My parents curated musical households, and there’s no way they would have let me get to adulthood without understanding the importance of the Jackson 5. It’s also not like I wouldn’t have discovered Motown in due time. That’s what Looney Tunes did first, and Tiny Toons and Animaniacs did later, and shows like Adventure Time and Steven Universe are doing now. When we analyze them, we know the best cartoons were always the ones a little too old for us, the ones that went over our heads most of the time gave us hope for getting it someday. Here’s what a caricature is, this is the beat you take before the punchline, this is how a laugh grows. As a child, the point of cartoons was not to get the references, but to learn what humor looked like. I had no reference for the MTV VJs they occasionally skewered, the celebrity appearances, the Thirtysomething spoof Thirteensomething.
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Looking back the music was a smaller part of the show than I thought, but It’s not like I got the other references Tiny Toons was making half the time. Screams of love and wanting felt like they should be coming out of the mouths of elastic, pastel bunnies in T-shirts. The pure danceability and joy, the overwhelming emotion, of R&B felt cartoonish. Motown and 60s R&B was the backing track to something geared toward a new generation, not because it was music they loved, but because it just fit. I’m not sure if Tiny Toons aimed to boost Aretha Franklin’s record sales, but its relationship to music of a previous era is nearly identical. The side effect of it was that a lot of Warner’s catalog became inseparable from the show for viewers who were previously unfamiliar with the music. The imagery was just the latest, snazziest way to get the message across. Looney Tunes (and earlier, Merrie Melodies) was created as a vehicle to showcase the compositions Warner Music held in its library, and to promote sales of its sheet music. Music was a scatter plot, and Tiny Toons Adventures allowed me to learn music from my parents’ generation and own it on my own terms. I didn’t know that the progression from 60s rock to 70s disco and punk to 80s new wave and hip hop was sealed in amber. I had no gauge for what modern music was supposed to be like.
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But there is something about finding a song, a genre, alone.
TINY TOON ADVENTURES SONG TV
TV shows, albums, and movies only get to be part of pop culture after enough people experience them and find some shared reality. The song came out in 1958, but in the early 90s it was new to me. The first time was related, when I saw Plucky Duck’s dad and a group of yaks sing The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” on Tiny Toons Adventures. This was the second time I learned that you don’t have to be topical to be great. Liz responds, “No, I like Elmer Fudd.” For reference, Wagner’s Die Walküre was first performed in 1870, while Looney Tunes’ “What’s Opera, Doc?” aired in 1957. There’s a moment in 30 Rock where Liz Lemon’s phone rings to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries.” “Oh you like Wagner?” asks the woman she’s lunching with.