TV and film bumpers can pack a lot of music into a short window. They often run through multiple key changes in mere seconds. Cadences bleed into other cadences. Power choruses stacked upon lesser choruses. The TV bumper does all the work of a three-minute pop song in the course of fifteen seconds or less. Disney has a classic. The Fox fanfare is oft-missed.
One popular bumper at the end of ’80s cartoon was for DiC Entertainment. A camera peers through a sleeping child’s bedroom, jumps out the window into outer space, where a star punctuates the “i” in DiC and a child’s voice pronounces the acronym as “deek,” although every single child everywhere subvocalized it as “dick.“
It begins on a D9 chord, the V of G Major. Everything points to a perfect cadence to the G, but then they throw in a C (add 9), the IV. While still in the key of G, a plagal cadence is now expected from the IV to the I. Instead we get a bIII borrowed from G minor. The child intones the tonic “dic” on a G4, which is too perfect to be a coincidence. A musical director had to have cued the child, right? There would have to be an NBC chime on hand.
The withheld tonic appears in the voice with the name of the company. This is a stroke of genius subconscious advertising on the part of the DiC ad-wizards. If Beethoven were alive in the ’80s, this is the kind of thing he’d devote his musical brain to. Nobody ever realized what secrets the DiC bumper held until blog. Now that I know, one hundred neuralinked monkeys will also know, and soon the world.
