Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon by: Goldmark, Daniel
Hardcover. Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 225 pages, illustrated in b&w. In the first in-depth examination of music written for Hollywood animated cartoons of the 1930s through the 1950s, Daniel Goldmark provides a brilliant account of the enormous creative effort that went into setting cartoons to music and shows how this effort shaped the characters and stories that have become embedded in American culture. Focusing on classical music, opera, and jazz, Goldmark considers the genre and compositional style of cartoons produced by major Hollywood animation studios, including Warner Bros., MGM, Lantz, and the Fleischers. Tunes for 'Toons discusses several well-known cartoons in detail, including What's Opera, Doc?, the 1957 Warner Bros. parody of Wagner and opera that is one of the most popular cartoons ever created.