From Nickelodeon Animation in Burbank, California, this is the Nickelodeon Animation Podcast. AHHHHH! Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Hector Navarro, and we have such a good episode for you today. No matter where you go or who you talk to, everyone has a favorite cartoon theme song. I would definitely say the Rugrats theme song, even though there's no words. The Spongebob.
of Squarepants. I just love the line drop on a deck and flop like a fish. The old Fairly OddPants theme song. The song that you could hear three rooms away and you'd know exactly what's playing on TV. Like I hear it in the next room like oh that's my jam or that's you know that's my that's my Show! The song that you know every note and every word of even if you haven't heard it for years. The lyrics that I remember is different of you guys because I'm from South Korea.
The song that brings you right back to being a kid on the floor of your childhood living room filled with excitement for what's going to happen next. It's like, okay, time to grab my goldfish crackers. You know, get set up, and then you're on the journey. The theme song is the gateway to our favorite characters and stories, and they stay with us throughout our lives. So much goes into these...
This week on the podcast, we talk to some of the people behind our favorite Nick theme songs and ask them, why are theme songs so important? In about 37 seconds, if it has a lyric or not, I think it has to...
give you a vibe of what you're about to watch. There's like a call to action, you know? It's like, come on in or get up and come over. I like songs that do tell a little story, but also set a tone for the show that will bring you into the show. And it should relate in some ways to the way that the...
shows scored and nothing like that so it all feels of a piece obviously you kind of want to hear it in the other room and sometimes when we sit and listen to a mix and make something sound totally perfect for our for our you know like ears we'll go now put the mix through the little tv speaker
And I'll literally kind of stand in the doorway sometimes because I like to, a theme song's a perfect example because it's the first thing up. You can kind of have this opportunity to set up the whole world and what the parameters of the show is and how it works. the dynamics of how it plays. I think it needs to become some insidious thorn or seed in your brain that doesn't go away. The thought of working on stuff that just haunts people.
in that same way where they just can't, they can't get it out of their heads. A show's theme song sets the stage for what kind of show the audience is about to watch. The truly amazing thing is, it doesn't even have to have words to tell you everything you need to know. The theme song for the seminal Nickelodeon series Doug is the perfect example.
I barely just mentioned it and you're already humming it to yourselves series creator Jim Jenkins told us a little bit about the Inspiration behind the iconic theme song I love that that there's there's a handful of theme songs that you can kind of mess with people my own age and that
One of them is you can start, you can go, and they will have to finish it. They go, what are you doing to me, man? Come on. And you can kind of mess with people like that, which is great. So where did the direction and idea for the Doug theme song come from? Nickelodeon had three of us go on the road to promote Nickelodeon. There's another show parallel to this at the very beginning called Livewire. Livewire's host was Fred Newman.
So Fred Newman and I met each other on the road. Just we'd be showing up at a gig in Cincinnati or Tulsa or wherever we were. But every now and again, our paths would cross because we were two groups promoting. nickelodeon when we weren't doing our own shows pinwheel and livewire and so Fred and I became friends and have been for a zillion years now. But Fred is the master of mouth sounds and a very brilliantly funny man, very musical guy. And so when Doug was going to happen, I cast.
fred as pork chop the dog and mr dink and many other characters and uh and the mouth sounds especially for skeeter and um that was fred hey doug Oh, Skeeter, maybe you can help me. I have this friend. It's not me, though, and he knows his best friend did something that could get another different person in trouble. Excuse me, Doug, but is this a math problem? Because I'm terrible in math. Fred was working on the Mickey Mouse Club with Disney. And that's where he met Dan Sawyer.
was on that show. So he said, I've got a guy. I need him. He's the music guy. He can make my ideas come to life, and we make a great partnership. So Fred Newman and Dan Sawyer became the team. And so from there, it's just meeting with them. and talking about the sensibility of the show. And there were things like the Andy Griffith show. I love that show. I just think it's another one of those.
It's still airing. It's still out there. Classic American show. Right. And it has great solid characters and stories and the content behind it. But think about the opening to that show, that whistle. And so I thought... We referenced that and thought we need something that distinctive, but not slick, not synthy. It's got to be really simple and direct. And that's when Fred got that. All that was Fred. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo you
Normally, the theme song of a show comes well after a show's already been in production. In many cases, it's one of the last things that's created before the show premieres. But sometimes the exact opposite is true, like in the case of the classic theme song for Cat Dog. I've been playing the guitar since I was probably like 12 years old or maybe 10 years old.
I have gotten better, but not that much better. This is Peter Hannon, creator of CatDog. In terms of the inception of CatDog, it turned out to be a way in in a certain way. I got hired by Nickelodeon before CatDog to make three short films. by this small department called the Creative Lab, which was in New York City. And Amy Friedman was the person that ran that. And she chose this thing called CatDog, which was going to turn out to be three one-minute little movies.
And then while I was kind of writing scripts for those, the songs started going through my head. So I just started singing the CatDog song in my head and then ended up making a demo of it. It was just me playing the guitar. It went kind of viral inside of Nickelodeon. And so then I got a call back from the president of Nickelodeon who had actually walked into Amy's office and he heard the song and then he ended up calling me.
And I picked up the phone. The first thing he did, the very first thing was that he started singing my song to me, like he sang, singing the cat-dog song to me, which was really funny. And he said, I have bad news. We're not going to make those three short films. I have good news. We want to make a pilot. Cat doll. Alone in the world is a little cat doll.
The very first version I did of the song was really a little more mournful. I had this kind of like had a little bit more of like a real country feel that was a little more downbeat. Like Alone in the World of Little Cat Dog was a little bit more mournful in the way I said it. You know what I mean? The world is a little cat dome.
Then we realized when we were recording it for the series that we were like, you know, I think we want this to be a little more upbeat. So I don't want the kids to be crying before the show starts. Canine little cat dog. Cat dog. Cat dog. Cat dog. Alone in the world with a little cat dog. So sometimes theme songs come out of the blue as if sent from above. But like any creative endeavor, they don't always come out perfect the first time.
Some of the most iconic theme songs ever might not be the original intent at all. If you grew up in the 90s, the theme song for Hey Arnold is probably in your DNA. I bet you've already got the melody in your head right now. But when it came time to come up with the theme song for that show, the version that we all know and love wasn't the first idea.
We talked to Craig Bartlett, creator of Hey Arnold, and the series composer Jim Lang, and they told us about their first crack at the Hey Arnold theme. We talked a lot about... The kind of Rat Pack era swing stuff. And Craig had, you know, from kind of from day one, he was always going, Arnold, you crazy nut. You know, something like that. And so.
So we thought, wow, that's a great idea for the theme song. That seems really thematic. So we went into the pitch, and it was Catherine Seitz and Mary Harrington. And we're in a conference room in the old Nickelodeon. The ability to go front violent. No, we didn't have anything. We were just completely free sticking it. You crazy nut. I really love the way your head is shaped like that. Hey Arnold. Push button whiz.
Won't you please tell me what your last name is? Swing it. We're finger-popping and singing that, and we're about... We're in like bar six and the two executives are already moaning. They're making it like that. And we were like, should we finish? So that first effort was a no-go. The first effort was a no-go. So I went home. I thought, oh, this is not good. This is not a good way to start this relationship. And I had this little thing. that I had written years ago.
that little shape, that little melodic shape. I was working at a studio in Boston, and one of the guys at the studio was this guy, Don Rosenberg, whose dad was Dunkin' Donuts. He started Dunkin' Donuts. And I thought, I'm gonna to write a Dunkin' Donuts ad. You know? So I wrote this little thing. It was like, I got the feeling for a donkey today. A Dunkin' Donuts, Dunkin' Donuts.
And so I got home and this... You turned that around like in a day. The little new jack swing. Ring-a-ding-ding-ding-a-ding-a-ding. That little, what we call the ring-a-ding. You know, I put that up and then I played this thing against it. I thought... that's pretty catchy you know and so it wasn't exactly the same thing i had to sort of customize it and then put the little samples and stuff in but it it was pretty much a slam dunk it was slam dunk they heard it and loved it and we were done
Hey Arnold! A thing I always remember about Hey Arnold is that you could tell if it was a newer episode just by listening to the theme song. That's because in between seasons 2 and 3, a new version of the song was recorded. So, why the change? Jim, you mentioned you were a little unhappy with how the first one, some of the parts you didn't like as much as...
as you could have. And he thought, yeah, I'd like another crack at it, right? I mean, wasn't that what we decided? Yeah, I had great guys, but a really great tenor player named Buzzy Jones played on it. But I kind of didn't have parts for him. I sort of didn't know what I wanted to do. And so it was very...
It was very kind of ad hoc. And so I always, in the back of my head, I thought, gee, it would be really fun to do a big band, a legit, you know, big band version of the main title. And, of course, we were always tipping the cap to big band stuff in the show. So that's what we set out to do. And we wrote a big band chart. We hired a big band, went over to Village. and cut the whole track and the original idea was there won't be any electronics, it's just going to be straight up big band.
And I got the tracks home to the studio, and I put it up, and it didn't have anything like the kind of kinetic impact that the original theme song had. You know, just all the electronics. how punchy the bottom end was, all the stuff that really makes that theme song. There's a bass there going, and it's completely electronic. Yes, totally. So I thought, well...
What a drag. I don't want to just throw this out. So what we ended up doing was I kept the beginning of the main title pretty much electronic. uh so you really had you're kind of in the comfort zone it starts out with a little ring and ding and all that stuff and then in the back half uh All that stuff is the full big band. You can tell by now
that creating a series theme song is an extremely important part of the development process. No two theme songs are alike, and the process of making each theme song can be strikingly different. Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go creator Valerie Walsh told us a bit about how different the experience was between the two shows. For Diego, we had these two guys who pretty much just hit it out of the park on their own. Joel and George, we call them the Miami guys.
just they had that Latin sound they were writing music for pop stars and we just so lucked out that they wanted to do a theme song for us and it was amazing Dora, on the other hand, was a bit more of a struggle. And Chris is a musician. He was in rock bands and stuff. And so he had a very specific... feel for music. And he had a lot of different people auditioning to do the theme song. We had this great, great composer who had done the backpack song and the map song.
and was trying to work on a theme song, but then would get other voices in, and some people who had worked in kids' TV, specifically like the Sesame Street world, were trying to pitch it. And what happened was... it sort of became... a little bit of a patchwork the song like you know a lyricist would do two lines that we liked and then would get somebody else and they'd do they'd you know use those two lines but then they would put in their own lines it was a bit of a
But one thing about Chris and myself is that we always seem to have the same sensibility. So when we know a song works, we're both like, yes, that is it. That's Superboy. In the 80s, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had one of the most recognizable theme songs of all time. So when executive producer Ciro Nieli was tasked with bringing the Turtles to a new generation, you know he had to update the theme as well.
well the main title from the 80s show is great because i think it does a good job of setting up the world and and also you know making it kind of catchy i mean i think over the years the idea that raphael's a rude dude and donnie does machines coming from that song is a big thing that was hard to get away from. So yeah, the new song in that sense was almost lyrically a remix of the old one. Like how do we update it slightly?
But we had a lot to work with there, and I think it was a good way to kind of go, hey, we're doing something new, but here's kind of a wink and a nod and some... And it's somewhat respectful to the past. It's referential, but it's also reverent. I always liked that song, so I had no problem doing that.
When I started making this show, it actually disappeared for quite some time. So I was kind of going into this project assuming that children knew nothing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So the whole idea of... you know, explaining what these abstractions were, you know, turtles that knew martial arts, but that were human size and understood pop culture and could speak English because they're mutated by this mutagen. I mean, it's a whole lot to just kind of assume that a child is just...
going to kind of be able to jump right in. I kind of really leaned on the main title almost telling a story within that song to kind of set it all up so that when the show would start it would just kind of hit the ground running. And the visuals play a big part of it too because you don't want to say every single thing and then actually draw every single thing that you're saying. You want to kind of checkerboard it so that it feels a little bit more like a waltz.
And so that's kind of what we did. The Chosen Few emerged from the shadows to make their move. The good guys win and the bad guys move. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You know, it's easy to look back on all of these famous cartoon show theme songs and talk about what made them so great. But what if it was your job to come up with a quintessential cartoon theme song that may go down in cartoon history?
Pinky Malinky creators Ricky Asbjorn and Chris Garbutt were faced with that very dilemma. I can remember, I either heard this or read this about John Williams when he was composing stuff like... Jaws or Star Wars or whatever. Whenever he was coming up with things like that, he'd always have the title of the film in mind. So even though...
There's no singing to Star Wars or whatever. There's beats in there where you can imagine someone singing Star Wars to the thing. Wow. So similar kind of thing. But obviously we want to say Pinky Malinky in the show. So try and come up with... some kind of tune that works around his name, some kind of rhythm that works around his name. So that was kind of the initial start of the process and then just wrote out lyrics.
just try to sum him up and the show talk about him the show and try and get some of the humor of the show across in the lyrics and then from that with some help from some people on the team like Josh Engel I think did the scratch for this but we kind laid down a very rough scratch version of it and then we passed it on to our composer Dave Newby who then did his musical pass on that and I always wanted something that sounded very fresh and catchy
Yeah, fresh, modern, catchy, uplifting, like positive, trying to kind of keep going up with the music, not feeling too down. And yeah, again, just instrumentation, something that sounded unusual and very current.
And I remember throwing a lot of like Gorillaz stuff at him because I know like with Damon Albarn and the Gorillaz, they use a lot of like really interesting instrumentation. It does have that cool poppy sound. So we kind of use a bit of that as inspiration as well as a few other things. and he did his pass which was fantastic and we just kind of went from there really yeah i mean it comes across full of joy and processed meat it's right in there
A lot of cartoon theme songs are positive and upbeat and happy because they reflect the tone and sensibilities of the show that you're about to watch. But what if the tone of your show is decidedly not that? Enter Invader Zim. We sat down with series creator Jonan Vasquez to get the story behind the theme from Invader Zim. One of the most important terms of the show is that the theme song itself isn't necessarily funny. It's funny in the context of what it's for, like all the Zim music.
Like the overall directive for Kevin, Kevin Manthe, who did the score, not the theme music. He reorchestrated the theme music from a friend of mine, Mark Tortorisi, who was... the original composer of the actual theme music. But the idea was that this music doesn't know it's for a cartoon. It doesn't know it's for like a kid's show. This music thinks it's for some huge... incredibly important, incredibly serious, scary science fiction action show.
It's playing for what these characters think they're doing. Zim and Dib think everything is the end of the world. And in a way it is, but everyone around them doesn't see it as that. But they think everything they're doing is the greatest, most important thing. So the music reflects that. It happened pretty quickly. I mean, the only thing that I said to Mark at the time, I was living in Burbank, and he came up and spent the weekend at my place.
And all I wanted was military, like to reflect Zim. Everything in Zim's head is military. His walk in his mind, he's hearing a march. Everything is a march. And I wanted the military drums mixed with sort of... Just the electronics, like electronic orchestral was just everything to me at that time. I wanted it to be futuristic, but grounded in sort of earth military. And I had this...
God, what was it? It was an Alesis. I want to say it's like a QS8 or so. It was like some letters and then a number. So I had this keyboard there and he used that to, he just used the built-in sequencer on it to... come up with that theme music very quickly. But they didn't really go through many changes. He basically just pooped it out and I was like, oh my God, this is, it just stuck in my head. We redid it when it went to series and we just stuck with it from that point on. Oh my god!
So there you have it, our episode on theme songs. So many great cartoon theme songs and so many great stories behind each and every one of them. And we want to thank all of the creators who came on today's show and talked about their theme songs. And we want to hear from you
the audience. Visit us online at nickanimationpodcast.com or hit us up on social media and tell us what your favorite Nick theme song is. You're not going to want to miss an episode of the Nickelodeon Animation Podcast so please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Thanks to the awesome crew who puts this podcast together. This podcast is produced by Jonathan Highlander, Dana Vasquez Eberhardt, Tony Gutierrez, Jamie Goss, and Andrew Huebner.
Original music by Useful Creatures. This week's episode edited by Jonathan Highlander and Josh Caldwell. Our social media team is Narbae Manassians, Sammy Armager, and David Watson. And our man behind the faders with the gorgeous flowing locks, our engineer, Manny Grujava. Until next time, keep watching. Cartoons.