Daniel Goldmark really likes cartoons. Not to worry, though. They won't distract him from his work and studies. In fact, cartoons are his work and studies. He just got his Ph.D. in cartoon music from UCLA and, unfortunately for Rhino, left its gilded halls for a career in academia. He's now a music history professor at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Shortly before his departure, he finished producing what will surely prove to be one of the definitive collections in the world of cartoon music: Rhino's That's All Folks! Cartoon Songs From Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes.
I was able to grab Daniel for an interview just before he beat it out of here. It was great -- I got to sit around on a Friday and chew the fat about Bugs, Elmer and Wagner. Better yet, you get to hear it from one of a handful of folks who really know what they're talking about when it comes to this stuff.
How did the That's All Folks! collection come about?
Like a lot of other people, I was very fond of the Carl Stalling Project CDs that Greg Ford and Hal Willner produced. I thought they were very well put together, giving a very good cross-section of what Carl Stalling was trying to do at Warner Brothers, where he would incorporate popular songs, most of which most people wouldn't necessarily pick up on, into his scores, while at the same time using classical melodies and folk songs and old minstrel tunes and jazz tunes. I thought those were great, and they really inspired me in my work, but I always thought that what people remembered most about the cartoon music was not the instrumental stuff, but what people were singing. That's something that someone who isn't educated about music can still hold on to. What I wanted to do was make an anthology of the most memorable vocal musical moments from the cartoons, which would also include a lot of instrumental stuff, because it goes parcel with it.
Do you find that this is something that a handful of people know about, and you're one of 'em?
Yes. I think everybody who's watched cartoons is familiar with a fair cross-section of this. I think everybody knows 'What's Opera Doc?' The may not know the title, but they certainly know 'Kill The Wabbit.' A lot of people know 'What's Up Doc?' or Elmer's 'A Hunting I Will Go.' Knowing it in more detail falls to big fans of animation, film, or music. I know a lot of people who are very fond of Carl Stalling, who've spent a lot of time watching cartoons and committing them to memory. I got into music when I was five or six. I started playing piano because I'd heard this piece of music. It was a Mozart piano sonata, called a facile sonata because it was sort of a student piece. It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that I'd heard it in a cartoon repeatedly -- in Looney Tunes.
You've likened early cartoons to music videos. What was their promotional value?
These cartoons, specifically the Warner Brothers cartoons, you could very much compare to music videos. The story goes that Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising used to work with Disney. They were from Kansas City, they knew Disney from the old days. They struck out on their own with a young animator named Friz Freleng, who invented Yosemite Sam and various other characters. They sold Warner Brothers on the idea of funding these cartoons on the condition that each cartoon would feature a Warner Brothers-owned song within the cartoon. It was always an underlying goal to promote sheet music for which Warner Brothers owned the publishing. Of course, now music videos are trying to compel people to go out and buy the CD. Back then sheet music was huge.
At what point did the music start being written for the cartoon instead of vice versa?
It was written for the cartoon from the very beginning, but it was a matter of how much emphasis the songs received, and it was about the time that Carl Stalling arrived in 1936 that the directive that they had to feature a song seems to have fallen by the wayside. Very often what would happen is the cartoons would be titled after the song. There are a couple of examples from the [That's All Folks!] collection: 'Shuffle Off To Buffalo,' 'Crosby Colombo And Valee,' 'Page Miss Glory' -- several songs that existed as sheet music before the cartoon. So they would construct the story to try and somehow get the song to work into the story. Often it didn't work, and a song came out of nowhere. It wasn't until 1936 when Stalling came that it became more driven by an original score. But Stalling liked using popular songs so much that he kept using them. He used them more than his predecessors, but he didn't use them as a way of hawking the songs. His references to the songs could be so short -- and they usually weren't sung -- that it was more his way of constructing the scores and making the music interesting for himself and the spectator. It had nothing to do with selling sheet music, because by that point radio was bigger, people were selling more records, and sheet music was no longer a big commodity.
What amazes me are all the cultural references these animators wove into their stories, especially in 'What's Opera Doc?' Was there, for instance, an opera aficionado among their ranks?
'What's Opera Doc?' is a very interesting example. Some people think it's a misrepresentation of Wagner, and other people think it's a perfect summation of what Wagner's all about in seven minutes. And that's really what the cartoon is: It's everything that, from a culturally mediated standpoint, we need to know about Wagner rolled up and spat back to us in a format we can really appreciate. So no, there wasn't anybody at the studio who was an opera expert per se. There's nothing in 'What's Opera Doc?' that is actually drawn directly from Wagner when it comes to staging or storyline or anything. It's the music. It's creating a new sense for us of what opera and what high culture are.
I'd asked Chuck Jones about this once. Basically, he always wanted to know what would happen if he took something like the universe Wagner created for The Ring, the 14-hour opera sequence, and dropped in that X factor -- that being Bugs Bunny. Is 'What's Opera Doc?' a parody of Wagner or is it what happens when we put Bugs and Elmer into Wagner's universe? Those are really two different things -- one is very serious, and one isn't. I think it's a little bit of both, because they're obviously poking fun at Wagner in a lot of ways, but at the same time there's a lot of respect for what he created.
Was fascist imagery attached to Wagner at the time, or did that come later?
I talk about that in my book quite a bit. The association of Wagner with the fascists of Germany originally started with Hitler adopting Wagner for rallies as this representation of what is good in Germany. When it comes to film music, one of the basic tenets is to identify setting or an ethnicity that the audience can recognize very quickly, something that is completely stereotypical and idiosyncratic. Before WWII, Wagner couldn't represent the Nazis, because they didn't necessarily exist. But Wagner still represented what people saw as Germany. So by the time 'What's Opera Doc?' happens, people might have thought about Nazi Germany, but as far as I know -- and Jones has never said anything about it -- there was no explicit reference to the fascists in that cartoon. That's not to say that they're not making fun of them. A lot of people would say that that cartoon trivializes German culture, German high art -- everything the Germans might hold dear.
How did the social climate during WWII seep into these cartoons?
I would say that Hollywood cartoons are one of the most useful places to investigate social currents and what's happening culturally, because animation is taken less seriously in a lot of ways. Warner Bros. and several other studios -- Disney as well -- made cartoons during the war. Warner Bros. produced a series of short cartoons featuring Private SNAFU. These cartoons are basically: 'Don't do what Private SNAFU does. Don't tell secrets to people you don't know. Don't fall into booby traps, etc.' Very often, these cartoons would have imagery -- things bordering on complete nudity -- and much racier language than you would in domestically released cartoons, because they were only going to be seen by 'the boys overseas.' Any cartoon you look at is informed by the time in which it was created. If you look at any of the war cartoons, you see all kinds of references to the Japanese, the Germans, and the Italians being evil and nonhuman.
Were they making these cartoons for kids or adults?
Neither. They were making them for themselves. Several of the directors have said that they didn't make them for children; they didn't make them for adults; they made them for, as I think Chuck Jones said, 'a limited audience.' If it made them laugh, then great. The way I've always looked at cartoons is that they operate on two levels: kids watch the action, and adults listen to the dialogue. As spectators, we hear and we see. Kids are seeing more than they are hearing. Adults are hearing more than they are seeing -- especially with the Warner cartoons, because they are so dialogue-driven. There are so many inside jokes -- references to the Marx Brothers, to popular culture and politics.
What are the fundamental differences between Warner and Disney?
A lot of people like to look at Warner cartoons as being more irreverent. The Disney cartoons look beautiful -- a lot of time is spent on how they look. The story writing is very good. The humor operates on a different level. The Warner cartoons are very dialogue-driven, and it's a lot about cultural references and verbal jokes, whereas with the Disney cartoons, a lot of the humor can come from timing, from pantomime -- watching Pluto try to get a crab off his tail. Almost everybody worked for Disney, so they were very familiar with what he was doing. Disney was really the trendsetter. Disney employed people who would do one character. Say you're animating Pluto, that would've been all you did. Warner Bros. didn't work that way. You were working on all kinds of different things at once.
Do they still make cartoons like they used to?
Logistically, no. It's impossible. The financial resources and the studio system that fostered the animation system no longer exist, but people are still creating cartoons with the same goals in mind. The studio I used to work for -- Spumco, that produced Ren & Stimpy -- and numerous other places are really trying to capture the same kind of humor and trying to look at new approaches. The circumstances that allowed the golden age of Hollywood cartoons to exist were just that: circumstantial.
What attracted the composers to this medium?
I haven't really figured out the answer to that yet. Carl Stalling was an early film accompanist. He would play the piano or organ, or lead an orchestra in a exhibition house. He got into cartoons because Disney asked him to score his early sound cartoons. Scott Bradley, the composer for MGM, was coming from the perspective of somebody who wanted to establish himself as a classical composer. A lot of people just wanted to do film music, and cartoons were the particular niche they fell into. I don't know if any of them really said, 'I want to score cartoons.' Today, yes, because they hear Carl Stalling and they say, 'I want to do that.'
Subscribe to Feed
