MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer, arranger and conductor Buddy Baker died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, on July 26, 2002, at the age of 84.

One of the most prolific musicians in the history of Walt Disney Productions, Baker composed, arranged or conducted music for more than 200 films, television programs and theme-park attractions during an association with the studio that lasted almost three decades.

Norman Baker was born in Springfield, Missouri, on January 4, 1918. After studying music at Southwest Baptist College, he moved to California and began working as an arranger for radio and big bands. Among his early successes was his arrangement of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” for Stan Kenton’s orchestra, and he later became musical director for Bob Hope’s radio program. Baker also taught arranging and composition at Los Angeles City College, where one of his students was future film composer Jerry Goldsmith.

Baker joined Walt Disney Productions during the mid-1950s, initially assisting composer George Bruns, and gradually became one of the studio’s principal musical figures. His early Disney work encompassed television, animated shorts and documentaries before he moved increasingly into feature films. His scores included Toby Tyler (1960), A Tiger Walks (1964), The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964), The Gnome-Mobile (1967), Rascal (1969), The Million Dollar Duck (1971), The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), The Shaggy D.A. (1976) and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979).

His greatest recognition as a feature-film composer came with Napoleon and Samantha (1972), the adventure drama starring Michael Douglas and a young Jodie Foster. Baker’s warm, melodic orchestral score earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Dramatic Score, placing him alongside John Williams and John Addison among the nominees at the 1973 ceremony.

Baker was also deeply involved with Disney’s Winnie the Pooh productions, arranging and conducting the music for the animated featurettes that were eventually assembled as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977). Later feature assignments included The Devil and Max Devlin and The Fox and the Hound, both released in 1981. His versatility made him especially valuable to Disney, where assignments might require orchestral comedy, Americana, animation scoring, songs or atmospheric music rather than a single recognizable compositional style.

Perhaps Baker’s most enduring legacy, however, lies outside conventional cinema. He became one of Disney’s most important theme-park composers, writing music for attractions including Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and, most famously, The Haunted Mansion. For the latter he composed “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” with lyrics by Imagineer X Atencio, while also creating much of the attraction’s eerie instrumental underscore. The resulting mixture of Gothic atmosphere, macabre humor and memorable melody became inseparable from one of Disneyland’s signature attractions.

Baker continued contributing to Disney parks for decades, working on EPCOT’s Impressions de France and later composing music for Journey to the Center of the Earth at Tokyo DisneySea. He remained connected with Disney long after his formal retirement and was named a Disney Legend in 1998.

Teaching was equally important to Baker. After his earlier work at Los Angeles City College, he became a central figure in the film-scoring program at the University of Southern California, which he led from 1987 until his death.