November 16th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Fans of the classic animated series Animaniacs rejoice! The new reboot season premieres this Friday November 20th on Hulu. Married, Emmy-winning composers Julie and Steven Bernstein are back to score the latest antics of the Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister).
Steven Bernstein: When we heard the show was coming back, it was little by little, rumor by rumor.
Julie Bernstein: I was getting little texts and things from friends saying, “Have you heard? Have you heard?” [And I replied] “Have I heard what?”
Jackson Murphy: And so when did you officially get involved in it, then?
SB: It was about two years ago. October 2018, I think. When we were brought-in after some letter writing and “Please!”, they brought us in to talk about writing songs for the show. We wrote songs for the previous iteration.
JB: We didn’t write any for this one.
SB: And so we thought, “Okay.” And we went back home, we got an email that said, “Oh, we’d like you to do the underscoring too.”
JB: We thought that we were being hired first to write songs, and then it turned out we were being hired to write the underscore. We didn’t write any songs for this.
JM: Is it true you have every score from the first run of the show archived at home?
JB: We had some cabinets made [for our garage]. We have large manilla envelopes because the scores are very big. Throughout the years, we have taken scores out to look at them. And they don’t always get put back. There are different areas in our house, but it used to be organized.
SB: The first go-around of the show was done by production numbers in segments. It was kind of put together not as episodes at first. We were scoring this segment and that segment and then they would put them together in whatever combination seemed to work.
JM: That’s cool. Overall, what were your goals coming into Animaniacs 2.0 – coming back to this show after 22 years? What did you want to set out to do?
SB: Not disappoint anybody. (laughs)
JB: We just wanna do the best job that we can for the cartoon.
SB: We wanted to have some continuity between the first show and this one. That was basically our assignment: to make it sound of apiece. To make it sound like nothing… happened to the sound.
JB: We just try to do justice to the cartoon.
JM: In the first episode, the Warners get a major pop culture lesson about what’s happened over the past 22 years. There are so many references! Were you surprised when you found out what happens in the first episode?
JB: We were excited! We were really glad that from the moment it started that it paid attention to the fact that it’s been 22 years.
SB: We found out when we got our work video. That’s the first time we saw it. We didn’t read any scripts. It’s what writers call “The Terror of the Blank Page.” We really didn’t concern ourselves with how we’re gonna do this, we just had music to write and a certain amount of time. So we dive in!
JM: What kinds of research or prep did you do? Did you go back to old episodes? Or did you just attack it?
SB: No, we just dove in. The show is so engrained because we were with it from the beginning. It’s just a muscle that needed to be warmed up a little bit.
JB: I don’t think the show has left us over the years. It was an intense, long, consistent experience for us last time and it’s ingrained in us. It’s a very large part of our lives. Jumping back on was very, very exciting. And daunting.
SB: And familiar. The characters didn’t drastically change. And because of that, everything was familiar. We knew what to do and when to do it.
JM: Steven Spielberg has been very involved in this. Did he have any specific input for the two of you and what he wanted to see and hear from the music?
JB: I’m sure he did, but we haven’t spoken to him.
SB: Not from him directly to us. It probably made its way from Wellesley Wild, the showrunner… passing on whatever instructions [he] gets. But it was basically “Do what you did before. Make it good. Make it sound nice in the orchestra.” And I think that’s what we’ve done.
JM: Oh yeah. You’ve done a great job. And in the episodes I watched, it’s the timing. Is the specificity of it really tricky? You’ve got music, dialogue and characters moving and stopping at certain points.
SB: It’s very labor-intensive.
JB: We don’t just start writing. The first thing that we do is look at the picture and we figure out what the points need to be hit very distinctly.
SB: If it’s an important door slam, it needs to be on the first beat of a measure.
JB: You have to look at the cartoon and make a decision. What’s gonna be very important, musically, to make sure that we hit? And we’re going to want that to be on a good beat so the orchestra can play it.
SB: That involves finding a tempo – a speed for the music – that will allow us to meet that event with the music.
JB: There’s a computer program that we use to help us get there.
SB: After two and a half episodes, we went to remote recording because we weren’t allowed back in the studio.
JM: That’s gotta be different challenges than what you did the first time.
SB: It’s an immense amount of work.
JB: It’s already very different from the first time because the first time, everything was written on paper. Nobody could hear what we had written until they came to the recording session. There was no such thing as sending a mocked-up score, which we do now. But once this remote thing happened…
SB: It took days off of our writing. Each musician was recording their own separate part in their own home or in their small studio. We had to prepare files so they could do that. There’s a click track and a reference track.
JB: They need to have the beat. They also need to hear what everybody else is doing. It’s a very, very different thing to play in an orchestra where you hear everybody and you’re part of a whole than to play at home.
SB: So all of a sudden everybody becomes a soloist.
JB: They’re amazing. Each musician is spending more time than they ever have before. They are making sure that they send us something that they think we will wanna hear, and they’re doing a great job. Once we get it, we assemble it.
SB: We get 30 separate soloist tracks that we then put together.
JB: And once we have assembled and edited, then we send to our engineer, who we would’ve been in the studio with.
SB: We could not have done anything like this not that many years ago.
JM: Technology has been incredible throughout this whole [COVID] thing.
JB: If we had to have a pandemic, we’re lucky that it happened when we can do this. Otherwise, it would’ve been nothing.
JM: Thank goodness for all the advancements in technology.
JB: I take back all those bad things I said about technology over the years. (laughs) I take it all back! I now understand how important it is to our entire life not just in our careers.
JM: The characters on the show go all over the Warner Bros. lot. Do you have a favorite story/memory of being on the WB lot?
JB: [During the original run] We were there for 10 years pretty much a few times a week.
SB: [At one point] We had a small child who was not yet walking. He was eight or ten months [old]. We would bring him along and spread some furniture pads on the floor in the machine room. Tape recorders were in there.
JB: It had all the equipment in it, and we were in the adjacent room where the mixing board was. When I had the baby, I brought him, handed him to the contractors… and they would put down a furniture pad. And they would take care of the baby. When the musicians who had also just had babies saw that we were bringing ours, some of the guys told their wives, “Hey! Bring in the baby at lunchtime so they can all be together.” We ended-up having a lot of babies… all at the session. It was really incredible.
SB: It was like the Warner Bros. nursery next door. And now our baby’s 25.
JB: It was a great atmosphere back then, and we can’t wait for the live to start back up. To have that atmosphere. It’s a really great day: the recording session.
SB: It’s really why we go through the pain of writing.
JM: How much of Season 2 are you into?
SB: Zero.
JB: We don’t know where the other part of the process is.
SB: I know it’s underway. I just don’t know what stage it is. I know that if we wanna do the same kind of schedule, hopefully it will be a little more spread out than it was this season… we’re probably gonna have to start pretty soon on Season 2.
JM: You won several Emmys last time for your work on this show. Are you gunning for more?
JB: I would not mind! (laughs)
SB: We will exhibit our work and hopefully be judged favorably but there’s so much good music being written all over the place – and so much more good music. It’s great to be recognized.
JB: It would be very exciting.
SB: It would be wonderful. I don’t know if I wanna characterize it as gunning for it but it would be nice. We’ll submit!
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