Daniel Goldmark: “The Televised Animated Musical Extravaganza”

You’re invited to hear a talk about music in shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show, Muppet Babies, Animaniacs, and South Park by Daniel Goldmark.

Professor Goldmark learned to play piano at age 5 because of a song he’d heard in a cartoon. He went on to work on music at a Hollywood animation studio, produce recordings of cartoon music for a major record label, and become a pioneering scholar of music and animation. He’s written seven books about cartoons, films, and popular music, including the foundational monograph on cartoon music, Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (2005). A professor of music at Case Western Reserve University, he is the director of their Center for Popular Music Studies and teaches classes on animation, music, and film.

About the Presentation 

From the earliest sound cartoons, musical performances have been a ubiquitous part of American animated shorts. By the 1940s, however, the popularity of such performances had waned, and they largely disappeared by the 1950s. Limited budgets and limited animation—exemplified most famously in Hollywood by the output of the Hanna-Barbera studio—meant a hiatus for musical numbers, until the animation renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when The Simpsons, Animaniacs, South Park, and other series reintroduced musical moments as a regular feature of cartoons. Unlike the theatrical shorts of the 1930s, where musical numbers were an accepted and expected component of the cartoon universe, television cartoons used such performances as a way to refer to other prevalent forms of pop culture, including Broadway, film musicals, and even their own animated ancestors. But the style and approach to performing musicals have changed remarkably little in all that time. Even when Hollywood animation was at its least remarkable (in the 1970s and 1980s), the connection to the 1930s style never entirely disappeared, so that when the animation renaissance occurred, the musical and all its trappings was waiting right there to be brought back into the service of the cartoon.

Sponsored by the Department of Film, Media, and Digital Studies, the Department of Music, and the McGaw Lecture fund from the Public Lectures Committee.