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How Looney Tunes & Other Classic Cartoons Helped Americans Become Musically Literate

Distance learning experiments on television long predate the medium’s use as a conduit for advertising and mass entertainment. “Before it became known as the ‘idiot box,’” writes Matt Novak at Smithsonian, “television was seen as the best hope for bringing enlightenment to the American people.” The federal government made way for educational programming during TV’s earliest years when the FCC reserved 242 noncommercial channels “to encourage educational programming.”

Funding did not materialize, but the nation’s spirit was willing, Life magazine maintained: “the hunger of our citizenry for culture and self-improvement has always been grossly underestimated.” Was this so? Perhaps. At the medium’s very beginnings as standard appliance in many American homes, there was Leonard Bernstein. His Omnibus series debuted in 1952, “the first commercial television outlet for experimentation in the arts,” notes Schuyler G. Chapin. Six years later, he debuted his Young People’s Concerts, spreading musical literacy on TV through the format for the next 14 years.

“It was to [Bernstein’s] — and our — good fortune that he and the American television grew to maturity together,” wrote critic Robert S. Clark in well-deserved tribute. Much the same could be said of some unlikely candidates for TV musical educators: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and other classic animators, who did as much, and maybe more, to familiarize American viewers with classical music as perhaps all of Bernstein’s formidable efforts combined.

Who can hear Wagner without wanting to sing at the top of their lungs, “Kill da wabbit, Kill da wabbit, Kill da wabbit!” Goodness knows, I can’t. Nonetheless, Chuck Jones’ What’s Opera, Doc? has been recognized for its major contributions to “American enlightenment” — deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and preserved in the National Film Registry. This, Alexander suggests, is as it should be. (Just consider the opera singers Bugs inspired). We should honor animation’s major contributions to our culture literacy: a mass musical education by cartoon. See many more classic clips in Alexander’s Twitter thread here.

via Laughing Squid

Related Content: 

The Evolution of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck & Other Looney Tunes Legends: A Video Essay

Kill the Wabbit!: How the 1957 Bugs Bunny Cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Inspired Today’s Opera Singers to First Get Into Opera

Books Come to Life in Classic Cartoons from 1930s and 1940s

“The Ducktators”: Loony Tunes Turns Animation into Wartime Propaganda (1942)

 

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