The Queen Of The World and I like to watch MeTV for the old reruns (Andy Griffith, Hogan's Heroes, that sort of thing). They're advertising that they'd going to start running Looney Tunes cartoons in the morning. That got me thinking about classical music (yes it did - stick with me here) and that led to today's musical selection.
Walt Disney released Fantasia in 1940 which was a very high brow introduction to classical music, albeit aimed at kids. Three years later Warner Brothers released a spoof, A Corny Concerto which mimicked Fantasia but in not at all a high brow manner. Quite the reverse, actually.
We've seen Fantasia here, several times before (some of these links suffer from bit rot as Youtube plays copyright whack-a-mole but a quick search there will find the composition). All of these posts here were presented in a High Brow fashion. In my defense, I've also posted about classical music in Bugs Bunny before. That one was also written by Carl Stalling who wrote a score a week for twenty years for Warner Brothers cartoons.
If you're looking for high brow, you might want to pass this one by, but if you enjoy low brow, then enjoy away.
5 comments:
That was wovewey.
I am glad the Blue Danube swans had a happy ending.
Do not miss what has been called the greatest cartoon ever made: Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in the opera parody "What's Opera Doc?" Bugs is Brunhilde and Elmer is Sigfried reprising Wagner's Ring Cycle in seven minutes. There are so many inside jokes on the world of opera that as many times as I've seen it, I'm sure I'm still missing many of them.
The 'lowbrow' treatment of classical music kept classical music within the reaches of the masses at a time that the highbrows were isolating the highbrow stuff from the common man.
Seriously.
Starting in the late 1930s, ticket prices for classical and opera music, which were at one time low enough, like ticket prices for professional sports, that the 'common man' could and did go to see matinee and even 'dumbed-down' evening performances. But snobbishness reared its ugly head and the common man lost the ability to hear 1st rate or even 2nd rate performers, and thus classical music was beginning to be lost to the commoners.
Sad, very sad.
But cartoons did wonderfully at keeping classical music in the forefront of civilization, much better than Fantasia.
Every year pre-COVIDification, they had a Looney Tunes classical music night at the Hollywood Bowl, and featured a live full orchestra playing in synch to the actual cartoon soundtrack. The highlight was 10,000 people in the seats singing along with "Kill Da Wabbit!" to Wagner.
Which may explain Mark Twain saying Wagner's music was better than it sounds.
Libertyman, the Internets you just won will arrive via courier ...
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