Orrin Scott: Cartoons in Stereo

In 2013 Jerry Beck began hosting Cartoons in Stereo; an hour-long radio special held once a year on Christmas Day, broadcasted by KPFK, Los Angeles and produced by Marlena Bond.

Cartoons in Stereo features music featured in or inspired by cartoons. That could be anything from the stellar musical repertoire of Raymond Scott in Looney Tunes (and re-orchestrated and re-contextualized by Carl Stalling) to theme music covers featured in the album, Saturday Morning: Cartoon’s Greatest Hits (1995. Featuring bands like Reverend Horton Heat, Butthole Surfers, and Sublime) and everything in-between.

About two years ago, I took it upon myself to create annotated videos to accompany each of the five broadcasts for two reasons; one selfish and one pragmatic. The first reason was, at the time, I had only dabbled in video editing/creation and wanted a project to learn the ins and outs of DaVinci Resolve.

The second reason, since Jerry has a deep knowledge on the background and origins of each song or cartoon featured, I felt it was a bit of a bummer to only learn about them during the breaks between songs. Having a visual element during each song’s runtime would allow me to put additional supplemental information about the subjects Jerry brought up during his commentary. This supplemental material ranged from news articles, interviews with creators, or anything else to elaborate further on the music featured and the histories shared.

In 2019, Jerry had to skip that year's program as he was aiding in family affairs. During the early months of the pandemic this year, I took the opportunity to remaster the videos in high definition and add additional polish to all the episodes; swapping out low resolution pictures and fixing my sources utilized during the credits.

Working on the Cartoons in Stereo videos have been an absolute blast to work on over the last two years. Luckily, Jerry and producer Marlena didn’t mind my butting into their awesome project and have even aided in getting me a missing episode to annotate. You can check all the episodes produced thus far at the Cartoons in Stereo official Vimeo channel or at the bottom of this post. If you find you’ve enjoyed what Jerry and Marlena have made you can make a donation to KPFK or subscribe to the many newspapers featured in the videos and make sure you tune in this Christmas to see if these is a new episode!

Fun aside; in doing this project, I discovered Jerry had borrowed the logo for the show from the 1961 Bob Prescott album of the same name.