Like many American kids, I grew up watching re-runs of Looney Tunes and hearing the music of Carl Stalling and his team of composers. In the early 90s, composer Bruce Broughton and his team reinvigorated the genre with their musical accompaniment to Tiny Toon Adventures, as well as the Animaniacs show. Though at the time I couldn’t imagine how they did it, I found myself wishing that one day I’d get to score an animated project.

That opportunity came during my first season of writing additional music for “Angel” (season 4). Composer Rob Kral asked if I’d be interested in contributing to the music for a new WB animated series he’d been hired to score, an update of Chuck Jones’ “Duck Dodgers,” starring Daffy Duck. My immediate response was “Yeth, of courth!”

As it turned out, the concept for the show required that much of the underscore play very seriously. The visuals and storylines often borrowed from contemporary space-adventure films (“Star Trek” and “Star Wars” primarily) so, in addition to the occasional bassoon and pizzicato strings comedic gestures, the music employed a large-scale orchestral sound. Having grown up hearing the great music written for those films, I had always wanted to try my hand at that, too. After learning to be appropriately restrained and subtle on the dramatic and thriller projects I’d scored up to that point, it was great fun to let loose compositionally and orchestration-wise and write big, bold music. Rob wrote a perfect cluelessly heroic theme for Duck Dodgers, as well as themes for the Martians and Queen Tyr’ahnee. These were often arranged and integrated into the score, along with some original themes and motives of my own. I found that even during the most intense scenes of crisis or planetary doom, the music inevitably had a smile on its face - after all, we are talking about Daffy Duck...in space...with one hand on a blaster and the other in a bag of salty snacks.

The first cue in the playlist - “Battle On The Snow” - is from a sequence in episode 12 of season 3 in which Dodgers and Queen Tyr’ahnee have a rigorous smack down on an icy planet that reminds me of Hoth for some reason. The other cues represent some of the themes I wrote or favorite sequences.

Working on the Duck was by far the most fun I’ve ever had on a job, and not just for the musical playground I found myself on. The voice talent on the show was phenomenal, something I appreciated more each time I had to replay a scene in the process of scoring (which could be dozens of times). My favorite memory is the day I got to sit in the back of the WB recording studio and listen as Joe Alasky became Daffy Duck. Following that, Tia Carrere recorded a song for the show as the Martian queen - great voice and one of the nicest people I’ve met in the business.

While production stopped after the third season, the show continues to air on Cartoon Network, Boomerang and throughout Europe and South America.