Merry Melodies and Silly Symphonies, Blog 9 for 3/30/2010, by John Lyver
Merry Melodies today is probably more well know then Disney’s old Silly Symphonies, especially among younger peoples of the day. Both of these types of cartoons use older forms of Classical and Jazz music in order to help tell the story. Merry Melodies has done well with promoting many classical works of music with their cartoons. Often times people hear a song and remember not for its classical significance but because it was used in a bugs bunny or other Merry Melody cartoon. One thing I have noticed with the differences between Merry Melodies and Silly Symphonies is how they use their music. Merry Melodies uses the music to help to set the mood for each scene or for each character where in Silly Symphonies on they tends to do the opposite and have music be the main focus of the cartoon.
We can see Merry Melody using music as good background music in the cartoon “A Day at the Zoo” we can see therefore that the music does not become the center of the cartoon but is used more to add feeling or a theme to each character(s). Each time the camera pans to a different cage for each animal the mood of the music changes to match the characters. We can also see this change when a character changes mood, for example the young man who is tormenting the Lion the music is light and happy where as when the narrator corrects the young man and the young man seems sad for what he has done and, the music changes. At first the type of instruments or timbre that is being used is that to show the change expression of lightness in the playing stringed instruments and more serious to the heaver sound of woodwinds and brass.
In the Silly Symphonies cartoon “Music Land” we can see how the music is very much the central theme of the cartoon so much so that all the people are musical instruments. They instruments do not really talk they simply play music, even when the saxophone was locked up he wrote not in words but in musical notation. The music of this cartoon is also much louder then that of the Merry Melody cartoon. The Merry Melody cartoon had less volume so the music is a lot quieter, this is so that the focus is more on the action of the cartoon.
I commented on Hayleigh Allingham’s post at http://hallingham.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/blog-post-9-ethnocide/#comment-27
