Cartoon Time ... !!! CRAIG!!!!!

Hi,
 
(You have to listen to a couple of these, and then go check out some Faust!)(What an experience, and it makes a world of difference about what we thought was just ... weird stuff!) 
 
I have been reading a book on Cartoon Music, called the "Cartoon Music Book", and it has some unbelievably far out things.
 
The book is now a bit dated, but it covers a lot, all the way to Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats.
 
Of all the things that are the most important here is the amount of history and detailed explanations of how things were done, and how they developed and how even Walt Disney had create a STEREO original for Fantasia that could not be enjoyed all across the country and it took over 20 years for that film to recoup its investment, a lot of which went to the development of the sound, whose details appear to have been influenced by Leopold Stokowski, who probably was the first conductor, ever, to be concerned with the "mix" and do so, even if some of it on his end was about the positioning of the instruments, in a non-conforming sort of style, compared to other conductors, who simply worked the music and did not have the ear to take it further.
 
There are some great stories, and there are some cartoons that you want to go after really bad, like the NY/Harlem stuff and the original (and not censored) versions of Betty Boop. Not to mention how an orchestra doing William Tell, ends up doing a song that is over 150 years old! The eternal battle between "serious music" and "popular song" is taken on ... but the song does not lose! And this is the history of the 20th century music, where popular music has just about single handedly destroyed the "high levels" of the classical music world ... though we forget that even Mozart was writing popular music, that also did very well, which satirizing the seriousness of the supposed "masters".
 
The cleverness and the compositional situations are excellent ... the inevitable question was what came first, the music or the cartoon, and the proper answer is BOTH ... not one or the other, and this is something that is really hard to discuss these days in the era of rock music ...
 
It is, if anything, a very bright shine on how music developed, and although I am not sure that anyone can appreciate the inanity and the childishness of some of the gags and jokes here, even on the music and musicians themselves, in the end, this is a wonderful and extremely enjoyable book ... on a time of innovation and creativity, when today, with better tools, we do not create new things ... we repeat the old stuff over and over again!
 
Highly recommended for anyone that enjoys learning something or other about creativity! Not only their own, but someone else's!