So That's What an Orchestra Sounds Like

There was never a final episode for Animaniacs, so so put together the 99th and last episode, the producers took one leftover cartoon and asked Richard Stone, the supervising composer, to fill out the episode by composing an "Animaniacs Suite" based on the various themes he had written for the characters. (All the characters had original themes except Slappy Squirrel, whose theme was Dvořák's 7th "Humoresque.") The music was illustrated with clips from the previous 98 episodes. I don't think the cartoon has been run very often -- YTV used to have a package that consisted of the first 98 episodes, but not this elusive 99th. It's too bad, because the Suite, written for an expanded orchestra, stands as a nice tribute to Stone, who died only a few years later. I don't think it would really work as a separate orchestral piece (though I doubt Warners ever even bothered trying to market it that way), but I wouldn't mind being able to get it as a separate track or download, without the sound effects. I would also like the Goodfeathers section to be longer, since I thought the combination of cartoony music with jazzy New York movie music made for some of the show's best scores.

The question of how much you do or don't like Stone's style -- and the style of his other staff composers, but they all learned to write exactly like him -- is inseparable from the question of what you think of the shows, since he was an exact match for the style of the shows he composed for: brash, loud, and with a tendency toward obvious effects; if there was ever an opportunity for a wah-wah trombone moan, he'd take it. (Some of this, though, may not have been his personal choice; in his interview with Daniel Goldmark, he mentioned that he would have preferred to hold the music back for explosions and let the sound effects do the work, the way Stalling did, but that he was asked to put big musical stings under the explosion effects.) Also, no matter who was orchestrating for him, the obsessive use of the xylophone is a feature of nearly all Stone scores.

But I don't think any of that matters much compared to his ability to find the exact right musical style for these shows. Tiny Toons, which didn't have as much of a uniform style, had some good scores, some weak scores, and just like the show itself, we didn't always quite know what kind of style it was aiming for. Stone came up with a type of music that sounded like what Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and the rest were trying to be: like the old cartoons, but not too much like them (because any time they tried to compete head-to-head with the classic stuff, they inevitably fell short). It was like Carl Stalling music in terms of the effects and the musical jokes, but if you compared a Stone score with a Stalling score you would find that the overall sound wasn't unpleasantly similar (in part because it had just enough of a '90s sound to it to avoid sounding like a complete retro throwback). It's music that nods to the past but sidesteps unflattering direct comparisons, just like the shows were trying to do.

memorable masterpiece
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The upload above is in mono; there's also a YouTube clip that has only the audio of this segment, without the video, but it's in stereo, and in some ways the music comes off better without the clips.