(or more “Mysteries Involving the Walter Lantz Cartunes”)
I truly know nothing about the history of stock music cues used in vintage television cartoons. I’d leave that mostly to the experts like Yowp, and so on. But the topic of today’s post started because I may be needing some vintage cues for a project I’m working on, and was curious about the royalties involved using one particular cartoon musical director’s: Darrell Calker.
Calker was certainly one of the most underrated of his contemporaries, providing music primarily for the Walter Lantz studio in the 1940s. They are well-done bearing in mind their low budgets and the little access he had to pop music. In its own way, Calker’s music is as pleasant to listen to as Carl Stalling’s, and was never as overbearing as Scott Bradley’s. (Though in some instances, as in his brief stint doing music for the ill-fated Screen Gems cartoon studio, his score is the real star of an other wise incoherent and eye-glazing misfire.)
Calker, like Winston Sharples and Walter Greene, was a theatrical cartoon composer who did cues that were reused in low-budget animation (and sometimes live-action) productions. It’s common knowledge that the third-rate Famous Studios Popeye short Child Sockology was the source for a lot of the Sharples cues, but it’s the only instance I’m aware of where cues had been cut up from a specific cartoon’s score.
All of Calker’s scores for Walter Lantz were registered for copyright by Universal, as was the standard procedure at most cartoon studios. I had never heard of the scores for Lantz’s, or anyone else’s, theatrical cartoons being cut up for use as cues, save the Famous cartoon mentioned above.
The second element of the puzzle… If you enter “beany” into the ASCAP ACE search engine, you’ll find some of the names of Beany & Cecil‘s composers. Melvyn Lenard, Eddie Brandt, Freddy Morgan… and Bob and Sody Clampett. But you won’t find Calker.
So our mystery is… how did music from a 1945 Woody Woodpecker cartoon end up in a 1962 Beany & Cecil cartoon?
Note, too, that in the original cartoon, Shamus Culhane’s pseudo-classic Chew Chew Baby, there is extensive dialog and sound effects over the music. This means Clampett had access to the original isolated music track to use for Cecil Meets Cecilia.
This isn’t the only instance of Calker’s music turning up in the Clampett TV cartoons, but it may be the most extensive. But how did it end up there? I can find no reference whatsoever of Universal making the Lantz tracks available, nor can think of any other production that used them. (Perhaps Clampett absconded with the recordings from Universal’s garbage, as he did so often at Warners’ with artwork. Mental image accompaniment: Bob humming through the garbage cans ala Sylvester.)
This mystery was posed to Daniel Goldmark, the world’s classic cartoon music expert, and even he doesn’t know what’s going on with these direct Calker ripoffs showing up in Beany & Cecil. Any help would be appreciated.
UPDATE: TV cartoon historian Yowp has the definite answer!
Calker’s film music was among piles of music repackaged by David Chudnow for the Mutel library music service (Mutel = Music for Television). Chudnow did this with a bunch of ’40s B-movie film cues and listed himself as the publisher under BMI as Byron Music to collect royalties. Clampett must have simply bought the Mutel library and used it.
Thanks, Yowp, you’re man’s best friend.
Speaking of the possibility of Clampett rummaging through Lantz’s garbage…. Here’s a clue that may or may not have anything to do with it: Clampett’s production offices, Snowball Productions, was located at 729 Seward Street in Hollywood; Lantz was 861 Seward Street – one block away.
The one crucial piece of the puzzle you don’t mention: by 1961, when the Beany cartoons were being made, Calker was at Lantz scoring new cartoons for them, along with Gene Poddany, and eventually Walter Greene. Calker would have to have had access to the recorded music tracks at that time, so it may not necessarily have been a case of Clampett digging through garbage.
About Walter Greene… when he was at Lantz he provided an original score for each cartoon, unlike at DePatie-Freleng where he would maybe score half a dozen cartoons for each series, then future scores for those series would be the same cues over and over again. Eventually some William Lava cues were mixed in. (Doug Goodwin worked much the same way.) There are a few examples of Pink Panther cues showing up in Woody Woodpecker and Chilly Willy cartoons! Wish I could remember which ones…
Off the top of my head, here are some more Famous cartoons that provided cues to the Hal Seeger-Winston Sharples music library – “Spook No Evil”, “Big Bad Sindbad”, “Patriotic Popeye”, “One Funny Knight”, “Felineous Assault”, “Out Of This Whirl” and “Dawg Gawn”, to name just a few. Later in the 60’s cartoons like “Solitary Refinement”, “The Trip” and “Sick Transit” were the basis of a newer library, used mostly in Batfink cartoons.
Calker’s film music was among piles of music repackaged by David Chudnow for the Mutel library music service (Mutel = Music for Television). Chudnow did this with a bunch of ’40s B-movie film cues and listed himself as the publisher under BMI as Byron Music to collect royalties. Clampett must have simply bought the Mutel library and used it.
A bunch of these guys did library music. Gene Poddany had a series of cues that were in the Capitol Hi-Q library and Bill Lava wrote material that was in the CBS E-Z cue library.
Just an added note, Thad. David Gordon released a stock music library of cues he picked up from ’40s movies, then apparently turned around and listed the composer credits as “Melvyn Lenard” (his son) on some of them.
I don’t know if Calker’s cues were among them. But the basic explanation is Calker’s old music was picked up by one of the library services and re-released without his name, or a different name, on it.
Paul Mandell did a pile of research on the topic some years ago and that’s the source of all this.
Reminds me of when I first watched “The Loose Nut” many years ago and being confounded as to why cues from “Leave It To Beaver” were now being heard in a Woody cartoon.
“Owly to Bed”, “Cock-a-Doodle Dino”, “Huey’s Father’s Day” and “Witch Is Which?” were some of the other Sharples cartoons where his musical hooks ended up part of the stock score library (in fact, the end music for “HFD” actually made onto TV almost the exact same time it hit the theaters, as the closing music on the Trans-Lux/Joe Oriolo Felix the Cat shorts).
As far as Calker, it’s also interesting that when he returned to Lantz, he tried to pick up almost exactly where he left off, as the modified opening music he implemented when transitioning over from Clarence Wheeler 1962 is virtually the same as the music from the final scene of 1949’s “Drooler’s Delight”, the last cartoon prior to the Lantz shutdown.
While I’ve been exposed to the Lantz shorts since before I hit the double-digit age, I always enjoyed the 1940’s shorts the best and that was because of Darrell Calker’s scores. His music arrangements for “The Bandmaster”, “Pixie Picnic” and other shorts of that realm are excellent!
When I started colleting the COLUMBIA Fox & Crow shorts in the early 2000’s, I immediately noticed his music in “Grape Nutty” & “Tooth or Consequences” – you just tell it was his style.
Whatch’er makin’, Thaddeus? A cartoon?
Possibly, possibly.