the smallest dwarf (ap-
parently meant to resemble Disney’s Dopey) plants a kiss on So White
that sends her pigtails straight into the air with little American flags on
them, while the trumpet in the background doubles the joke by reach-
ing a piercingly high note. The jazz trumpet, typically a signifier of mas-
culinity for the black men who play it, can also serve as a sign of phallic
powerlessness: musical incapacity is equated with psychological castra-
tion.61 In this case, the prince has already been set up as less than a real
man—when So White was kidnapped by Murder, Inc., the prince dis-
played a cowardly yellow streak that grew straight up his back. His
inability to wake up So White from her sleep simply confirms his less-
than-manly qualities. Only a real man (in this case, a man in uniform)
has what it takes to rouse her, and thus the music reflects his rhetorical
and physical power.
On a par with, if not exceeding, the insulting racial imagery of Coal
Black is the 1941 Lantz cartoon Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,
directed by Lantz himself and part of the Swing Symphonies series. Draw-
ing on an entirely different set of black stereotypes, this short dwells on
images of indolent blacks in Lazytown, lounging around a river landing
on a hot summer day. Everybody moves slowly: two men fighting slap
each other upside the head in slow motion, a listless man on the dock
reacts slowly and deliberately to being stung on the nose repeatedly by
a wasp, and a woman washing clothes almost stops moving altogether.
A remarkably lethargic version of “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)”
underscores the sequence. As a riverboat pulls up to the dock, it releases
102 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
jazz’s invigorating spirit and rhythm into the town. A full band of mu-
sicians, led by a mulatto (in Bogle’s rubric) female singer, injects the spirit
of jazz into the locals. The singer tells the woman washing clothes that
she just needs rhythm, and the woman replies, “What do you all mean
‘rhythm’?” As in Clean Pastures, a jazz tune, in this case the title song,
saves the people in the cartoon; the happy result here is not heavenly sal-
vation but an awakening from physical stupor. The imagery becomes, if
possible, even more offensive, as greater numbers of stereotypical char-
acters (a man eating watermelon, pickaninnies, an Uncle Tom figure) ap-
pear to take part in the jamming.
During several quick shots of the musicians playing together, an un-
usual combination of images is presented. All four men shown are black,
and three (the bass, trumpet, and piano players) exhibit the big-lipped,
chimpanzee-faced design that typifies these cartoons. The clarinet player,
in contrast, appears almost to have stepped out of a Harlem club, with
very realistic and human-seeming face and body, as if he alone had been
drawn by someone more sympathetic to the portrayal of blacks. Though
this clarinetist never assumes a substantial personality in the story, his
brief appearance reminds us how sharply such renderings can differ from
cartoon to cartoon, and even within the same scene.
Scrub Me Mama was just one of the shorts that Lantz produced in the
early 1940s in the Swing Symphonies series; not surprisingly, they em-
phasize swing music and swing culture, though many do not focus on
music per se. More often, the stories present life as somehow unfulfilling
and lacking sparkle until everybody gets rhythm—frequently bestowed
on them by the boogie-woogie man, as in Boogie Woogie Man (Culhane,
1943), Greatest Man in Siam (Culhane, 1944), Boogie Woogie Sioux (Lovy,
1942) and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company “B” (Lantz, 1941).
Not all the Swing Symphonies feature African American characters,
however. Pied Piper of Basin Street (Culhane, 1945), The Hams That
Couldn’t Be Cured (Lantz, 1942), The Sliphorn King of Polaroo (Lundy,
1945), and several other cartoons feature musical numbers based on boo-
gie-woogie without resorting to racist visual imagery, although other
racial elements are pervasive. Jazz is brought in through standard car-
toon plot devices: the pied piper’s hot tunes attract rats, the three (hip)
little pigs ham it up in a music teacher’s shop, and so on.
Like those of the Fleischers a decade earlier, Lantz’s cartoons
benefited from a hometown connection. Darrell Calker, who scored
Lantz’s cartoons in the late 1930s and much of the 1940s, was a jazz
pianist known in local clubs around Los Angeles. Lantz could thus get
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 103
WHITE JAZZ
Jazz in cartoons did not belong solely to black characters. In fact, white
characters appear quite frequently playing jazz; the animated sequence
in King of Jazz demonstrates how far back these portrayals can be found.
The best known, perhaps even beloved, example occurs in the Warner
Bros. short I Love to Singa (Avery, 1936), a truncated and animated ver-
sion of The Jazz Singer (1927) that features the opening (and closing)
song from 1936’s The Singing Kid (both Warner Bros. films starring Al
Jolson). I Love to Singa presents the now-familiar theme of the old world
clashing with the new. Professor Owl teaches strictly classical music (the
sign on his housefront vehemently states “NO JAZZ”), but his youngest
son, Owl Jolson, is born to be a crooner. (He literally pops out of his
shell dressed in a red blazer, singing the title song.) Papa throws sonny
out, but eventually the family accepts him for who he is—after he finds
success singing on Jack Bunny’s radio show.62 Like that of his big-screen
predecessor, the singing of Owl Jolson is relatively tame. The conflict in
the cartoon between traditional and popular styles recalls that of the orig-
inal film, in which the young Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) had to make
a far more emotional choice between the religious faith pressed on him
by his ailing father and popular fame. The similarity of the cartoon’s
music to that in King of Jazz is quite striking, as both (animated) white
performers stay a safe distance from anything resembling truly hot jazz,
opting instead for the safer ground of swing-infused pop songs.63 In
Whiteman’s film, the songs were simply drawn from his band’s typical
playlist. Likewise, the director of I Love to Singa, Tex Avery, used the
music sung by the real Jolson.
The image of hot jazz musicians, established (as we have seen) through
generations of stereotyping, persisted into the late 1950s.64 With the be-
bop revolution fully ingrained in the music world, and free and modal
jazz just around the corner, a more modern and sanitized image of what
104 ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE
hot jazz sounded like began to surface. The 1957 Warner Bros. cartoon
Three Little Bops, yet another short reinterpreting the story of the three
little pigs, features the trumpet work of the West Coast jazz luminary
Shorty Rogers and ultra-hep narration by Stan Freberg, a star of com-
edy recording.65 Suddenly there seems to be nothing anomalous about
three white (or pink) characters playing jazz (see figure 27). On the con-
trary, the pigs set up grooves that swing everywhere they go, frustrated
only by the unmelodic sounds of the Big Bad Wolf, whose unhip play-
ing rubs the pigs and their audience the wrong way. We can see that by
the time Three Little Bops appeared, what was once an old stereotype
(only black musicians can play good jazz) had been shattered, supplanted
by a new stereotype created by the musicians themselves: only tonal and
melodic jazz is worthwhile.
The music the wolf plays sounds vaguely like an early form of free
jazz, a style fomented in the Los Angeles jazz scene, particularly at the
hands of the saxophone player Ornette Coleman. It does not gain ac-
ceptance until after the wolf has blown himself up and wound up in hell,
where he can play truly hot (that is, tonal and melodic) jazz, as the pigs
state the cartoon’s moral,
The wolf twice sits in with the pigs (and sneaks in a third time), only to
be ostracized and kicked out of the club when his trumpet licks have noth-
ing to do with what the pigs are playing. He is further humiliated when
he tries to enter the pigs’ club (the House of Bricks, “built in 1776”) dis-
guised as a 1920s hipster, complete with fur coat and playing “The
Charleston” on a ukulele. His sound finally gets ultra-cool down in hell,
where his trumpet suddenly takes on a muted timbre with smooth articu-
lations. Whiteman and Jolson pleased their audience by confining them-
selves to playing what was, in their time, the most widely accepted (and
also conventional) type of pop or jazz, shying away from the hot jazz
preferred by innovative black groups. Twenty-five years later we find the
definition of “conventional” shifting. The West Coast or bop style be-
came the new norm, exemplified by the three white pigs. As a result, the
innovative free jazz sound became the music that is too hot to touch. We
cannot discount the possibility that Rogers, a known figure in the L.A.
music world, might have used Three Little Bops to make a statement
ANIMATION, JAZZ MUSIC, AND SWING CULTURE 105
FIGURE 27 Three Little Bops (Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1956). © Warner Bros., Inc.
If cartoons have become associated over time with any one musical
genre, it is classical music. When I talk to people about cartoon music,
that is inevitably what they first think of and talk about: “Cartoons are
where I learned all the classics.” “I love it when Elmer sings ‘Kill the
Wabbit!’” “I can’t go to a concert without thinking of a Tom and Jerry
cartoon.” Apparently, countless Americans attribute their first conscious
memory of the classical repertoire to cartoons. Through film, and then
television, cartoons have repeatedly introduced large segments of soci-
ety to this music. Among those exposed were Timothy and Kevin Burke,
who write in their book on Saturday morning television: “Certainly for
both of us, our first acquaintance with opera, particularly The Barber
of Seville, came from Bugs Bunny. See, cartoons are educational.”1 With
the increasingly limited attention given to classical music in primary and
secondary schools, cartoon scores have managed to keep the classics in
the public’s ears, albeit in a context that gives them an entirely differ-
ent set of meanings.
107
108 CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS
Who, then, is in the cartoon canon? At the top of the list is Wagner,
with both the greatest number of overall references and the greatest num-
ber of specific pieces cited. Other favorites include Rossini, Mendelssohn,
Liszt, Chopin, Franz von Suppé, Brahms, Johann Strauss, Schubert, Schu-
mann, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven.2 Often just a fragment of a piece is
used. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is sometimes heard, but usually only
its opening gesture, recontextualized to elicit feelings of patriotism dur-
ing World War II—the symphony’s main “da-da-da-daaaaah” motif was
associated with the slogan “V for Victory,” because it echoed the rhythm
of the letter V in Morse code (dot-dot-dot-dash). Similarly, Chopin is rep-
resented in cartoons almost entirely by the opening four-note motif of
his Funeral March.
The most famous works of a composer do not always appear in car-
toons, which need short, easily digestible melodies to match the rapid-
paced action that dominates their story lines. Not every piece in the canon
will flourish in this environment.3 For the same reason, many of the pri-
mary composers of the concert hall canon are underrepresented or com-
pletely absent from the cartoon canon, which thus consists of an idio-
syncratic assortment of classics. Lesser-known works of well-known
composers appear frequently, such as music from Wagner’s early opera
Rienzi. Composers no longer regularly heard in concert, such as Franz
von Suppé and Alphons Czibulka, are favorites. The overtures to several
of von Suppé’s operas, including Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna,
Light Cavalry, Beautiful Galatea, and The Poet and Peasant, are often
featured.Czibulka’s best-known melody is “Wintermärchen” (see music
example 6), familiar as the stereotypically weepy violin piece that one hears
at moments of mock tragedy.4
The popularity of such pieces was recognized and exploited before
the film era, however. Already in the late nineteenth century, Lawrence
Levine notes, orchestral programmers differentiated between classical
works that were popular (and thus profitable for concert promoters) and
those that were aesthetically superior (symphonies and concertos by
Beethoven, Schubert, and the like). Certain orchestras would thus “mount
110 CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS
from Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 (see music example 7), with
its clusters of thirty-second-note figures followed by a long, sliding
glissando, appears in both Rhapsody in Rivets (Warner Bros., 1941) and
Rhapsody Rabbit (Warner Bros., 1946). The earlier cartoon depicts the
building of a skyscraper (under)scored to a performance of the Liszt (see
figure 28). The overarching conceit is that the foreman conducts his crew
just as a conductor leads an orchestra. At one point, a bricklaying oc-
topus puts down four bricks in a row in time with the thirty-second-
note figures, and then lays a long layer of cement over the bricks, under-
scored by the glissando. In Rhapsody Rabbit, Freleng interprets the music
similarly. Bugs Bunny (a concert pianist) picks up the piano keys in
bunches for the first half of the passage, and then lays them all back down
in a long row during the rest of the phrase (see figure 29). In both cases,
Freleng takes a single gesture out of a larger piece, gives it a unique visual
image for the cartoon, and then reintegrates it into a series of audiovi-
sual gags. The independence of each gesture makes possible such a dis-
section of motifs.
This reliance on gesture usually prevented modernist and avant-garde
music from finding any place in cartoon scores except when such
sounds were being ridiculed, as in Freleng’s 1955 Warner Bros. cartoon
Pizzicato Pussycat. The plot: A mouse plays the piano beautifully. The
house cat catches the mouse, sparing its life on the condition that the
mouse play his mouse-sized piano inside the grand piano that the cat
pantomimes playing, a deception for which the humans fall. At his Car-
negie Hall debut (for which, we see on the street posters, “Leopold Stab-
owski”’s performance has been hastily canceled), the cat accidentally
breaks the mouse’s glasses. The tiny, half-blind mouse ends up playing
what Will Friedwald calls “frightening Cecil Taylor-like thumps which
cause press and public alike to reject the miracle cat as a fraud (the
squares).”8 Several music critics in the audience make scornful faces and
112 CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS
then retreat hastily from the auditorium, thereby informing the cartoon’s
viewers that modern music cannot and will not do at a temple of high
art like Carnegie Hall. This example also shows that in practice, a car-
toon score cannot successfully incorporate such pieces, as they lack the
gestures that make so much late-nineteenth-century music a film com-
poser’s best friend.9
This point leads us back to another requirement of the repertoire:
for films and cartoons, the music chosen has quite often been something
recognizable or at least easily appreciated by the audience. The classical
pieces promoted by various film music compendiums usually had some
sort of cultural or social resonance, whether due to their original sources
(e.g., Wagner’s “Bridal March” in Lohengrin, obviously suitable for
accompanying a wedding) or to an earlier cultural reassignment (e.g.,
Rossini’s William Tell overture, given new life in the early 1930s as cow-
boy music when it was used as the theme for The Lone Ranger radio
program).10 The most famous gestures became independent of the pieces
CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS 113
in which they occur. The gallop figure of Rossini’s overture and the rapid
scalar movement in Liszt’s Rhapsody can and do make sense outside the
context of the works they come from. The Rossini no longer evokes ideas
of opera; its resignification by The Lone Ranger had led most listeners
to identify it with that show or, more generally, with images of horses
or chases.
In a talk given at UCLA in 1944, Chuck Jones foresaw the influence
of visual media on the generations of Americans growing up with films,
cartoons, and eventually television: “It is important at this time to re-
member that visual education has a head-start on other educational
methods in that we have a sympathetic audience to start with.”11 While
Jones appears to see benefits in children’s being more appreciative of or
“sympathetic” to learning through a visual medium than from text-
books, his phrase “sympathetic audience” evokes the arguments made
against such media by the critic Theodor Adorno, who in the 1930s and
’40s objected to the commodification of music by the media, particu-
larly the radio. Adorno decried on-air music education programs such
as Walter Damrosch’s NBC Music Appreciation Hour. The music his-
torian Joseph Horowitz summarizes Adorno’s main objections to the
flattening and general distortion of symphonic music by radio trans-
mission: “In short, far from wafting symphonic culture to an ever wider
audience, the radio voice fetishized the symphony. Deriding apostles of
radio enlightenment, Adorno concluded that ‘the isolation of the main
tune, and similar features, [make] a symphony on the air [become] a piece
of entertainment. Consequently, it would be absurd to maintain that it
could be received by the listeners as anything but entertainment.’”12
Adorno found the repeated use of the same few melodies in film scores
just as offensive; according to Horowitz, he called this process “‘plug-
ging’: the tactic of redundantly programming certain popular tunes until
‘the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again
and again and made still more familiar.’”13 The very things about mu-
sic in media that Adorno criticizes inform the entire system of film and
cartoon scoring, which in turn fetishizes the already-limited symphonic
repertoire that he lamented. But neither he nor Jones could have pre-
dicted how films and television would displace all other methods of im-
parting information to the masses; indeed, Jones also told his audience,
“I want to make clear that I do not believe the animated cartoon will
ever quite replace the old-fashioned ballet.”14 By the end of the century
(he died in 2002), Jones no doubt realized that cartoons, including many
114 CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS
that he directed, have inadvertently become for many children the ear-
liest and sometimes almost exclusive venue for regular exposure to clas-
sical music.
Most often, classical music is introduced into a cartoon by setting the
story in a performance space, either formal (Carnegie Hall, the Holly-
wood Bowl, a multitude of unidentified concert halls) or informal (a barn,
a barbershop, a bookstore). Such cartoons had a great deal in common:
from depicting the conductors to showing the behavior of the different
audiences, they all follow a rigorous rubric in portraying how the cul-
ture of the concert hall supposedly works. Chuck Jones’s Long-Haired
Hare (Warner Bros., 1949) ably exemplifies the form. This cartoon sat-
irizes all aspects of concert performances, culminates in Bugs Bunny’s
takeover of a Hollywood Bowl concert, and brings issues of high and
low art into play, particularly the struggle of classical music versus con-
temporary “popular” music.
“Turkey in the Straw” on one instrument, the flute, rather than switch-
ing from song to song. This fixation with a single tune, performed in a
particularly carefree manner, infuriates Mickey to no end. Nearly all these
cartoons end by somehow returning to the original work. A great deal
of humor comes from the effort and contortions required to play the final
chords, even if the singer, the instruments, or the auditorium has been
damaged or destroyed. A triumph over the fugitive influence of more con-
temporary sounds remains the ultimate goal.
In Long-Haired Hare, only three outward characteristics—his instru-
ment, his home in the “country,” and his song—were needed to construct
Bugs as an anti-aesthete. Playing the banjo places Bugs at a great ideo-
logical distance from a classically trained opera singer accompanied by
piano; it not only shows Bugs to be a truly rustic (and therefore uncul-
tured) musician but also sets him in direct opposition to the singer and
the aesthetic values he holds dear. His backwoods location behind
Jones’s bungalow magnifies his image as a yokel. Bugs also sings his
song from memory. The absence of sheet music points to a lack of musi-
cal training per se, implying that though Bugs may sing well, his is an
unskilled performance. On the other hand, the singer uses scores and what
we assume to be years of training to faithfully reproduce the notes of a
time-tested aria. Even as the cartoon viciously satirizes the world of clas-
sical music, it also implicitly confirms several positive stereotypes about
it: professional singers, while stuffy and ridiculous, are trained artists;
in contrast, popular singers may have character or charm, but they lack
such training and therefore do not deserve the same respect. Bugs sings
American popular songs, while Jones’s music comes from the western
European repertoire, further separating the two ideologically. Levine has
shown that the sacralization of music that occurred in the nineteenth cen-
tury strengthened Americans’ belief that works of “divine inspiration”
came not just from the heavens but from Europe.22 In this cartoon, Gio-
vanni Jones serves as the sole representative of all European art music,
thereby becoming Bugs’s prime target.
blinked if Bugs had led the concert in his usual state of dishabille, yet he
explicitly chooses instead to adopt the culturally accepted practice. He
dons evening attire because he wants to identify himself as a performer—
one of the several reasons, according to Small, why musicians have re-
tained the use of evening wear at all. His pose as the concert’s leader,
the conductor, further mandates his traditional attire. Michael Barrier
notes that by dressing as the conductor, Bugs can take control of the per-
formance rather than simply disrupting it, as before.28 Bugs also cannot
help surrendering part of his will to the power and history his clothing
represents. While he cannot, or will not, perform as a “normal” conduc-
CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS 123
tor (his goal on the podium, after all, is to torment Jones), he also can-
not be himself—his costume, which is in effect a uniform, prohibits it.
“People in uniform are behaving not as themselves,” Small points out,
“but as representatives of the organization whose uniform it is.”29 Bugs
the conductor thus becomes a contradictory mixture. Naturally, his in-
herent wackiness and mischief overshadow his desire to conduct, yet he
still leads the concert to a successful conclusion that literally brings down
the house.
As Lawrence Levine remarks, many people believe that only a “highly
trained professional” has the ability and insight to properly interpret and
execute “the intentions of the creators of the divine art.”30 Bugs is clearly
ensconced in the world of popular music as the cartoon opens. His em-
brace of classical music would be that much funnier and more ironic if
he took it to the greatest possible extreme, becoming the embodiment of
what he has been trying to subvert all along. By assuming Stokowski’s
persona, Bugs can confidently carry the performance on personality alone;
his conducting of Jones relies much more on attitude than on any notion
of skill. Because (at least in this cartoon) Bugs is only pretending to be a
professional, he eventually leads the performance into chaos. In Baton
Bunny, Bugs is portrayed as a real conductor, and thus the comic confu-
sion there occurs despite his efforts to the contrary.
Why pick on Leopold Stokowski? As one of the most famous Amer-
ican conductors of the twentieth century, his very visible place in the
media, particularly in films, made him a target for the Warner Bros. car-
toons long before Fantasia (Disney, 1940) explicitly associated him with
animation. For instance, She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (Warner Bros.;
Freleng, 1937), which takes place in a contemporary movie palace, fea-
tures a goofy, thick-accented organist and conductor named “Stickout-
ski.” Stokowski makes a canine cameo as the conductor Bowowski in War-
ner Bros.’ Hollywood Canine Canteen (McKimson, 1946; see figure 35).
Other Warner Bros. cartoons featuring cameos of him include Porky
at the Crocadero (Tashlin, 1938), in which Porky briefly imagines him-
self as the great conductor; Hollywood Steps Out (Avery, 1941), a car-
toon set at the famous Hollywood nightclub Ciro’s, where Stokowski leads
a conga with his signature locks in a hairnet (see figure 35); and Stage
Door Cartoon (Freleng, 1944), a typical Elmer-chasing-Bugs plot that
ends with Elmer being thrown out of a vaudeville theater while Bugs,
dressed as Stokowski, looks on from the conductor’s podium. Fantasia
only reconfirmed the image of Stokowski as the quintessential longhair,
particularly as he does not say anything during the entire two-hour pic-
124 CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS
ture. His silence allows his gestures and posturing to speak for him. Per-
haps Adorno was thinking of such images of Stokowski when he de-
scribed a conductor as “an imago, the imago of power, visibly embod-
ied in his prominent figure and striking gestures. . . . Impressed by his
medicine-man gestures, the listener thinks it takes just such an attitude
to make the players give their artistic best—a best that will be taken for
something like the setting of a physical record.”31 Many of Adorno’s
thoughts on the role of the conductor seem pertinent here, especially be-
cause neither Adorno nor the creators of Long-Haired Hare seem to have
viewed conductors, or many other components of the modern concert
hall, in a positive light.32 Chuck Jones takes these images of Stokowski
to heart, making them the essence of Bugs’s performance as “Leopold.”
Once Bugs’s masquerade begins, the mystification of the classical per-
formance becomes much more explicit.
Bugs sends two related messages to Jones when he breaks the con-
ductor’s baton: he will not be constricted by a conventional conductor’s
tool, and the music that he gets out of the singer will be what he wants.
In breaking the baton, Bugs symbolically calls Jones out, in essence threat-
ening retaliation for the earlier abuses he endured from Jones. In addi-
tion, using his hands to conduct after casting off the baton is only one
of Stokowski’s idiosyncrasies that Bugs appropriates. This portrayal does
not mock Stokowski: in fact, it attributes superhuman qualities to his
conducting. In the final extended gag, Bugs’s gloved hand waves unceas-
ingly, forcing Jones to carry a continuous high note. The sound becomes
so painful that Bugs abandons the stage to send away for earmuffs, leav-
ing behind the glove that continues to float in midair and demand more
from the singer. The gag lampoons the public’s notion that Stokowski’s
hands were instruments unto themselves; fascination with them arose
CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS 125
in the early 1930s, not long after he had all but given up the use of a
baton.33
Bugs, not Jones, shows that the music is really not as important as the
performance, an approach to conducting that Adorno referred to as
“histrionics at the podium.”34 Through his actions as conductor, and speci-
fically his hand motions, Bugs can “play” Jones, eliciting an improvised
and yet virtuoso performance from the singer. We don’t know what piece
Jones would have sung had Bugs not interrupted the concert, but it doesn’t
matter. Jones’s training enables him somehow to decode Bugs’s gestures
sufficiently well to follow along. Bugs’s power further extends to the au-
dience, as Barrier points out: “When the concertgoers respond with ap-
plause, Bugs conducts them, too, instantly silencing their applause with
a gesture.”35 Chuck Jones thus presents us another stereotype: a conductor
whose ability to command his surroundings is so great that he can con-
trol the orchestra and the audience equally well.
Such control, according to Adorno, can actually interfere with the per-
formance: “The conductor’s figure comes to be the one that acts directly
on the audience; at the same time his own music-making too is neces-
sarily estranged from the audience, since he himself is not playing. He
thus becomes an actor who plays a musician, and precisely that conflicts
with a proper performance.”36 Adorno clearly is attacking the charla-
tanism of conductors; he also brings to the surface the marked distance
between the musicians and members of the audience. As a conduit be-
tween the two groups, Bugs the conductor wields a tremendous amount
of power. In leading the performance, Bugs becomes a locus of power
and creativity, the path through which the sensibilities of his world—
anarchy and wackiness—invade the staid realm of the concert.37
Bugs can assume control of the performance in part because he has
no regard for the understood course of events in a concert hall and does
not adhere to any conventional program. Cartoon characters, who lack
a commitment to what the music critic Simon Frith calls a “script or a
routinized social situation,”38 are not bound to preset roles in the con-
cert hall. Viewers are fully aware of this freedom: the sight of a cartoon
character in such a setting creates an immediate incongruity. Such incon-
gruity involving real characters often gives rise to a sense of embarrass-
ment; with cartoon characters, we instead wait for the fugitive element
implicit in every animated individual to erupt and somehow derail the
performance.
An extreme form of the conductor’s contribution to the performance
is portrayed in Magical Maestro (MGM; Avery, 1952), another cartoon
126 CLASSICAL MUSIC AND CARTOONS
Fantasia, which used the featured music as the seed for an audiovi-
sual ballet, differed in two important ways from the cartoons discussed
above (such as those produced by Warner Bros.), which more often took
the music as a point of comic departure: the Disney name and the ani-
mated film’s length (two hours). Both forced reviewers to take Fantasia
seriously as either an assault on or a well-intentioned tribute to the canon,
and most leaned toward the former position. Animated shorts clearly
lacked the power and draw of a Disney feature; they were largely per-
ceived as throwaway comic filler, which any theater across the country
could show or shelve as it pleased.47 This lack of prestige may in fact
have benefited the shorts, enabling them to fly mostly under the radar of
any cultural critics who might otherwise have objected to their treatment
of the classics. No cartoon, spoofing the classics or not, could expect more
coverage than a blurb in a film exhibitor’s daily. For example:
ular culture icons—or perhaps the Disney folks hoped that people would
simply come to see their favorite stars and the brilliant animation, re-
gardless of the music featured.
One area of high-art music was left untouched by both Fantasia films
but singled out for special attention by every cartoon studio: opera, the
subject of the next chapter.
5
What’s Opera, Doc? and Cartoon Opera
132
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 133
they perceived as the most important ideas, both musical and dramatic,
thereby allowing Jones to take, as he put it, “14 hours of The Ring of the
Niebelungen and reduce it to six minutes.”1
Despite the fact that he was producing a cartoon, Jones, along with
the cartoon’s writer, Michael Maltese, approached Wagner carefully.
Jones once explained, “Many cartoons using classical music have failed
because they don’t take the music seriously enough. I always felt that
Bugs and Elmer were trying to do the opera right.”2 Jones also told me,
“We didn’t want people to laugh at the music, we wanted them to laugh
at what was interpreted by Bugs and Elmer. . . . It seemed to me that we
were paying great respect to the music itself, but we’re saying that if you
put a bunch of clowns in front of it, it will be a lot different.”3 His sen-
timent may have been noble, but we will see that What’s Opera, Doc?
actually stands as a testament to what Jones believed he knew of Wagner
and opera. Dramatically and musically, Jones established a specific set
of criteria that he felt needed to be met in order to have a complete opera.4
He constructed the cartoon out of a hodgepodge of famous tunes with
familiar plot devices, taking the most familiar parts from the whole of the
composer’s dramatic oeuvre, and poured them into the shell of Wagner’s
single most famous work: the Ring cycle.
comedic treatment, leaving intact only the barest framework of the orig-
inal. The public’s familiarity with operatic stereotypes ensures that au-
diences get the gags, which rely on generalizations about opera and opera
singers. Simply placing opera into an animated medium is intrinsically
humorous, because it violates cultural tradition—we laugh at the juxta-
position of high and low. As the cartoons added their (sometimes not so)
gentle commentary on operatic conventions, the almost absurdly serious
nature of the dramatic form became even funnier.
Such opera parodies are not purely in the domain of cartoons. In fact,
probably the most successful large-scale spoof on opera in the twentieth
century is the Marx Brothers’ 1935 film A Night at the Opera, which
juxtaposes action on and off the opera stage. As this and other comedies
constantly parodied cultural ideals, they created, as Lawrence Levine says,
“a rapport with their audiences that generated a sense of complicity in
their common stand against the pretensions of the patrons of high cul-
ture.”5 Cartoon characters work with the same sense of narrative logic
as the Marx Brothers; when Bugs Bunny and other characters enter the
opera house they inevitably bring along the outside world, and their injec-
tions of popular culture during performances create a string of culture
clashes that grow in intensity throughout the short. (We have already
seen such a collision of worlds in Long-Haired Hare, discussed in chap-
ter 4.) What’s Opera, Doc? is a notable exception to this pattern, for it
takes place within an understood universe of Wagnerian opera; thus the
only music that exists for anyone—including Bugs, whom we expect to
transgress the highbrow conventions of the story—is Wagner’s.
Film parodies usually refer to particular operas and arias, and often
feature actual opera stars playing either themselves or fictitious charac-
ters. Nearly all cartoons are less specific in their approach to opera, in part
because many of the writers and directors had only a superficial knowl-
edge of the subject.6 The directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera (both at
MGM), as well as Chuck Jones (Warner Bros.), have all stated in their
respective autobiographies that they had little background in music and
often left decisions about it to their writers or even the composers.7 Such
ignorance may well have worked to their advantage: rather than focus-
ing on details, the cartoon director relies on familiar references and broad,
sweeping generalizations to create humor based on stereotypes. More-
over, general ignorance of opera may add to its cultural authority; the
musicologist Jeremy Tambling argues that “where opera is only very im-
precisely known about, its myth-making powers seem further ensured in
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 135
terms of promoting images of taste and the good life.”8 For Jones and
others, the idea of opera probably was inextricably bound to notions of
high art and the upper classes. These associations may explain why the
Warner Bros. cartoons that involve opera almost always are set in the
opera house, creating an image of that stage and hall as a sacred space
(albeit one that must be assaulted), while the music itself does not really
matter . . . so long as it’s Italian.
The predominance of Italian opera (in particular, bel canto—literally,
“beautiful” or “fine singing,” an operatic style of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries that is typified by Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini)
marks another idiosyncrasy of opera in cartoons. Tambling explains that
films privileged Italian operas because of the tunefulness of their arias,
duets, and choruses.9 These same films eschewed Wagner because the vo-
cal lines lacked such catchy tunes. Conversely, while Rossini and Donizetti
have singable, memorable phrases in their bel canto arias, those com-
posers are no match for Wagner when it comes to creating short motifs
in the orchestral accompaniment, and Wagner is a favorite in cartoons
as well as in films for underscore cues. David Huckvale notes that “the
appeal of Wagner’s nonvocal or orchestrally arranged music has always
been considerable.”10
Cartoon characters often sing in the opera’s original language, if for
no other reason than the inherent added humor: a cartoon animal sing-
ing opera is funny, and a cartoon animal singing in a foreign tongue is
funnier still. In One Froggy Evening (Warner Bros.; Jones, 1955), for ex-
ample, the main character, Michigan J. Frog, sings the beginning of
“Largo al Factotum” in a public park for his owner, who cannot seem
to convince anyone that he can sing at all. The majestic, even brassy voice
that comes out of the frog’s mouth is a far cry from what we expect to
hear. This enormous voice becomes one of the short’s fundamental comic
devices. Joe Adamson, in a biography of Walter Lantz, describes a simi-
lar scene in a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Barber of Seville (Lantz; Cul-
hane, 1944): “Woody just launches straight into the ‘Largo al factotum’
from The Barber of Seville—no translation, no motivation, no explana-
tion. He suddenly becomes a musical purist . . . and the effect is funny.”11
By using opera in its original foreign tongue, the cartoon also highlights
the vast cultural distance between the music and the cartoon itself. A
“serious” performance of an aria in a short—that is, overdubbed in Ital-
ian by a professional opera singer, as was done in One Froggy Evening
and in Tex Avery’s Magical Maestro (MGM, 1952)—sets up the audi-
136 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
ence for the disintegration that inevitably follows. Such respectful treat-
ment of the original cannot go unchallenged; indeed, veneration of the
original exponentially increases the chances that the performance will
go awry. In this respect as well, What’s Opera, Doc? defies the norms es-
tablished by other cartoons, presenting a story that is funny without
sacrificing the integrity of the opera’s narrative.
enquire to ask / what’s up, doc?” After Elmer reiterates, “I’m going to
kill that wabbit,” Bugs answers: “Oh, mighty warrior ’twill be quite a
task / how will you do it, might I enquire to ask?” Elmer shows off his
magical hardware, singing, “I will do it with my spear and magic hel-
met.” “Spear and magic helmet?” Bugs replies. Elmer demonstrates the
helmet’s power by destroying the tree Bugs is standing under with a bolt
of lightning, sending Bugs running for the hills, with a “Bye!” reminis-
cent of Martha Raye.
Elmer runs after Bugs (with music from Rienzi underscoring the chase)
138 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
The song ends with a magnificent crescendo, just as Bugs’s wig falls off
and Elmer realizes he has been fooled. Bugs rushes off (losing the rest of
his costume along the way) as slowly building timpani indicate Elmer’s
rising anger. As the skies go purple and red, he bellows out, “I’ll kill the
wabbit! Arise storms! Lightning! Earthquakes! Hurricanes! SMOG!
Strike lightning! Strike the wabbit!” With these final words (accompa-
nied once more by the Dutchman overture) bolts of lightning level the
distant mountains. As Elmer runs over to see the results, we find Bugs
lying motionless, his hand poised dramatically over his head, a beam of
sunlight breaking through the clouds to illuminate him. Overhead, a
flower, whose stem was broken in the melee, slowly drops watery tears
EXAMPLE 9 Melody for “Oh Bwunhilda, you’re so lovely.”
Not only was Wagner often used in cartoons, but his instrumental mu-
sic was clearly preferred. Though drawn from his operas, it is primarily
symphonic rather than vocal in nature. This bias displayed by Stalling
reflects not only the general preference mentioned above but his own
background. As a musical director in theaters Stalling was responsible
for all music played during each show, which could go on for three hours
or more; some days the shows ran back to back for almost half a day.
Wagner had a formidable presence in Stalling’s musical library in a va-
riety of forms, notably excerpts arranged for organ and similar extracts
orchestrated for a typical theater orchestra of winds, brass, a few strings,
and keyboard. Stalling’s experiences with this music in his early film days
likely predisposed him to use the same pieces for dramatic purposes in
later years.23
Because of his background as a film accompanist, Stalling reflexively
took advantage of the cultural significance of the music he used to tell
the story. In Captain Hareblower (Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1954), for in-
stance, the Dutchman motif from The Flying Dutchman was meant to
create a notion of danger on the high seas, not just through the illustra-
tive nature of the music itself but also through its evocation of Wagner’s
opera. Just as J. C. Breil used “The Ride of the Valkyries” to accompany
the “heroic” ride of the Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a
Nation (1915), so Stalling quotes Wagner, knowing well the audience’s
familiarity with such music and using it to his advantage.
Warner Bros. was not the only cartoon studio to focus on Wagner.
Fifteen years before What’s Opera, Doc?, the Disney studio devised an
animated scene based on The Valkyrie to be used in Fantasia. (Disney
had originally planned to update Fantasia following its original release
by replacing sections of the film with new musical sequences.) Accord-
ing to the film historian Robin Allan, more than a hundred sketches
created in 1941 for an animated sequence on “The Ride of the Valky-
ries” show “the descent of the Valkyries from the clouds and their con-
ducting of slain warriors to Valhalla.” Walt Disney planned to address
the music seriously; in a story conference he warned, “You’ll get em-
barrassing animation if you get Brunnhilde up there mugging, or one
of those things.” The director of the sequence, Sam Armstrong, had
intended to base the sequence on the imagery of traditional Norse
mythology rather than the purely Germanic Wagnerian version.24
Within a year, however, the United States was fully embroiled in World
War II, and the presence in film of Wagner’s music took on an entirely
new, politicized meaning.
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 143
FIGURE 43 Bugs meets Hermann Göring in Herr Meets Hare (Warner Bros.;
Freleng, 1945).
Bugs’s entry onto the scene, as he rides a large white horse while dressed
as Brünnhilde, shows up fundamentally unchanged in What’s Opera,
Doc?: the music and much of the staging stay the same. When Bugs and
Göring dance together, however, their waltz is almost slapstick, unlike
the refined ballet performed by Bugs and Elmer in What’s Opera, Doc?
A dance between Bugs and an admirer appears in both films, but with
radically different motivations. Göring, lost in the moment, simply fol-
lows Bugs’s lead; Elmer and Bugs, in the midst of an artistic performance,
enact some of the cultural expectations for such a presentation. Jones did
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 145
not formally acknowledge the influence of Herr Meets Hare on his Wag-
nerian exploration, although similarities between the two can be at least
partially attributed to Michael Maltese’s role as writer for both shorts.
Perhaps it was in part to distance himself from Freleng’s earlier short as
well as to inject his own sensibility into the story that Jones created a par-
ody of the opera world itself in his cartoon, focusing only on the per-
formers and the performance and forgoing any references to the composer,
conductor, musicians (except for the tuning at the beginning), or audi-
ence. Production notes from What’s Opera, Doc? reveal that several gags
that might have more clearly differentiated the two stories were not used.
For instance, after Bugs flees from his first encounter with Elmer, the story
sketches indicate that Bugs was to steal Elmer’s magic helmet and con-
jure a small storm with it, only to have Elmer sneak up and quickly repos-
sess it. Immediately after this interaction, Bugs would dress as Brünnhilde
and toy with Elmer for a while before beginning the love duet.30
Though What’s Opera, Doc? appeared more than a decade after the
end of World War II, it is possible that the cartoon contained implicit
criticism of Germany in addition to its undisguised satire on opera and
high-art music. Through its association with Hitler and Nazi Germany,
Wagner’s music had become something to fear, something to hate—Leni
Riefenstahl’s use of The Mastersingers in Triumph of the Will (1935)
was simply one of the more explicit instances of a connection made be-
tween Wagner and Hitler in film.31 In Herr Meets Hare, the director
clearly intended all of the German references as a comment against
Hitler, the Nazis, and Germany as a whole, and Stalling clearly viewed
Wagner as the suitable musical backdrop for such criticism. The war
did not change the music that Stalling and other composers for anima-
tion used; rather, it complicated the associations produced when such
pieces were heard, adding a political and emotional charge at a time
when practically everything in the media referred to the war in one way
or another. The comedic elements inherent in what Jones retained from
Freleng’s cartoon (Bugs in drag and the dance sequence) do little to
evoke World War II; Jones’s cartoon instead takes on Wagner (as well
as opera) directly, with any more general mockery of German culture
remaining secondary.
THE MUSIC
What’s Opera, Doc? divides easily into two narratives at work simulta-
neously—the visual, discussed above, and the musical. Table 3 presents
the musical skeleton of the short, and shows that it breaks down into
three categories:
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 147
Time
Title Composer How Used (min.sec)
The production emulates not only the sound but the form of opera,
specifically in its stylized movements. Bugs and Elmer’s dance to the
Venusberg music adds another dimension to the cartoon, which already
148 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
included singing, instrumental music, and dramatic acting before the ad-
dition of ballet (which in Wagner’s operas plays a substantial role only
in the Venusberg sequence in Tannhäuser). Ever vigilant about realism
in portrayals of such performances, Jones researched the scene thor-
oughly: “When we were making the film, Titania Riabachinska and David
Lichine of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo were working on the Warner
Bros. lot, and we went to the studio where they were rehearsing to sketch
them before creating the What’s Opera, Doc? scene.”37 Rather than pre-
cisely copying the movements of the ballet dancers by rotoscoping
them—that is, tracing a live-action film of the dance, projected one frame
at a time, to reproduce it more naturalistically in the animation38—Jones
and his animators instead relied on their studies to create a more realis-
tic duet between Bugs and Elmer. In the process, they steered clear of
Herr Meets Hare’s farcical dance.
Similarly, Jones’s fastidious attention to detail regarding how in gen-
eral opera singers move and act broadened the characters’ depth. While
animation in general requires that attention be paid to the smallest move-
ment, animators often do not take great pains at literalism when ren-
dering visual representations of performance. For instance, they might
not bother to make sure that the character is playing in the correct range
of the piano at various moments in a performance (in Rhapsody Rabbit
[Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1946], Bugs is not). We find in What’s Opera, Doc?
a remarkable focus on all aspects of the performer’s physical toil, and
these too inspire some subtle humor. Such careful planning is evident at
a number of points in the opening confrontation between Bugs and Elmer.
For instance, Elmer rhythmically punctuates each syllable of the excla-
mation “Wab-bit tracks!” by jabbing his spear into the ground. And af-
ter Bugs fearfully questions Elmer’s intentions to “Kill the wabbit,” he
affectedly flutters his eyelids to the rhythm of the Valkyrie/“Kill the wab-
bit” leitmotif (being played at that moment on the flute). Finally, between
the lines “Oh, mighty warrior ’twill be quite a task” and “How will you
do it, might I enquire to ask?” Bugs visibly takes a dramatic, full breath
as a singer might in preparation for an important line (see figure 44).39
Jones may have believed that he was faithfully representing the outward
appearance of opera singers, but in making the performance by Bugs and
Elmer so highly stylized he underscored the level of artifice that exists in
all opera performance. The pensive, heaving breaths taken by both char-
acters throughout the cartoon call attention to the unnatural demands
that opera singers must place on their bodies.
Bugs’s and Elmer’s singing raises an issue touched on earlier: the his-
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 149
The most noticeable shift in the drama occurs when Elmer, chasing Bugs
on foot across the countryside, is brought to an abrupt stop by the sight
of Bugs, in drag as Brünnhilde, riding down to greet him (see figure 45).
The music marks this drastic change in direction (and attire) by switch-
ing from Rienzi to the beginning of the Tannhäuser overture, replete with
bold trombones to properly illustrate the majesty of Bugs’s descent from
on high. It makes no difference that no such scene ever takes place in
Wagner’s world; Bugs (or, rather, Jones) resolves the conflict with Elmer
by switching to the narrative logic (or illogic) of cartoons, in which his
152 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
short appeared in 1957, the meetings between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd
had moved well beyond the predictable. As an adversary, Elmer did not
offer much of an opponent for Bugs; he was just too gullible. In order to
revitalize the feeling of conflict for What’s Opera, Doc?, the stakes between
hunter and hunted had to be higher. In earlier cartoons Elmer proclaims
“I’m hunting wabbits,” or “Ooooh, I’ll get you for this, you, you . . . wab-
bit!” Here, he audibly states that he wants to kill Bugs. 49 Although other
Warner Bros. directors had characters “die” on screen (for example, Clam-
pett, in Hare Ribbin’, 1944; Freleng, in Back Alley Oproar, 1948), and at-
tempted murder and involuntary manslaughter occur in almost every car-
toon, What’s Opera, Doc? marked a particularly dramatic exploration
of these ideas for Jones. The safety of the operatic diegesis allows Jones
to deal with death almost lightly: the comic juxtaposition between the
opera and cartoon worlds predisposes the audience to ignore issues of
mortality—after all, how can a cartoon character be killed? At the same
time, however, Elmer’s hunt and Bugs’s subsequent death suggest that in
Jones’s mind, a death is a natural if not essential part of an operatic nar-
rative, an inference confirmed by Bugs’s parting shot as the cartoon ends.
Thus we come to the other shaping force behind this story, which al-
lows Jones and Maltese to bring two worlds into conflict: the metanar-
rative of the animated cartoon, in this case the chase. Fundamental to
this type of story line is expecting the unexpected, since Bugs has every
right to use any means at his disposal to keep Elmer from catching or
killing him (or both). Cartoons that fall into the chase subgenre usually
consist of disparate scenes in rapid succession. What’s Opera, Doc? con-
tains the expected and reassuring story details that any Wagner opera
should have, while still displaying the unpredictability for which the
Warner Bros. cartoons had become famous. By putting the two styles to-
gether, Jones can appeal to the cartoon and opera fan at the same time.
Seeing Elmer and Bugs in the same story is enough for any cartoon fan
to fathom the core narrative of the cartoon: Elmer hunting Bugs. And in
case some of us do not get the point immediately, Jones clearly indicates
the chase subplot with the opening words/arioso: “Be vewy quiet—I’m
hunting wabbits!” The subplot is more than simply just the motivation
154 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
for the story itself: the ongoing conflict between Bugs and Elmer bridges
the gaps between the five operatic episodes. Elmer’s consuming desire to
catch Bugs transcends time, place, and setting; Bugs always verbally toys
with Elmer, and then mentally and physically abuses him until a critical
moment when somebody gets “hurt.” Knowing that all this will unfold
gives the cartoon fan a sense of security; so, too, an opera devotee takes
comfort in the belief that generic norms will be maintained, though they
are norms of a different nature.
Indeed, the story must end in accordance with the audience expecta-
tions not just for a cartoon but also (as perceived by Jones) for an opera.
Christopher Small points out that all such stories “partake of the nature
of myth,” and that even the conventional “happy” ending leaves us won-
dering, “What makes people happy?”50 In this case, Elmer triumphs over
Bugs, for Jones’s notion of Wagner’s universe dictates that the story in-
volve a tragic death—even though such a death confounds the archetypal
Warner Bros. chase, in which Bugs prevails. Elmer/Siegfried carries the
lifeless Bugs/Brünnhilde off into the distance, perhaps to a funeral pyre.
Lest we forget we are watching a cartoon, Bugs breaks character and the
fourth wall to address the audience with “Well, what did you expect in
an opera? A happy ending?” A death provides the audience with what
they “expect” from a dramatic opera, while Bugs’s trickery at the expense
of death fulfills our desires that he outsmart Elmer the hunter. Everybody
is happy.
When the thrust of the opera’s narrative momentarily weakens in
the cartoon, the protagonists’ personalities as cartoon characters reen-
ergize the scene. The humor comes from the collision between their es-
tablished personas and the fantastic yet straitlaced world of Wagner,
not from the pratfalls and explosions typical to cartoons, especially those
in the vaudeville-based style of the Warner Bros. shorts. Jones apparently
felt that some sign of respect toward the composer was necessary, insist-
ing, “There are no gags in the film. We believed that a rabbit and a hunter
working with that grand music in a fully Wagnerian environment would
be funny enough in itself. But with the humor coming from personality
rather than from gags, the need to play the music properly and to make
the action logical became more emphatic.”51
The claim that there are absolutely no gags in What’s Opera, Doc? is
not quite true; more accurately (and what Jones likely meant), there are
few cartoon-based gags in the film. In his quest to preserve Wagner’s dra-
matic integrity, Jones refrains from the physical or word-based humor
that usually pervades his cartoons. Instead, he relies on the seeming mis-
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 155
match of high and low art forms to create comedic tension. As Michael
Barrier puts it, “Jones obviously respects both his principal ingredients,
Bugs Bunny and Richard Wagner. He invites his audience to sneer at nei-
ther one, but to enjoy the incongruity of Bugs Bunny in a Wagnerian set-
ting instead.”52
Those gags that do occur are not as explicit or gratuitous as in most
cartoons. For instance, as mentioned earlier, when a distressed Bugs
rhetorically repeats back Elmer’s “Kill the wabbit!” he blinks his eyes
rapidly, exactly in sync with the Valkyrie motif on the flute; thus his ges-
ture is both distraught and momentarily comic. And when Elmer con-
jures the forces of nature to “strike the wabbit,” the final and most deadly
earthly power he calls down is “Smog!”—a curse he yells at the top of
his lungs. The topical joke about the pollution in Los Angeles (especially
in the 1950s) briefly startles the audience out of the opera’s universe.53
In a gag that plays with Wagnerian convention, as Elmer stabs furiously
at Bugs’s rabbit hole, he yells out “Yo-ho-to-ho!” rather than the familiar
“Ho-yo-to-ho!” of The Valkyries. In case we think that Elmer has sim-
ply switched his syllables, he ends his onslaught with a final “Yo-ho!,”
just short of a slightly more congenial “Yoo-hoo!”
When Elmer destroys the mountains around him in retaliation for
Bugs’s drag deception (see figure 46), Jones puts the narrative perspective
of the short into question. As the mountains come crashing down, the au-
dience wonders whether the action is taking place on the stage of an opera
house or in a world of animated make-believe. We can see the falling
mountains either as a stage’s backdrop—perhaps even sets at Bayreuth—
crumbling, or as proof that Elmer indeed has the powers he claims to
wield in Wagner’s universe. The beginning of the cartoon as described
above, a title card and credits shown while the sounds of a tuning orchestra
(including bits of leitmotifs) are heard, complicates the question of inter-
pretation. Maurice Noble recalled, “We’d had a production designer that
wanted to have the proscenium arch right on stage all the time. I said,
well, to hell with that, you know, I wanted to have super grand opera.
We threw away the arch completely and immediately began writing on a
grand scale.”54 Jones also stated repeatedly that in What’s Opera, Doc?
he took two unpredictable elements (Bugs and Elmer) and simply dropped
them into the ordered world that Wagner had created.55 The audience un-
derstands that they are seeing an animated spoof on opera and all its stereo-
types; whether they believe the story is set in the Rhineland where the
Ring takes place does not matter as long as Bugs and Elmer play out their
parts to the fullest, which they do.
156 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
Perhaps one of the few stereotypes that Bugs does not take on is the
prototypical woman of opera. The roles of female characters in cartoons
are limited at best, and the use of opera and opera narratives did noth-
ing to add to them, despite the ease with which images of the loud fe-
male opera singers, or the proverbial fat lady, might be spoofed. The
Rossini and Donizetti arias mentioned above as frequently used in car-
toons are performed by men; no such famous aria for women appears.
The few women that are depicted in operatic roles are usually a hybrid
form, wearing the costume associated with Wagner’s Rhinemaidens but
singing Italian words. Occasionally we see someone performing as Car-
men, as in Chile Con Carmen (Lantz, 1930) and Carmen Get It! (MGM;
Deitch, 1962). Apparently, the use of female characters simply did not
occur to the directors. Jones once commented on the general absence of
female stars in Hollywood cartoons, “This always comes up. . . . It’s a
pity. I can only beat my breast and say that I should be nailed to the wall.
But I didn’t [consider having any female characters]. So I don’t know
how to answer that except to say I’m sorry.”56
Jones fails to mention the host of instances when male characters dress
in drag, a device he uses in all three of his opera cartoons: Long-Haired
Hare, The Rabbit of Seville, and, most extensively, What’s Opera, Doc?
He injects his characters into an unusual performance space, but he com-
pels them to adopt only the attire appropriate to their environment and
not the physical form of its usual inhabitants. For Bugs, this means as-
suming the costume of a Wagnerian diva, but not her stereotypical size.57
The horse Bugs rides while posing as Brünnhilde, however, more than
makes up for his (unusually—for a diva) svelte figure. Jones exaggerates
Bugs’s steed to the point of absurdity, enabling the bunny as Brünnhilde
to make a truly grand entrance. As already noted, Jones clearly modeled
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 157
his horse on the one that appeared in a similar scene in Herr Meets Hare,
which itself seems to have been influenced by the centaurs in the Pastoral
Symphony section of Fantasia, which in turn were inspired by classical
Greek vase paintings. In his autobiography Chuck Amuck, Jones explains:
“Missing the great pink, busty quality of the proverbial Wagnerian diva,
we invested all the fat curves we owned in Brünnhilde’s charger.” He
tells the story slightly differently in Chuck Reducks: “Since we didn’t have
a voluptuous soprano at hand, I designed a voluptuous horse as a stand-
in.”58 The horse acts as a surrogate because Jones cannot change Bugs
physically. He even gives the horse a bit of personality: at one point during
Bugs and Elmer’s ballet, Bugs hides coyly behind the horse as Elmer gives
chase playfully, while the horse looks on at their capers with a clearly
perceptible sneer (see figure 47).
WRESTLING OPERA
In his discussion of storytelling and the use of myth, Christopher Small
claims that “the historical accuracy of a myth is more or less irrelevant
to its power as paradigm.”59 Rather than striving for complete histori-
cal accuracy—using a scene directly from a Wagner opera with its original
music intact—Jones and Maltese instead go for a more entertaining ap-
proach: they create a cartoon that is culturally accurate, satisfying the
common notions of what Wagner’s operas look and sound like. Nothing
that occurs in the narrative of What’s Opera, Doc? is drawn directly from
Wagner—all the events are parodies or stereotypes—and the cartoon like-
wise almost entirely avoids using its own heritage of comedy and timing
developed over twenty-five years (rooted largely in film comedies and
vaudeville routines). That is, we can imagine the better part of the action
158 WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA
Andre: And why are you bad-mouthing opera? I know you like the music.
Florus: I do not. Take it back.
Andre: You like cartoons, right?
[Florus smiles and nods, then drops his smile.]
Florus: Is this a trick question?
WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? AND CARTOON OPERA 159
Andre: Well, cartoons are full of opera music. Remember Elmer Fudd on stage
in a little Viking hat? (Hums) Da da di daaaa da, da da di daaaa da,
da da di daaaa da.
Florus: Yeah . . .
Andre: That’s Wagner. That’s opera.
Bill: Yeah, but if you take Elmer and Bugs out of it, opera’s really boring.61
The Jump Start comic strip at the beginning of this chapter (figure 37)
offers another example of the extent to which popular notions of opera
are drawn from cartoons. We don’t know what opera Joe and his wife
Marcy are attending, and it doesn’t matter—his musical knowledge of
opera derives, as he says, completely from Bugs Bunny.
In a 1946 article, Chuck Jones foresaw the possible role his cartoons
might take: “The animated cartoon can match, enhance, make credible
the melodic fantasy of the composer. Overlapping here a little bit, I believe
that the educational system will one day demand a library for its public
schools of just such painless introductions to classic and semiclassic mu-
sic.”62 Many would argue that such exposure renders Beethoven, Mendels-
sohn, and Wagner anonymous (in cartoons, there is no time to mention
the names of the composers being spoofed), chopping up their respec-
tive works and reducing them, like a stockpot of classical melodies, down
to the barest essence of the now-defunct canon—the same short melodies
that found their way into silent film underscores only decades earlier. Yet
the music in cartoons can inspire audiences to learn more about the com-
posers caricatured and parodied. Similarly, though What’s Opera, Doc?
and cartoons like it are often accused of undercutting and weakening
classical music’s rightful place in the cultural hierarchy, in reality they
do as much to maintain music’s elevated status as do more worshipful
representations. Just as Fantasia firmly places Bach and Beethoven in the
temple of high culture, so too What’s Opera, Doc? reminds us that clas-
sical music is high art; every time we see these cartoons, we are reminded
that the object of their parody—opera—occupies a place of honor in our
culture. By focusing on music and concert hall culture as worthy sub-
jects for deflation, these cartoons more firmly set the music and specta-
cle in their high place.
A Brief Conclusion
Even a quick glance at the animation industry in our own time reveals
that a great deal has changed. With the demise of the animation units
run by or for major Hollywood companies, the power shifted to inde-
pendent animation studios that could supply the seemingly insatiable
demand for children’s television programming. In the 1970s and 1980s,
Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, DIC, Ruby-Spears, and other studios paid
little attention to (or money for) such luxuries as unique sound effects
or original music. At the same time, there was an explosion of cartoons
featuring rock bands, including Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, Josie and the
Pussycats, and Jabberjaw.1 The stock music these cartoons typically used
is a topic worthy of future investigation. Both the animation, which re-
lied on the photocopying of drawings and repetition of backgrounds ad
infinitum, and the music, which drew on stock cue libraries and generic
mood music, diminished in originality, though these cartoons were more
popular than their predecessors among consumers (a popularity due in
no small part to television’s national and eventually global reach).
A renaissance in cartoon production occurred in the late 1980s. Re-
awakened interest in the now-classic Warner Bros. cartoons led Steven
Spielberg to produce Tiny Toon Adventures, based on Warner stars and
cartoons; at the same time, networks and cable channels commissioned
entirely novel series, including Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, Animaniacs,
Batman, and Doug. Many of these went out of their way to identify
themselves—through their story lines, design characteristics, voice actors,
and music—with the animation styles of their precursors. Warner Bros.,
the producers of Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Pinky & The
Brain, among others, seemed especially interested in reviving the sound
and feel of Carl Stalling’s music, which had been reintroduced to the pub-
lic when the first Carl Stalling Project CD was released in 1990. Com-
161
162 CONCLUSION
posers like Richard Stone helped reacquaint audiences with Stalling’s style
of composing, raising their awareness of the complexities and subtle hu-
mor that pervade all of the Warner Bros. cartoon scores. The popularity
of the Carl Stalling Project and Stone’s revival and supplementation of
the melodic arsenal established by Stalling (many new tunes came into the
public domain after Stalling retired) compel us to reexamine the modern
cartoon score, which has reclaimed its role as a link between popular
culture of the present and years past—a role practically abandoned during
the 1970s and 1980s.
Meanwhile, shows like South Park, which use little synchronized under-
scoring (that is, mickey-mousing), instead turn their musical attention to
the production of showstopping musical numbers. Again, such shows
have classic Hollywood cartoons to inspire them, often using the shorts
from the old school as a source for parody; with astonishing regularity,
1930s cartoons are used as the point of departure in modern cartoons.
In fact, the first broadcast episode of South Park, “Cartman Gets an Anal
Probe,” features what amounts to an audio sample of a chorus of Owl
Jolson singing “I Love to Singa” from the 1936 cartoon of the same name:
it comes out of Eric Cartman’s mouth with brilliant results.2 By making
I Love to Singa the joke, South Park shows just how much modern ani-
mation relies on its predecessors. The cutesy-sounding music itself is cer-
tainly funny, but the actual gag rests on a joke made more than a half
century earlier.
Music does more nowadays than tell stories or provide an emotional
barometer. The employment of contemporary music written in Bradley’s
highly synchronized style, or of a modern reinterpretation of Liszt’s Sec-
ond Hungarian Rhapsody, reaffirms the continuity of music in Holly-
wood animation throughout the past century. Thematically, stories or
gags involving music are still vital; the conflict between high and low art
remains as popular a trope in cartoons now as it was when Disney made
fun of highbrow concert musicians in the early 1930s. Likewise, contem-
porary popular music has become a fundamental element in contempo-
rary cartoons. The scores for The Powerpuff Girls, for instance, are largely
driven by electronic dance beats, taking the place of the jazz combos and
orchestras that pervaded 1940s cartoons. Popular songs also feature as
a major element in the stories of many cartoons, in particular when they
are performed as part of the plot. And, of course, we can’t overlook the
road map for cartoon music drawn by Scott Bradley and Carl Stalling
some seventy-five years ago. Not only did Stalling and Bradley work as
composers in animation, but they defined its rules as they went along;
CONCLUSION 163
their impact has been so great that no one since has escaped their
influence. Time has not lessened their impact or altered the function of
cartoon music; on the contrary, it still serves as both the motivation for
gags and their accompaniment. Modern cartoons have the great advan-
tage of being able to use the better part of a century’s worth of cartoon
music history as a template for making their own gags that much funnier.
APPENDIX 1
165
166 APPENDIX 1
if you’ll pardon the expression, Walt Disney. The title of the first picture was ‘The
Galloping Gaucho.’” Then pointing to the score of the latest Warner Bros. Car-
toon, “High Diving Hare,” he said, “And I’m still at it!”
Since that first cartoon, Carl has scored, composed and conducted the music
for about six hundred animated cartoons—and that’s a record of some sort!
There’s another record in Carl’s history, the Tic-Tempo record. In fact, you
couldn’t write about Carl without mentioning the Tic-Tempo because this is his
baby.
It is a method of synchronizing a picture to a recorded tempo with mathe-
matical precision, and is used today in all studios, not only for animated car-
toons, but for live action as well. This should rate an Oscar of some sort.
By way of statistics and background we find that this only musical Stalling
was born in Lexington, Missouri on the 10th of November, 1891. He started
playing the piano (for money) at the age of fourteen, and is a graduate of the
Kansas City Conservatory of Music. He studied piano under the late Boguslawski
and pipe organ under Pietro Yon, honorary organist to the Vatican.
Carl gained recognition as feature pipe-organist and pianist in the theatres
of Kansas City and Chicago, and one time was member of Leo Forbstein’s or-
chestra. Leo Forbstein, as you all know, is Musical Director on the Warner Bros.
main lot.
It is worth noting that four [sic] men who have contributed a great deal to
the animated cartoon industry have come from Kansas City. They are: Carl
Stalling, Friz Freleng and Walt Disney.
By way of romance we find Carl meeting, falling in love, and marrying Gladys
Baldwin, who was teaching violin at the Conservatory. This was a musical nat-
ural and they have been living in perfect harmony for thirty years; that is, if you
discount the discord which occasionally creeps in at the pari-mutuel window,
which has just closed in Carl’s face—too late to place his wife’s winning wager.
Somewhere in the foothills, near Upland, California, there is a citrus ranch
and a rambling redwood house. Here it is that Carl and Gladys relax over the
weekend. (Santa Anita is midway between Hollywood and Carl’s orange grove.)
This year Carl is celebrating his forty-third year in the show business; twenty
of them being with animated cartoons, the last twelve of which have been with
Warner Bros. Cartoon Studio.
Monotonous? Listen to what Carl said to that:
“There’s no business like show business, and I get just as much of a kick out
of hearing my latest score as I did when I heard my first one, twenty years ago!”
APPENDIX 2
167
168 APPENDIX 2
mystical beauty of Debussy’s music, animated by artists of great talent, and mise
en scene by Dali! American Indian legends and the great wealth of Old World
folk-lore would provide endless subject matter both to authors and composers.
Fourth, the present rigid methods of recording, wherein we must follow a
“click track” in order to co-ordinate the music with the animation, will be aban-
doned in favor of free and flexible tempi governed by the emotional quality of
the music. There will be unlimited variation in composition, giving the composer
complete freedom of expression, and giving the music cutter a chronic headache
trying to “break down” the sound track!
Fifth, there will—or should be—no dialogue at all, for fantasy is best por-
trayed without the irritating presence of speaking voices. Furthermore, it will
have the added advantage of being equally understood in Athens or Zanzibar
and most important to the composer, it will allow the maximum of opportunity
for his music to be heard without the necessity of dubbing under the voices. What
a Utopia for the long-suffering Composer, when he actually hears his “brain
child” as he hears it in the mixing booth! (Off-stage voice: “What an optimist
you are, Scott.”)
Finally, for composers, it will require a new type of orchestral tone color, since
sound effects will be contained in the orchestration, and the possibilities will
be boundless. I have been experimenting in this field for several years but it is
still in its infancy. The composer will finally come into his own and receive equal
screen credit with the author and producer. The orchestra will, of course, be of
symphonic size and quality and the premiere will be reviewed by a music critic
instead of a gossip columnist. In brief, fellow composers, Forward March! The
world is your oyster, the sky is the limit, and the once lowly and despised slap-
stick cartoon will be your liberator.
preface . . . . . . 1967
Prof. Ingolf Dahl’s article accurately reflects my views, and the status of Cartoon
music, as of 1949. Naturally, my own opinion of music in general followed the
progress (or lack of it) of contemporary thought. That is, to a certain degree.
But they “lost” me when such things as Partitas for concrete mixer, and Alle-
mandes for piano and silence, e.g. John Cage’s “3:45”—give or take a few
seconds—were accepted as music.
However, this does not indicate that I am a reactionary in toto. My dislike
for women’s slacks, etc. has changed 180 degrees. For the current mini-skirt craze,
I quickly cry: “Vive la legs”!!
Concerning Cartoon music in the 1960’s, I can only ask, what music? The
APPENDIX 2 169
t.v. cartoons of today are 95% dialogue, and music is rarely heard at all, unless
sound effects may be called music.
Finally, for the avant-garde music student who may be weary of the squeaks
and groans, I offer a soothing panacea: Go to your piano, and play the Chopin
Mazurka in A-minor, opus 68. And welcome back to the world of beauty and
order.
Scott Bradley
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Kristin Thompson, “Implications of the Cel Animation Technique,” in The
Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 110–11.
2. Thompson, “Implications of the Cel Animation Technique,” 110.
3. For a recent evaluation of the state of film music, see Robynn J. Stilwell,
“Music in Films: A Critical Review of Literature, 1980–1996,” Journal of Film
Music 1.1 (Summer 2002): 19–61.
4. George Tootell, How to Play the Cinema Organ: A Practical Book by a
Practical Player (London: W. Paxton, n.d.), 84.
5. Edith Lang and George West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures
(Boston: Boston Music Company, 1920; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970),
35–37.
6. Erno Rapée, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925;
reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970); this work was originally published under
the title Erno Rapee’s Encyclopædia of Music for Pictures.
7. “Jazz and ‘Aesop’s Film Fables’ Good Mixers,” Motion Picture News, 2
June 1923, 2651. Michael Barrier refers to this short article in Hollywood Car-
toons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 51.
8. Sam Fox Incidental Music for News Reels, Cartoons, Pictorial Reviews,
Scenics, Travelogues, etc., 4 vols. (Cleveland: Sam Fox Publishing, 1931);
Classified Catalogue of Sam Fox Publishing Co. Motion Picture Music (Cleve-
land: Sam Fox Publishing, 1929); Sam Fox Loose Leaf Collection of Ring-Hager
Novelties for Orchestra, vol. 1 (Cleveland: Sam Fox Publishing, 1926); PianOrgan
Film Books of Incidental Music, Extracted from the World Famous “Berg” and
“Cinema” Incidental Series, 7 vols. (New York: Baldwin, n.d.).
9. Kurt London, Film Music (London: Faber and Faber, 1936; reprint, New
York: Arno Press, 1970), 149–53.
10. Stephen Handzo, “Appendix: A Narrative Glossary of Film Sound Tech-
nology,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John
Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 409.
11. Raksin did receive significant attention for his feature film scores, par-
ticularly Laura.
12. Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1977); Jon Newsom, “‘A Sound Idea’: Music for Animated Films,”
171
172 NOTES TO PAGES 7–13
1970), 36. Stalling’s copy of this book can be found in the Carl W. Stalling Pa-
pers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; while it is not inscribed
with a date, the abundance of materials in the collection from Stalling’s days as
an accompanist suggests that this book, too, dates to those years.
11. Tim Anderson, “Reforming ‘Jackass Music’: The Problematic Aesthetics
of Early American Film Music Accompaniment,” Cinema Journal 37.1 (Fall
1997): 12. See also Erno Rapée, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists
(New York: Schirmer, 1924; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1974).
12. Lang and West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures, 36.
13. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 29–30.
14. Lang and West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures, 37.
15. Anderson, “Reforming ‘Jackass Music,’” 12.
16. Charles Merrell Berg, An Investigation of the Motives for and Realiza-
tion of Music to Accompany the American Silent Film, 1896–1927 (New York:
Arno Press, 1976), 244, 199.
17. Anderson, “Reforming ‘Jackass Music,’” 14. The use of popular music
to comment on or somehow become involved with the film’s story (diegesis) has
become a standard element in the construction of modern soundtracks. See Jeff
Smith, “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema,” in
Soundtrack Available, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 407–30.
18. Barrier, Gray, and Spicer, “An Interview with Carl Stalling,” 26.
19. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 155–65; Steve Schneider, That’s All Folks!
The Art of Warner Bros. Animation (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 34–39; Hank
Sartin, “From Vaudeville to Hollywood, from Silence to Sound: Warner Bros.
Cartoons of the Early Sound Era,” in Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner
Bros. Animation, edited by Kevin S. Sandler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 69.
20. Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mis-
chief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood
Comedy, edited by Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 96.
21. Russell Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Busi-
ness in the Twentieth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 55. While other
Hollywood studios had an interest in hiring songwriters to create new music for
their musical films, Warner Bros., according to Sanjek, was “unique in the rush
by movie companies to purchase music houses[,] . . . look[ing] to the day when
it might be freed of onerous and increasingly exorbitant synchronization fees”
(i.e., fees paid for the use of music). Warner Bros. purchased Witmark in Janu-
ary 1929, and in May purchased a half interest in Remick, which also included
parts of DeSylva, Brown & Henderson; Harms; and several others (Smith, The
Sounds of Commerce, 30).
22. Contract quoted in Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 160.
23. Smith, The Sounds of Commerce, 30–31.
24. For more on Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone short subjects, see Roy
174 NOTES TO PAGES 18–21
guide to or reminder of the songs he had easy access to through Warner Bros.’
publishing concerns.
39. Adamson, “Chuck Jones Interviewed,” 135. Jones told the same anec-
dote in an earlier interview: “If it was a lady in a red dress, he’d always play ‘The
Lady in Red,’ or if a bee, he’d always play ‘My Funny Little Bumblebee,’ which
was written in 1906 [emphasis mine]. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it
didn’t—that ‘Funny Little Bumblebee’ thing was so obscure no one could make
the connection. You had to be a hundred and eight years old to even know there
was such a song” (Greg Ford and Richard Thompson, “Chuck Jones,” Film Com-
ment 11.1 [January–February 1975]: 23). The bumblebee song (properly titled)
is “Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee” (1912), which provided the title music for
the cartoon The Bee-Deviled Bruin (Jones, 1949). I emphasize Jones’s use of the
word “always” to underscore his explicit disapproval of—if not outright disdain
for—Stalling’s technique, though in fact the composer used “Be My Little Baby
Bumble Bee” only once during his tenure at Warner Bros. Jones’s taunt about
“Fingal’s Cave” is similarly inaccurate; Mendelssohn’s melody shows up a dozen
times, but never for a cave scene (in a cartoon directed by Jones or anyone else).
Moreover, “Bumble Bee” was hardly obscure: it was a tremendous hit in the Flo-
renz Ziegfeld–produced show A Winsome Widow, and was recorded that same
year to great acclaim by the hugely popular duo of Ada Jones and Billy Murray.
See Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 276; Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories, 1890–1954:
The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, Wis.: Record Re-
search, 1986), 239.
40. Freleng, Animation, 105. The color gray was hardly a safe choice, as
Stalling could have used “The Old Gray Mare.”
41. Ford and Thompson, “Chuck Jones,” 23.
42. Smith, “Popular Songs,” 416, 417.
43. The song comes from a patriotic wartime musical, Banjo Eyes (opened
25 December 1941), starring Eddie Cantor; the song was introduced by James
Farrell and chorus (information from the Playbill of the original production).
44. Smith, “Popular Songs,” 418.
45. Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy
(London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 108.
46. Anderson, “Reforming ‘Jackass Music,’” 17.
47. Will Friedwald, quoted in Greg Ford, brochure notes for Carl Stalling,
The Carl Stalling Project: Music from Warner Bros. Cartoons, 1936–1958
(Warner Bros. Records 26027, 1990), n.p.
48. Smith, “Popular Songs,” 418.
49. Chuck Jones, “What’s Up, Down Under? Chuck Jones Talks at The
Illusion of Life Conference,” in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed-
ited by Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991), 39.
50. John Robert Tebbel, “Looney Tunester,” Film Comment 28.5 (September–
October 1992): 66.
51. Barrier, Gray, and Spicer, “An Interview with Carl Stalling,” 53.
52. Irwin Chusid, brochure notes for Raymond Scott, Reckless Nights and
Turkish Twilights: The Music of Raymond Scott, the Raymond Scott Quintette
176 NOTES TO PAGES 29–34
(Sony 53028, 1992), 2. See also Chusid’s essay on Scott, “Raymond Scott: Ac-
cidental Music for Animated Mayhem,” in Goldmark and Taylor, eds., The Car-
toon Music Book, 151–60.
53. Schneider, That’s All Folks!, 54.
54. Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths,” 93–94.
55. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and
the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 70–71;
cited in Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), 135.
56. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London:
BFI Publishing; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 58.
57. Because each gag or series of gags in a cartoon is allotted only a relatively
limited amount of time, every punch line must be delivered quickly and succinctly
before the next joke occurs and the previous one is forgotten.
58. A few other examples of songs Stalling used that are listed in Erno Rapée’s
Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925; reprint, New York:
Arno Press, 1970) include Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre” for deaths or funerals,
Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” or Daniel Decatur Emmett’s “Dixie” for
the South, J. B. Lampe’s “Vision of Salome” for settings in the Middle East or
the Orient, and “Chinatown, My Chinatown” by Jean Schwartz and William
Jerome for scenes involving Chinese characters. One could develop an entire his-
tory of film-accompanying practices from the contents of Stalling’s library at the
time of his death in 1972. For the discussion here, the tremendous number of
popular songs, either in sheet music form or in arrangements for band or small
orchestra, is by far the most significant component of the collection. Music writ-
ten and published specifically for use in film scores is also present, evidenced by
the multitude of volumes from series such as “A.B.C. Dramatic Set” by Ernst
Luz, “Breil’s Dramatic Music” by J. C. Breil, and “Moving Picture Series” by
various authors. See the Stalling Papers.
59. Henry Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World
(New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 81.
60. Sapoznik, Klezmer!, 55–56. A copy of the book Twenty-five Hebrew
Songs and Dances, arranged by Maurice Gould, compiled by Julius Fleischmann
(New York: Fischer, 1912), is in the Stalling Papers, and the volume includes
“Mazel Tof.” The page on which the tune appears was torn out and later re-
placed, suggesting that this is the version used by Stalling.
61. Karl F. Cohen, Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted
Animators in America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), 72.
62. Several other cartoons deal with the Japanese during the war—notably,
The Ducktators (McCabe, 1942), Tokio Jokio (McCabe, 1943), and Bugs Bunny
Nips the Nips (Freleng, 1944)—but Stalling was not musically venturesome in
their scores. Among the Japan-oriented songs he used in them are “Kimygayo”
and “From Nippon Bridge.” For more on the musical representation of Japanese
characters in American films during World War II, see Anthony Sheppard, “An
Exotic Enemy: Anti-Japanese Musical Propaganda in World War II Hollywood,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 54.2 (Summer 2001): 303–57.
63. See chapter 5 for more on Stalling’s musical characterizations of Nazis,
especially in Freleng’s Herr Meets Hare.
NOTES TO PAGES 34–43 177
64. Six of the ten published works Stalling uses in Porky’s Moving Day are
by Zamecnik, whose work other composers for cartoons also drew on; both Frank
Marsales and Bernard Brown (who worked in 1935 between the tenures of
Marsales and Stalling) used him often. Buddy’s Pony Express (Hardaway, 1935),
scored by Brown, consists almost entirely of Zamecnik cues, including one of
Stalling’s favorites for horse chases: listed as “In the Stirrups” on the cue sheets,
it is titled “Western Scene” in volume 4 of Sam Fox Moving Picture Music (Cleve-
land: Sam Fox Publishing Company, 1924), 5.
65. For Disney and Iwerks, Stalling typically had no more than a dozen mu-
sicians to work with, although the wind players played two or more instruments.
At Warner’s, between thirty and sixty players were available to him at any one
time. In these early days, he was no doubt getting used to his new job and his sud-
den jump in output. Eight of the ten cartoons Iwerks produced in 1935 were scored
by Stalling, but in 1937, the year after he arrived at Warner Bros., he scored three
dozen cartoons (Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American An-
imated Cartoons, rev. ed. [New York: New American Library, 1987], 407, 422).
66. Much of this material can be found in the Stalling Collection.
67. Chuck Jones, Chuck Reducks: Drawing from the Fun Side of Life (New
York: Warner Books, 1996), 158.
68. While he is not formally named in this cartoon, the cat in Mouse Warm-
ing is identical in appearance and personality to Claude Cat, who appears in sev-
eral other Jones cartoons.
69. Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Car-
toonist (New York: Avon Books, 1990), 224–25.
70. The most obvious exception to Stalling’s aversion to musical repetition
is his use of the theme from Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” overture as a walk-
ing melody for the mynah bird in the half-dozen Inki cartoons.
71. Freleng had his share of pantomimic stories, but he relied much less on
facial expressions than did Jones. Particularly in his musical cartoons, in which
the score dominates the soundtrack almost entirely (Rhapsody in Rivets, 1941;
Pigs in a Polka, 1943; Rhapsody Rabbit, 1946), the visual humor created with
the characters’ bodies is histrionic rather than subtle.
72. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 490.
73. Practically the same confrontation between Bugs and Sam occurs in the
first Yosemite Sam cartoon, Hare Trigger (1945); but there (in a scene set on a
train) rather than having dramatic music the scene is completely silent, so that
the sound of their spurs can be heard as they walk toward each other.
74. Among those viewing Stalling as a postmodernist is the composer John
Zorn, probably the most vocal of all of Stalling’s supporters: “On first hearing,
Stalling’s immense musical talents are immediately apparent, and certainly all
these basic musical elements are there—but they are broken into shards: a con-
stantly changing kaleidoscope of styles, forms, melodies, quotations, and of course
the ‘Mickey Mousing.’ . . . Stalling developed this technique while playing piano
for silent films in Kansas City, honed it to a science with Disney and elevated it
to an art with Warner Bros.” (Zorn, “Carl Stalling: An Appreciation,” brochure
notes for Stalling, The Carl Stalling Project, n.p.).
75. Schneider, That’s All Folks!, 149. See also Eric O. Costello’s online en-
178 NOTES TO PAGES 44–46
cyclopedia on the Warner Bros. cartoons (The Warner Bros. Cartoon Compan-
ion, 1998, http://members.aol.com/EOCostello/ [accessed 1 June 2004]), which
is dedicated to explaining all sorts of arcane information about the series. The
bulk of its entries are devoted to explicating various intertextual references.
I did all Scott Bradley’s TOM & JERRY cartoons at M-G-M from 1936 to 1941.
Scott was an elegant composer of music for cartoons, one of the best anywhere.
He was well schooled in his craft. It seemed that at the conclusion of any picture
that was being scored, a cartoon was in the wings, waiting to be scored if a few
minutes were left over on the recording sessions. . . . Ingolf Dahl once did a treatise
on cartoon music [“Notes on Cartoon Music”], detailing all the difficulties involved.
One such difficulty would be ways one has to contract or elongate a melodic line
to fit the action. His most quoted source was Scott Bradley. Scott once confided to
me that his contract to M-G-M amounted to $10,000 a year, a shocking revelation
that to me only denigrated the music department and at the same time revealed that
the players were not the only ones being taken advantage of.
first appeared in theaters (its score was recorded on 19 February 1941). It is fair
to assume that he made them with this cartoon in mind. Obviously he was pleased
with the process and thought all cartoons should be done the same way.
34. Bradley, “Music in Cartoons,” 116.
35. “Cartoons,” Film Music Notes 1.3 (December 1941): 6.
36. E. G. Lutz, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and
Development (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1920; reprint, Bedford, Mass.:
Applewood Books, 1998), 230. Lutz also points out that “an effect like this is
easy to produce in animated cartoons.”
37. Lutz, Animated Cartoons, 225–26.
38. Avery, quoted in Joe Adamson, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1975), 190.
39. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 422.
40. Eugene Slafer, “A Conversation with Bill Hanna,” in The American Ani-
mated Cartoon, edited by Gerald and Danny Peary (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1980), 258.
41. Avery, quoted in Adamson, Tex Avery, 193.
42. John Culshaw, “Violence and the Cartoon,” Fortnightly, no. 1020 (De-
cember 1951): 834.
43. Dave Hickey, “Pontormo’s Rainbow,” in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and
Democracy (Los Angeles: Art issues. Press, 1997), 48.
44. Bradley, “Cartoon Music of the Future,” 28.
45. Bradley, interview by Barrier and Gray, 2.
46. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, edited and translated by
Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 224, 109.
47. Chion, Audio-Vision, 112.
48. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London:
BFI Publishing; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 88.
49. Chion, Audio-Vision, 122.
50. Bradley, quoted in “News Items . . . Comments,” Film Music Notes 3.3
(December 1943): n.p.
51. Steele, “Scoring for Cartoons,” 12. Bradley’s willingness to make such
a statement, particularly in a music and performance journal like Pacific Coast
Musician, demonstrates his lack of concern about offending his colleagues in the
cartoon music world, as he undoubtedly was referring to the cartoons produced
in the 1930s by the Columbia, Lantz, Terry, and Warner Bros. studios.
52. Chion, Audio-Vision, 61.
53. Chion, Audio-Vision, 13–14.
54. In addition, Bradley usually used a band arrangement of a popular tune
at the very beginning of a cartoon (following the title cards) to establish a play-
ful or boisterous mood.
55. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and
the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 146.
56. Steele, “Scoring for Cartoons,” 12.
57. Chion, Audio-Vision, 121.
58. Bradley, “Music in Cartoons,” 118.
59. Winge, “Cartoons and Modern Music,” 136–37.
182 NOTES TO PAGES 72–78
use current popular songs with their inevitably expensive licensing fees (as dis-
cussed in chapter 1).
13. The Aeolian Hall concert of 1924 is seen as the performance in which
Whiteman supposedly “made a lady out of jazz” (Ernst, “The Man Who Made a
Lady out of Jazz,” 39). Whiteman in King of Jazz reprises his role as the musician
who helps tame jazz and make it respectable. We also cannot ignore that White-
man was a white man: his race surely helped reassure uncertain white listeners.
14. Lantz would in any case have needed at least to record Whiteman for the
sequence in order to have something to animate to. It would make sense to record
the entire short sequence in one session, especially since sound recording and
mixing technology at the time was still (comparatively) primitive (Michael Bar-
rier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999], 174).
15. Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated
Cartoons, rev. ed. (New York: New American Library, 1987), 162.
16. Grant, “Jungle Nights in Harlem,” 7.
17. Walt Disney and his colleagues were the first to animate Oswald; when
Lantz took over, his character and appearance changed significantly. For more
on Oswald’s transition from Disney trickster to Lantz cutie-pie, see Barrier, Hol-
lywood Cartoons, 48–49.
In the midst of a discussion of recurring figures in African storytelling tradi-
tions, Samuel Floyd “posit[s], as have others in casual conversation, that Br’er
Rabbit later metamorphosed into Bugs Bunny, trickster hero of millions of Amer-
icans, white and black, child and adult” (Floyd, The Power of Black Music [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 29). Some of Oswald’s traits no doubt
influenced Bugs’s personality.
18. When Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising left Warner Bros. in 1933, they
took Bosko with them. In the cartoons they produced with Bosko for MGM the
somewhat indeterminate character was transformed into a black human child
who, unlike his non–Homo sapiens forebears, could clearly be thought of as hav-
ing African roots.
19. Animation historians who have investigated the presence of stereotypes
in cartoons have recorded some of the common rationalizations used to defend
them—for instance, the critic Charles Solomon’s claim that “At the time, most
people considered this style of humor both good fun and good taste” (quoted in
Terry Lindvall and Ben Fraser, “Darker Shades of Animation: African-American
Images in the Warner Bros. Cartoon,” in Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in
Warner Bros. Animation, edited by Kevin Sandler [New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1998], 123). Solomon does not explain who “most people”
might be.
20. Sampson, That’s Enough, Folks, v. See also Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulat-
toes, Mammies, and Bucks.
21. Erno Rapée, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925;
reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 64. In the category titled “American (South-
ern),” Rapée includes songs such as “The Darkville Dance” and “From the Cot-
ton Field,” as well as “Turkey in the Straw” and Septimus Winner’s “Listen to
the Mocking Bird.” The cue sheet for the Fleischer cartoon Bimbo’s Initiation
NOTES TO PAGES 84–87 185
(1932) lists “Old Zip Coon,” but that title might have referred to “Turkey in the
Straw,” the song into which “Old Zip Coon” had eventually mutated at the turn
of the century (Charles Hamm, Music in the New World [New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1983], 259–60).
22. Of course, “Sweet Georgia Brown” has continued to serve as a racial
marker in its role as the theme music for the Harlem Globetrotters, who provide
a latter-day minstrel show on the basketball court.
23. Leslie Cabarga, The Fleischer Story, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press,
1988), 63–64.
24. Among the other performers who appeared in Fleischer cartoons were
Arthur Tracy, Lillian Roth, Irene Bordoni, the Royal Samoans, Gus Edwards, the
Three X Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, Borrah Minnevitch and His Harmonica Ras-
cals, Vincent Lopez, Jimmy Dorsey, and even Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd; see
Cabarga, The Fleischer Story, 212–13, for a complete list.
25. For more on the cultural life of New York in the Fleischers’ time, see Ann
Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1995).
26. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1971), 89.
27. Cabarga, The Fleischer Story, 63.
28. LeRoi Jones [Imamu Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White
America (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963), 149.
29. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 300. In his examination of homosexual-
ity and animation, Sean Griffin observes that a wide variety of subverted cul-
tures flourished in 1920s New York: “The Prohibition era created in New York
City a vast underground of speakeasies and gin joints that allowed individuals
who had considered themselves law-abiding before Prohibition to mix with mi-
norities and outcasts from society” (Griffin, “Pronoun Trouble: The ‘Queerness’
of Animation,” Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism 15.1
[Fall 1994]: 99).
30. Others in this series from Fleischer include Cab Calloway and his or-
chestra in Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow -White (1933), and The Old Man
of the Mountain (1933); the Mills Brothers in I Ain’t Got Nobody (1932), Di-
nah (1933), and When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba (1933); and Don Red-
man and his orchestra in I Heard (1933).
31. The session players for the songs in this cartoon were Armstrong on trum-
pet and vocals; Zilmer Randolph, trumpet; Preston Jackson, trombone; George
James and Lester Boone, alto saxophone; Al Washington, tenor saxophone; Charlie
Alexander, piano; Mike McKendrick, banjo; Johnny Lindsay, bass; and Tubby
Hall, drums (Tom Lord, The Jazz Discography, vol. 1 [West Vancouver, B.C.: Lord
Music Reference, 1992], A334).
32. For more on the ubiquity of “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and other
Asian-themed Tin Pan Alley songs, see Charles Garrett, “Chinatown, Whose Chi-
natown? Defining America’s Borders with Musical Orientalism,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 57.1 (Spring 2004): 119–73.
33. Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998), 217.
Sean Griffin similarly describes Betty’s descent into the cave in Snow -White as
186 NOTES TO PAGES 88–94
“much like the entrance to a speakeasy, dark and secret” (Griffin, “Pronoun
Trouble,” 99).
34. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 13.
35. I Heard, featuring Don Redman and his orchestra, takes place at a min-
ing camp. The first half of the cartoon occurs nearby in Betty’s Tavern, but the
song’s chorus is heard only when Bimbo, mining deep underground, comes upon
a cavern inhabited by a skeleton and several ghosts (or spooks), singing “I Heard.”
36. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 90.
37. On the derivation of “tom” from “Uncle Tom,” see Bogle, Toms, Coons,
Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 4–7.
38. Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins, 207.
39. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 255.
40. The title of the cartoon clearly plays on the common pronunciation of
the South Pacific island Pago Pago with a nasalized g (see Merriam Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.).
41. Several elements of Pingo-Pongo appear in other cartoons. The Mills
Brothers and Fats Waller combination had already been seen in Clean Pastures
(Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1937; discussed in this chapter). Bob Clampett would
use the exact same gag of a switch from refined dancing to hot jitterbugging in
Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs (Warner Bros., 1943): So White and the Prince
first dance a courtly tune (to the tune of the nineteenth-century ballad “Long,
Long Ago” by T. H. Bayley) before switching quickly to a more contemporary
song and style (“Nagasaki”).
42. The conflation of ethnicities or cultural groups in film music is not limited
to cartoons. For articles on the musical depictions of Native Americans and Asians
in film and in Western music in general, see Michael Pisani, “‘I’m an Indian Too’:
Creating Native American Identities in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century
Music,” in The Exotic in Western Music, edited by Jonathan Bellman (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998), 218–57; Claudia Gorbman, “Drums along
the L.A. River: Scoring the Indian,” in Westerns: Films through History, edited by
Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 177–95; and Anthony Sheppard, “An
Exotic Enemy: Anti-Japanese Musical Propaganda in World War II Hollywood,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 54.2 (Summer 2001): 303–57.
43. Sampson’s chronicle of black images in cartoons, That’s Enough, Folks,
confirms the ubiquity of the jungle portrayal of jazz’s origins.
44. An all-black vocal jazz/rhythm group similar to the Mills Brothers, known
as the Four Blackbirds, recorded the backing vocals for many cartoon sound-
tracks, including Clean Pastures and The Isle of Pingo-Pongo. One member of
this group—possibly Leroy Hurte—also did the imitations of the famous music
personalities. My thanks to Keith Scott for providing this information.
45. Hank Sartin, “From Vaudeville to Hollywood, from Silence to Sound:
Warner Bros. Cartoons of the Early Sound Era,” in Sandler, ed., Reading the
Rabbit, 75. Sartin makes some very compelling arguments about the similarities
between Hollywood musicals and the early sound cartoon, as well as the great
debt that the storytelling practices in cartoons owe to vaudeville conventions.
46. Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 306–7.
NOTES TO PAGES 94–103 187
47. “Swing for Sale” was originally featured in a 1930 Vitaphone short of
the same name, sung by Hal LeRoy.
48. Hamm, Music in the New World, 129.
49. We can see a similar relationship between jazz and hell in the Disney short
Goddess of Spring (Jackson, 1934), which tells the story of Hades and Perse-
phone. A balladlike song introduces the “goddess of spring,” featuring a high
tenor voice. When Hades takes Persephone down to his kingdom, he sings to
her, “With this crown, I make you queen of Hades. Hi-dey Hades!” The latter
phrase clearly alludes to Cab Calloway and his catchphrase “hi-de-ho.” Hades’
little devil henchman, all red and black, with black faces, green eyes, and pitch-
forks, sing a song to “Hi-dey Hades” around a geyser spurting lava—this in stark
contrast to the flowers, birds, and little wood elves that grace Persephone’s do-
main. My thanks to Ray Knapp for bringing this short to my attention.
50. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 68.
51. Cohen, Forbidden Animation, 29.
52. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 342.
53. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 68.
54. Grant, “Jungle Nights in Harlem,” 8.
55. The “world” to which Fats travels is “Wackyland,” the wonderful never-
never land first seen in Clampett’s 1938 cartoon Porky in Wackyland.
56. For another take on salvation vs. redemption in this and other Holly-
wood cartoons, see Richard J. Leskosky, “The Reforming Fantasy: Recurrent
Theme and Structure in American Studio Cartoons,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 24
(Fall 1989): 53–66.
57. Although the cartoon’s racism has rendered it largely unseen for the past
twenty-five years, many animation and film historians agree that its animation
and timing make Coal Black among the best cartoons ever produced at Warner
Bros.
58. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 439. Barrier also points out that the stu-
dio management turned down Clampett’s request not to have the Warner Bros.
orchestra record the score, though a trumpet player from a black band did per-
form the solo for the cartoon’s finale.
59. Keith Scott, communication with author, 27 April 2003.
60. Among the notable artists who released “The Five O’Clock Whistle” were
Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, and Duke Ellington (all in 1940, for Decca, Blue-
bird, and Victor, respectively).
61. For further discussion of this idea of the trumpet, see Gabbard, Jammin’
at the Margins, 138–59.
62. For a discussion of this cartoon, see Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 3–4.
63. In The Singing Kid, Jolson introduces “I Love to Singa” by singing it on
the balcony of his penthouse apartment. His accompanist is Cab Calloway and
his orchestra, who just happen to be playing on an adjacent penthouse balcony,
dressed to the nines. Even Calloway cannot manage to make Jolson’s rendition
more than tepid. All three of Calloway’s shorts for the Fleischer studio, show-
ing a very different image of the popular bandleader, had already been released
(one in 1932, the others in 1933).
64. In the cartoon Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears (Warner Bros.; Freleng,
188 NOTES TO PAGES 104–9
1944), a trio of bears (clarinet, bass, and piano) are shown jamming in their home
(on the Raymond Scott tune “Twilight in Turkey”) until each instrument in turn
catches fire, literalizing the idea of “hot jazz” and the notion of a player “burn-
ing up.”
65. Fifteen years earlier, Walter Lantz produced a “Three Little Pigs do jazz”
short titled The Hams That Couldn’t Be Cured. It opens with Algernon Wolf
about to be hanged for trying to kill the three little pigs. Pleading with a noose
around his neck, he cries, “I’ll tell you what really happened.” In a flashback we
see the wolf’s life as a simple, law-abiding music teacher. The pigs arrive at his
house to take lessons, walking in with a trumpet, trombone, and a clarinet and
stating, “We want youse to learn us to play music.” The speech of the uncouth
pigs is rough, with a smattering of jive; the first commands the wolf, “Shoot the
tune to us, goon!” After the wolf plays the opening arpeggio of the second
Kreutzer etude on the piano, the pigs turn it into a boogie-woogie tune. They
play on every instrument in the place, including tuba, drums, and piano. One
pig plays clarinet in a fishbowl, making bubbles that float away while another
plays a tune on them; as he hits the bubbles with mallets, they make the sound
of a vibraphone. The pigs corner the wolf and continue to play until their mu-
sic literally blows the roof off the place. As in Three Little Bops, the wolf can-
not play the right kind of music: that is, the pigs cannot appreciate the sounds
he is producing, and therefore reject him.
66. The wolf’s ejection from the clubs in Three Little Bops reminds me of a
story told by Charlie Haden, the bass player who played on most of Ornette Cole-
man’s earliest (and most controversial) albums on Atlantic Records, about the
first time he saw Coleman play: “This guy came up on stage and asked the mu-
sicians if he could play, and started to sit in. He played three or four phrases,
and it was so brilliant, I couldn’t believe it—I had never heard any sound like
that before. Immediately the musicians told him to stop playing, and he packed
up his horn” (quoted by John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: The Harmolodic Life
[London: Quartet Books, 1992], 44; Litweiler is quoted in the brochure notes for
Ornette Coleman, Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings
[Rhino Records 71410, 1993], 8). Others, David Ake points out, were not so
taken with Coleman’s music as Haden; he specifically mentions an incident in
which the drummer Max Roach reacted to Coleman’s playing with physical vi-
olence (Ake, Jazz Cultures [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001], 63).
67. Hamm, Music in the New World, 363.
68. I am referring here not to films that used popular songs or jazz or big band
tunes within the narrative or the film’s underscore, but rather to films that consis-
tently incorporated elements of the jazz style and sound into the score as a whole.
3. The opposite logic dominated the selection of music in the spate of Hol-
lywood feature films released in the 1930s and ’40s that fetishized life in the con-
cert hall. They showcased the performance, mainly on the piano, of famous works
of music, as featured soloists (from Ignace Paderewski to Gracie Allen) displayed
their skills at the keyboard. The more bombastic or intense the piece, the better.
Thus among the works found in these films are longer pieces by composers such
as Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, as well as excerpts from operas by Mozart and
Verdi. For a detailed discussion of this film subgenre, see Ivan Raykoff, “Dreams
of Love: Mythologies of the ‘Romantic’ Pianist in Twentieth-Century Popular
Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2001).
4. I recently saw the film A Christmas Story (1983), which uses “Winter-
märchen” in a scene of comic and melodramatic pathos clearly modeled (in part)
on similar scenes in cartoons.
5. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988),
130–31.
6. Some examples of plots derived from the pieces named by Levine: the first
half of A Corny Concerto (Warner Bros.; Clampett, 1943) is a Fantasia-spoofing
setting of Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz, which is also the featured piece in The
Blue Danube (MGM; Harman, 1939); several of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances
are the only music used in Pigs in a Polka (Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1943); and the
second of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies is the featured work in Bars & Stripes
(Columbia, 1931), Dipsy Gypsy (Paramount; Pal, 1941), Rhapsody in Rivets
(Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1941), Rhapsody Rabbit (Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1946),
The Cat Concerto (MGM; Hanna and Barbera, 1947), and Magic Fluke (UPA;
Hubley, 1949).
7. Friz Freleng with David Weber, Animation: The Art of Friz Freleng (New-
port Beach, Calif.: Donovan Publishing, 1994), 127.
8. Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A
Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons (New York: Henry Holt,
1989), 268–69.
9. In his quest to employ modernist music in cartoons, Scott Bradley defied
the unwritten rule for catchy tunes, often using twelve-tone scales much as Stalling
might have used a phrase from Liszt or Rossini. Bradley’s scales may be consid-
ered “gestures” in that they are short, unique phrases matched specifically with
a particular action, but they lacked the cultural associations typical of the Ro-
mantic melodies that were more common in film scores and radio programs. With-
out this extramusical resonance, audiences probably did not identify the avant-
garde phrases as anything other than unusually precise mickey-mousing.
10. Reginald M. Jones, Jr., The Mystery of the Masked Man’s Music: A Search
for the Music Used on “The Lone Ranger” Radio Program, 1933–1954 (Metuchen,
N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 5. Jones quotes James Jewell, the first director of
The Lone Ranger, describing how the Rossini overture was chosen: “It was
actually a tossup between March of the Light Brigade and the William Tell with
its inspiring fanfare and ominous galloping movement suggested by the storm
scene. Of course, Rossini won out and the rumbling, ever-increasing cadence and
roar of the brewing storm became a gallop whether or not it was intended as
190 NOTES TO PAGES 113–19
such.” Jones believes that “March of the Light Brigade” was likely Jewell’s mis-
nomer for von Suppé’s “Light Cavalry Overture.”
11. Chuck Jones, “Music and the Animated Cartoon” (1946), in The Car-
toon Music Book, edited by Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Cap-
pella Books, 2002), 96.
12. Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1987), 231–32 (brackets his).
13. Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 232. Adorno elaborated on this no-
tion in great detail in the book he coauthored (though initially without credit)
with the composer Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947).
14. Chuck Jones, “Music and the Animated Cartoon,” unpublished type-
script, Music and Contemporary Life Papers (Box 3, Item 54), Special Collec-
tions Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
15. Among the cartoons that begin with Bugs singing are Bugs Bunny Nips
the Nips (Freleng, 1944; “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat”), Hare Trigger
(Freleng, 1945; “Go Get the Ax”), Gorilla My Dreams (McKimson, 1948; “Trade
Winds”), Hare Splitter (Freleng, 1948; “If I Could Be with You (One Hour
Tonight)”), A-Lad-In His Lamp (McKimson, 1948; “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold
Ground”), and Rabbit Every Monday (Freleng, 1951; “It’s Magic”).
16. Other cartoons in this vein include The Band Concert and Music Land
(both Disney, 1935), I Love to Singa (Warner Bros.; Avery, 1936), and Dixieland
Droopy (MGM; Avery, 1954).
17. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 232.
18. Philip Brophy, “The Animation of Sound,” in The Illusion of Life: Es-
says on Animation, edited by Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications,
1991), 97.
19. Viewing the scene more closely, I noticed on the wall inside Giovanni
Jones’s home a reproduction (or the original—who knows what Chuck Jones in-
tended?) of Henri Rousseau’s 1897 painting La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleep-
ing Gypsy), demonstrating that Jones (both the singer and the cartoon’s direc-
tor) is firmly entrenched in the highbrow world.
20. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 54–56. The most famous example of this plot is the assim-
ilation of music of the New World presented in Al Jolson’s film The Jazz Singer
(1927)—the film that helped usher in the sound era. Cartoons that use this same
story line include The Oompahs (UPA; Cannon, 1952), Music Land, and I Love
to Singa (Warner Bros.; Avery, 1936), the animated version of The Jazz Singer.
See also my discussion of I Love to Singa in chapter 3.
21. Hank Sartin, “From Vaudeville to Hollywood, from Silence to Sound:
Warner Bros. Cartoons of the Early Sound Era,” in Reading the Rabbit: Explo-
rations in Warner Bros. Animation, edited by Kevin Sandler (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 67–85.
22. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 140.
23. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listen-
ing (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 24.
24. Small, Musicking, 23.
NOTES TO PAGES 120–28 191
He ends on the melody to “Largo al Factotum,” which goes on for another fifteen
seconds. The Donizetti, usually performed by an ensemble, generally leads to some
kind of gag involving the singers; for instance, in Back Alley Oproar (Warner
Bros.; Freleng, 1948), the cartoon ends with the death of caterwauling Sylvester,
whose nine lives all ascend to heaven singing the sextet. The short is a remake
of Notes to You (Warner Bros.; Freleng, 1941), which ends with the same gag.
10. David Huckvale, “The Composing Machine: Wagner and Popular Cul-
ture,” in Tambling, ed., A Night in at the Opera, 134.
11. Joe Adamson, The Walter Lantz Story (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1985), 144.
12. Few cartoons take place entirely in an operatic narrative space. In the
mid- to late 1940s, Paul Terry produced a series of cartoons performed with an
operetta-style score.
13. Reading a plot summary, however detailed, is no substitute for examin-
ing the work itself. What’s Opera, Doc? is included on a recently released DVD,
Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, vol. 2 (Warner Home Video DVD31284,
2004). The complete original soundtrack can be found on the two-CD collec-
tion of songs from the Warner Bros. cartoons from Rhino Records, That’s All
Folks! Cartoon Songs from Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes (R2 74271, 2001).
14. This image directly refers to the demon Tchernobog in the Mussorgsky
“Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia (Disney, 1940), one of the many
allusions made by the Warner Bros. directors and animators to their competitors.
15. Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1994), 39–41.
16. Kate Hevner Mueller, Twenty-seven Major American Symphony Orches-
tras: A History and Analysis of Their Repertoires, Seasons 1842–43 through
1969–70 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 380; John H. Mueller,
The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1951), 188.
17. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 301–2.
18. Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: W. W. Norton,
1983), 294.
194 NOTES TO PAGES 141–43
Daffy (Tashlin, 1943), Russian Rhapsody (Clampett, 1944), and Dumb Patrol
(Harman and Ising, 1931). The “heroes” of Dumb Patrol are not Nazis but Ger-
man soldiers in general, taking part in an unspecified war (by implication, World
War I). That Frank Marsales, the original composer at Warner Bros., scored Dumb
Patrol indicates that the association of “Ach du lieber Augustin” with Germans
was not limited to Stalling; further evidence is the song’s listing under “German”
in Rapée’s Encyclopedia.
28. As explained in chapter 4, Beethoven’s “da-da-da-daaah,” which rhyth-
mically echoes the letter V in Morse code, came to signify victory; it plays this
role in several Warner Bros. cartoons, including The Fifth-Column Mouse, Ding
Dog Daddy (Freleng, 1942), and Scrap Happy Daffy (Tashlin, 1943).
29. Freleng’s Herr Meets Hare cartoon clearly influenced What’s Opera, Doc?,
but Freleng himself apparently gleaned some visual inspiration for his cartoon
from a 1943 Disney short, Education for Death, adapted loosely from Gregor
Ziemer’s 1941 text Education for Death: The Making of a Nazi. One sequence
of the film describes the Nazis’ version of the story of Sleeping Beauty, who is
revealed to be a characterization of the German homeland (Germania), a rather
large and quite amorous Brünnhilde, making fun (in part) of Hermann Göring.
The prince in armor who rides to her rescue removes his helmet, revealing that
he is actually Hitler. The music for this sequence relies largely on the Ride of the
Valkyries; Germania’s responses to Hitler’s incoherent ravings are to screech “Heil
Hitler” to the tune of the Valkyries’ “Ho-yo-to-ho!”
30. Production notes, Chuck Jones Collection, Warner Bros. Corporate
Archive, Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, California.
31. Huckvale, The Composing Machine, 124.
32. Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden
Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 542.
33. Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated
Cartoons, rev. ed. (New York: New American Library, 1987), 268. Noble is re-
ferring to the scene in which Elmer becomes infuriated with Bugs and calls the
elements of nature down upon his enemy; as he yells out “I’ll KILL the wabbit,”
the normally colored scene is suddenly flushed with bright magenta on Elmer
and deep purple in the background, a startling and dramatic change.
34. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 543. Jones told Barrier that he “was so fa-
miliar with the characters” that he could “lay out a Road-Runner in two weeks
or less.”
35. Jerry Beck, ed., The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Anima-
tion Professionals (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1994), 31.
36. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 542. Looney Tunes: Golden Collection,
vol. 2, which contains What’s Opera, Doc?, includes an audio channel dedicated
to the voice artists in that cartoon—Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan—including
some retakes and outtakes from the recording session.
37. Jones, Chuck Reducks, 159.
38. The rotoscope was a device invented by Max Fleischer. It projects film
onto a surface one frame at a time, allowing the animator to trace the outline of
a figure in each image and thus to give the animation a seemingly natural effect.
39. Jones had actually planned an elaborate gag for this short sequence that
196 NOTES TO PAGES 149–55
was not included in the final film. “Elmer’s skirt is made of short metal slats, and
when he is jabbing the hole, his head is at one point lower than his feet, causing
the skirt to turn over one slat at a time. I envisaged the slats making a metallic
musical scale as they flipped over, slat by slat—do, re, mi, fa, so, la—but we never
recorded it, and I miss that sound every time” (Jones, Chuck Reducks, 162).
40. Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film, 105.
41. Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Stud-
ies, 1895–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 198–206; Rapée,
Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures, 387. The accounting of how many times
Rienzi and other Wagner pieces appear is drawn from my research on the cue
sheets for these cartoons.
42. Chuck Jones, “Music and the Animated Cartoon” (1946), in The Cartoon
Music Book, edited by Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Cappella
Books, 2002), 98.
43. Jones, Chuck Reducks, 159; Jones, interview by author. According to
the animation historian Greg Ford, for years Jones had no idea that the music
that accompanied his Road Runner and Coyote cartoons to such great success
was actually “The Dance of the Comedians” from Smetana’s The Bartered
Bride, not an original Stalling composition (Ford, communication with author,
2002).
I call the aphorism a “misquotation” because what Jones attributes to Twain
is actually Twain quoting another humorist, Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye: “The late
Bill Nye once said, ‘I have been told that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds’”
(Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine [New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1924], 1:338).
44. Huckvale, “The Composing Machine,” 130.
45. Jones, Chuck Reducks, 157.
46. Jaime Weinman, “What’s Up, Chuck?” Salon.com, 6 June 2000 http://
dir.salon.com /ent / feature /2000/06/06/chuck_jones/ index.html?sid=806031
(accessed 22 October 2004).
47. David Schroeder, Cinema’s Illusions, Opera’s Allure: The Operatic Impulse
in Film (New York: Continuum, 2002), 227.
48. Philip Brophy, “The Animation of Sound,” in Cholodenko, ed.,The Illusion
of Life, 99.
49. “The Ride of the Valkyries” also appeared as music accompanying death
and warfare in Music Land (Jackson, 1935), one of Disney’s Silly Symphonies.
When the strings (classical music) go to war with the brass and reeds (jazz and
swing), the queen of the strings fires her cannon at the enemy by playing “The
Ride” on the pipe organ.
50. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listen-
ing (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 101.
51. Jones, Chuck Reducks, 157.
52. Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 542.
53. According to Greg Ford (communication with author, 2000), Arthur Q.
Bryan, who created and who alone voiced the character of Elmer until his death
in 1958, performed all his role in What’s Opera, Doc?—except for the word
“smog,” which was shouted by Mel Blanc (who also performed Bugs’s voice).
NOTES TO PAGES 155–62 197
54. Maurice Noble, interview by Greg Ford and Margaret Selby, in “Chuck
Jones: Extremes and Inbetweens—A Life in Animation,” Great Performances,
Public Broadcasting System, 22 November 2000.
55. Chuck Jones, interview by Greg Ford and Margaret Selby, in “Chuck
Jones: Extremes and Inbetweens—A Life in Animation”; Jones, interview by
author.
56. Jones, “What’s Up, Down Under?” 64.
57. For more on Bugs Bunny and drag, see Sean Griffin’s “Pronoun Trouble:
The ‘Queerness’ of Animation,” Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television
Criticism 15.1 (Fall 1994): 95–109; and Kevin Sandler, “Gendered Evasion: Bugs
Bunny in Drag,” in Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Anima-
tion, edited by Kevin Sandler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1998), 154–71.
58. Jones, Chuck Amuck, 207; Jones, Chuck Reducks, 165.
59. Small, Musicking, 101.
60. Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 304–19.
61. The remainder of this scene is quite telling as well. In response to Bill’s
claim that opera without Bugs and Elmer is boring, Andre says, “Boring? Bizet’s
Carmen has a knife fight. Puccini’s Butterfly commits hari-kari. Strauss’s Salome
kisses a head that is not attached to a body. And she’s naked.” My thanks to the
writer of this episode, Susan Dickes, and to Renee Kurtz and Erika Weinstein at
the William Morris Agency, for providing me with an excerpt from the original
script to this episode (#221) of The Jeff Foxworthy Show (NBC, 28 April 1997).
62. Jones, “Music and the Animated Cartoon,” 97.
A BRIEF CONCLUSION
1. For more on rock cartoons, see Jake Austen, “Rock ’n’ Roll Cartoons,”
in The Cartoon Music Book, edited by Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chi-
cago: A Cappella Books, 2001), 173–91; see also Kim Cooper and David Smay,
eds., Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent
Pop, from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001).
2. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” South Park,
Comedy Central, 13 August 1997. On I Love to Singa (Warner Bros.; Avery,
1936), see the discussion in chapter 3.
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210 BIBLIOGRAPHY
213
214 INDEX
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 159 83–84, 86, 94, 105–6; songs of,
Back Alley Oproar (Freleng), 153, 193n9 83–84, 96, 105–6
Ballet, 56–57, 144, 147–48, 157 “Blackout” gags, 37, 74
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 148 Blanc, Mel, 196n53
The Band Concert (Jackson), 116–17, Bland, James, 96
190n16 Blimele (Mogulesko and Lateiner), 32
Baraka, Amiri, 85 Blue Danube Waltz (Strauss), 189n6
Barbera, Joe, 51–52, 58, 60–62, 134 Blues, 79
Barber of Seville (Culhane), 135 “Blues in the Night,” 27, 100
The Barber of Seville (Rossini), 107. See Bogle, Donald, 88, 96–97, 102
also “Largo al Factotum” Booby Hatched (Tashlin), 27
Barney Bear, 55, 69 Boogie woogie. See Jazz: boogie woogie
Barrier, Michael, 16, 19, 39, 59, 73, 74, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company
97, 122, 125, 128, 146, 155, 178n2, “B” (Lantz), 102
179n9, 180n23 Boogie Woogie Man (Culhane), 102
Bars & Stripes, 189n6 Boogie Woogie Sioux (Lovy), 102
Bar sheets, 20–21, 52, 64 Bosko: at MGM, 55, 184n18; at Warner
The Bartered Bride (Smetana), 26, 39, Bros., 83, 105
196n43 Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, 31–32
Bartók, Béla, 45 Boulevardier from the Bronx (Freleng),
Batman, 161 35
Baton Bunny (Jones), 35, 120, 121, 123, Bowery Theatre, 140
127 Bradley, Scott, 46; approach to humor,
Bayley, T. H., 186n41 53; biography, 45–47, 75–76,
Bayreuth, 155. See also Wagner, Richard 178nn1,5, 180n23; and chase
Beautiful Galatea (von Suppé), 109 music, 54–55; compared to Carl
Bebop. See Jazz: bebop Stalling, 17, 47–55, 57; composi-
The Bee-Deviled Bruin (Jones), 175n39 tional style, 51–55, 162, 174n33;
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 41, 109–10, 128, concert music, 50, 57; feature
140, 143, 159, 189n3, 195n28; film scores, 47, 49–50, 54; illus-
Fifth symphony and World War II, trative scoring style, 44, 63–67; at
109, 143, 195n28; Sixth symphony, MGM, 44, 179n20; and mickey-
“Pastoral,” 130, 157 mousing, 63–64, 69, 72, 189n9;
Bel canto. See Opera: bel canto and modern music, 8, 49–50, 70–
Bellini, Vincenzo, 135 73, 182nn62,63, 189n9; orches-
Belwin (publishing house), 110 tration style, 48–49, 53–54, 55;
“Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee,” 175n39 possibly at Iwerks, 45–46; pref-
“Be My Love,” 74 erence for original music, 44; repu-
Benshoff, Harry, 130 tation, 44, 178n1, 180n21; salary,
Berg, Charles, 15–16 180n21; scoring process, 51–54,
Bernie, Ben, 84 62; theories on cartoon music, 47–
Bernstein, Leonard, 49 50, 55–56, 62–67, 167–69, 179n17,
Betty Boop, 86–90, 99; interactions with 180n33; use of MGM-owned songs,
black men, 88; and stereotypical 67; use of popular music, 52–53,
plotlines, 87–88 55, 67–68, 181n54; use of string
Betty Boop’s Big Boss (Fleischer), 31–32 instruments, 54; use of themes, 68–
Big band music, 8, 81, 93, 99. See also 69; use of Wagner’s music, 194n22;
Jazz and violence, 44, 61; work with
Billboard (periodical), 10 Hanna and Barbera, 52–55, 61–62,
Bill Haley and His Comets, 54 73; work with Tex Avery, 73–75
Bimbo’s Initiation (Fleischer), 184n21 Brahms, Johannes, 2, 45, 107, 109–10,
The Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 142, 140, 189n6
150 Breen, Joseph I., 97
Bishop, Henry Rowley, 55 Breil, J. C., 142, 176n58
Bisociation, 22–23, 26 “Bridal March,” 150, 194n22. See also
Blackboard Jungle (Brooks), 54 Lohengrin
Blackface minstrelsy: characteristics of, “British Grenadiers,” 74
INDEX 215
logue plots, 91–92; use of Warner Whole-tone music. See Bradley, Scott:
Bros.–owned songs, 17–21, 53, 84, and modern music
93–94, 97–99, 173n21, 174n38; Williams, Esther, 54
vaudeville influence on, 30, 154, Williams, John, 49
157; voice artists, 93; and World William Tell overture (Rossini), 8, 31, 39,
War II, 143; writing style, 16–21, 112–13, 189n10
35–42, 86, 121, 129, 145, 152, Willie the Whale, 130
153. See also Looney Tunes; Merrie Willner, Hal, 10
Melodies Winge, John, 54, 71
Warnow, Mark, 29 Winner, Septimus, 55, 184n21
Watson, Leo “Zoot,” 100 “Wintermärchen,” 109, 189n4
Waxman, Franz, 73 Witmark & Sons (publishing house), 17,
“We Did It Before (And We Can Do It 110, 173n21
Again),” 23 Woody Woodpecker, 135
Weinman, Jaime, 151 Work, Henry Clay, 33
Wells, Paul, 87 World War I, 195n27
“We’re Off to See the Wizard,” 67 World War II, 23, 29, 33–34, 44, 60,
West, George, 4, 13–15, 78–80 100–101, 109, 142–45, 194n22.
Westby, James, 179n20 See also Allied forces; Axis powers;
West Coast jazz. See Jazz: West Coast Disney studio: and World War II;
Western films, 39–42 Nazis
What’s Opera, Doc? (Jones), 35, 132–59;
dancing in, 147–48; and Gesamt- “Yankee Doodle,” 183n12
kunstwerk, 151; inspiration for, The Yellow Cab Man (Donohue), 54
143–45, 152, 157, 195n29; “Kill Yiddish theater, 32
the wabbit!” 136–37, 148, 149, Yodeling, 91
152–53, 155; as opera parody, 145; Yosemite Sam, 19, 177n73
plot synopsis, 136–40; production “You and You,” 143
issues, 145–46; “Return My Love,” You Ought to Be in Pictures (Freleng),
138, 149; role of music, 146–51; 193n9
soundtrack, 146; story construction, Your Hit Parade, 29
151; unused gags, 145, 195n39
Wheeler, Clarence, 6 Zamecnik, John Stepan, 5, 34–35, 177n64
“When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” Zampa (Hérold), 150
89 Ziemer, Gregor, 195n29
“When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the “Zip Coon,” 84, 185n21. See also “The
Tuba,” 114 Turkey in the Straw”
Whiteman, Paul, 80–84, 183n12; style Zoot Cat (Hanna and Barbera), 99
of jazz, 81–83, 104, 184n13 Zorn, John, 177n74
Whitney, John, 6 Zurke, Bob, 103