Music recycling


Watching this with my kid nowadays (and wow, it really is so much better than what gets made these days) I notice things I didn't when I watched it when I was a child.

Like the fact that they only have about half a dozen musical themes that get recycled throughout the episodes, meaning that you sometimes get a strange choice of music playing in the background, like the same extract from Ride of the Valkyries whenever they need anything a bit classical, irrespective of the mood of the scene, or the little piano piece (possibly Webby's theme?) whenever they need anything that doesn't fit the description of "danger", "adventure", or "Building up to something".

I guess watching it weekly years ago it wasn't as obvious as watching them one after the other, but even though, does it really cost that much to come up with a new piece of music every now and again?

For some reason I've never picked up on this in other cartoons, but their soundtracks don't tend to achieve the same level of orchestral quality as you had in Ducktales either I guess.

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It was not uncommon for tv cartoons to use the same score for several episodes back in the day. The Real Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did it as well if I recall right.

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