What's Up, Doc? Whatever happened to Saturday Morning Cartoon music?
"Overture, curtain, lights... this is it, the height of heights... and oh, what heights we'll hit, on with the show this is it!" -Warner Bros.
"Saturday Morning cartoons SUCK!" the 12-year-old said when I asked her why she didn't park herself in front of the television on the first morning of the weekend. She promptly booted up her laptop and started playing a video game.
I cringed at the coarseness of the language, but after a moment's thought I had to ask myself, "Who could blame her? Have you sat in front of Sushi Pac or Qubo, the Saturday morning fare of the 21st Century?" The beloved Saturday mornings of my youth have degenerated to hitherto unknown depths of dreck for our grandkids.
We 70 million baby boomers owned Saturday mornings in the 60’s and 70’s. The whole world seemed centered on our wants and needs. Though a bomb might fail to get us out of bed by 7 a.m. on a school day, we were all up, bright-eyed and rarin' to go by 6:30 every Saturday morning.
Jacked-up on glorious bowls of pure sugar nuggets in milk, we consumed hours of animated ecstasy a'la pajama. It's iconic boomer culture, the Saturday morning cartoon block. From Roy Rodgers and Trigger, the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, to The Flintstones, Jetsons and American Bandstand, each of the three (count 'em... three!) television networks competed for our undivided attention, so that advertisers could subvert childish desires while parents slept in.
As I think about it, this is also where I got much of my early musical education. I didn't learn how we play musical instruments from cartoons, but I did get schooled on how the music can play us.
Raptly attentive, all senses working overtime, the soundtrack to Saturday morning was punctuated by insanely addictive commercial refrains like "Slinky" and "Lucky Charms" et. al, as it carried us across the West with charging bugles accompanied by full orchestra... through the stone-age with the comedic xylophone twinkles "of Fred's fantastic feet" and full orchestra... over the surreal hills and dales of Warner Bros. Land with Bugs, Porky, Daffy and Elmer, again, accompanied by the tympani, piccolos & bassoons of the full orchestra.
Truly, no expense was spared when it came to quality music production of these features, as they were originally made for the more sophisticated movie theatre audiences of the previous generation. Part of the magic of our Saturday mornings was in the fact that our parents, once they finally got out of bed, enjoyed many of these gems as much as we did!
Take the "Merrie Melodys" for example. Created in the 30’s, they were some of the first music videos in that their primary purpose was to sell songs from the extensive Warner Bros. catalog to the 'young people' of the day. Those songs became touch points for both generations; as 'pop' songs for our folks and 'children's songs' to us.
If one man could be said to have set the musical standards for these cartoons, he'd have to be the friend of the young Walt Disney and fellow innovator, Carl Stalling. With Disney, Stalling helped create the 'Silly Symphonies' before going to Warner Studios where he was given carte blanche access to their music catalog and session musicians to compose for the Looney Tunes series that made such big stars of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and of course, Bugs Bunny in the 40's and 50's.
Tho in this period the focus moved from 'song' based to 'star character' based productions, Stalling kept the music in the foreground. He was a master of mixing and matching musical styles with quick changes dictated by action sequences in the animation, and used popular song titles that described the action to add depth of meaning to them. He was masterfully adept at the art of 'musical punning.' Here are a few examples...
Any scene depicting complex mechanics, like those of the classic "Home of the Future", would have Raymond Scott https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Raymond_Scott
"Powerhouse https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Powerhouse_(song) " playing (RUSH later did a great version of this modern classic). A beautiful woman would always sashay into a room to "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/You_Must_Have_Been_
a_Beaut iful_Baby ". A character overcome by demon-brew would stagger to "How Dry I Am https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/How_Dry_I_A m ". At a lunch counter, "A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich, And You". For a farm scene "Turkey in the Straw". A shot of a home, such as Elmer's cabin in Rabbit Seasoning https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Rabbit_Seasoning , required "There's No Place Like Home https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Home!_Sweet_Home!". A character waking up would be accompanied by Edvard Grieg https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Ed vard_Grieg 's "Morning Mood https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Morning_Mood " every time. Sudden wealth or good fortune demanded Harry Warren https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Harry_Warren 's "We're in the Money" and the slightest reference to "going West" called for a breakneck paced rendition of Buddy DeSylva https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Buddy_DeSylva 's "California, Here I Come https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/California,_Here_I_ Come ". In doing so, he gave our generation literacy in relation to The Great American Songbook. "Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the WAAAAABit!" - Elmer Fudd in "What's Opera Doc?"
Stalling also loved the juxtaposition of 'high brow' classical music forms with the zany fare of cartoons. Set-pieces like "The Rabbit of Seville", "Baton Bunny", "The Corny Concerto" and "What's Opera, Doc? https://outlook. charter.com/wiki/W hat%27s_Opera,_Doc%3F " (which featured Bugs and Elmer parodying Wagner's https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Richard_Wagne "Der Ring des Nibelungen https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Der_Ring_des_Nibel ungen "), provided our generation with fun introductions to opera and classical music. As proof to the point, "What's Opera, Doc?" has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/Library_of_Congress and is preserved in the National Film Registry https://outlook.charter.com/wiki/National_Film_Registry . It was the first cartoon short to receive the honor. Stalling was also the first to use the metronome for film scores and is credited with the invention of the 'click track', still used to this day to synch audio and video productions.
Without being consciously aware of it at the time, boomer kids became more culturally and musically educated than generations before, an attribute that created taste for the music that would soon change the culture. The Beatles even had their own Saturday morning animated show that featured a different new song each week. I'd tune-in for the music but even a 12-year-old could tell that it was clearly a crass commercial tool, and the animation sucked, which brings us back to...
"Saturday Morning cartoons SUCK!" the 12-year-old said. And she's right. They began to after Stalling, his successor Milt Franklyn, Disney and the other greats of the golden era either died or retired, after synthesizers began to substitute for orchestral scores, after cost-cuts brought lower quality character animation, after parent groups began to demand politically correct content and the government began to regulate. They came to true sucki-tude with the advent of the all-cartoon networks like Nickelodeon, Noggin, Cartoon Network and Discovery Kids. Cartoons aren't 'special', just for those magical Saturday mornings, anymore. What's to love? Sponge Bob is funny and zany but the music doesn't matter much and he's on all the time!
"Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks!" -Porky Pig's Looney Tunes sign-off (you can still hear Stalling's fanfare in your head, cant you?).
Steve Funk has been stirring northern Nevada's musical melting pot since 1967 as a musician, musicologist and recovering DJ. Comments are appreciated at scfunk@charter.net.