A Big Box Of Looney Tunes 1949-1962

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Seven discs… 71 scores… over 8 hours of original music from the creatively untouchable Warner Brothers cartoon factory, dating from 1949 to 1962. Some of the most daring, unpredictable and subversive music ever made. As kids in the 50s/60s, we were all so busy laughing it up over the dumb ducks and bloviating roosters that many of us never stopped to study the musical chaos that was seeping into our psyches via the soundtrack. The genius of court composer Carl Stalling and Warner Brothers’ composer/arranger Milt Franklyn (as well as jazz band leader Raymond Scott and countless others), has been spotlighted in recent decades, most notably via Hal Willer’s two volumes of Looney music, The Carl Stalling Project (HERE, in the archives). I was accidentally ahead of the curve on this stuff as a kid, recording cartoons from my TV set as a teen, and freaking out my parental units with the unexplainable obsession. So consider this unofficial collection – boasting 71 complete cartoon scores – my long-lusted-after holy grail. These “music-only” and “music & effects-only” scores are culled from the highly recommended Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a 24-DVD box set with 375 cartoons and countless bonus features, including these priceless stand-alone soundtracks… for all those that want – no, need – their cartoon music undiluted. Amazingly, there are only about a half-dozen duplicates to be found from Willner’s Stalling CDs, as the famed producer was prone to editing, paring, cherry-picking and re-imagining Warner’s scores for introduction purposes. This set, on the other hand, is the straight-up, unedited stuff. Many begin and end with the familiar Merry Melodies theme song, but many don’t… while some scores feature orchestral count-offs that lend a ‘you are there’ feel to these largely, live-in-the-studio recordings. You’ll hear a few patches of silence on occasion, but that’s actually pretty rare. I could go on for hours about this stuff (and already have on previous posts), but I think I can guarantee that Frank Zappa’s developing brain was partly rewired by Stalling’s colorful vibes arrangements heard throughout this material. There are two streaming tracks below… “Rabbit Seasoning,” a music & effects example, and one of the numerous ‘duck season – rabbit season – duck season’ plots in the WB catalog. While “Jumpin’ Jupiter” is a music-only, space-themed toon that incorporates Raymond Scott’s immediately recognizable “Powerhouse” into the arrangement. We’ve got more Scott – along with a disc of Tex Avery cartoon music – in the archives, HERE.