Devo Founder Helps 'Rugrats In Paris' Retain Unique Musical Sound

11/26/2000 7:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(11/26/00, 7 a.m. ET) - The makers of Rugrats In Paris: The Movie had to make some musical adjustments for the animated tykes' second big-screen outing. While voice actors worked on their characters, Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh tackled the challenge of maintaining the animated show's signature sound while expanding it for a full-length feature. Mothersbaugh explains how he magnified the Rugrats' musical presence. "There's elements of it in the Rugrats score, especially, like, the theme song is where you still hear it the strongest," he says. "And in the feature, it had to get bigger than that. That was music created for a Nickelodeon television series with a limited budget, and now when you see the film, all of a sudden it's going from being on a little TV screen to it's on this big view, so the music had to get commensurately bigger, so it's got a 90-piece orchestra."

Mothersbaugh, a trained artist and experimental musician, dug into his unique sound library to give Rugrats In Paris its musical consistency. "It [Rugrats In Paris] still has a lot of the sound samples that I had done 10 years ago. I still use those whenever it comes into like Phil and Lil or Tommy or Chuckie," he explains. "When they're having, like, a Rugrat kid moment, you still hear these odd electronic samples, sound effects that were voices that we did 10 years ago and we just went, 'Bah, bur, egh.'"

-- Sofia Fernandez, Los Angeles

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