Why ‘Hey Arnold!’ Sounded Like That
Plus: news.
Welcome! Glad you could join us. Here’s the slate for the latest issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:
1) Speaking with Jim Lang about his music for Hey Arnold! (1996–2004).
2) Animation newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Composing Arnold
Back in the ‘90s, something happened to TV animation in America. Shows like Doug, Rugrats and Dexter’s Lab started popping up — new stuff that didn’t follow the templates. Visual styles got more diverse, stories more creative, music quirkier and more original.
This new wave grabbed viewers. In 1992, Animation Magazine cited evidence of a TV animation boom — series with “20-share ratings and register-ringing revenues.”1
Execs were seeking out risks and hiring the people who took them. Cartoon Network’s founder, Betty Cohen, wanted her enterprise “to be viewed as incredibly creative.” Margaret Loesch billed her own Fox Kids as “the rebel,” “a risk-taker” and “a little quirky.” Over at Hanna-Barbera, Fred Seibert described television as a “proving ground for innovation.”2
Even more critical to this ecosystem was Nickelodeon. One animation exec noted the network’s “willingness to try really different things” — which helped to open “more outlets for creative diversity on TV than ever.” As Animation Magazine reported in ‘92:
… the industry insiders we spoke to were almost universal in their praise of Nickelodeon and Liquid TV. They provide a much-needed home for the underground rebels of the toon world — true revolutionaries, armed with irreverence and artfully skewed insight.
A few years into the TV animation renaissance, Nickelodeon began to air Hey Arnold. It’s the kind of subtle, unorthodox and psychologically complex cartoon that networks didn’t greenlight before. It told stories about broken families, Vietnam War refugees and everyday life as a kid in the city. And the risk paid off again. It was popular.
The oddness of Hey Arnold was always right there in its music: the soundtrack is full of jazz (including acid jazz), with quasi-Sinatra pop on the side. Showrunner Craig Bartlett was aiming for a sound that fit the series, and Nickelodeon played along. The network was up for almost any music Arnold delivered.
And so Jim Lang, a composer from outside the animation world, got to do special work here. He’s still proud of that work today. “Hey Arnold was a fantastic show,” he tells us. “Definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
This month, our teammate John spoke to Jim about his years on Hey Arnold — the creative leeway of that era, the learning curve and the chance to score scenes that made him cry. Their conversation (edited for length, clarity and flow) appears below.
John (Animation Obsessive): How did you first meet Craig Bartlett and get involved in Hey Arnold?
Jim Lang: It’s a great story. I was introduced to him — I’d done a project for a company called Bob Rogers in Burbank. They did theme parks and visitor centers and World’s Fair projects, and stuff like that. I’d done some music for a video wall they did for General Motors in New York.
And I got a call from them. They said, “We need you to score VCR assembly robots. They’re the unruly students of another robot who’s a teacher. We’d like you to get in touch with the guy who’s directing that.”
I said, “Great. Can we set up a meeting?” And they said, “No, he’s actually in Osaka in a warehouse with a bunch of Japanese engineers, trying to teach them how to do these robots.” [laughs] So, we communicated long distance. It was kind of before the days of text and email, so I really don’t know how it happened, but that was our introduction. And he really liked the music I did. It was pretty goofy, kind of funky, and it ended up working out.
We did several more projects for the same company. And then, at one point, he said, “Hey, I made this claymation film. I’ve got a pitch that I took to Nickelodeon based on that. Would you be interested in doing the music?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely, I would.” And that was Hey Arnold.
John: Do you remember your talks with Craig for the style and mood he wanted for the music? Was that set this early, or did that develop over time?
Jim: No, we definitely had conversations before we started making the show. And there were two things we were confident would be great for Hey Arnold.
One of which was… we’d been listening to a DJ named Jason Bentley on KCRW in LA. He was playing a bunch of acid jazz, at that point — which was basically the soul jazz stuff Craig and I had grown up on, with electronic beats laid over it. We thought the feel of it really hit the nail on the head for the kind of urban environment that we wanted to evoke for Hey Arnold. So, we created some mixtapes of that stuff.
The other thing was, we were great believers in melody as a powerful tool for any kind of film music, but particularly for animation. We were both fans of Vince Guaraldi, the stuff he did for the Peanuts specials back in the day, which is very melodic. That was another thing we wanted to explore with the show — and did, a lot.
John: What was the opinion of the executive side about this whole direction? It was a little bit different for animation on TV at that time.
Jim: It’s funny — I have one recollection of a meeting that we took with Kathrin Seitz, one of our executives on the show. Mary Harrington was our producer, and I can’t remember if she was there as well. But we were pitching them an idea for the theme song.
We always talked about the Rat Pack era as a great resource for musical ideas [laughs]. In addition to the acid jazz and the Vince Guaraldi stuff. Craig would sing like a fake Frank Sinatra. He’d go, “Arnold, you crazy nut.”
And we were sitting in this meeting, and we started singing that. Immediately, the two executives who were there began to moan, and it looked very dark [laughs]. So we knew that wasn’t gonna fly. But that’s the only time I really remember having direct contact with them.
Honestly, most composers would love to be able to sit down with the executives, with an instrument in their hands, and spitball stuff. Because you want to give people what they want. But that was the only time we sat down with them.
I know I got notes from Craig as we were making the episodes, and I’m sure I must have gotten some notes from the executives. But, basically, my memory is that they just let me do what I want, and Craig was a fan. There was never any big, “Well, no, we can’t go that direction.” There was none of that [laughs].
We just got really lucky in that regard. They fought a lot of battles about script ideas, I know — especially in the first two seasons. Fortunately, that stuff never really made it to me.
John: That’s really cool. So, could you talk about your process for composing on the series? What was involved in, for example, doing a specific episode?
Jim: At that point, the video was not digital yet. I’d get a ¾-inch video cassette. On a per-episode basis, I’d have a couple of weeks to turn around an episode.
I tended to let myself taxi through the show and write everything sequentially. I like to write an episode from the beginning to the end, to experience the story the way the viewer is gonna experience the story. We were so blessed: the writers on that show were fantastic. Warmhearted relationship things between Arnold and the other characters, lots of great conflicts — Helga was an endless resource for scoring ideas.
The first week, I would write and draft. Then I would send Craig… I can’t remember how he actually got to look at the music with the picture. I must have sent them a stereo mix, and then they would lay that up against the video. The second week, I would address whatever notes he gave me and turn [a finished mix] in.
I did some thematic writing before we started the show. If they have the time, most composers will do [what] people sometimes call a “diary.” You’ll sit with your ideas of who the characters are gonna be, the environment that the show takes place in — in our case, the urban environment. So, I wrote a few things, just experimenting, and a lot of that stuff made it into the show.
John: How much original music would be recorded for an average episode?
Jim: The episodes were two 11-minute stories, and that would make up an episode. And there’s a lot of music in animation. I would say probably eight or nine minutes an episode — some more, some less.
John: Was anything about Hey Arnold a different experience compared to what you’d done up to that point in your career?
Jim: Well, I didn’t know anything about animation [laughs]. I’d done a bunch of record arranging for Motown. I did the themed entertainment stuff: World’s Fair things and exhibitions. I’d done two movies with John Carpenter. But animation was terra incognita for me. So, the process — how the sausage gets made — was all new.
I’m completely self-taught. I didn’t ever go to the conservatory — I was a band guy, a Hammond organ player who toured on the road. I got married, and my wife said, “So… what are you going to do for a living now that you can’t go on the road?” And I was lucky enough to find my way into writing music for pictures.
Doing animation as a composer, a big part of the job description is being an arranger. Because you’re asked to do pastiches of every musical style you can think of. You find out there’s a scene where a marching band gets run over by a parade float, and you have to figure out how to score that. Then you get another scene where you’re doing Carmen and the Ride of the Valkyries [laughs], and you gotta do that.
So, the arranging part of it was really fun, but also on-the-job training for me. Especially given that I’m a one-man-band guy. A lot of what we did, I had to make in the studio with the tools that were available to me — you know, synthesizers and working on the computer.
Fortunately, I was on a show that was incredibly well-written and wonderfully animated. It was super funny, super heartfelt. All of the things that make a composer look really good, that show had in spades.
And the other thing is… I’ve been fortunate throughout my career to have really good mixers. Even when I was still learning how to write music around dialogue — which I’m still learning how to do 30, 40 years on [laughs]. I’ve always had mixers who made me sound really good.
John: So, you were in LA while composing and recording Hey Arnold. What was your experience like sourcing musicians for this in LA at the time?
Jim: Oh, my God. I mean, LA is… in terms of a place where there are people who play on film scores, without a doubt, Los Angeles is the mecca.
I had a core group of six or seven people who played on the show, pretty much from the first episode to the last. The very first episode and the pilot, I used some people I didn’t end up using later — not because I didn’t like what they were doing. One of them, a great saxophonist named Buzzy Jones, had moved to the Midwest to teach and wasn’t available. And there were other people who I couldn’t stay in touch with.
But I ended up with two guys, really, who were absolutely essential to my process. One was Nick Kirgo, the guitar voice of that show — phenomenal jazz guitar player. And the other guy was a reed player and arranger named Bill Liston. And Bill played every woodwind instrument known to God and man.
My studio was on this ridiculous hill. It’s like the second-steepest hill in Los Angeles — it’s called Baxter Street. There’s a great picture of [saxophonist] Art Pepper [there]. If you search for “Art Pepper pictures in LA,” you’ll see a guy standing on a hillside, holding a sax, and it’s Art Pepper right in front of where my studio ended up 30 years later.
Bill would park at the bottom of the hill and then lug five, six, seven cases of instruments up the hill [laughs].
John: [laughs]
Jim: The poor guy. But the wonderful saxophone playing you hear on that score, that’s all Bill.
And then the big band stuff was done with three guys. It was Bill playing all the reeds, and a great trombonist named Andy Martin and trumpeter named Wayne Bergeron. Those three guys are on a million film scores. They’re a part of the film musician community in LA. I think Bill’s retired, but the other two guys are still playing all the time. They’re way, way, way, way above my pay grade; I was super fortunate to have them. It was thanks to Bill’s influence.
And then there was a violinist — a viola player by trade — Nancy K. Roth. She was the [musical] voice of Helga, so the kind of histrionic, faux-operatic stuff that accompanies Helga was all Nancy Roth.
That was the Hey Arnold Symphony Orchestra [laughs].
John: Do you have any tracks that stand out to you today — favorites, or one particular favorite?
Jim: Yeah, I have a bunch of cues that I’m really fond of. I think my favorite theme was the theme I wrote for Grandpa. Kind of [an] old-school, ‘20s-style piece of music, because it got introduced [in] a show about his past. And that ended up being one of the signature themes of the whole show — I used that melody a lot for things that weren’t even related to Grandpa. It was sort of like a “nostalgia theme.”
There was [another] piece of music that I wrote when we did the episode “Parents Day,” which is where you find out the backstory on Arnold’s parents. There’s a heart-rending scene where they’re saying goodbye to Arnold at the door. And that piece of music [became] one of the major themes in the show.
And then that goofy thing Craig was singing, that really made the executives [wince]. “Ar-nold, you da-da-da.” I ended up using that Ar-nold, that little motif, all over the place in the show. It didn’t show up as a piece of music, I think, until maybe the third season. We did a promo and recorded a whole track with a big band. A promo guy for Nickelodeon wrote lyrics to it and a great vocal group called Take Five did the singing.
Those are all faves. There’s another one called A Crazy Night, which is really kind of bittersweet. It’s played on the saxophone, but Bill had to play it on two saxophones. Because [the way] I wrote it, the range was too big for one sax. He played the bottom part of it on baritone and the top part of it on tenor. He did an amazing job of playing these two lines so I could blend them together. And people were calling him up after the show — they said, “What did you play that on?”
If you’ve ever seen it, there’s a vinyl Hey Arnold album that came out three, four years ago — all of the things I was talking about are actually on that.
John: Very cool. I’ll also ask — do you have standout memories from the recording sessions?
Jim: Well, the ones we did with the cast tended to be really fun. Oh, my God, Tim Curry doing the mean drama teacher. Lou Rawls doing the postman. I mean, those were just amazing sessions. Being in the presence of talent like that was an awesome experience.
But the other vocal recording sessions that were really cool — there were a couple of ‘em. The first one was our salute to What’s Opera, Doc? We had the entire cast and everybody else that we could corral. Joey Paul, who was the casting director, Craig, other people from the studio, some of the writers, I think. When we did the big group vocals, everybody crammed into the studio.
It was the Foley stage at a great studio called Horta Editorial. And they were very old-school. I mean, the first season of the show, all the music was edited on a Moviola. That’ll give you a sense of where we were in time [laughs].
John: Wow. Yeah.
Jim: But we got everybody on the Foley stage over there. And part of the score, since it was an opera takeoff, was Carmen, Ride of the Valkyries. Craig had written these amazing lyrics. So, we had individual characters in the cast singing stuff, but then we had these big group vocals, and everyone joined in and sang. That was amazing fun to do and people totally killed.
And then, later on in the series, there was an episode called “Eugene, Eugene!” The character Eugene appeared in a musical. We wrote a bunch of musical comedy-style stuff. That was another one where we had a big group of kids — there were no adults in that session.
But I remember my son was old enough to come in and sing on that. There were always craft services, snacks and sodas — and he got totally wired drinking soda, bouncing off the wall [laughs].
John: [laughs]
Jim: But those were wonderful sessions. I loved those. And there were a bunch of great musician[-only] sessions.
For me, I think the most amazing session that was just musicians [was when] we did the score for the first Hey Arnold movie at Paramount Studios. [We were at] Stage M, the famous Paramount scoring stage. Which is, criminally, no longer there; it’s been converted into office space.
For cartoon composers — unless you’re doing a big, feature-length film for Disney or Pixar or somebody like that — you don’t do a lot of orchestra dates. So, for me, that was quite a party. We spent a day at Paramount, recording. It’s just breathtaking for a composer, the first time you hear something that you’ve written — you strike up the band and there’s 50, 60 people out there playing the music. That was a great day.
John: For sure. So, this is a question I like to ask people. Do you remember what it was like when you first saw an episode of Hey Arnold on television?
Jim: You know, honestly, I don’t. Confession, full disclosure, I almost never watch the stuff that I’ve written music for. Partly because I’m pretty busy, so I don’t always have time to sit down and watch it.
The best I ever hear of the music is when I’m listening to it in my studio. And so those are the experiences that stick with me. I was talking about the music for “Parents Day” — that moment is a real weeper. It really is. And I’m a very tender-hearted guy, and I actually was crying when I was working on that.
I will say — and this doesn’t really answer your question — the other comment that I would make is [about] the experience of listening to the music with the picture, with other people in the room. In my case, mostly the showrunner or the people responsible for giving you notes. That’s an amazing experience, because you feel the music, you inhabit the music, completely differently. You’re feeling their reaction, so that changes everything.
Watching it on TV, though? [laughs] No, I can’t tell you about an experience where I got a big buzz out of that.
John: [laughs] Really interesting — that’s a great answer. That’s something I love about that question, because you always get different answers from everybody.
So, I guess I’ll wrap it up by asking what you’re working on at the moment.
Jim: Two projects. One that just wrapped, which is a Disney show called Primos. And an interesting note: Natasha Kline, who’s the creator of that show, is the partner of Craig Bartlett. As soon as I heard Natasha’s pitch for that show and found out she was gonna be doing it, I was all over it like a bum on a bologna sandwich.
I really had to stir my stumps to make the music keep up with what was going on in the show, but that was a lovely experience. Working with Natasha was fantastic.
And I’m doing a show with a producer named Dete Meserve. This is my third project that I will have done with her. It’s a PBS science show that was conceived by Al Roker, the weatherman. It’s a show about weather for kids — it’s called Weather Hunters.
That’s been fun — also a very different show. The pacing is much slower and more gentle. I went from... it’s like when you’re on a roller coaster and it comes down off that last hill going 50 miles an hour, and, all of a sudden, you hit the brakes and slow down to 20 miles an hour. That’s kind of what it felt like when I first started writing on that show [laughs].
John: [laughs] Well, it’s been an honor to talk to you about this. I’ve always loved Hey Arnold, always loved the music.
Jim: You know, it was interesting. The other day, I was listening to somebody talk about animation at that point in time. I didn’t really ever think about it, but it was in the era where, all of a sudden, there were cartoons for kids that weren’t “Saturday morning cartoons.” Which was such a different thing.
They weren’t really long form, but they were much longer form and more intentional. Especially Hey Arnold, you know — the stories were definitely not just gag after gag after gag after gag, like the old Warner Bros. cartoons. I’m not taking anything away from them, ‘cause I grew up on that stuff. But it was interesting to be doing that.
Of course, we had no idea at the time what we were doing. We were just kind of making it [laughs]. And following our noses, as Craig has said often. There were things we knew we wanted to try, but a lot of it just happened because of what the show was, who the writers were, who the performers were, what worked.
You gotta thank all those badass women who started Nickelodeon. I mean, Geraldine Laybourne, Kathrin Seitz, Mary Harrington. They really took the ball and headed downfield in a wonderful way. They still produced the shows, but they let people make their stuff — in a way that doesn’t always happen. You know, that’s part of the reason those things ended up being standalone franchises. I think they got what they made room for. They got wonderful things.
2 – Newsbits
In France, the feature films of Annecy 2025 have been revealed. Little Amélie, Arco and Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life are in the main competition. Elsewhere: the Dominican Olivia & the Clouds competes for the Contrechamp prize, and I Am Frankelda (Mexico’s first stop-motion feature) is getting its world premiere.
Kazuya Kanehisa animated a fun new music video in Japan.
Also in Japan, Isao Takahata’s classic series Anne of Green Gables (1979) is getting a restored Blu-ray release.
Academy members in America can no longer vote for a nominee in an Oscar category before watching every film in that category.
In Cuba, the state-owned ICAIC studio has signed a deal with Soyuzmultfilm, which could lead to “joint animation projects” in the future.
Nezha 2 is somehow back in first place at the Chinese box office, three months into its theatrical run.
Jumbo’s march in Indonesia continues. The film has surpassed 7 million attendees — the third-largest showing for a domestic movie in the country.
Last of all: we looked into the creation of the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh.
Until next time!
See Animation Magazine (Fall 1992), used several times.
The quotes from Cohen and Loesch come from Animation Magazine (Summer 1992 and Fall 1993).
Hey Arnold had so much heart. Our household had very nearly aged out of watching “cartoons” - definitely aged out of the gag after gag cartoons, and I remember us still watching Hey Arnold. The music was beautiful and some really somber topics. Even as a kid, it felt like a modern “a tree grows in Brooklyn” to me. Primos is on my watchlist, I will have to move it up the list!
This is GOLD. I never thought I would read such thing! This was SO interesting. Simply phenomenal to be able to know about such a big fond memory of my childhood and the amazing songs of the show... Outstanding job.