Evil Toons

Dragon's Domain Records, to be distributed through buysoundtrax.com presents the original motion picture soundtrack for Evil Toons, featuring music composed by Chuck Cirino for the 1992 horror comedy directed by Fred Olen Ray and starring David Carradine, Arte Johnson, Dick Miller, Monique Gabrielle, Suzanne Ager, Madison Stone, Barbara Dare, Don Dawe and Michelle Bauer.

Evil Toons tells the story of four young ladies who work as housecleaners for Burt Wentworth (Miller) and are tasked to clean up an isolated house on the edge of town. When one of them blithely reads an incantation from an ancient book, she unleashes an evil demon who terrorizes them all.

Inspired by Jessica Rabbit and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, producer/director Fred Olen Ray made Evil Toons, a fun 1992 amalgamation of live-action/cartoon-animation, horror, comedy, and bare-breasted bimbos. Ray arranged to film the movie in only eight days, re-using a set from previous films and combining the project with reshoots he was helping another filmmaker with. He hired actor friends David Carradine, Dick Miller and Arte Johnson to take small but pivotal roles. The primary cast was then filled with local actresses including Monique Gabrielle, Ray's then-girlfriend Suzanne Ager, and soft-core adult movie actors Barbara Dare and Madison. The cast was completed with Dan Dowe and scream queen Michele Bauer. A pair of New York-based animation studios provided the animation, with Streamline Film Manufacturing creating the animation cells and Kenimation handling the composite photography to combine the animated cells with the live action backgrounds that Ray had filmed on set.

Chuck Cirino has scored 17 films with Fred Olen Ray as director, of which Evil Toons was his seventh. The film came to him in a hurry in between scoring 976-EVIL II and Munchie, both for Jim Wynorski. Ray needed a score composed and recorded in little more than a week. This kind of post-production rush could not provide the ingredients of a great film score, but in Cirino's hands it produced an effective one. Using the same electronic set-up with which he'd scored 976-EVIL II – Prophet 2000 sampling keyboard, Roland D50 synthesizer, and a key-less, rack-mounted Yamaha TX81Z – Cirino composed and recorded the Evil Toons score using a classical-styled orchestration created with these early 1990's synths.

Dragon's Domain Records is excited to bring Evil Toons to compact disc for the first time, mastered by James Nelson at Digital Outland with exclusive liner notes by author Randall Larson, with the participation of the composer.