Ya just gotta love old time cartoon music.
First of all… there was so much of it! During Hollywood’s heyday, an animated short was the one type of theatrical film that always featured a continuous musical score from first frame to last sprocket hole. Then there’s the fact that while most of the characters are viciously trying to hit each other, eat each other, or blow each other up with firecrackers, the background music remains sprightly, energetic, and so damn cheerful!
Carl Stalling, the guy behind those wonderful Warner Brothers soundtracks, has received a lot of deserved attention the last decade or so. But there was a whole gang of great cartoon composers like Scott Bradley, Sammy Timberg, Phil Scheib, and Clarence Wheeler. Each had his own style and approach, each was capable making a major contribution to a great film, and each was equally capable of making a dull short seem lively and fun.
I’ve long admired the work of Winston Sharples. He did a bang-up job on many a forgotten RKO-Van Buren cartoon back in the thirties, then found a long time berth at Paramount Famous. Taken at face value, Paramount’s stuff, like Popeye, Baby Huey, Herman and Katnip could be downright gruesome, full of the sort of cartoon violence that would give Itchy and Scratchy nightmares (keep in mind, this is the studio that thought the continuing humiliations of a dead kid, Casper, would be cute.) No matter. Sharples’ airy, melodic scores to these cartoons made everything seem downright jolly. Carl Stalling would custom tailor his music to the most specific detail of the on-screen action. In contrast, Sharples’ work was much more generic, far less prone to violent mood swings. Mostly what we got was six and a half minutes of cheerful, cheerful, cheerful!
I guess they don’t call them ‘toons for nothing!
Dave Kirwan
