Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah

I was transferring my VHS copy of the 1956 Foghorn Leghorn/Daffy Duck crossover cartoon "The High and the Flighty" to disc (hopefully, this means that there will be some Foghorn Leghorn cartoons on DVD, since any time I spend time copying VHS to DVD, a commercial DVD comes along and makes my work irrelevant), and since the score of this cartoon was included on the second "Carl Stalling Project" CD, I decided to try synching up the isolated score with the picture.

This proved to be harder than I thought, because I had to adjust for the fact that the cartoon has shorter pauses between musical sections than the CD score does, and also the CD is missing a few sections of the score (and one scene was done without music, a scene with a fake train: Stalling scored almost every scene in a cartoon, but when it came to a train scene, he often let Treg Brown's sound effects stand alone). But while the synch isn't perfect, I did at least sort of manage to combine the portions of the score with the images the music was supposed to match. This is not the complete cartoon; if you want the complete cartoon, it's here.

Stalling's style was a little different at this time, near the end of his career, than it had been for most of his career. Even though it's a lighthearted comedy cartoon, the music is a little less brash and "cartoony" than usual for Stalling, with fewer song quotations than usual (except for "Camptown Races," but even that isn't used in the opening credits). Especially in cartoons from 1956-7, he seemed to use a style that was slightly more... not exactly advanced, it just sounds a bit more like a through-composed movie score than usual. He's still following the action, but trying a little more than before to integrate the action music into something resembling full-fledged musical phrases. Even in talky cartoons, where he once would just use a few strings or bare chords or a song to accompany dialogue, he now throws in some unusual (for him) harmonies and original melodies like the theme for Daffy in "Flighty."

Also, one thing that's become clear in listening to isolated scores from the mid-to-late '50s is that by this time the Warners cartoons did not have access to the size or quality of the orchestra they once had. The string section in particular sounds like it's smaller and scrawnier than it once was.

One thing that remained consistent: when a character sings, Stalling doesn't play the tune in the orchestra, instead playing an accompaniment or a countermelody to Blanc's singing.