SIMPSONS , Inc. (?!) — A Very Short Fascicle on Music’s Dramaturgy and Use in Adult Animation Series

The congress on music in quality tv series (February 27 — March 1 2015) during which this lecture was held had hardly no speaker talking about cartoon or adult animation music — despite the obvious fact »that cartoon music on television has never been more complex« since the 1990s (Nye 2011, 143). This fact might provoke the question whether or not the animated feature, respectively the cartoon series does or does not belong to the ongoing propagated and frequently discussed ›quality tv‹?! Aren’t shows like THE SIMPSONS, SOUTH

cal outspokenness and social criticism not only in THE SIMPSONS, but also in FAMILY GUY and AMERICAN DAD! 7 , Seth MacFarlane's second rendition, one might say: rip-off of the Simpson family in which the creators take a totally different way of criticism with the main character CIA Special Agent Stan Smith being a hardcore conservative republican, president George W. Bush enthusiast and mostly unreflecting believer of FOX's ›propanda machinery‹ -even though this attitude changed due to the political adjustments caused by the Obama administration (Perlmutter 2014, 306pp).
In this paper I'm trying to display more or less common ways of musical setup in American adult animation series of the 21 st century. Therefore I will be concentrating on the three first-mentioned series. Nevertheless it is inevitable to know at least a bit about the origin and evolution of both theatrical and television cartoon music. So at first I would like to depict some general aesthetics of the music in cartoon and animated series starting all over with Walt Disney's SILLY SYMPHONIES. 8 The second part of this article will focus on more recent programs, where I will be portraying the main categories of musical usage in contemporary animated series.
PART ONE.

I. Music as Cartoon's Backbone
The truism of a picture being worth a thousand words is a crucial dictum in television production. (Perlmutter 2014, 5) Not only since Mickey Mouse made his first appearance on the silver screen during the first animated talkie STEAMBOAT WILLIE (USA 1928, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks), the understanding of musical dramaturgy and usage in animated shorts and features, both theatrical and televisional, consistently developed. 9 From Max Fleischer's early 1920s sound film attempts in his SONG CAR-TUNES series and Walt Disney's ›mickey-mousing‹-beginnings in anthropomorphic animal cartoons to the satirizing references of musical high culture -but mainly popular culture -, the animation genre is no longer deniable at the TV landscape since the ›comical turn‹ during the 2000s. After almost one hundred years of successful animation history, the cartoon is constantly growing acknowledgment as a serious genre serving both comedy and drama.
STEAMBOAT WILLIE hereby marks the beginning of the musical (under-)scoring for animated films, which back then had an average duration of 5-8 min- 9 For further reading about the development of critically acclaimed cartoon music studies, cf. the many discipline-defining articles and volumes by Daniel Goldmark (2002Goldmark ( , 2005Goldmark ( , 2011Goldmark ( , 2014. Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 15: Music in TV Series & Music and Humour in Film and Television // 68 utes, functioning as short amusing openers to upcoming feature films or news reels in movie theaters (Cooke 2010, 294). 10 In addition to exploiting music's ability to create continuity and momentum, and its emotional suggestiveness (the latter especially necessary in order to humanize the artificially created imagery), the animated cartoon demonstrated a significant debt to musical techniques popularized in ballet and the circus [.] (Ibid.,287) The renowned cartoon historian Leonard Maltin not only confirms Mervyn Cooke's statement about »the genre's debt to music as both a dynamic and illustrative device« (Ibid., 287), he goes even further and admits that for the early years of the studio-era animation [m]usic wasn't just punctuation […]; it was their backbone.
[…] Music and cartoons have gone hand-in-hand since Walt Disney made Steamboat Willie in 1928. Music wasn't just an accompaniment for that cartoon, it was what helped sell the movie to the public and to the motion picture industry. (Maltin 2002, ix-x) By saying that it was the backbone of theatrical cartoon storytelling, Maltin already comments on the contemporary situation in televised animated series 10 Max Fleischer's famous OUT OF THE INKWELL series eventually became part of the monthly Screen Magazine of Paramount, »a short news and entertainment program shown before feature films.« (Cavalier 2011, 66). For further reading on Fleischer's music efforts, cf. Jahn 2016, 67p. claiming that music does not matter as much anymore. Well, I will do my best to prove that music still is an integral part of modern animation programs. In the introductory text to their CARTOON MUSIC BOOK (2002) editors Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor are pointing out the general nature of cartoon music: Since a cartoon had only a tenth of the time to get its dramatic point across, the music had to adapt; it necessarily needed to be faster in how it punctuated the gags moving by on screen at 24 frames per second. Cartoon music simply had to be more telling [emphasis in original] than music for liveaction films. (Goldmark/Taylor 2002, xiii) To pinpoint David Perlmutter's statement of a picture being worth a thousand words, I might add: a tone, chord or sound says more than a thousand pictures.
Fully aware of this the Disney Studios invented the synchronization of music and image which eventually became known as ›mickey-mousing‹, that has been improved from every SILLY SYMPHONY to another with Walt Disney's animators studio working alongside the ingenious composer and cinema organist Carl Stalling. 11 Those kinds of close relations between music and image helped to 11 »With Stalling at his side, however, Disney eventually streamlined and updated the sound process, creating innovative Silly Symphonies, which were pre-scored animated shorts choreographed to well-known classical works. His first was The Skeleton Dance (1929). The close synchronization between music and on-screen movement popularized by this and earlier shorts came to be known as »mickey mousing.« […] At Disney, Stalling also invented a tick system for synchronizing music to visuals. It was a forerunner to the click track, now the standard process in both live-action and animated features. One of the first click tracks, a reel of unexposed film with holes punched out to make clicks and pops when the film was run on the sound head, was devised by Disney sound effects man Jim Macdonald and used in The Skeleton Dance.« (Strauss 2002, 7 cally and non-diegetically levelled music. We certainly wonder where the music the skeletons so cheerfully play along to comes from. This concept, howsoever, went on to be one of the most successful techniques to underscore humorous scenes even in full-length animated features -i. e. Disney's grand success FANTASIA (USA 1940, Walt Disney), where of course the picture is being synchronized to the preexistent music! -and also in live-action films. Here, of course, the comical effect lies in the citation of this well-known musical treatment from the animation genre, provoking some kind of aesthetical or even semantic dissonance for the viewer. In this very brief cartoon music introductory I need to leave aside the subject of instrumental semantics. Such composers as Scott Bradley, Hoyt Curtin, Raymond Scott, and Carl Stalling not only established rhythmical scoring techniques, but also harmonical, melodical and instrumental techniques that made turing some fossils' bones. That Stalling utilizes a scoring aestethic that Saint-Saëns invented is remarkable inasmuch as the French composer is commonly considered to be the very first composer ever to write a genuine film music. In 1908 Saint-Saëns scored L'ASSASSINAT DU DUC DE GUISE (France 1908, Charles le Bargy and André Calmattes) while major parts of his concert pieces also found its way to the movies, being utilized as preexistent stock music. This suggests the conclusion that Stalling knew the oeuvre of Camille Saint-Saëns and thus adapted his scoring and instrumental techniques for the music of Disney's SILLY SYMPHONIES and later on at the Warner Bros. Studios, scoring multiple LOONEY TUNES and MERRIE MELODIES. (cf. Barrier 2002, 37-60, esp. 39p andJahn 2016, 207p) them and thus their production studios distinguishable from each other. 14 The effectiveness of such musical models later became sort of stereotypes -few might say: ›cliches‹ or ›tropes‹ 15 -in animation music history with whom today's cartoon series are able to goof around.

II. TV Killed the Cinema Star
Cartoon music is among the most engaging and experimental forms of twentieth-century music, exploring the more outrageous extremes of instrumentation, rhythm, and nonmusical sound. (Strauss 2002, 5) Even though »[a]nimation came to embrace television sooner than other aspects of the film industry« simply because it »needed to survive« (Perlmutter 2014, 34) the theatrical animated short received a slight set-back having to struggle with the uprising television phenomenon during the 1940-50s (Ibid., 32pp). 16 After developing 30-minute compilations that mainly consisted of three 7minute-shorts (plus two advertising blocks) for the afternoon television pro- Ralph Kramden (THE HONEYMOONERS). All these shows center a more or less overweight, ›blue-collar‹ working class man and his fairly attractive (house-)wife -both trying to make their living in American suburbia through their weekly encounters. THE FLINTSTONES, often considered to be the ›animated adaption‹ of THE HONEYMOONERS, became the most successful animated series ever to be on prime time television (Ibid., 54), until THE SIMPSONS took the field in 1989, becoming not only the most successful cartoon series but also one of the longest running shows in worldwide television history. With the misadventures of an American »modern stone age family« and its friends, the two FLINTSTONES creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera brought a new format to the television animation world: consistently narrated and developing stories -in which music no longer has the main part of amplifying the comical situations, as it has to stand back behind the dialogue. One is eager to confirm Leonard Maltin's statement seeing and hearing that the aforementioned ›backbone‹ kept shrinking more and more throughout this first animated sitcom boom (Hilton-Morrow/MacMahan 2003, 74pp). Or does it?! Initial situation comedies like I LOVE LUCY »drew upon the conventions of the film musical« (Rodman 2010, 191) and frequently centered on musical storylines in the show as for instance 25 FAMILY MATTERS (USA 1989-19989 seasons, 215 episodes;ABC (1989ABC ( -1997, CBS (1997CBS ( -1998 Unlike live-action sitcoms, the animated series have the ability to react immediately and also rather excessively on current cultural, political or any other events and developments in the (mostly American) society (Perlmutter 2014, 3) and therefore could comment on it in their own environment (Ibid., 54p). In these particular environments, music also made its way to the diegetic level of storytelling, being part of the narration as background music to create a realistic 27 THE JETSONS (USA 1962(USA /63, 1985(USA -1987 setting or as a cornerstone to an episode's plot. 29 As Fred Flintstone is quite an aficionado of jazz and swing music and himself a ›versatile‹ musician, Hanna-Barbera's chief composer and musical director Hoyt Curtin created scores in his and Fred's most favourite fashion: 1940-50s big band and modern jazz, commonly aside a sweetish and enchanting chamber musical tone 30 . With its often slight allusions to silent film or vaudeville musical numbers and the swing music of Henry Mancini and Nelson Riddle, Curtin's ideas fit well with the contemporary spirit and with the taste of its time (cf. Hanna 1996, 4 andJahn 2016, 158p).
With The Jetsons, just as with The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera demonstrated that it was possible for television animation to achieve a prime-time [adult] audience -albeit at a cost. The characters and situations had to be structured in a way that made them acceptable, and this often involved the use of social and artistic stereotyping rather than genuine creativity. (Perlmutter 2014, 62p) Despite all of Curtin's many efforts in television animation musical direction, rather the same »artistic stereotyping« could be certified to the mainly functional underscore music of Hanna-Barbera Productions' early animated sitcoms.

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Even though 80-90% or more (Goldmark/Taylor 2002, 169) of an average FLINTSTONES episode utilized music to underscore and spotlight the show's sense of humor, i. e. with the multiple variations of the »Meet The Flintstones« theme song 31 , it might still be stated that animation music lost its 'backbone' quality and got diminished to a simply amusement providing and confirming background. Nevertheless, it would be harsh to equal Hoyt Curtin's music for this ›limited animation‹ programs 32 as ›limited composition‹ 33 given that huge parts of music were used over and over again, from one show to another, to paste an entire 22-minute episode with underscore music. To conclude this first part I quote Homer Simpson once again, who mentions the quality and importance of situation comedy shows, in this case of SEINFELD 34 which became a major hit and eventually a huge part of American pop culture: 31 »Meet The Flintstones« actually has not been the theme song before the third season (1962)(1963). Until then an instrumental melody called »Rise And Shine« functioned as the opening sequence accompaniment, while »Meet The Flintstones« appeared only as underscoring music.
32 The 'limited animation' practice had been standardized for television animation programs by Hanna and Barbera »in order to meet the shorter deadlines of television« (Perlmutter 2014, 44). Historian Ted Sennett describes the 'limited animation' procedure as follows: »As opposed to the intricate details of classical animation, a few moving parts of the principal characters were animated and then photocopied on to the cells to simulate talking or simple action. The character walks and other standard movements were codified and reused in cycles, while a single background could serve for entire sequences.« (Sennett 1989, 49). It would be worth discussing, if music has a comparable ›pedagogical‹ function in animated programs -for instance regarding the full-length underscores in Hanna-Barbera cartoons that might be compared to the usual laughter track. But even more debate-worthy seems to be the fact that the statement by Homer Simpson is originally from the German dub version 36 and cannot be found in the original script.
PART TWO.

III. Categories of Musical Usage in Adult Animation Series a. My Cartoon Education
To begin with, I am taking the freedom to deliver some personal informations on the following segment that communicates my individual background through animated series and its music -as this article is written both by a SOUTH PARK had a charming start-up with their childish and paper-cut-like animation 40 and never-seen-before subversive and not-so-childish offensive humor.  (Nye 2011, 147) -also corresponds with its musical outcome of the early seasons that combines »an appropriation of sitcom and film music practices in cartoons and […] a new genre system of music« (Ibid., 144), that speaks of a great variety of SOUTH PARK's artistic standard. This series and its musical approach could most fittingly be described with the German buzzword ›niveauflexibel‹ (›level flexi-ble‹), which also refers to the expected wide demographics SOUTH PARK is marketing for and targeted at (cf. Ott 2003, 220pp); from a young through a probably blue-collar audience up to (politicized) intellectual upper classes.
Whilst Homer Simpson says that everything seems to be a rip-off of THE HONEYMOONERS one might also go further by saying: Everything after 1989 is a rip-off of THE SIMPSONS, as it happens to be with the two, respectively three animated series Seth MacFarlane developed for FOX (Perlmutter 2014, 243pp). episodes within an approximated duration of nearly 29,000 min. -and that will already be outdated in less than one year from today. So, how to sum up that wide variety of funny and musical moments? It is a bold venture that simply has to fail! Being sure that not every best musical moment of any of these 42 cf. SOUTH PARK's constant variations of the opening sequence that also 'embellishes' the theme song as »[t]hese remixes were carefully produced to keep SOUTH PARK trendy« (Nye 2011, 148 (USA 1940, Michael Curtiz) is used to underscore a pirate-like car chase] to create the comical effect to recognizing a certain piece of music that somehow actually fits for the depicted scene, but is totally taken out of its original context. SOUTH  Richard Marquand)) | Though all these episodes feature the original music from the three mentioned STAR WARS movies by the uncredited composer John Williams there is also additional music by Walter Murphy throughout the episodes, mainly being used as incidental music or for scenes unrelated to STAR WARS scripts.  What makes SOUTH PARK a special animated series, is its point of view. Seen through the wondrous eyes of 8 to 10 year-old children the cornerstone of this show is mainly a sort of ›hyperbolic overacting‹ that seems to be blown totally out of proportion when compared to real life circumstances. One could argue that this would apply for any cartoon series, because in the end they are all fictitious. But SOUTH PARK actually brings the audacity of artistic and realistic license to a whole new level. The series uses less musical numbers to underline 51 ANIMANIACS (USA 1993-19985 seasons, 99 episodes;Fox Kids (1993-1995, The WB (1995-1999. Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 15: Music in TV Series & Music and Humour in Film and Television // 86 its humor, even though Sean Nye estimates that »the role of music […] has been central to SOUTH PARK's success« (Nye 2011, 143). Therefore, the show deploys music mainly on a diegetic level as being part of the action. In All About Mormons 52 , an invisible chorus tells the story of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism:

im. 1 »Joseph Smith was called a Prophet« from All About Mormons
(00:04:48-00:05:00), transcribed by Peter Motzkus The simple-hearted and pure-minded melody, which makes it »abundantly clear that the foundational mythoi of Mormonism is too preposterous to be believed« (Daas 2012, 83), functions as an auctorial narrator that tells us the story from his omniscient point of view. As the viewer realizes later on the sung narration couldn't resist to comment and evaluate the uprising of Joseph Smith. Almost every new beginning of a phrase starts a half-tone higher than the one before, which finally leads to the confrontation of Smith's co-worker and financial sup- Nye's observation that the co-creators Parker and Stone built up a »musical genre system« which contains very diverse musical genres from classical and jazz through Hollywood blockbuster and cartoon music to rock, punk, soul, pop, and country, can be seen in several appearances of musicians and music groups throughout the series (Nye 2011, 143 Another category of musical usage in adult animation series are songs, which I recommend to split in the two subcategories ›recitativo‹ and ›aria‹ both being part of the narrative diegetically. It stands out that FAMILY GUY uses the highly intriguing, versatile, humorous ways of musical narration through song. The dramatic ambivalence between totally serious and utterly hilarious varies from one moment to another. To reach that goal the soundtrack often resorts to preexistent musical numbers that are supposedly largely known for its actual filmic origin. In Baby, You Knock Me Out 54 Lois becomes a famous pugilist -the episode loosely reconnects story plots of the ROCKY saga (USA 1976(USA , 1979(USA , 1982(USA , 1985(USA , 1990  Curtin score. Excessive use of xylophones and chimes are perpetually repeating and modulating the five-tone main theme, additionally combined with fast rhythmical patterns by percussion and brass that are accompanied by de-and ascending whole tone scales from the strings -that try to match the »fingerbusters« of Curtin's JETSONS theme (Hansen/Kress 2002, 172). The musical and visual allusions to the Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1960s are obvious. In his explicit in-depth analysis of the SIMPSONS' opening sequence, Martin Kutnowski points out that the soundtrack for the initial sequence of The Simpsons encapsulates the essential underlying themes of the show, introducing the physical, behavioral, and psychological profiles of the five family members plus the suburban American culture that surrounds them in the town of Springfield. (Kutnowski 2008, 599) The »luscious symphonic overture« (Ibid., 599), in which »music, image and narrative are all logically threaded as to project absurdity and irony« (Ibid., 603), is a conglomerate of multiple well-known musical styles (cf. Jahn 2016, 236p Groening decided that he wanted a lush, fully orchestrated, yet irreverent theme that would prime the TV audience for what was coming. The producers found the perfect composer in Danny Elfman, who a few years earlier had created a wildly original score for Tim Burton's first feature, Pee-wee 's Big Adventure (1985). To give Elfman a better idea of what he was imagining, Groening gave him a sampling tape he'd cobbled together -featuring a nutty mix of material that included a Frank Zappa electric shaver jingle, a »Teach Your Parrot to Talk« recording, some cuts from Nino Rota's Juliet of the Spirits soundtrack, and The Jetsons theme music. (Neuwirth 2003, 40p) Not just in sound but also in picture does the SIMPSONS intro commemorate the one of THE JETSONS (Kutnowski 2008, 607). The similarities between these two sequences eventually led to a ›reproduction‹ of the latter in one of the latest SIMPSONS episodes. 61 to be the whole point of SOUTH PARK's early attempts: crudely done, badly sung, and weirdly funny in its overall absurdity. By saying that the intro has no further meaning for the show I mean that the song never appears diegetically during the episodes. While the two other series occasionally make fun of its main themes, as for instance Bart whistles the SIMPSONS motif only to be silenced by his mother when he is asked to stop piping that »annoying tune«. 63 Totally out of the blue the Simpsons' world collides with the real world where the viewer is left behind trying to figure out: How could they possibly get to know this melody? Well, of course: the high school band is constantly playing it in every title sequence… The employment of the theme music is on the one hand a practical joke of self-reflexivity and self-referentiality and on the other hand the music seems to function as a sort of a collective memory of a town's population (and sometimes beyond). 64 The theme itself becomes part of the soundscape of Springfield.
not have the slightest influence on the subsequent episode's story -it is plainly a silly and misleading game with the audience. On a similar note SOUTH PARK chose recently the opposite approach, sticking to its clumsiness-in-making and childish sense of humor by retelling GAME OF THRONES 70 , breaking the whole story down to just one topic. to an overly dramatic play -as it is some plain game played by children.

im. 2 'A Chorus of Wieners' from A Song Of Ass And Fire
Maria Goeth calls this kind of musical usage ›lofty humor‹ 72 , meaning that an actually minor situation is being exaggerated and dramatized by its background music and thus turned into a big event (Goeth 2016, 282pp just an attempt to retell one of the current major programs on American television.

IV. The (almost) Left-Asides
Left out in this fascicle are musical numbers that are not just woven into an episode but that are the main plot of an episode, such as the numerous appearances of actual and fictional music artists -Homer Simpson himself was part of at least three different bands (e. g. Sadgasm 75 ), Bart Simpson once joined the Party Posse 76 , Eric Cartman formed the '90s boyband Fingerbang 77 and Christian rock band Faith + 1 78 , and each Griffin family member has at least one time been a member of a musical formation. 79 Furthermore entire musical shows like ized as background music, is set in a cuban jazz and caribbean reggae kind of style that clearly functions as an indicator for the scene. While in the End Credits it is supposed to enable the audience to reminisce about the plot. The End Credits music speaks directly to the audience's memory and tries to leave it with a final smile or at least a slight chuckle. Therefore it is an important part of the overall narration and thus the backbone of the cartoon.
Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 15: Music in TV Series & Music and Humour in Film and Television // 106 ingenious composer Scott Bradley, who's music Neil Strauss supposedly had in mind when he tried to sum up the multistylistical and -dimensional assets of cartoon, respectively animation music. Bradley's »tense clusters of harmony […] and rapid melodic lines to focus the viewer's attention on each distinct movement a character made« (Goldmark/Taylor 2002, 116) found a worthy epigone in Alf Clausen. As he is describing his own method of writing music for cartoons Scott Bradley always kept trying to maintain a continuous melodic line, and follow the action with new harmonization and orchestration of conventional patterns. This sometimes leads to very harsh dissonances, but remember, we are trying to make it funny, and music can't be both funny and beautiful (Ibid., 117), one could imagine the importance music in animation programs have had and in the 1990s, when they also co-wrote the mock musical CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL in 1993 (Nye 2011, 145). As I opened the second part of this article with the assumption that -compared to their different musical approaches - Already at the beginning of this century Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor demanded that the silliest of all musical genres finally be taken seriously. After more than 70 years of television animation it is about time, as they say (cf. Goldmark/Taylor 2002, xvi). Therefore this paper encourages further musicological research regarding the constantly developing field of adult animation programming.
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