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Tunes for 'Toons': Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.

Article Excerpt
Tunes for 'Toons': Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. By Daniel Goldmark. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. [xviii, 225 p. ISBN 0-520-23617-3. $24.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography, illustrations.

"In brief, fellow composers, Forward March! The world is your oyster, the sky is the limit, and the once lowly and despised slapstick cartoon will be your liberator." So wrote longtime MGM cartoon composer Scott Bradley in a 1941 manifesto entitled "Cartoon Music of the Future" (p. 168). That document, reprinted as an appendix in Daniel Goldmark's book on music and Hollywood animation, is but one of several important and relatively unknown interviews, essays, and cartoons brought to light in this pioneering work. The cartoon Zukunftmusiker Bradley, most famous for his work on Tom and Jerry cartoons, knew a thing or two about music history, and he had high hopes that his music, and the genre for which he wrote (animation), would someday assume a more prestigious place within that history. Bradley was not alone in thinking animation might offer expanded possibilities for composers: in 1946, Kurt Weill observed that the animated film, together with the documentary and the film musical, offered composers great potential for creating original music and experimenting with progressive music/image fusions ("Music in the Movies," Harpers Bazaar 79 [September 1946]: 400). By the 1960s, however, Bradley was saddened by what he and others perceived as the declining state of music being composed for cartoons; a golden age for both cartoons and cartoon music seems to have risen and waned...

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