*And to further limit this, I’m only going to consider “narrative” animated programming.  And by narrative I mean cartoon shows that are a full half-hour program with only one story and not a collection of animated shorts, such as the classic Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons.  It also helps if the series as a whole has a larger structure, but that is not a requirement.

So now with those disclaimers out of the way, let’s chat.  I already mentioned how after seeing The Last Airbender over the Fourth of July weekend I decided to seek out the original cartoon series and was wowed by the score.  That got me thinking about animated shows as a whole and their scores.  I have written in other places on this blog about animated shows and their music – such as Shirley Walker’s score for Batman: The Animated Series or the music for Cowboy Bebop – but I figured now would be the time for a formal declaration of what I think are excellent examples of scoring for animated television shows.  Before we get to the list, I will provide one final caveat:  I can only talk about what I’ve seen and know, obviously.  This has been implied in all my earlier lists, but given my even more limited knowledge of a lot of cartoons, especially ones made post-2000, I figured it would be prudent to restate this fact.  As is my “new” custom here, I’ll present these in chronological order.

Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995) – Shirley Walker, et al: For me, this is the cartoon series that really changed how I view the medium, it also helped that this was realesed just as I was entering adolescence.  The series was dark, moody, and didn’t really shy away from dealing with topics seriously.  It didn’t “talk down” to kids which is why those of my generation who grew up with the show still hold it in high regard and enjoy it to this day.  And just as the series itself doesn’t fall into children’s cartoon cliches, so does the score.  Building on the tone of Danny Elfman’s Batman film score (he also did the show’s theme), Shirley Walker and a team of composers wrote orchestral music that set the standard for how I judge music for animated shows.  La-La Land records released a two-disc set with music from a collection of episodes back in 2008, but it quickly sold out due to fans like myself snatching up all of the 2,500 copies.  Just shows that even after almost twenty years, this show continues to have an impact.

Cowboy Bebop (1998-99) – Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts: The first of two Japanese anime shows on this list, Cowboy Bebop has a stunning score that pulls from just about every musical style there is, though, as the title indicates, it focuses mostly on jazz traditions. I didn’t discover this series until the penultimate year of my collegiate education (sometime around late 2002), but the first episode I saw, entitled “The Ballad of Fallen Angels,” was a great entrance into the show.  Featuring an opera scene that takes its cues from the opera sequence in The Godfather, Part III, and a pop-song sequence, along with more conventional non-diegetic scoring, the episode encapsulated just how closely music is tied to the overall aesthetic of the show.  And what is so great about Bebop and the other anime on the the list (see below) is that they are both 26-episode long shows that were planned as such.  This means two things: first, relatively cheap complete DVD sets (around $50 each, and usually available at your local Best Buy), and second, there is a continual story arc from the first episode to the last which makes for a great viewing experience.

Samurai Champloo (2004-05) – DJ Tsutchie, Force of Nature, et al: This is the other anime show on the list, and whereas Bebop is a jazz influenced show, Samurai Champloo, despite its 19th Century setting, features a soundtrack of hip-hop, rap, and R&B.  And while you might think this anacronism might clash or be distracting, it works so well because the characters themselves are anachronistic in some ways.  Their attitudes are more contemporary, one character, Jin, sports John Lennon-esque glasses, which, while not uncommon in the era, certainly separates him out.  While personally I don’t like this score nearly as much as Bebop – if it’s for pure listening pleasure I will go for Bebop before Champloo – I find that I think it works quite well in context and the sheer variety of tracks and styles set it apart from the everyday fare of animated programming.  For comparison, the only other anime series I really enjoy, The Big-O (giant robot anime and such but with a noir-ish twist), while having some nice score pieces that help set the noir tone of much of the series, they are too few and are overused.  What, for me, helps set a television score apart is how often they will “go to the well” and reuse music.  If a composer is given enough freedom and time and can write enough new music for each episode and lessen the use of preexisting tracks, it helps raises the overall quality in my opinion.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) – Jeremy Zuckerman: Zuckerman is one-half of The Track Team who do both music and sound, with Zuckerman obviously doing musical chores.  As I mentioned in my review of James Newton Howard’s Last Airbender score, the music for this series uses a lot of traditional Asian instruments such as the duduk, shamisen, pipa (or biwa), and koto (or qin) – it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between some of the Japanese and Chinese instruments by sound alone.  It took most of the first season for the score to really find its voice, but one it did the sound of the series really opened up.  The series started out fairly conventionally, both  in terms of tone and plot as well as the score, but once it found a solid footing in a larger story mythology, the stories started to go deeper into the emotion and background of the characters.  Like Batman: The Animated Series, this is a cartoon that will be long appreciated by kids, teens, and adults alike, and a musical score that is as challenging in tone as this one is goes a long ways.  How many other cartoons feature a duduk?  Seriously!  Well, at least one other…

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-Present) – Kevin Kiner: The score for the television Clone Wars series (not to be confused with the earlier series) follows much in the style of the CGI film, in fact the film itself was really just a multi-part episode re-edited for the theatre.  Kiner’s score for both the film and series follows in the tradition of Avatar in that he uses a lot of instruments not before heard in an animated show…well at least until Avatar itself (though some of the Asian instruments, such as duduks and taiko drums, had been used perviously in Bear McCreary’s Battlestar Galactica score).  According to an interview for the film’s special features he strives to create a new sound for each world featured in the show, and he succeeds in large part.  I’m slightly confused that on IMDB Kiner is only credited for 17 episodes on the series, but no other composers are listed under the series credits.  I’m guessing that someone has been slacking off in the cataloguing department because each episode features mostly new music and new themes as characters are introduced to the series.  In a three-part story arc ending season 2, the young Boba Fett, a well-known character from the original film trilogy, is introduced and has teamed up with a group of Bounty Hunters (many seen at other times in season 2) in order to seek revenge on the jedi who killed his father.  For this, Boba is accompanied by a theme that is strongly reminiscent of Harmonica’s theme from Once Upon a Time in the West, which is fitting since Harmonica was seeking revenge for the death of his brother in that classic film.  Oh, and the score also features the big orchestral sounds that one would expect of a Star Wars related score…so it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

Well love it or hate it, those are my five.  Next week, in recognition of the upcoming release of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (music by Hans Zimmer), FSFT5 will take on Sci-Fi scores of the last five years.  Will Zimmer’s efforts make the list?  I don’t know since the score isn’t released until 7/13.  Regardless, I’ll hopefully have a full review up sometime over the weekend of the 16th.  And, finally, Bear McCreary has at long last gotten some love from the Emmy committee!  His theme from Human Target has been nominated in the category of “Outstanding Main Title Theme Music.”  Congratulations, Bear!

It’s been awhile since I did a proper Film Score Friday Top 5, between classes and the difficulty of coming up with a topic each week, I’ve been a bad blogger.  So once again I’ll throw it to you, fair readers, if you have either a topic you want me to tackle or a list yourself, let me know – part of what makes the internets so great is the interactivity of it all.

Anyway, for today’s installment, I have decided to do what I consider the best musical moments on TV (narrative shows, not live concerts, award shows, etc) of the last ten years.  Why ten years, you ask?  Because that is what I know best, and if I try to go further back I do not feel that I’m on as solid of ground.  My criteria for inclusion is memorabililty, re-watchability, and if the music actually served to further the narrative of the show and wasn’t just for cheap plugging or ratings.  I considered both diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the list I came up with actually includes many examples of the blurring of the line between the two.  Lastly, I wanted specific instances, not just so-and-so’s music for x show, and to that end I decided to limit myself to only one instance from either Lost or Battlestar Galactica, though I could have easily done top five lists for either shows and have done so in the past.

Well with all that out of the way, let’s go to the list.  I shall present them in chronological order.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – “Once More With Feeling” (Season 6, Episode 7; November 6, 2001): Also known as the Buffy musical, this episode, though not the first instance of a “musical episode” within a television show, is certainly one of the most well-known.  Creator/Writer/Producer/Director Joss Whedon also wrote all the song and music for this episode, showing the world that he really is master of all he surveys.  What strikes me most about this episode is how integral it is to the story arc of the entire season, and while one can watch the episode on its own and enjoy the music, without the context of what has come before it, many of the subtleties of the song lyrics are lost – especially in the show’s penultimate number in which the Scooby Gang (look it up) finally confronts the villian…the villian which is actually the cause of the entire town of Sunnydale breaking into song.  And this is what I also find so brilliant, instead of the traditional musical caveat of the characters not commenting on the songs, they are fully aware of their singing and find it quite strange.  This is also the only entry in this list in which it is not a specific moment but rather the episode itself, though musical highlights include Xander and Anya’s  throwback number “I’ll Never Tell.”  Also great are the little moments like “They Got the Mustard Out” or the woman singing to the traffic cop to not give her a ticket heard only in passing as the main characters walk down a street.  It is an amazing episode that set the stage for Whedon & Co.’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.  And if you haven’t see that…well you really need to.

Life on Mars (BBC Version) – Episode 1 (January 9, 2006): Let me first just say this, if you’ve only seen the American version of this show (from the 2008-09 t.v. season) or if you haven’t seen either, do yourself a favor and get ahold of this show.  They’ve released it on DVD in the US and you might also be able to find it via torrents (that’s how I first saw it prior to its domestic DVD release).  The basic premise of the show is that a modern-day cop is somehow transported back to the 1970s (the how is left open until the end – is he in a coma, did he actually travel through time, is he dead and this is the afterlife?) after being hit by a car.  And it is this sequence, as his is hit by the car and then wakes up in 1973, that I am highlighting here.  As this happens, the David Bowe song “Life on Mars?” off his album Hunky Dory is playing on his iPod in his car, and the song plays through the traveling sequence and continues to play as he wakes up and is now playing on an 8-track.  The song moves into and out of the diegesis and is links the two time periods together and they even used the sound of telephones (heard at the very end of the album track) as the song fades into the police department, and indeed the sound of a ringing phone becomes very important throughout the show.  I am speaking specifically of the BBC version here because this sequence as rendered in the US version does not even hold a candle, and everything that is brilliant about the BBC version is not present in the US remake.  Unfortunatly, this clip cuts off right before the phones come in.  But listen to the song itself and you’ll hear it.

Battlestar Galactica – “Crossroads, Pt. 2” (Season 3, Episode 20; March 25, 2007):  Of course, for all you Galactica fans out there, you know where I’m going here – the use of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” at the end of Season 3.  For a few episodes prior, four characters had been hearing faint snippets of music and eventually towards the end of this season finale, they come together and realize they’ve all been hearing the same song, unbeknownst to them as “Watchtower” (though in a new arrangement by composer Bear McCreary, and the actual melody heard by them is entirely unique to McCreary’s version).  The handling of the sequence musically leading up the four gathering and the subsequent use of the song itself in the new arrangement during the final sequence of the episode is one of the few good examples, in my opinion, of the use of a “pop” song during an ending montage (I’m looking at you Scrubs and The O.C. for gratuitous overuse and bad examples) because it serves purpose other than “setting a tone” in that it truly serves a narrative function.  Note: I am forgoing posting a video of this sequence here in order to save parties that have not seen the show from spoilers.

Chuck – “Chuck vs. the Ring” (Season 2, Episode 22; April 27, 2009):  I’ve written about this sequence, Jeffster’s performance of Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” in an earlier post, “Domo Arigato, Mr. Bartowski,” so I’ll let you read that instead of recapping it here.  It’s ironic that I put down The O.C. in the previous selection when both it and Chuck were created by the same person, and The O.C. always had a good selection of music, but Chuck, in my opinion, does a much better job of using it.

Lost – “The End” (Season 6, Episode 18; May 23, 2010):   The final musical sequence of Lost is one of the most satisfying musical endings to any television show, I believe.  Where Battlestar has many musically satisfying conclusions, they are separate instances for the most part.  What Michael Giacchino does in the final sequence for “The End” is take at least three major themes from throughout the series and builds them all up into a conclusion (as mentioned earlier, I’m planning a more in-depth analysis later on, once I can transcribe the actual music).  And where some may see at least one, if not more, of the themes as character specific, I see this ending as affirming that many of the major music motifs are not character based, but rather based on themes of the show.  What I find satisfying about it is that it brings to a conclusion these musical themes while underlying many of the similarities between them…the “fundamental interconnectedness” of them, which, in many ways, a major theme of the show…we either live together or die alone. Note: I’m also not linking of video of this sequence either for obvious reasons.

Well, that’s all for now, think I missed any?