BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES ORIGINAL TELEVISION SOUNDTRACK VOL. 4

Well, it's an even-numbered year, which apparently means it's time for a new BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES soundtrack album from La La Land Records.* (Though if I had my druthers, we'd be getting one of these sets every year rather than every other!)

After 2012's volume 2 and 2014's volume 3, this past week brings us the BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES Original Television Soundtrack, volume 4. Like volume 2, this album had pre-release availability at Comic-Con, but as I've noted here in recent weeks, I was unable to attend this year due to the birth of my son. So I pre-ordered the album straightaway when it went up on La La Land's site Tuesday at noon, and it arrived (autographed by composers Michael McCuistion, Lolita Ritmanis and Carlos Rodriguez) in the mail Friday.

Naturally, given the hectic nature of my life at the moment, I haven't had time to give this set a real in-depth listen, but I have given it one cursory run-through while the baby was sleeping (I think he liked the music!) and I wanted to jump on a post while the iron was hot -- so I found a bit of time to cobble this piece together during a subsequent naptime. Speaking of which -- note also that La La Land released a 4-disc soundtrack album for JUSTICE LEAGUE this past week, and I'll try to write something about that as things settle down within the next month or two. But for now, I really couldn't wait to cover BATMAN.

BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES - ORIGINAL TELEVISION SOUNDTRACK VOL. 3

If you'll allow me to gush for a moment: There are days that I still can't believe I'm able to listen to this music. Getting a score album from BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES was a pipe dream for me when I was in my teens. By the time I turned fifteen years old, I had been watching the show regularly for about two years and, along with the engrossing visual style and dramatic scripts and voiceover performances, I had fallen in love with the program's musical score.

Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM was released to theaters in the U.S., with an accompanying soundtrack album. I grabbed that soundtrack before I'd even seen the film, simply to get some of the ANIMATED SERIES-style music to listen to. At last I could hear, unencumbered by dialogue and sound effects, the great Shirley Walker's Batman theme (more befitting the character, in my opinion, than Danny Elfman's iconic contribution to the 1989 movie -- which of course also served as the main title theme for B:TAS), as well as snippets of the Joker's comically twisted music, both weaved into a wonderful full-length movie score. For fifteen years, that was the only BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES music available to me, and I played it often -- but still I wished for some scores from the actual episodes, which were nearer and dearer to me than the film.

SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES - ORIGINAL TELEVISION SOUNDTRACK

In the early nineties, the Warner Brothers television animation department was in the midst of what would eventually be dubbed a "second golden age" for cartoon musical scores. Programs like TINY TOON ADVENTURES, ANIMANIACS, and BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES featured original scores for each and every episode, crafted by a variety of talented composers and performed by a full (roughly 30-piece) orchestra. BATMAN was followed a few years later by SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, from the same creative and musical teams.

Helming the musical side of these DC superhero shows was the great Shirley Walker. Walker came up with the recurring themes and motifs to be used for the majority of the series' main characters and villains, and she contributed many complete scores to both shows herself, but scoring as many episodes as Bruce Timm's production team created was unfeasible for one person. So Walker also trained and supervised a group of younger composers, which eventually shrunk to her core regular group: Kristopher Carter, Harvey R. Cohen, Michael McCuistion, and Lolita Ritmanis.