Serious Fun – How Millions of Kids Were Introduced to Classical Music via Cartoons

Apple recently announced a new music streaming service focused on classical music. It’s a standalone app that launches today, and it will feature composer metadata and of course spatial audio as well. Access to the app is included with a standard Apple Music subscription.

“Apple Music Classical makes it quick and easy to find any recording in the world’s largest classical music catalog with fully optimized search, and listeners can enjoy the highest audio quality available, and experience many classical favorites in a whole new way with immersive spatial audio,” Apple wrote in a press release. 

The Classical music genre in particular should be a great use case for immersive audio in that it gets measurably enhanced with a richer sense of depth and presence. The app will also offer “hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, intuitive browsing features, and much more.”

Admittedly I don’t listen to a lot of Classical music myself, but I certainly appreciate the genre for its impact. In fact in reflecting on the first time I really heard it on any kind of a regular basis, it seems I was initially exposed to it through cartoons and animated films – as were millions of other kids spanning many decades. 

Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes made prolific use of Classical music in many of its cartoons, perhaps most frequently (and memorably) through Bugs Bunny. I mean, who can ever forget the way director Chuck Jones synced Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” with Bugs as a barber to the bald Elmer Fudd in “Rabbit of Seville.” Or “Hyde and Hare” where he performs the “Minute Waltz” by Chopin, and the whole thing goes sideways. In fact, the Bugs Bunny Classical music sequences were so indelible as a part of our culture the US Post Office even issued stamps with the image on it as featured above.

Hanna Barbera was similarly aligned when they featured “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” in a Tom and Jerry sequence. Someone actually spliced the Bugs version (Rhapsody Rabbit) and the Tom and Jerry version (The Cat concerto) into one clip here which is kind of fun to watch!

Of course Disney featured classical music in several of their animated films as well – including most notably “Fantasia” in 1940, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” that same year, as well as the Mickey Mouse “Symphony Hour” in 1942 featuring “The Light Cavalry Overture” by Franz von Suppe.

And who could forget the timeless Pink Panther theme by Henry Mancini – which of course played with all the Pink Panther cartoons, and the subsequent title sequences in the films featuring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.  While the cartoons and titles were entertaining by themselves, can you imagine watching them without the music – always impeccably performed by an orchestra (in this case, perhaps arguably more jazz-themed than classical)? They were indelibly linked in our minds as a whole package.

More recently, we’ve experienced orchestras worldwide performing songs from various Pixar films in concert which is also great fun. 

So bottom line, there’s a real marriage of the timeless appeal of Classical music and animation that continues on which is fantastic because of how it exposes the genre to kids and remains forever cross-generational.