‘The Day The Earth Blew Up’ Composer Joshua Moshier On Scoring A 90-Minute Looney Tunes Film (Exclusive Video)
Seven years ago, composer Joshua Moshier (Baskets, Dragons: Rescue Riders) got the gig his Looney Tunes-loving, childhood self could never have dreamed might come his way — scoring new Looney Tunes shorts for Warner Bros. Animation.
Developed by Peter Browngardt, Looney Tunes Cartoons was an intentional throwback to the golden days of the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes era of theatrical shorts, made using Warner Bros.’ deep bench of characters from Bugs Bunny to Yosemite Sam. Hundreds of shorts were produced, with Moshier and Carl Johnson scoring them all.
It was like a mini recreation of the “Termite Terrace” days at Warner Bros. where a band of animators and musicians had a decades-long job just making new cartoons. Moshier tells Cartoon Brew that it was like experiencing a mast class approximating how the legendary Carl Stalling composed and arranged with speed and creativity.
“We were recording in these historic studios, just going through these cartoons and working really quickly, but also with a lot of attention to detail,” he said. “Through that process, you learn to really trust your gut. You start hearing the possibilities before you even sit down to write. When you look at those original shorts, there’s not a lot of second guessing. It really is people following their intuitions and directors encouraging that. And that’s exactly how Pete [Browngardt] approached it as well.”
Moshier took to it so well, Browngardt asked him to score his feature animated directorial debut, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (out now in theaters via Ketchup Entertainment). It’s a sci-fi comedy thriller that pairs Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza) as they try to save the planet from an alien invasion. We spoke with Moshier about how scoring the Looney Tunes Cartoons (available on Max) prepared him to score what is now the first original, all-animated Looney Tunes feature in the illustrious history of the franchise.
He also provided us with an exclusive video to explain his process:
Cartoon Brew: What was your reaction when Browngardt asked you to score The Day the Earth Blew Up? And were you nervous at all?
Joshua Moshier: I was thrilled to be asked. I just knew that whatever they were doing was going to be great, so the trust was mutual. I wasn’t concerned at all. I was just really excited to see a really fun Looney Tunes movie, so to be part of it was just extra.
Scoring shorts is a different animal than scoring a feature film. How did those creative conversations start?
There was a conversation about, does the musical aesthetic change because it’s a movie? And I think absolutely it does, because you want to cast a spell that the audience is invested in these characters — not just in a six-minute relationship, but in a 90-minute movie. For me, it’s letting the music stretch. And when there’s a funny drawing, it’s looking for the moment that you want to catch and punctuate it. There’s some brilliantly funny drawings in the movie. I think a lot of people think that Looney Tunes is catching all these moments. Really, it’s restraint and holding back for the right moment, then, “Pow!”…you grab it. Then, it means something because it’s married to this really funny drawing.
Did you look to other musical inspirations outside of Warner Bros. Animation examples?
I took a lot of inspiration from Broadway musical adaptations, like The Lion King Broadway musical. I was listening to it and thinking about, “Okay, how did they translate this body of music from the movie and take it into this other stage? What are the moments that in the movie were smaller, or shorter, but were expanded on this bigger stage?” I also really love the work of this music director, Adam Blackstone, who does the Super Bowl halftime show. It’s a similar thing where he’ll take these hooks from pop songs, but they get blown up into this bigger, more epic thing. Then, I was thinking about the history of Looney Tunes, and what are these little hooks that we can use, and can be little motifs to develop and grow and be used to tell the story?
Did anyone give you any particularly helpful advice as you started the scoring process?
When you look at the “Termite Terrace” history, they weren’t getting tons of notes. They were just doing the work. My experience with the studio was very supportive. I remember [executive producer] Sam [Register] telling me, “Just hit those emotional beats.” It really set the tone that this is an emotional film. It’s about these characters. It’s about how they love each other. I remember thinking, “If I can help everyone feel connected to these characters, everything will just fall into place.
How did your scoring process start with Browngardt? Did you get a temp score matched to animatics?
I had seen the entire movie without music, which rarely happens. So, I really was able to put my whole imagination into it freely and not feel too pushed in any one direction. They had temp, but I don’t think they were tied to it. At one point, I asked for the file just so I could see where there was music. But I wouldn’t listen to it. I would just look at the waveforms. So, we were able to just approach it really freely. And because I’d seen the whole film, I did have a sense of the arc of it and how it needed to build.
Did you score as they provided you animated sequences?
I worked mostly in chronological order. As I got into the action sequences in the last two-thirds of the movie, I would finish like a big chase, or a big action scene, and go, “Whew. I got through it!” And then we would spot the next one which is even bigger. In some ways, I was kind of competing with myself to build on what I had done before. In this case, approaching it chronologically was really great because I could take what I had learned and start applying that as things got more challenging and more technically complex.
Overall, the film score is a 1950s-style paranoid thriller with lots of classic Looney Tunes musical flourishes. How did you approach that melding of the genre with the familiar?
I’m really proud of the action and the horror in the movie. And I tried to approach it all very earnestly. Whether it’s like a dramatic, emotional cue, like when Farmer Jim leaves, or when Daffy and Porky are being chased up the fire escape — 30-stories in like two seconds — it’s being able to push that dramatically, but still honor the fact that it’s a cartoon. There’s so many beautiful backgrounds in the film where you’ll go from a very figurative setting, where you see trees or whatnot, and then it just goes to bright yellow, like a splatter paint. And that’s where the music can turn on a dime for this, and then go right back to the really dramatic, earnest approach. I think that’s where the visuals really tell you what to do. I’m really proud of finding ways to create tension and action that feels connected to the history of those kinds of scenes, but also has the elasticity of the drawing. That’s something I was really trying to do. It’s something I hadn’t really seen modeled before, for me.
Did you consider creating character themes to represent characters, or was that too traditional?
Something that helped me was focusing on the relationships between the characters rather than just the characters. There’s a Porky and Petunia theme, and a Porky, Daffy, and Farmer Jim theme. Then you really get in emotionally between the characters because that’s really what the movie is about. It’s about these characters and their relationships to each other. There aren’t really character themes in Looney Tunes, and I wanted to preserve that and not have a Daffy theme. But there are some things that I dropped in that fit for Daffy. Like, there’s a reference to [composer] Bill Lava’s arrangement of “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.”
When we spotted, I was like, “I have an idea and I’m just gonna try it.” We had done that in the shorts for Crumb and Get It, so it was in my mind. I have learned the weird intervals in it to give it that angular sound, so they were in my fingers, at the ready. It was nice to have that for Daffy’s unhinged moments where it’s really going off the rails. Something I’ve tried to embrace about Looney Tunes is even if something was kind of aesthetically weird in history, and might not seem to make sense to us now, it still might be useful in some way. While the sound of those cartoons in the late [shorts] didn’t always serve the comedy, it certainly fit the art. And so my thought was the artwork on this is more ’40s inspired, but maybe it could fit the emotion?
Part of the payoff when you hear “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” is that melody encapsulates [Daffy and Porky] at their best. Not only are they being loony, but they’re having fun. You hear it in that job hunt sequence. But when things really go off the rails for their friendship in the film, you don’t hear it. You have other elements. You have Porky and Petunia’s relationship, and you have the fact that they’ve forgotten the words of Farmer Jim to stick together. And so when they do start working together, that’s where it comes back.
How did you think about reframing other classic Looney Tunes riffs?
[Raymond Scott’s] “Powerhouse” was an easy choice to include. It was David Gemmill’s idea to have them say, “Push the button, pull the crank” to the rhythm. I actually got to write that entirely away from the picture. They just explained to me what the sequence was and said, “Go do it.” I knew I wanted it to ramp up and have this elasticity that you would almost find in like a Broadway showtune. I was listening to a lot of the original Mary Poppins songs, and so I wanted to go into a waltz. You don’t really hear “Powerhouse” and adapt it into different musical modes, as much. It’s usually done in a straight ahead way, so I wanted to put it through its paces a little bit and see what we could wring out of it. I originally had an ending that was a little more of an unexpected little pluck. But Sam Register had the note, “I think it should end big,” so I went back and made it screaming which was absolutely right.
There is a lot of music in the film. How many minutes did you compose all together?
It’s an 80-minute score. It’s a lot of music. There’s some great songs at key moments in the score, but still the music is really present and connected to the characters and to the action throughout. And that’s how the Looney Tunes are. The elevator pitch for ourselves was, “How do you make a 90-minute Looney Tunes cartoon?” Having the through line of music is a big part of that.
How big of a live orchestra were you able to use?
We knew that we were gonna have a big orchestra. I think we were around 30-pieces. We had live theremin. We brought in drums for the “Powerhouse” sequence; Bernie Dresel, who’s the drummer in the Brian Setzer Orchestra. There were certain things where I would go to our line producer, Mike Fallon, and say, “Is there any way we could find a way [to do…]?” And he always made it happen. When we had those touches, like the live drums, everyone just lit up because you could hear the difference between the mock ups.
Having now scored Looney Tunes shorts and a feature film, what did it teach you as a composer?
There’s a lot of gifts getting to work on these. I’m so grateful to have met Pete, and so many talented artists on the show. For all of us, just getting to work on such a volume of animation has been amazing because you become non-judgmental about your work. You work from left to right. Carl Stalling would [write] a short a week, and that’s what I learned to do. You build a team around you to manage the various pieces of it, so that while you’re on to the next one, things are happening while you’re doing that. And then you get to record and you go record it. It’s just taking it week by week and really giving your full attention to the chunk that you’re working on, and then taking a step back and making sure it all works as a whole. But having that volume in the first place to develop a craft, especially in an age where a lot of shows are six to eight or 10 episodes — which is lovely and I love working on shows like that too — but to have years with the same group of people working on lots of cartoons and just really trusting your instincts is special.
Purchase digital downloads of Moshier’s original motion picture soundtrack to The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie at this link.
