The Looney Tunes Composers of the Golden Age

Marsales scored all of the Warner Bros. cartoons from the Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising era (1930-1933). He did have a few catchy scores such as his rendition of the title song in “Freddy the Freshman” and the music that plays over the opening credits of “Bosko the Speed King”.

Scoring cartoons concurrently with Bernard Brown, Norman Spencer scored several Warner cartoons from late 1933 to mid-1936. Although Warner didn’t officially find their footing until the arrival of Carl Stalling, Spencer was capable of very solid scores (his scores for Tex Avery’s masterpieces “Page Miss Glory” and “I Love to Singa” are particularly awesome).

Scoring cartoons concurrently with Norman Spencer, Brown was just as competent as he was. A few of my favorite Brown scores include the music over the opening credits of “How Do I Know It’s Sunday”, his rendition of “La Cucaracha” in “Country Mouse”, and especially the chase music in “The Blow Out”. He also frequently used the tune “Merrily We Roll Along” in “Billboard Frolics”. When that one was released in the fall of 1935, no one had any idea then that “Merrily We Roll Along” would soon become a permanent staple of the Warner cartoons.

Inarguably the greatest film composer of all time (others would probably say it’s John Williams or Hans Zimmer, but my favorite has always been and always will be Carl Stalling). Before he became a composer at Warner Bros., Carl Stalling scored for Disney for a while, working on such films as the iconic “The Skeleton Dance” (1929). Stalling became the composer for the Warner cartoons in mid-1936 and up until his retirement in 1958 (the last cartoon he scored was Jones’ “To Itch His Own”), scored over 600 Warner cartoons for 22 years (more than half of the filmography). Stalling had complete access to every song Warner Bros. owned the rights to and he took full advantage of that. He had “The Merry Go Round Broke Down” become the Looney Tunes theme music while “Merrily We Roll Along” became the Merrie Melodies theme music and he particularly enjoyed utilizing the quirky masterpieces of Raymond Scott. Like with Mel Blanc, Stalling was an essential figure in why the Warner cartoons were the best Golden Age cartoons ever made. Some of Stalling’s scores were made available on the two-volume CD, the Carl Stalling Project in the 1990’s, which you can listen to these here.

When Carl Stalling was temporarily recovering from a brain injury in 1951, Eugene Poddany briefly filled in for him and scored five cartoons: “Room and Bird”, “French Rarebit”, “The Wearing of the Grin”, “Leghorn Swoggled”, and “Lovelorn Leghorn”. Poddany also scored for Chuck Jones during his tenure of making all-new Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM in the mid-1960’s, as well as “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (1966). My personal favorite Poddany score is the rendition of “Fiddle Dee Di” over the opening credits of the aforementioned “Room and Bird”.

The second best Warner cartoon composer, Milt Franklyn was originally Stalling’s orchestrator before he started sharing composer duties with him in 1954. When Stalling retired in 1958, Franklyn scored every Warner cartoon (with the exception of a few during the musician strike in the fall of 1958) up until his death in 1962 (although a few cartoons that Franklyn scored were released after his death). Franklyn’s scores are very pleasant and come very, very close to matching Stalling’s skills (a few of Franklyn’s scores can be heard by themselves as “music-only audio tracks” on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs).

One of a few one-off composers, jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers did the score for Freleng’s jazz-themed masterpiece, “Three Little Bops” (1957).

Surprisingly, no photos of him have been found, but the stock music of John Seely (August 23, 1923-April 23, 2004) was utilized for five cartoons released during a musicians’ strike: the three McKimson cartoons, “Weasel While You Work”, “Pre Hysterical Hare”, and “Gopher Broke”; Freleng’s “A Bird in a Bonnet”; and two Jones cartoons (both of which are Roadrunner cartoons): “Hook Line and Stinker” and “Hip Hip Hurry”. Some of these cues were also used in a few early Hanna-Barbera series. Most folks online seem to take issue with stock music being used in the Warner cartoons but I actually find it very pleasing and with them actually fitting the scenes in the cartoons. A few that I enjoy are all of the stock music used in “Hook Line and Stinker”, the usages of “Zany Comedy” and “Pixie Comedy” in “Pre Hysterical Hare”, and the usage of “Fred Karno’s Army” as well an unnamed tune that plays when Barnyard Dawg downs sleeping pills in “Gopher Broke”.

After Milt Franklyn’s passing, Bill Lava became his replacement and you could immediately tell that Lava’s style was very different from Franklyn’s. His music was all sorts of tones such as sinister (“Martian Through Georgia”, “Devil’s Feud Cake”, “Now Hear This”, “Mad As a Mars Hare”, “Transylvania 6-5000”, “Freudy Cat”, and “Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare”) , exciting (“The Million Hare”, “Hare Breadth Hurry”, “Banty Raids”, “The Unmentionables”, “A Message to Gracias”, and “War and Pieces”), or pleasant (“Aqua Duck”, “Claws in the Lease”, and “Hawaiian Aye Aye”). Lava also scored most of the cartoons during the DePatie-Freleng era and all of the cartoons from the Seven Arts era (his best scores in the latter two periods are, in my opinion, “Pancho’s Hideaway”, “Cats and Bruises”, “Suppressed Duck”, the music he used in the Rudy Larriva Roadrunner cartoons, “Go Go Amigo”, “Mexican Mousepiece”, “Snow Excuse”, his theme tunes for Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse, and especially “Chimp and Zee”).

Walter Greene was only at DePatie-Freleng for six months but literally every score he did for them is absolutely awesome (both the Warner cartoons he scored and DePatie-Freleng’s own Pink Panther and Inspector cartoons). That reason alone makes the six Warner cartoons he scored for my very favorite cartoons from the DePatie-Freleng era (and proof why the cartoons from this era are very overhated). These include the last Roadrunner cartoon from the Golden Age, “Sugar and Spies” (1966) and the five best cartoons with Daffy Duck pitted against Speedy Gonzales: “A Squeak in the Deep”, “Feather Finger”, “Swing Ding Amigo”, “A Taste of Catnip”, and “Daffy’s Diner” (the latter was released in 1967 while the other four were released in 1966). I also like listening to Greene’s scores when looking at Greene County, Georgia on Google Maps.

Each of these three composers all scored one Warner cartoon each: Herman Stein did “Mucho Locos” (1966), Irving Gertz did “Daffy Rents” (1966), and Frank Perkins did “Quacker Tracker” (1967).