Composer
Biography
Silent-film pianist and then theatre organist, Carl Stalling learned to fit music to action and to comic timing before his work in cartoons. Born in Lexington, Missouri, he worked with Walt Disney in the studio's first sound years and on the Silly Symphonies, moved on to Ub Iwerks, and in 1936 became music director of Leon Schlesinger's Warner Bros. animation unit. For more than two decades he scored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies at a weekly pace, splicing his own writing together with quotations from the concert repertoire, popular song and the Warner catalogue — used as puns, as character labels, as running commentary. Milt Franklyn orchestrated his scores. He had played the theatre organ in Kansas City before joining Disney in 1928, where he shaped the music of the first Mickey Mouse films and proposed the Silly Symphonies, begun with The Skeleton Dance; he left the studio in 1930. He was born in 1891 and died in 1972.