It's not the best music, but the cartoon music that was closest to my heart growing up was the music from Filmation's shows from the '70s, which was credited to Yvette Blais and Jeff Michael, but which I now know was actually composed by Ray Ellis, Marc Ellis, and Norm Prescott (although it's unclear whether Prescott actually helped write it or just produced it). That was the soundtrack of my childhood, pretty much.
Of course the music Shirley Walker and her team did for
Batman: TAS was fantastic, as good as any other TV score and quite diverse. Another favorite of mine was Shuki Levy & Kussa Mahchi's score to the 1994
Spider-Man series. It wasn't nearly as stylistically diverse, but it was lively and had a rich orchestral sound, as well as the kind of motif-driven style that I like. (I couldn't stand the theme music, though, which I think was by some guy from Aerosmith.)
I'm also very fond of Ron Jones's score for
Disney's Duck Tales from the late '80s. There was a slew of syndicated Disney TV series that followed
Duck Tales, but none of them ever equalled the quality of Jones's scores.
I think GI Joe and Transformers shared some of the same music.
Not really. The two soundtracks and theme songs were very distinct. However, since they were both produced by Sunbow, every once and a while they would cross over music - including the bumpers for the commercials.
Well, that's exactly what
Unicron said: that they shared
some of the same music. I didn't watch either show that often, but I definitely remember them using a lot of the same stock cues. Naturally any cues that used either series' main theme were reserved for that series alone, but the more generic action cues were heard often on both (probably the "chase music"
moocey is referring to). And of course they both had the same composers, Johnny Douglas and Rob Walsh.
By the way, to give credit where it's due, the music from MGM's cartoons was by Scott Bradley.
