Carl Stalling - Stalling Self-Parody: Music from "Porky's Preview" (1941)
Music doesn't often get the chance to be witty. Adding a funny lyric might be able to make someone laugh, but doing that with the music alone is something much rarer. Carl Stalling had that ability. He wrote the music for all of your favourite Looney Tunes cartoons. It was his musical voice, as much as the antics of Bugs, Porky, Tweety Pie and Speedy, that gave those short films their distinctive character.

Just as the cartoons themselves were fast paced, so did the music have to keep up with them. Whenever the scene or the focus changed, Stalling's music would too, perhaps with a musical reference, perhaps with the phrasing. With an under-rehearsed orchestra and the technical difficulty of the music, it's astonishing that it turned out as well as it did.

Here's a track from the 1990 album which started the reappraisal of Stalling's work, The Carl Stalling Project. Stalling Self-Parody: Music from "Porky's Preview" (1941) shows him pushing his techniques to the limits. It's crammed full of musical quotes, and when it isn't shifting mood every 15 seconds or so, it uses that breathing space to do ridiculous things with the timing. It's tremendously clever stuff. Yet despite the undoubted musicological interest in this, honesty demands admitting that a large amount of the appeal here is nostalgic. Listen to that famous introduction and you'll be six years old again, and wondering why the rest of the world didn't realise that these cartoons were mankind's single greatest achievement.

Carl Stalling - Stalling Self-Parody: Music from "Porky's Preview" (1941)