Sunday, 8 August 2010 01:44 pm
(no subject)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deckardcanineThis is an unusual weekend for my family, because three men are belatedly celebrating their birthdays. Dad couldn't do it properly in Spain, so we gave him presents at a restaurant on Friday. My sister's boyfriend had his birthday in the last week, but his party's today. (I'm not going, partly due to other obligations and partly because I've had enough big gatherings for a while.) And last night I and my sister went to a concert for which she bought tickets back in May. (Incidentally, yesterday was Ted Forth's birthday as well.)
The concert: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, the same venue as Dial H for Hitchcock last year. I'd had a choice between this and... some other concert; I've forgotten after more than two months. It makes sense that they'd make a concert of this, as the cartoons weren't called "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" for nothing. By either sheer coincidence or subconscious choice, I saw the Bogdanovich movie What's Up, Doc? on Wednesday, ending with a few seconds of a cartoon by the same title that was excerpted in this concert.
I've always had mixed feelings about the Tunes. I watched them a lot on Nick and TNT, but they rarely got a visible, let alone audible, reaction out of me. It wasn't just their age showing; the early ones weren't really made for kids. In retrospect, the fact that they were made to be appetizers before movies would explain why they got repetitive and didn't function so masterfully as an integrated TV show. Nowadays I take moderate interest in the cartoons that weren't shown on Nick for obvious reasons. I have little hope for the latest plan to revive the franchise.
Fortunately, the cartoons shown in full or in part while the live orchestra played were mostly ones I'd seen once or never before. That and the laughter of the vast audience made them pretty easy to enjoy. I especially liked the opener, "Baton Bunny." The animal characters are cuter to me now that I'm older. Bugs makes nice use of his ears, feet, and tail; once he even tickled the ivories of his incisors.
Interestingly, according to conductor George Daugherty, the studio took seriously the depiction of piano playing. The original orchestra had to transpose a song so Bugs in "Rhapsody Rabbit" wouldn't have to hit the black keys. Having four digits per hand didn't help; only once did they give him five. Yet I noticed they took substantial liberties all the same.
Daugherty also said that the NSO didn't get this show on the road as soon as they'd hoped because they couldn't find a good instrument to make the inflected opening sound of "Merrily We Roll Along" (which they played far more than "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down"). Eventually they found the original '30s slide guitar at the Warner Bros. vault. We applauded as they held it up.
After the intermission, they got into some non-Warner cartoons. First there was "Tom and Jerry in the Hollywood Bowl." Then a Scooby-Doo montage was set to "In the Hall of the Mountain King." The last thing before resuming Warner Bros. was a Flintstones montage set to Offenbach's "Can-Can." Plenty of slapstick there, naturally, and it seems I haven't seen as many episodes as I thought. (I may or may not have seen the SD episodes; they largely run together.)
In general, I thought the show got weaker as it went along. The music was just as good, but the humor declined. About half the finale, "The History of Warner Bros. Cartoons in Four and One Half Minutes," was clips of what they'd already shown.
The Wolf Trap program is kinda mean. It's one thing to say what's coming up; it's another to talk in the past tense about what you know has already finished so that we'll feel sorry we missed it. Will I come again next year? Possibly, but it'll have to be something that promises to be less up and down.
The concert: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, the same venue as Dial H for Hitchcock last year. I'd had a choice between this and... some other concert; I've forgotten after more than two months. It makes sense that they'd make a concert of this, as the cartoons weren't called "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" for nothing. By either sheer coincidence or subconscious choice, I saw the Bogdanovich movie What's Up, Doc? on Wednesday, ending with a few seconds of a cartoon by the same title that was excerpted in this concert.
I've always had mixed feelings about the Tunes. I watched them a lot on Nick and TNT, but they rarely got a visible, let alone audible, reaction out of me. It wasn't just their age showing; the early ones weren't really made for kids. In retrospect, the fact that they were made to be appetizers before movies would explain why they got repetitive and didn't function so masterfully as an integrated TV show. Nowadays I take moderate interest in the cartoons that weren't shown on Nick for obvious reasons. I have little hope for the latest plan to revive the franchise.
Fortunately, the cartoons shown in full or in part while the live orchestra played were mostly ones I'd seen once or never before. That and the laughter of the vast audience made them pretty easy to enjoy. I especially liked the opener, "Baton Bunny." The animal characters are cuter to me now that I'm older. Bugs makes nice use of his ears, feet, and tail; once he even tickled the ivories of his incisors.
Interestingly, according to conductor George Daugherty, the studio took seriously the depiction of piano playing. The original orchestra had to transpose a song so Bugs in "Rhapsody Rabbit" wouldn't have to hit the black keys. Having four digits per hand didn't help; only once did they give him five. Yet I noticed they took substantial liberties all the same.
Daugherty also said that the NSO didn't get this show on the road as soon as they'd hoped because they couldn't find a good instrument to make the inflected opening sound of "Merrily We Roll Along" (which they played far more than "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down"). Eventually they found the original '30s slide guitar at the Warner Bros. vault. We applauded as they held it up.
After the intermission, they got into some non-Warner cartoons. First there was "Tom and Jerry in the Hollywood Bowl." Then a Scooby-Doo montage was set to "In the Hall of the Mountain King." The last thing before resuming Warner Bros. was a Flintstones montage set to Offenbach's "Can-Can." Plenty of slapstick there, naturally, and it seems I haven't seen as many episodes as I thought. (I may or may not have seen the SD episodes; they largely run together.)
In general, I thought the show got weaker as it went along. The music was just as good, but the humor declined. About half the finale, "The History of Warner Bros. Cartoons in Four and One Half Minutes," was clips of what they'd already shown.
The Wolf Trap program is kinda mean. It's one thing to say what's coming up; it's another to talk in the past tense about what you know has already finished so that we'll feel sorry we missed it. Will I come again next year? Possibly, but it'll have to be something that promises to be less up and down.