Animation
World Magazine, Issue 2.1, April 1997
Who's Afraid of ASCAP?
Popular Songs in the Silly Symphonies
by J.B. Kaufman
Music and animation: the potent union of those
two forms of expression was celebrated in Walt Disney's animated series,
the Silly Symphonies. From 1929 to 1939, this extraordinary series of films
united animation with a rich array of music, encompassing classical melodies,
traditional folk tunes, operatic themes--and popular songs.
Carl Stalling, who played a pivotal role in inaugurating the Silly Symphonies,
also set the musical tone for early entries in the series. Drawing on his
background as a theater organist, he exhibited a knack for developing musical
scores both from original themes and from a wide variety of existing sources,
including currently or recently popular songs. This facility would serve
him well in later years during his celebrated tenure at the Schlesinger/Warner
Bros. studio, where it was part of the charter of the Looney Tunes and
Merrie Melodies to exploit the songs in the vast catalogs of Warner's music
publishers.
But Disney in 1929 had no music catalog, and the use of copyrighted music
in his films meant the added expense of royalty payments--at a time when
his meager budget was already stretched thin. Stalling and his musical
successors were usually discouraged from using such material in their scores.
Occasionally copyrighted songs did turn up in Disney's films; Walter Donovan's
"Aba Daba Honeymoon," for example, can be heard in Monkey
Melodies (1930).
When established music was used in the Silly Symphonies, it was
used imaginatively. Historian Russell Merritt points out the significance
of Just Dogs (1932), which opens with a group of mournful dogs in
a dog pound. The score accompanying this scene is a musical joke: the tune
is Guy Massey's "The Prisoner's Song," made popular by Vernon
Dalhart's 1924 hit record. To get the joke, an audience was expected to
recognize the tune and remember the title. (In 1935 the song was reused
in a roughly similar way in another Symphony, Music Land.)
As a rule, however,
Disney composers were urged to avoid such tunes. Stalling recalled* that, on at least one
occasion, Disney had asked him to compose a tune that suggested
a popular song without actually plagiarizing it. This practice did not
end with Stalling's departure from the studio in 1930; a notable example
can be heard as late as 1934, in the baseball sequence in The Tortoise
and the Hare. As the cocky Hare flaunts his speed by playing baseball
with himself, the music accompanying him is an original theme written by
staff composer Frank Churchill--the cue sheet identifies it as "Battin'
the Balls Around"--but it plants a strong subliminal suggestion
of Albert Von Tilzer and Jack Norworth's "Take Me Out to the Ball
Game." This was the preferred way of dealing with established songs
in Disney's cartoons.
The success of "Who's
Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" inaugurated a wave of original songs
written for the Silly Symphonies.
A New Concept
But if one source of music was generally
discouraged, Disney did sanction another, characteristically inventive,
one: the use of original songs. This phase of Disney music was launched
in earnest with the success of Frank Churchill's "Who's Afraid of
the Big Bad Wolf?" in Three Little Pigs (1933). This landmark
song was conceived only to serve a simple functional purpose in the short:
the two playful Pigs sang it to express their carefree personalities and
to tease their hard-working brother. As heard in the film, however, the
song exercised an irresistible appeal of its own.
Three Little Pigs opened in the spring of 1933, and its subsequent
success story has become a matter of record. Similarly, the extraordinary
success of "Who's Afraid" is now well known; quite unexpectedly,
the Disney studio found itself with a hit song. Soon "Who's Afraid"
appeared in sheet-music form, published by Irving Berlin, Inc. and embellished
with additional lyrics by Ann Ronell. (In recent years her contribution
has been disputed--inexplicably, since the "additional lyrics"
attributed to her are embarrassing at best.) By the end of 1933, at least
a dozen recordings of "Who's Afraid" had been issued by various
record labels, and several of those recordings were further "milked"
by recoupling with alternate B-sides or on subsidiary labels. One side
by Harry Reser and His Eskimos, recorded in October 1933, was used on seven
different records!
Perhaps spurred by this overwhelming success, the Disney studio began to
inject more original songs into the Silly Symphonies. Songs, or sung dialogue,
had been heard in the series before Three Little Pigs, but now the
Disney musicians seemed to be composing songs with the popular-music market
in mind. Lullaby Land, produced in the spring and summer of 1933
as Three Little Pigs was first appearing in theaters, illustrates
the trend. The Lullaby Land score was composed primarily by Leigh
Harline, but Frank Churchill, fresh from "Who's Afraid," contributed
a theme song titled "Lullaby Land of Nowhere." This song not
only helped set the mood of the film but was also a pleasant tune in its
own right, and enjoyed a modest life of its own apart from the film.
Story development of another Symphony, Grasshopper and the Ants,
took place in the autumn of 1933 while the "Who's Afraid" recording
boom was at its height. Coincidentally or not, great care was taken to
develop a theme song for the Grasshopper; pages of tentative lyric suggestions
survive today as evidence. The result was Leigh Harline and Larry Morey's
"The World Owes Me a Living," a number which, though undeniably
catchy, failed to duplicate the runaway success of "Who's Afraid"
when Grasshopper and the Ants was released early in 1934.
Still, the Grasshopper's song did realize a nominal success. It was published
and recorded, and it also achieved a curious immortality at the Disney
studio itself. During a nightmare sequence in Mickey's Garden (1935),
the orchestral score quotes a few bars of "The World Owes Me a Living"--whereupon
Mickey Mouse looks around to find himself menaced by a giant grasshopper!
Still later in 1935, Goofy makes his first appearance in On Ice
singing "The World Owes Me a Living." Why was the Grasshopper's
song given to the Goof? The only connection between the two characters
was gag man/vocalist Pinto Colvig, who had supplied the same voice for
both characters. As slight as this connection may seem, it was enough to
justify the adoption of "The World Owes Me" as a sort of unofficial
theme song, both vocal and instrumental, for Goofy in numerous cartoons
over the next 15 years. As late as 1950, in Lion Down, he can be
heard singing it.
The Wise Little Hen (voice by Florence Gill) sings Leigh Harline
and Larry Morey's "Help Me Plant My Corn" in The Wise Little
Hen (1934).
Then Came the Deluge
After Grasshopper and the Ants came the deluge. Virtually every
subsequent 1934 Symphony included an original song of some kind, written
by either Churchill or Harline. The title character in The Wise Little
Hen sings "Help Me Plant My Corn," the Three Pigs reprise
"Who's Afraid" in The Big Bad Wolf, while other songs,
like "See the Funny Little Bunnies" in Funny Little Bunnies
or "The Penguin Is a Very Funny Creature" in Peculiar Penguins,
are sung by offscreen choruses. (One seeming omission from the hit parade
is The Tortoise and the Hare; the song "Slow But Sure,"
written by Churchill and Morey for that film, is never sung in the finished
version but is used as an instrumental theme.)
All of these songs, of course, were kept subservient to the overall flow
of the pictures; the Silly Symphonies were never reduced to mere showcases
for popular songs. Songs in the Symphonies always helped to establish a
character or a mood, and were deftly integrated into the action and incidental
scores of the pictures. In The Flying Mouse, for example, the song
"You're Nothin' But a Nothin'" occupies a scant 35 seconds of
screen time, a brief, mocking snippet of music sung to the title character
by a gang of evil-looking bats. Apart from the film, however, the song
was published and recorded by several popular dance bands.
As the Silly Symphonies continued into 1935, the string of original songs
continued apace: "Dirty Bill" in The Robber Kitten, "The
Sweetest One of All" in The Cookie Carnival, "We're Gonna
Get Out of the Dumps" in Broken Toys. The title song in Water
Babies, like "Slow But Sure" the year before, was written
as a vocal song but was heard in the film only in instrumental form. One
of the most brilliant Symphonies, Who Killed Cock Robin?, featured
several new songs. In a key sequence Jenny Wren, designed as a caricature
of Mae West, struts into the courtroom singing Churchill's "Somebody
Rubbed Out My Robin," a canny and hilarious sendup of Mae West's own
songs.
Offscreen choruses provided the
songs in several Silly Symphonies, such as Harline and Morey's "The
Penguin is a Very Funny Creature" in Peculiar Penguins (1934).
After late 1935 the use of original songs in the series suddenly declined. Interestingly, in a few isolated but marked cases, the studio began again to turn to outside sources for songs. The title characters in Three Orphan Kittens (1935) find their way onto a player piano and accidentally start it playing; the tune is, appropriately enough, Zez Confrey's "Kitten on the Keys." An all-insect orchestra in Woodland Café (1937) gives out with a hot rendition of Ted Koehler and Rube Bloom's "Truckin'," introduced two years earlier. Perhaps the most significant of these later "borrowings" is in Cock o' the Walk (1935). This short was produced when the Disney films were still being distributed by United Artists, but overtures had already begun which would lead to a new Disney distribution arrangement with RKO Radio in 1937. Fully half the screen time of Cock o' the Walk is accompanied by an instrumental version of the Vincent Youmans-Gus Kahn-Edward Eliscu hit "The Carioca"--introduced two years earlier in an RKO feature, Flying Down to Rio.
In any case, if the practice of original songs
was disappearing from the Silly Symphonies, the days of the Symphonies
themselves were numbered. By 1936 serious work was under way on the studio's
first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Soon development
had begun on other features as well, and those projects increasingly usurped
the role of the Symphonies by absorbing the studio's top talent--including
its composers. Accordingly, within a few short years the Disney features
began to introduce popular songs that would become standards: "Someday
My Prince Will Come," "Whistle While You Work," "When
You Wish Upon a Star," and many more. In this domain--as in so many
others--the Silly Symphonies led the way.
J.B. Kaufman is an independent film historian who has written extensively
on early Disney animation. He is co-author, with Russell Merritt, of
Walt in Wonderland, and the two are currently completing a second book
on the Silly Symphonies, to be published by La Cineteca del Friuli in 1998.
*As quoted by Mike Barrier and Milt Gray in Funnyworld
13 (Spring 1971) p. 22.
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