Awesome Music / Tom and Jerry

Enter Liszt-Tom-mania

• Similarly to what Carl Stalling did for WB's Looney Tunes, Scott Bradley elevated the classic MGM Tom and Jerry shorts with memorably jaunty musical scoring that frequently incorporated snippets of popular songs to comment on the action.
• When most fans think of great music from "Tom and Jerry", the first thing to come to mind is the signature theme song. The Cinemascope rendition adds more orchestration to the mix, making an already-banger even more awesome.
• Louis Alter's "Manhattan Serenade" was used throughout "Mouse in Manhattan", complementing Jerry's adventures through Manhattan as he outruns traffic, bumps over a grate whilst hitching on a ride on a model's train, and skates with a placecard mascot.
• "The Cat Concerto" uses Mickey Mousing to the highest degree. Just about every gag complements Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 as Tom and Jerry struggle to show each other up. Even better? One person played the entirety of this short just by watching Tom. That's how faithful this short is to the piece that inspired it.
• The music that plays in this sequence when Tom invites his cat buddies to party hard in "Saturday Evening Puss". Such jazzy, chaotic music complemented with Tom and his cat gang having a darn good time is something to behold.
• Tom's performance of "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby" in "Solid Serenade". Say what you will about his Jerkass tendencies, that cat knows how to play bass.
• As far as the Deitch shorts go, his final cartoon, "Carmen Get It", is light-years ahead of any of his prior shorts in the soundtrack department, swapping out the sparse, tinny music previously used for a decent-sized orchestra and some actually very good renditions of the music from Carmen.
• "Cat and Dupli-Cat" begins with Tom singing the classical Neapolitan song "Santa Lucia". The song is a leitmotif throughout the short, and it ends with Jerry stumbling drunk across the docks while mumbling and hiccuping the end of the song.
• "The Cat Above and the Mouse Below" has Tom and Jerry duking it out over "Largo al factotum" from The Barber of Seville. Complete with awesome singing parts from both, no less.
• "The Two Mouseketeers" replaces the regular opening theme with a faster, more energetic version of Nelson Eddy's "Soldiers of Fortune" that sets up the swashbuckling adventure tone very well.
• Uncle Pecos' stuttering but high-energy performance of "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" in Pecos Pest.

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