Cartoon Classical

Posted by Sarah Canice Funke Jan 19, 2008

NPR's recent story on classical music in cartoons demonstrates that this "low-brow" medium has long been used to familiarize American culture with the "classics." Who doesn't associate the Allegro from Mozart's Sonata in C with Tweety Bird? Or Mendelssohn's Spring Song with Bugs Bunny?

The NPR article provided several examples of piano music and orchestral music that shows up in cartoons, but didn't mention where Bugs Bunny seems to end up the most: the opera house.

In the opera house, Bugs Bunny has the most room for upsetting convention, for foiling upper class values and finally giving the slip yet again to blunderers with guns. As Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin might say, the opera offers the perfect place to stage a "carnival," or the reversal of the status quo. "Highbrow" is ridiculous, the underdog wins and "everything is upside down."

Here are some examples of opera gone awry when this rabbit comes to town:

What's Opera Doc? (A parody of Wagnerian Opera, with some ballet thrown in for good measure.)

The Rabbit of Seville (A new take on an old classic. Most of the major themes from Rossini's music is preserved unaltered by anything other than the comic visual graphics.)