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After my friend recently baught the DVD set, he’s been looking for the soundtrack but it’s nowhere to be found. I would like to have the music used in the cartoon as well because some of Danny Elfman’s best work was in the Batman music. Anyone have any idea what the deal is with the music for the series?
I think it was just the theme Elfman wrote for the show. Shirley Walker (his conductor on Batman) did the rest of the music for the cartoon series and even did a great alternate theme of her own for it (which can be heard in the Main Titles of Mask of The Phantasm). I still loved how she incorporated Elfman’s work though.
I remember when the cartoon first came out in 1992 because It was two days after I saw Batman Returns (I was still in school then). There was this scene I remember in particular where Batman runs towards the villain through a building and Walker plays a variation of Elfman’s Batman theme which was just cool as hell. The cellos started stabbing and the brass just flourished and crashed and it was just awesome. She never really used synth. She used complicated orchestrations on every cue (I even think the cartoon Penguin’s theme was riffed off of a small cue on Batman Returns).
I hope someday the Animated Series will have a two-disk or four-disk (like with The Twilight Zone) score compilation album overseen by Walker herself. That would be the cat’s meow.
A few verifications:
Batman Returns came out on June 19. Batman: The Animated Series came out on Sep 5.
Composers Jeff Atmajian, Stuart V. Balcomb, Lisa Bloom, Richard Bronskill, Kristopher Carter, Steve Chesne, Harvey R. Cohen, Wayne Coster, Lars Cutterham, Peter Davison, Beth Ertz, Todd Hayen, Carl Johnson, Mark Koval, Brian Langsbad, Michael McCuistion, Lolita Ritmanis, Carlos Rodriguez, James Stemple, John Tatgenhorst, Peter Tomshek and Nerida Tyson-Chew also wrote music on the series.
There are no plans for an Animated Series album release.
Elfman did NOT do the adaptation of his own theme for the Animated Series. Shirley Walker said that someone on her team did the arrangement. Walker apparently wrote her own main title cue (using her own Batman theme, which can be heard all over the series and in the Mask Of The Phantasm), but Elfman used his pull to ensure that a variation of his own theme was used.
That’s cool.
I remember the McDonalds Batman Returns promos running on TV when I saw Batman: The Animated Series for the first time on FOX. I could swear it was two days after I saw the movie that the show came out. Oh well. Maybe I’m mistaken. It might have been two days after I bought the VHS. Hell… I know it was in 1992. That I AM sure about.
Shirley Walkers music was the most prominant of the whole series. She wrote all the themes (except for Elfman’s).
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