Monday 25 December 2017

Music For Alley and Cat

Christmas was Fred Flintstone’s favourite time of year, sang Alan Reed on a cartoon show quite some years ago, and it may be yours, too. So allow me to thank you for visiting this blog and, again, give you a little gift.


No, this isn’t the gift, but it has been sitting in my computer for a while. Evidently the cast of the Huckleberry Hound Show got sweaters from Perry Como for Christmas. They look like they’re ready to go out as a barber shop quartet (plus one). I don’t know who drew this or what Golden Bubble Bath is, but it’s an attractive drawing.

How about something from Dan Gordon?


Yes, it would be nice to have the full storyboard for Elephant Boy Oh Boy, but only the last page turned up somewhere in my travels. Mike Maltese wrote the story. He would make thumbnail sketches and then Gordon would take them and turn them into something that you see above.

I would like to be able to say I have more stock music from the original Hanna-Barbera series from the Langlois and Capitol Hi-Q libraries to post, but I don’t. Actually, I do have two cues I have not digitised from the Sam Fox library and, to be honest, I doubt I’ll have time to do it. However, thanks to reader J.J. Pidgeon (at least I believe he gave me these), we have some more background music from Top Cat.

I’ve mentioned before I’m not a fan of the series but my favourite H-B cues were written for it. Curtin needed city music for characters with names that evoked Damon Runyon, so he came up with cues with arrangements that evoke George Gershwin and George Shearing. T-10 and T-32 are really good metro chase cues with strings, clarinet and piano. T-113 has a neat jazz trumpet (Pete Candoli, I suspect). T-21 has a great little string line coupled with a baritone sax, while T-27 features an alto sax with piano chords in the background.

There are a few other cues I’ve tossed in because you may have heard them in different H-B shows. T-45 is a violin cue heard in my favourite Flintstones cartoon, Dino Goes Hollyrock, during the sequence where Dino is in studio watching Sassie and her arrogant co-stars shoot a heart-warming scene, and later when Dino films a scene with them.

One cue doesn’t fit in with the rest. Q-11 is a solo flute. You’ll recognise it is playing the Augie Doggie theme and you may recognise it as the music Mr. Jinks played to force the meeces to dance in Pied Piper Pipe (1960). The names are all from Hoyt Curtin’s sessions, except “Pizzi-Cat-o,” which is such a bad pun, it had to be used.

If you’d like to revisit some of our old Christmas posts, go to 2016 here, 2015 here, 2014 here and 2013 here.


T-3

T-4 Pizzi-Cat-o

T-9

T-10

T-21 Top Cat Sunset

T-23 Screwy Ideas

T-27 Lonely Alto

T-32 City Streets

T-34

T-44

T-45

T-101

T-110

T-113

Q-11

12 comments:

  1. Merry Christmas, Yowp!🎅🎄⛄🍸

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  2. Yowp is one of my absolute favourite blogs. Thank you for all of the great information and images you share. Merry Christmas!

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  3. "Lonely Alto" reminds me of Bernard Herrmann's theme from "Taxi Driver". Merry Christmas Yowp, and thanks for the wealth of information!

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  4. Merry Christmas my friend. Don't have a stressful Boxing Day-Ha!!

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    1. I had to work, Errol. You know how things are.

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  5. Hey Yowp. Long-time reader of your blog here (since 2009 actually). I love everything Hanna-Barbera and I thank you deeply for every post you've made over the years.

    Thanks so much for this never-heard-before Curtin cues. I love H-B music. Been searching all over the internet for the Capitol/IQ cues, finally found them here, though many of them are missing (a lot of Huckleberry chasing cues, the western ones used in Quick Draw, that early H-B music is so ingrained in my memory I could humm it word by word if someone asked me, lol.)

    You're right in stating there's a huge demand for Ted Nichols' compositions. Nichols is brilliant, he worked for H-B only for a couple of years but he wrote brilliant action/mystery music: Space Ghost, Herculoids, Huck Finn, Fantastic Four, Penelope and of course Scooby-Doo. There's currently a group of people pushing for an official Scooby-Doo, where are you! soundtrack release from Warner Bros. who own all those music libraries (they used a lot of Nichols' original action underscore in a Harvey Birdman episode, they still have it, as well as Scooby music in various modern parodies like 2002's Night of the living Doo and such, wonder why they haven't released that material yet, I'd pay a lot of money for it.)

    Sadly, the previous links you posted with Curtin cues (2015 and 2016 Christmas posts) are broken. They don't seem to appear in any of my webbrowsers (the only post with live links is this one right here). Could you please, please re-upload/ fix the previous links? I long to hear more Curtin cues. Please, from a long-time H-B music lover.

    Also, do you have any clue where I could find the Wacky Races soundtrack? Love that music, think it was Curtin who arranged that (though sources indicate he no longer worked for H-B during those years, replaced by Nichols. I don't think Nichols composed for that show though. By the way Nichols is still alive, he was interviewed in 2002 and 2013 and a person in youtube commented he lives near his/her home and sometimes comes over for dinner and they chat about those H-B years. Would be interesting if someone could do an extensive interview with him, so many H-B-related questions to ask, especially his enduring work on the original Scooby-Doo underscore music.)

    Also, love your H-B interviews. Jerry Eisenberg...great interview. Do you have more like that one?

    Thanks Yowp!

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  6. https://archive.org/download/TCTunes/T-45.mp3
    In which cartoons can be heard this song? And for which contexts?

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    1. That's T-45 above. It was heard in "Dino Goes Hollyrock" as described by Yowp.

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