For Christmas, I got the Tom & Jerry DVD set. I grew up on the old MGM cartoons (the Hanna-Barbera Tom & Jerry, and Tex Avery toons), and they were a fixture in my weekday afternoon TV viewing all the way through college. It's been a few years since I've regularly seen some of these cartoons and in viewing the DVD, it just reinforced why I love golden age animation. The frantic pacing, the visual humor, the creative violence (always wondered how these cartoon characters had such easy access to explosives and weapons), and just in general the craft of visual storytelling (consider that most of the MGM-era Tom & Jerry cartoons used no dialog). All in all, a great collection of toons (unfortunately, the image quality is spotty)

But, one underrated aspect of these golden age cartoons I think is the music. A great extra with this DVD is a feature on Scott Bradley who wrote the music for the MGM cartoons. It goes into how cartoon music really pushed the envelope in how it grew to emulate and match the action on the screen and mixed together different music styles inside a seven-minute short. I'd read before that musicians regarded Scott Bradley's music in particular as very difficult movie music to play because of its frantic timing and abrupt changes. The feature on the Tom & Jerry DVD traces how cartoon music in general evolved into its own genre. Very interesting stuff, well worth checking out.