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Film Music 101: Mickey Mousing

In the world of film and animation music, "Mickey Mousing" is the affectionate (and occasionally derogatory) nickname given to a technique whereby the music and the action on the screen are completely in sync with each other. The reason this technique is called "Mickey Mousing" is because it first appeared in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie starring Mickey Mouse!

Incidentally, Mickey was originally voiced by Walt Disney himself!

The reason "Mickey Mousing" occurred at all is because, after film studios learned the trick of making sound film, they all wanted to show off the fact that their films had sound. To that end, the soundtracks of many, MANY films, were overly synchronized with the actin on the screen, and this happened a lot in the early Disney cartoons as well.

For instance, the 1929 cartoon Skeleton Dance is a 5 1/2 minute example of "Mickey Mousing." Take a few minutes to watch it and I believe you'll see what I mean.

My favorite moment in "Skeleton Dance" comes when the one skeleton is sneaking around, taking first three long strides and then quick stepping (and how the music matches his movement, it's a trick seen more than once in cartoons).

While "Mickey Mousing" has decreased greatly over the years, it is still being used. A more recent example can be found in the first Spider-Man movie in 2002. In the scene where Peter (Tobey Maguire) discovers he has the ability to climb walls, listen to what the music does when his hand first touches the brick wall and then begins to climb up, it's mimicking his actions! Pretty cool right? Have a look here below:



Hope you enjoyed another look at the world of film music, have a great day!

On this day in Film History: January 10th

(a few days late I know, but still an interesting story about a great movie classic)

On this day in 1941, Orson Welles was well on his way to releasing Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest movie he ever released. The film told the story of Charles Foster Kane, a fictional newspaper tycoon, who became fabulously rich after a huge gold mine was discovered on property owned by his mother. When Kane becomes a young man, though incredibly wealthy, he is full of ideals and dreams of what he could do with that wealth. After marrying the niece of the current President of the United States and having a son, Charles Jr., Kane makes a run for President and initially does extremely well. During this time, his marriage to his wife has disintegrated, though they maintain a loving facade for the sake of their son and their reputations. However, just as it looks like Kane will secure the nomination, it is discovered (and made public) that Kane has been having an affair with a singer named Susan Alexander and in the ensuing scandal, Kane's wife leaves him and he is forced to end his nascent political career. When his wife and son are later killed in a car accident, it destroys Kane even further. The aging tycoon becomes obsessed with controlling everyone and everything around him. While Susan Alexander is initially happy to marry Kane, she finds life in the oversized mansion of Xanadu extremely stifling, not to mention the fact that Kane insists she be a huge opera star, when her voice is clearly unsuited to the task (Susan is not a bad singer, her voice simply can't take the range of an opera). When Susan ultimately leaves him, Kane withdraws from public life altogether, finally dying alone, a miserable old man, his final word being "Rosebud." And what is Rosebud? Well, you'll have to watch the movie to find out!

                                   (Orson Welles didn't just direct the movie, he starred in it too!)

That is a fairly concise summary of the movie. But what makes things really interesting, is that the real-life newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst did everything he possibly could to try and stop this film from being released. Hearst objected strongly to the film because he suspected and later outright accused Welles of basing the character of Charles Foster Kane on himself (Hearst). Welles vehemently denied this, but Hearst was determined to make the accusation stick. First he offered the studio $800,000 dollars (that's over 13 million dollars in today's money) to destroy every copy of the film they had. When that failed, Hearst allegedly tried to trap Welles in a scandal by planting a girl in his hotel room (no, really!) And when THAT failed, Hearst threw his entire newspaper empire into slandering both the film and Welles' character as much as possible. The plan partially succeeded as Citizen Kane did not perform nearly as well upon release as many had expected. However, Welles' ultimately had the last laugh because Hearst tried so hard to have the movie killed, that the character of Charles Foster Kane is now forever linked to William Randolph Hearst (not to mention that Citizen Kane is today considered one of the greatest movies ever made).

Nice try Mr. Hearst, but your evil scheme didn't work!

Film Music 101: Arranger

Another individual (or group of individuals) who serve an important function in getting a film score put together is the arranger.

An arranger should not be confused with an orchestrator. An orchestrator takes the composer's piano score and fleshes it out into a full-bodied orchestral score. Arrangement, by contrast, takes a pre-existing musical work and re-arranges it by adding new musical themes, new transitions or whatever is necessary to make an old work fit in a new context.

Take for example the main theme from the Mission Impossible film series. The title theme (featuring a lighted fuse) was taken from the original theme written for the television series in the 1960s.

The Mission Impossible film series now contains five films: Mission Impossible (1996), Mission Impossible II (2000), Mission Impossible III (2006), Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015). For each film's title sequence, the music has been arranged to fit the context of the new film, though the core of the music remains intact. Listen to the examples below and you'll see what I mean (the biggest contrast, in my opinion, comes in the title sequence for Mission Impossible II, it has a definitive 2000-era vibe).

You can thank the arranger for the different sound of the music in each title sequence. So hard to believe that the first Mission Impossible movie opened TWENTY YEARS AGO!! Hope you enjoyed!

On this day in Film History: January 7th

On January 7th, 1894, William Kennedy Dickson (a Scottish inventor who invented a prototype of the motion picture camera) received a patent for motion picture film. Dickson, who worked for a time with Thomas Edison in his film studio, is also responsible for creating the short film Dickson Greeting, considered by some to be the first film shown to an American audience (produced circa 1891).




If you look at the late 19th century films that have survived to the present day, you'll notice that they're all incredibly short by modern standards, and why is this? The reason the earliest films are so short is because when these inventors created the process of running film through a motion picture camera, the material used for film was incredibly flammable and those first cameras made it relatively easy for the film to overheat and catch fire if it ran too long. So, they adjusted the length of film to a certain length that they knew could run safely, and as the technology improved, the films grew longer in length.

Film Music 101: The Temp Track

Occasionally, while putting a film together, the director might wish for the composer to emulate a specific style of music. To that end, a temp track will be assembled to go with the rough cut of the film, to give the composer an idea of what the director wants.

A temp track is essentially a temporary soundtrack, someone in the technical department has found sound recordings that match the style the director wants and they've paired it up with the film. To give a few examples, part of the soundtrack from Ben-Hur (1959) was used as a temp track for Star Wars (1977), excerpts from a Howard Shore piece were used for Gangs of New York (2002) and, most (in)famously, 2001: A Space Odyssey used a temp track assembled from Strauss waltzes, Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss and Atmospheres by Ligeti.

2001: A Space Odyssey is so notable because director Stanley Kubrick actually REJECTED the score composer Alex North had created in favor of the temp track! Think about it, many of the scenes in that film are iconic because of the selections of classical music, but we (the audience) were never meant to hear it like that!

Interesting to consider what might have been...

On this day in Film History: January 6th

January 6th, 1942: Disney's Fantasia opens in theaters (not to be confused with its official New York premiere in 1940)

Seventy-four years ago, a strange movie opened in American cinemas. Fantasia was far from the typical feature film, beacause rather than telling a unified story, it was separated into a series of musical segments, some told stories, others consisted of abstract images. Disney originally intended for Fantasia to be the first in a recurring series of films that would continuously update itself by including old segments and adding in new portions as time went on. Although Fantasia 2000 attempted to follow this model, the plan ultimately fell through. Nonetheless, Fantasia is nowadays considered a masterpiece of animation and of musical talent.

The film is divided into eight musical segments and they are as follows:

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach

Of all the segments in Fantasia, the Toccata and Fugue is by far the most abstract segment of them all. The Toccata consists of the camera panning through the orchestra, with occasional shots of conductor Leopold Stokowski's back (seen in the picture above). The Fugue section is when things get interesting (or weird, depending upon how you feel about classical music). The viewer is taken through a medley of rolling red and purple hills, endless staircases and fantastical landscapes, all before plummeting back to earth and the orchestra as the piece finally comes to an end.

• The Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Despite it's name (and the host informs the audience as well), the titular Nutcracker does not appear in this segment. What does appear are a number of dances from the ballet, namely: "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"; "Chinese Dance"; "Dance of the Flutes"; "Arabian Dance"; "Russian Dance"; and "Waltz of the Flowers."

Dancing mushrooms from the "Chinese Dance"

Dancing flowers from the "Russian Dance"

Ice fairies from "Waltz of the Flowers"

• The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas

This is the only segment to be brought back in Fantasia 2000 and one of the most famous, mostly because of its famous star: Mickey Mouse is the titular apprentice, who works tirelessly for the wizard Yen Sid (Disney spelled backwards). Once the wizard departs for bed, Mickey decides to create some "help" to get his chores done quicker, but things quickly get out of hand...

Mickey and the broomstick

Daydreaming of being a great wizard...

Busted!!

• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky

This segment is usually the one kids remember because this is "the dinosaur segment" (at least that's how I always remembered it when I was growing up). Disney took Stravinsky's ballet about a group of primitives performing ritual sacrifice (not kidding about this) and transformed it into a story about evolution, starting with the primitive Earth boiling in lava, through the creation of microbes up until the mighty dinosaurs themselves. The climax of the segment (before the extinction anyway), is a terrifying segment where a T-Rex attacks a group of peaceful dinosaurs and the T-Rex squares off against the Stegosaurus (keep in mind that T-Rex was viewed primarily as a hunter in those days, and not believed to be the scavenger we now suspect he might have been).

The two square off, but you just know Stegosaurus doesn't stand a chance

How the dinosaurs were thought to have gone extinct before the Chicxulub crater was discovered

• Intermission/Meet the Soundtrack

Now comes an interlude where first, we see the musicians having an impromptu jam session and then our host introduces us to the soundtrack, personified as an animated string standing in the center of the stage. This animated string is used to demonstrate the different sounds the orchestra makes. Below is just one example (it's really funny to watch):

Demonstrating the sound of a harp

• The Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 6) by Ludwig van Beethoven

Now into the second half of the program, we see Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 (also called the Pastoral Symphony). Beethoven wrote this symphony as his deafness was progressively getting worse and so he deliberately evoked the landscape of the country in his musical writing and the Disney animators took these sounds and created a fantastical Greek world where all the creatures of mythology live. For instance you have (in no particular order):

Pegasus

Centaurs and Cherubs

Little unicorns, and of course...

Greek gods!

The whole program revolves around a day in the life in this little paradise. We see the life of a Pegasus family, courtship among the centaurs, a huge wine party hosted by Dionysus, a gigantic thunderstorm created by Zeus (apparently because he can), the aftermath and a spectacular sunset (with a brief cameo by Apollo no less!)

Apollo waving goodbye

• Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli

Next comes the ever hilarious Dance of the Hours, an allegory of the progression from Day to Night. The segment starts with Madame Upanova waking up her ostrich dancers (they represent the Morning)

Truthfully? I did NOT know these characters had names

The ostriches are frightened away by Hyacinth Hippo and her servants (and they represent the Afternoon)

While Hyacinth takes a nap, several elephants (led by Elephanchine) come in and do a bubble dance (and they represent the Evening)

Finally, the Elephants are (literally) blown away by the evening wind and Hyacinth remains asleep, unaware that Night has now fallen and she is being observed by Ben Ali Gator (get it?) and his troop of gators. Somehow, Ali Gator falls hopelessly in love with Hyacinth and she seems to reciprocate (an alligator and a hippo?!?!) and they share a brief dance together before Hyacinth gives a brief glance of "come and get me if you want me" and Ali Gator gladly gives chase, leading to the wild finale where the other alligators chase throughout the palace, pulling out ostriches, Hippos and Elephants, all while Hyacinth and Ali Gator dance oblivious. The finale is SO tremendous in fact, that it literally brings the palace crashing down at the very end.

• Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria by Modest Mussorgsky and Franz Schubert respectively

The climax of the program now comes with Night on Bald Mountain. On a distant mountain in the Eastern European countryside, the black demon Chernabog awakens at midnight and begins his devilish plan of wreaking havoc upon the world below.

This scared me so much when i was a kid!!

Chernabog summons ghosts, witches, lesser demons and who knows what else and all converge in a riotous dance of death on the mountain top.

But just as Chernabog has gathered his full power and is about to attack, a bell rings and the demon stops. The bell continues to ring, and each time a white flash appears to blind him. It is the early hour and a nearby church is calling the monks to prayer. It is the holy power of prayer that stops Chernabog and forces him to go back to sleep for another night. Meanwhile, the monks continue to pray, and the segment gives way to Schubert's Ave Maria

The monks walking to prayer

And that is how Fantasia ends. After the segment ends, we see the musicians departing the same way we came in, but there's no more narration, no more music.