Hecky, Ghosts and Augie Doggie

This blog was started ages ago because of stock music cues. The intention was to have a place on the internet listing the library music heard behind the cartoons in The Huckleberry Hound Show’s first season, along with some random notes and screen grabs about each cartoon. Well, it’s gone a little bit past that.

Anyway, long-time readers will know I don’t have names for quite a number of the cues, mainly the Jack Shaindlin pieces from the Langlois Filmusic library. The late Earl Kress had them but he never was able to remember where he put the list. There are several others, one of which is a little sweet potato “toodle-oodle” cue that found its way into Augie Doggie cartoons—“Mars Little Precious,” “Yuk-Yuk Duck,” and “Peck O' Trouble.”

Well, the identity of the cue has been discovered.

We have the greatest readers here. Evan Schad alerted me to a disc of a Hecky Krasnow cue called The Happy Cobbler that’s kicking around. Hermann “Hecky” Krasnow was the head of children’s records at Columbia then moved to a subsidiary of Sam Fox music in early 1957. The Sam Fox library was used in a number of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I checked out the label on the disc and discovered the flip side was another Krasnow cue called Swinging Ghosts. A little search on the internet for a tune by that name and... you guessed correctly. It was copyrighted on January 9, 1959, so it was a new tune when Augie first aired.

Both songs weren’t only found on the Sam Fox library (known as Synchro-Fox in Canada and Synchro in Britain). They were released on the Gallant label in April 1960 by the Hecky Kay Octet. I can’t find any indication that they charted, but the flip side was recorded by several groups. Perhaps some day we’ll be able to post links to both cues on the blog but this will have to do for now.

One spot on the internet says it was the theme to the BBC series A Mask For Alexis.



And another version by The Vampires. It features a flute instead of an ocarina.