Like shave and a haircut, there’s an instrumental piece we all know from cartoons regarding death. It doesn’t have lyrics, IIRC, but somehow in elementary school, many of us made up “pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you!” Any origin for this?
Sounds like Chopin’s Sonata No. 2, also called the Funeral March. Often used in Bugs Bunny cartoons, apparently.
You really want to learn more about Carl Stalling, http://www24.brinkster.com/carlstalling/ , who added numerous musical references to his 600 or so cartoon scores. The use of Chopin’s Funeral March is mentioned here http://looney.toonzone.net/articles/friz.html . You can hear a midi version of the piece at http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Chopin/FMarch.html .
Hope this helps.
Funeral March
a.k.a. Marche Funebre. Check out Chopin’s original solo piano version. Compared to the usual jokey instrumental workups, it is subtle yet spine-chilling, and also has a beautiful bridge section that you never normally hear.
One of my favorites was in a Sylvester/Tweety cartoon.
Granny was about to leave for the day, looked at Sylvester, and said, “If anything happens to Tweety, 'Eeeee[sup]n[/sup] Eeeee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eeeee[sup]n[/sup]”
After Granny leaves, Sylvester looks at Tweety with evil on his mind. Tweety reminds him, “You heard what she taid, Puddy, ‘Eeeee[sup]n[/sup] Eeeee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eee[sup]n[/sup] Eee[sup]n[/sup]-Eeeee[sup]n[/sup]’”
Puddy then thinks better of it.
At the risk of being accused of highjacking, one of my all-time favorite cartoons is the Bugs Bunny toon where they stage The Barber of Seville in about three minutes. I still think it’s hilarious.
Cartoons were many peoples’ first exposure to classical music, whether they knew it, or not. Usually, it was just snippets, like the five bars (Don’t hold me to that. I don’t have the score in front of me.) of the Funeral March, or the trumpet fanfare from William Tell. But, I imagine that it lent a comforting familiarity to those pieces for a lot of people when they were later encountered in their entirety. (Maybe not the Funeral March, but certainly lots of other classical pieces.) I know it did, for me.