Words by Selim Bulut

Chad and Jared Moldenhauer’s action-packed 2017 video game Cuphead was a love letter to 1930s cartoons. Entirely hand-drawn and beautifully animated in the vintage ‘rubber hose’ style of Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios, it was only a matter of time before things came full circle and the game was adapted into an animated series itself. Netflix’s The Cuphead Show! turns the adventures of Cuphead and his brother Mugman into 15-minute episodes, complete with authentic watercolour backgrounds, original songs, and – most importantly – a frenetic visual comedy that aspires to the chaos of Looney Tunes.

Perhaps it’s this sense of anarchy that appealed to The Cuphead Show!’s composer, Ego Plum. Plum is a successful composer for animated shows (he’s worked on Nickelodeon’s Making Fiends, Disney’s Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and the SpongeBob Squarepants universe), but he doesn’t have any formal training, and instead came up through the punk rock scene. Born in East Los Angeles and raised by immigrant parents, the self-taught Mexican-American composer was first a drummer obsessed with bands like the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, and XTC, and as a teenager, he was drawn to the soundtrack of kids’ TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which featured some of his favourite artists, a gaggle of new wave subversives like the Residents, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, and Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman. Cartoon music, he realised, could be as bold and inventive as anything else.

In 2008, after a decade making music after clocking off from his office day job, Ego Plum got a gig on Making Fiends, where he first met Dave Wasson, later to become The Cuphead Show!’s showrunner. Three years ago, Wasson called up Plum and asked if he could write a song around some lyrics he’d put together for its opening episode. The result was a ‘Minnie the Moocher’-Esque piece sung by the character of the Devil. “It went up and down the ranks of Netflix and was a bit of an informal audition, in a way, which got me the job,” says Plum. “The song you hear in the first episode is essentially the same, structure-wise, though I added a few more bells and whistles and got some other players on it.”

While the original Cuphead game used an authentic jazz age soundtrack by Kris Maddigan, Ego Plum wanted to hark back to the madcap, merrily melodic music of the Raymond Scott Quintette and Warner Bros. cartoons music director Carl Stalling. Composing the soundtrack was a lengthy and meticulous process, and it wasn’t helped by a global pandemic that upended his initial plans to record a band in a room together. “For two days in a row, I dreamed in Cuphead,” Plum says. “I was a character in that animated world having casual conversations like in a normal dream. That’s testament to how much I’ve worked on this show.”

What sort of conversations did you have about the musical direction for the series?

Dave Wasson had an idea of what he wanted it to sound like. Music is a very important part of Cuphead. If you’re familiar with the video game, Kris Maddigan did a fantastic job with the music for that. I talked to him recently for the first time and praised him directly. One of the things I love is that if you listen to a track of his on YouTube you’ll see comments from what I imagine are young gamers saying ‘What is this music? What do you call this genre? I’ve never heard it before.’ It’s bringing this music into the consciousness of young minds. It was clear that we had a really high bar to live up to.

At the same time, I realised what I was doing for The Cuphead Show! was running in parallel to the Cuphead game. I had to go to the same sources of influence that Kris did, but take it in a different direction. The needs for the show are a lot different to the needs of the game. At that point, I realised, ‘OK, what kind of music applies to this?’ For me, it was Raymond Scott, one of my biggest influences on the show. Raymond Scott made this jazz that he called ‘descriptive jazz’. He had song titles like ‘War Dance for Wooden Indians’ and ‘Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals’. He was not scoring for cartoons or films, but he was making music that created visuals that were so well suited for cinema that Carl Stalling, the musical director for Warner Bros., had the good sense to take that and put it in Looney Tunes. That’s been a tremendous influence.

What else were you drawing from?

In addition, there was Leroy Shield, the composer for Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang. That stuff is very playful and fun. [If you listen to the Devil’s song] the obvious comparison is Cab Calloway, but for me, a lot of my influences feel twice removed from their source – Carl Stalling gave me an introduction to classical music as a kid, and when I think of Danny Elfman, his interpretation of Cab Calloway through Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas or his character in Forbidden Zone has been more of an influence than Cab directly.

What was your workflow like for making the score? Did you write certain pieces in advance, or were you scoring to picture?

It depends. If it’s a song with lyrics, we do those way in advance. If it’s animation that requires the music to come first – if there’s a tap dance sequence, or if the character is going to be holding a trumpet and playing it in a certain way – then of course we write the music in advance. But for the most part, I get a locked picture and then I start working. In this show, we had the ambition to get a bunch of live musicians and put them in a room with one microphone in the centre, taking these black-and-white photos to make it feel like an old jazz band recording. But that went out of the window when the global pandemic happened. All of a sudden we were recording remotely with musicians who were learning in real-time how to set up mics and interfaces to record their own parts. That was difficult, for sure. At that point, it was my job to create the illusion of a band recording together, but the reality is that everyone was sending me individual parts and I had to assemble them in the studio.

How did you bring everything together while working remotely – especially working with a jazz style, which I’d imagine has an improvisational element to it?

You’d think that, and initially, that was what I was imagining too. But the more I kept writing, I realised I was even writing all of the solos. This is exactly what the Raymond Scott Quintette did. At a time when jazz was improvisational, he was writing every single note. So that made me feel more comfortable doing that. Ultimately, we’re not writing music for the sake of music, we’re trying to tell stories. You can write something with a beginning, middle, and end, that resolves after 16 bars, but if during the episode a door slams right at bar 13, you have to change how the music is going to resolve and go in a different direction. Contrary to my name, you have to have very little ego to do this work! You need to think in terms of the story, the characters, and their emotional needs.

Can you tell me about the sort of instruments you used? There are obviously a lot of traditional instruments that you don’t hear in as much contemporary music today.

The idea was to use traditional instruments in non-traditional ways. Essentially it’s the instruments you’d hear in the Raymond Scott Quintette or in a big band ensemble: woodwinds, tenor sax, alto, baritone, clarinets, trumpets, trombones, and then piano, drums, upright bass, and occasionally a few weird things like a musical saw, a banjo, or some nylon guitars. That’s the palette we tried to stick with, but we didn’t feel the need to be completely true and authentic to the 1930s and to let the stories decide what was needed. If there’s a moment of suspense that requires Bernard Herrmann-esque strings, then sure, we’ll go in that direction – we used Spitfire Audio strings, actually.

How did the animation inform your approach, in terms of its movement and elasticity?

What you described there is something I learned from Carl Stalling. He would take a piece that was classical, recorded with an orchestra, and right before your eyes, he would make it stretch like putty. It could slow down or speed up or turn into God knows what, and then come back again. What we use software to control, he was doing in real-time with real human beings. 

If you want to get into the technical aspect of [how I did that for The Cuphead Show!], it involved a lot of tempo mapping. I’ll have a complete scene in front of me, and I’ll have a tempo map that starts at 150bpm, goes down to 98bpm for three seconds, then jumps back up again. I’ll map it all out in advance, then start writing and hoping that the melodies can fit into four or eight bars so that it feels musical and melodic. The animation informs this in so many ways because there’s a lot going on very quickly. We can’t be true to big band music – we have to let the animation dictate our choices. Sometimes in 11 minutes, there are 30 or 40 cues coming or going. It’s really wild.

Can you tell me about a problem you had during recording that you had to find a creative solution to?

The entire show was filled creative solutions! It completely derailed when we couldn’t record in a room together, but the silver lining to that was that I came across fantastic musicians who I never would have thought about using, like some musical saw players in Greece. A friend of mine, Jeff Winner, who runs the Raymond Scott Archives, connected me with a group called Moon Hooch, a saxophone duo who play what I can only describe as primitive techno/dubstep/dance music, but with saxophones. They play with traffic cones coming out the end of their instruments and they generate the weirdest sounds that almost sound like electronic warbles. It’s the farthest thing from jazz, frankly, but the very fact that these guys are not jazz is why I wanted them in the show.

Did your punk rock background ever factor into it?

I take influences from a lot of different places. As lofty as it sounds, I’m striving for timeless melodies that can exist for 80 or 100 years – you aim that high, and then try to land somewhere in the middle. As crazy as it sounds, something like ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ or ‘Three Blind Mice’ is more important to me than Duke Ellington because those melodies don’t really have that much to do with jazz. But the energy I take from punk bands is just as important. With The Cuphead Show! I almost consider it like punk jazz. The reality is that I don’t know what I’m doing, in a lot of ways – I don’t have a formal musical education, I never studied jazz. But my favourite punk artists didn’t know what they were doing, they were just making records and having fun with their friends. When I put on the first Buzzcocks record, Spiral Scratch, I’m hearing young guys that truly just had a passion for music but no real idea of how or what to do. I’m trying to do that all the time: ‘How do I undo what I know in order to achieve this?’

Two days ago I went to see the Circle Jerks, and I was watching from the back and the entire audience was spinning in a circle, bodies crashing into each other, and I was doing everything I could to stop myself from jumping in. The music was pulling me in that direction. I realised that’s something I’ve never had from John Williams or Hans Zimmer or anyone else, but I feel this visceral reaction from punk rock. How does that apply to the score? I try to aspire to the energy of the Circle Jerks and the timelessness of ‘Three Blind Mice’. What does that sound like when you combine it? Who knows!

As a punk kid, how did you develop this interest in the 1930s and big band music in the first place?

It starts with Looney Tunes growing up as a kid, coming home after school and having this stuff seep into your subconscious. I had no idea who Carl Stalling or Raymond Scott were, but it was going into my brain whether I liked it or not. As I got older, I discovered Pee-wee’s Playhouse on TV. That was really important to me because Paul Reubens had the good sense to hire some of the most unusual artists of the time to do music. People like Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, and one of my favourite groups, the Residents. All these groups were making music for this kids’ show, and it made perfect sense. At that point, I realised incidental music could be more interesting than the stuff I was hearing on MTV or on the radio. It was more subversive, more strange. It was art. I realised I wanted to be a composer to get kids interested in Raymond Scott or the Residents or any other strange thing I’m putting into these scores.

I sincerely believe that as a composer you’re only as good as your influences. I have an eclectic library in my head that I can pull from at any moment: a Beatles song that has a double tambourine track, or a synth part in a Wall of Voodoo track, or the way a percussive beat kicks in an Adam Ant song, and then combine that with a Rossini melody. You can combine these in an endless way, but you need to be confident enough. I’ve had meetings with executives where I’ve said ‘If I get hired for this, it’s either gonna be completely perfect or an absolute disaster.’ I don’t do the middle – I don’t know how!