I Hear Voices

You hear their voices on cartoons but, of course, you never see them. They’re the great voice actors that Hanna-Barbera hired. Most of them had training in the days of radio drama and comedy before television bludgeoned it to death. Some did live action television, so their faces may be familiar.



We’ve posted pictures of some of them here before—Daws Butler, Don Messick, Doug Young, the casts of The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat. And you’ve seen others elsewhere on the internet. But I’ve got a file folder with photos and clippings that I don’t think have been posted, so I’m doing it now.

This is not intended as a complete, definitive photo gallery, so don’t ask “Why isn’t there a picture of Lennie Weinrib?” and then list every cartoon role he ever played. I’m just putting up a miscellany of graphic files I’ve accumulated. Some are trade ads, others are publicity head shots.



Daws Butler improved every cartoon he appeared in, and some needed a lot of help. This shot must be from the early ‘50s when he was working with Stan Freberg, and comes from a biography about him broadcast years ago on PBS. Daws had so many great voices, it’s impossible to pick a favourite. I do have a favourite one-shot voice, though. It’s when Daws did his Fred Allen impression in the Huckleberry Hound cartoon “Skeeter Trouble.” My dad came into the living room when the cartoon was on and remarked that it was Fred Allen. “No, dad, it’s Daws Butler,” I replied. It’s the only time I ever corrected my father; kids didn’t do that back then. But this was important. We were talking cartoons, after all. (You can also hear Daws as Fred Allen in the August 1956 CBS Radio Workshop production “An Analysis of Satire”).



Mel Blanc was the King of Theatrical Cartoon Actors. There was no one better. He was a tremendous actor, yet he failed when handed a starring role in a radio sitcom in 1946, though the one-dimensional characters and trite concept were the reasons. He didn’t work for Hanna-Barbera until The Flintstones came along. He was Secret Squirrel and, well, a bunch of other characters that didn’t do a lot for me. This trade newspaper ad is from 1950, which gives you an idea what roles Mel thought were his most important at the time.



I love Howie Morris. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen is Howie as Uncle Goopy on the This is Your Life send up on Sid Caesar’s show. His first H-B role, to the best of my knowledge, was Jet Screamer on The Jetsons, though he was pretty funny as Harlan, Cogswell’s lackey. He starred as Atom Ant, tried to enliven Magilla Gorilla cartoons as Mr. Peebles and got a Kellogg’s cereal gig as the voice of Hillbilly Goat, pushing Sugar Stars. He also told off Joe Barbera in language not fit for television, thus resulting in a change of cartoon addresses to the Filmation studio.



Know who this is? He’s in character as Solomon Levy on The Goldbergs radio show. It’s Alan Reed. This trade ad shot is from 1943. He carved out a good radio career before being hired as Fred Flintstone. His best role was probably that of hammy poet Falstaff Openshaw on Fred Allen’s show; the Falstaff voice got recycled as “Frederick” in the first season of The Flintstones. Reed did dialects on radio as well; Pasquale on Life With Luigi may be his best-known one.



This is the guy that Reed replaced as Fred Flintstone because he couldn’t keep enough gravel in his voice during recording sessions. It’s a picture of a young Bill Thompson, who theatrical cartoon fans will know as Droopy (MGM) and J. Audubon Woodlore (Disney). Old radio fans remember his long stint on “Fibber McGee and Molly” starting in the late ‘30s, interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Navy during the war. He was billed as “Jackie Coogan’s Double” at age five and went into vaudeville at 12. The Fibber gig dried up about the time MGM closed its cartoon studio, so Thompson got a job in 1957 as a community relations executive for Union Oil. That’s what he was doing when he arrived at Hanna-Barbera. He starred as Touché Turtle but didn’t do a lot of work for the studio. He died in July 15, 1971 at age 58.



Paul Winchell entertained audiences on radio, TV and cartoons. His sneering Dick Dastardly on Wacky Races was great, though I suspect his first H-B “appearances” were on The Banana Splits Show (both of which debuted in 1968). Winchell, of course, was Gargamel in the studio’s take on The Smurfs and popped up on other series, and made a fine Tigger for Disney. He was born Paul Wilchinsky and he, his father Sol (a tailor by trade), mother Clara and sister Rita were in Los Angeles by 1940 where Paul was acting in what was left of vaudeville. As you likely know, he was an energetic ventriloquist. You should check out a What’s My Line show where Winchell is on the panel and the mystery guests are Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. You can read Mark Evanier’s remembrance of Paul Winchell HERE.

Since we’re on the topic of ventriloquists, Yakky Doodle’s voice is still with us. Jimmy Weldon’s fame from his television appearances in California in the 1950s with his puppet Webster Webfoot. This photo is from 1959. Weldon had replaced Shari Lewis on “Hi Mom,” shot in New York, and would very soon be back on the West Coast. Red Coffey had been doing the voice of a little duck in the earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons but when the duck was given his own series in 1961, Weldon won the role. He’s spent time in retirement, if you want to call it that, as a motivational speaker.

Hanna-Barbera’s utility man was John Stephenson, who came on board after The Flintstones went to air in 1960. Besides Mr. Slate, he grumbled a lot about “if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and their dog,” started out playing Dr. Benton Quest until Joe Barbera or someone decided to replace him with Don Messick, tried out his Cary Grant voice on Top Cat, had supporting roles on Breezly and Sneezly and Squiddly Diddly (yeah, I know, not exactly two of H-B’s greatest), used Paul Lynde-inspired voices in a couple of series and even voiced later incarnations of Doggie Daddy when Doug Young left California in 1966. He seems to have been in every one of those mid-1970s Tom and Jerry TV cartoons, the stiff-looking, talky ones where the cat and mouse are friends. I always enjoyed watching him on Hogan’s Heroes because I recognised his voice from cartoons. He was still doing commercials up to a few years ago as part of Dick Orkin’s stock company and is apparently doing well in his late 80s. The bio is from a mid-‘50s Radio-Television Mirror magazine when Stephenson was on the sitcom The People’s Choice.



I’m not a fan of the Cindy Bear character, but here are some publicity photos of the young woman who played her, Julie Bennett. The first one is from 1950, the second from 1951. I suspect Cindy’s voice was inspired by magnolia-scented Leila Ransom on radio’s The Great Gildersleeve, voiced by Shirley Mitchell (imitating Una Merkel), who had the misfortune of appearing in Hanna-Barbera’s Roman Holidays. Bennett’s first role for the studio was on “Masking For Trouble” (1959), a Quick Draw McGraw cartoon. Her whereabouts today, unfortunately, are unknown.



Okay, I’m cheating now. Gil Mack never appeared in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. But he voiced a number of H-B characters on Golden Records recorded in New York City. Gil racked up credits on some great shows, as you can see by this 1940 trade newspaper ad, but imitating Daws Butler and Don Messick’s characters wasn’t exactly his forte.



And I’m cheating again. Jack Shaindlin and John Seely never voiced characters but their music was prominent behind the voices on the soundtracks of H-B cartoons from 1957 until Hoyt Curtin started writing underscores in 1960. Biographies of both Shaindlin and Seely have been posted elsewhere on the blog. These are trade ads; Seely’s is from 1961 and Shaindlin’s from probably a decade earlier. This is as good a post as any to put them on the blog.



This is a funny photo I grabbed off Facebook. You know who it is. But someone didn’t. The caption reads:

Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland.

One of the joys of being an archivist is finding mistakes and correcting them. We found this photo in the Imogene Coca file, but it's not her. Students of 1950s television or fans of voice actors, might recognize the face as that of Arnold Stang. But when and where did he dress up in drag?

One Google search later and we learned that the picture is from an episode of the "Red Skelton Show," broadcast on April 2, 1957. One of Skelton's recurring sketch characters, "Cookie," is in the Navy and there's a chance for shore leave in Japan as the prize in a drama contest. So Red became a six-foot-three Romeo to shipmate Stang's five-foot-three Juliet.

Arnold Stang had to be a great comedian to be able to hold his own on TV with hammy scene-stealers like Skelton and Milton Berle. Here’s Stang with his alter ego in a more familiar photo you’ve seen here before.



Of course, there were many more actors who settled in front of the microphones at the Hanna-Barbera studios. All of them were talented. All of them made fans laugh, even though they couldn’t see us and, in a case of tit for tat, we couldn’t see them.

Music for Cartoons and Aliens

Stock music was as much a part of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the studio’s first couple of years as the animation or the sound effects (many of which arrived from the MGM cartoon studio film library along with Hanna and Barbera). You’ve read on the blog about some of the composers and a couple of the different music libraries that were used. We haven’t talked about the concept of stock music itself, though, because it’s a little off topic. However, I found a piece on production libraries quoting Bill Loose who, as you likely know, composed music that was used in Ruff and Reddy, The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Quick Draw McGraw. He was put in charge of studio operations for Capitol Records in February 1956, about the time the Hi-Q Library was being composed, arranged and assembled.

In this Wall Street Journal story from September 5, 1978, Loose doesn’t mention which library he’s referring to, but he was involved with a couple of different ones at Capitol. Cues from the OK and PMS (Production Music Services) libraries were composed by Loose (with Emil Cadkin or Jack Cookerly) in the late ‘50s, bought by Emil Ascher in 1967 and removed from the Capitol repertoire. But the story gives you an idea about the industry itself and what Hanna-Barbera might have paid to use stock music.

Need Music to Do Nearly Anything By? These Firms Have It
They Provide Recorded Tunes Quickly, Cheaply for Ads, TV Shows, Budget Films
By STEPHEN J. SANSWEET
The industry grosses only $2 million to $3 million a year and provides full-time employment for perhaps 75 people in a dozen companies. Yet nearly every man, woman and child in the U.S. is exposed almost daily to the product these firms turn out.
“People just can’t understand what I do or how I make money from it,” says the president of one of the largest companies in the field. “It’s usually easier to tell them I’m a bookie and let it go at that.”
What his and the other companies do is provide, quickly and cheaply, vast amounts of pre-recorded music that accompany television and radio shows, commercials, documentaries, industrial films and slide presentations, to name a few of their activities The clients of the music-library or production-music business are advertisers, producers, governmental agencies, universities and most large companies with audiovisual facilities There is a lot of international business. The industry may be small but for an increasing number of clients, it has become essential in helping them get their messages across to the public.
“Music is really an integral part of making any production look and sound expensive and professional,” says Ed Hansen, head of an independent film-production agency in Studio City, Calif. “But the cost of using all original music for a half-hour show might run $10,000 not counting any residual payments to the musicians for subsequent showings. That’s hard to justify when library music provides such a good alternative.
A Sour Note
Some people, however, aren’t so pleased with music libraries. Victor W. Fuentealba, in fact, wants to put them out of business. Because Mr. Fuentealba is president of the 300,000-member American Federation of Musicians of the U.S. and Canada, his position isn’t easily dismissed. “A couple of people are making a lot of money with products made cheaply overseas that displace our members here,” he complains. Library operators counter that if the residuals problem could be worked out they would record in the U.S. and provide more work for musicians.
The controversy between the union and the music libraries has been under way since the libraries sprang up in the U.S. 30 years ago. Many observers believe that it was costly union demands during television’s infancy that helped solidify the position of the libraries in the first place. Hundreds of independent stations working on shoestring budgets decided they couldn’t afford musical groups, so they switched to recorded music.
The heart of every music library is hundreds of hours of specially written musical pieces, often no longer than one or two minutes each. “These aren’t songs or tunes or even necessarily formal pieces of music with beginnings, middles and ends,” says Everett Ascher, president of Emil Ascher Inc. and its West Coast affiliate, Regent Recorded Music Inc. But the snippets can be cut blended or added to the narration skillfully enough to make the listener believe the music is an original composition.
While corporations are the heaviest users of library music for such things as training films, much of it finds its way onto television and radio, particularly as the background for local commercials. Theatrical films use mainly original scores, but library music shows up in many X-rated movies and occasional general releases like “The Blob,” which starred a then-unknown actor named Steve McQueen. It is also used extensively by background-music services such as Muzak and has provided themes for several television shows like “Mary Hartman Mary Hartman.”
Rising Costs
Because the musicians’ union won’t let its members record music for libraries, all the recording is done abroad, mainly by full-time orchestras in Europe. Costs have risen sharply there in recent years; today the cost of producing and recording one album with a 50-piece orchestra is $7,000 to $10,000. Libraries constantly have to add new albums to keep up with the latest musical tastes or fads. Most composers are European, but Americans also write for libraries, sometimes using pseudonyms. “The union called me in once and told me to stop,” one US composer says, “but I told them where to go.” William Loose, a 60-year-old Hollywood writer who composes mainly original scores, is among the more prolific American tunesmiths. He once spent three months writing, arranging and supervising the recording of five hours of production music. The score covered 2,400 pages.
Library usage fees vary. Thomas J. Valentino Inc., a long-established New York library that produces all its own music, allows clients to buy all its 157 albums for $754 and then to make unlimited use of them for $500 a year. Other libraries charge $60 to $70 for commercial use of each cut. There aren’t any residual payments. Besides the large amount of money saved, clients say the use of production music saves time and lets them know in advance exactly what they’re getting.
All the musical pieces are indexed to help the user. The 194-page Ascher catalog, for example, is broken down into 158 categories, ranging from ceremonial and funereal to eerie and outer space. Mr. Ascher says his library contains the music of 14 production companies on 900 albums containing 16,000 individual tracks written by more than 1,300 composers The titles of the selections range from dull (“Product Efficiency”) to weird (“Dracula’s Kitchen”) but are rarely descriptive enough to provide more than a clue to the client. However, since Mr. Ascher has an uncanny ability to remember most of the music in his library he is able to pull out records for suggested listening.
Picking the proper music is something of an art. “You have to keep in mind the visual what the announcer’s saying and what you’re trying to sell,” says Robert Canning, broadcast-production assistant for May Co., a Southern California department store chain. “Sometimes, I’ll spend a couple of hours looking for the perfect 30 seconds of music, although after the first seven or eight cuts everything starts to sound the same.”
In more complex projects, where several pieces of music have to be blended and cut to fit the screen action, expert editors such as Richard R. McCurdy are called in. “You have to make every effort to avoid a canned music sound,” he says. “But the quality of library music is excellent and as getting better all the time.”
One of the problems with production music is that the same piece may be used unknowingly by two or three different sponsors or shows. Another criticism is that some of the music sounds disturbingly close to popular hits. “We aren’t ripping off any composers,” says Roy Kohn of the Peer-Southern Organization. “Just because a piece has the feel of Glenn Miller or sounds like Count Basie doesn’t mean it’s a copy. We had library music that sounded like the themes from ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars’ even before those two were written.”
There’s little ego satisfaction or public acclaim in the music-library business. One recent exception was a disco-classical number, “A Fifth of Beethoven,” which Walter Murphy, a young pianist and composer, originally wrote for the Valentino library. “I thought a couple of his pieces had commercial potential, so I pushed them,” says Thomas J. Valentino Sr., the 71-year-old founder of the library. Still, Mr. Valentino was surprised when “A Fifth” became so popular that it was added to the soundtrack of the movie “Saturday Night Fever” and the repertoire of the Boston Pops. “Everything is a gamble in this business,” he says.

My thanks to Bill M. for helping fill in some blanks in the article above, clipped together from Google News, and to Your Pal Doug for the pictures. They’re kind and generous people.

Now, I know you’re saying “Yowp, don’t you always have cartoon music in those posts about production music?” Well, for the most part, you’re right. And today is no exception. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything from the Langlois Filmusic library, though I do have a post on Langlois’ Jack Shaindlin coming. The majority of the cartoon cues that haven’t been posted here are from his library. However, I’ve managed to dig up some music from Ruff and Reddy.

As you know, Ruff and Reddy was Hanna-Barbera’s first effort after the studio formed in July 1957; some artists say they worked on it while still at the about-to-close MGM cartoon. Like The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Quick Draw McGraw Show, it featured music from the Capitol Hi-Q library. Several cues, like ‘TC-304 Fox Trot,’ ‘TC-215A Chase-Medium’ and ‘ZR-53 Comedy Mysterioso’, have already been posted here. They rarely or never were used in the other shows. We’ve got some more now.

As far as I know, all but two are all from the ‘D’ series, which I don’t have a lot of interest in. ‘D’ is for ‘dramatic’ and the music was perfect for westerns, detective shows and low-budget outer-space/horror feature films. And that brings us to our first set of cues.

The first Ruff and Reddy adventure (each was a 13-part cliff-hanger) involved an unexpected trip to the planet Muni-Mula (“That’s ‘aluminum’ spelled backwards”). Fortunately, Hi-Q had suitable scary space music, 15 pieces on two sides of an album, all by Spencer Moore. The first cue can be heard in production A-1 (Planet Pirates), the second in production A-4 (Mastermind of Muni-Mula) and the third in production A-5 (The Mad Monster of Muni-Mula).

L-1203 EERIE HEAVY ECHO
L-657 EERIE DRAMATIC
L-653 EERIE DRAMATIC

Here are the two ‘L’ series cues from the The Chickasaurus Egg Caper, animated by Carlo Vinci, the first cartoon of the fifth Ruff and Reddy serial. The first one is by Loose, who wrote at least a half-dozen reels with mechanical beds in a couple of different tempos featuring strings and/or horns meant to evoke chugging sounds. I’ve heard them in numerous industrial films from the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, which was the heydey for Hi-Q. The second was originally in the C-B music library by Harry Bluestone and Emil Cadkin and was repackaged in Hi-Q reel L-2A. You may recognise snatches of it from a couple of the “Seely Six” cartoons at Warners that used the Hi-Q library during a musicians strike (Seely was an executive at Capitol at the time, so that’s why his name was the one on the credits).

C-43A UNDERSCORE
CB-88A PUZZLED PUP

There are other Ruff and Reddy cues I haven’t been able to find and identify. To be honest, I have trouble sitting through those cartoons, though I saw some funny Ed Benedict people designs in one the other day.

While we’re at it, let’s give you a cue from Phil Green, originally found in the EMI Photoplay library. You’ll have heard this in Space Bear, when the quivery-voiced alien is pointing to a slide show of Yogi. Hi-Q put it in reel D-40 Dramatic.

EM-131I EERIE

And, finally, some bonus cues. These weren’t in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, they were either in live-action TV or movies and some you may have heard before. Here’s more of Spencer Moore’s work. The first two are from reel D-24 Dramatic, the next from D-1 Suspense Underscore and the last one from D-2 Dramatic.

L-1214 EERIE HEAVY ECHO
L-1216 EERIE HEAVY ECHO
L-2 SUSPENSE UNDERSCORE
L-7 SUSPENSE UNDERSCORE

These three are from Bill Loose and John Seely, the first from reel D-6 Tension, the second from D-3 Light Dramatic/Suspense and the last from D-4 Suspense/Mysterioso/Somber.

TC-52 TENSION aka FOREBODING DANGER
TC-69 SUSPENSE aka ANXIOUS EVENING
TC-73 MYSTERIOSO aka SPELLBOUND NIGHT

Finally, a cue originally from the Sam Fox library. It’s on Hi-Q reel D-27 Mysterioso. Evan Schaad has discovered it is a Lou DeFranceso cue called "Atomic Age."

SF-83 MYSTERIOSO

These are a little sampling. I haven’t bothered with more because, as the article says, the cues do sound alike after awhile, and you’d get weary listening to a bunch of not-always-melodic music anyways. However, we can only hope we may soon be able locate, and pass on, more of the music you heard in those earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the ‘50s.

A Few More Background Tunes

The earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons have a different feel to them than what came later, partly because of the stock music dropped into the background. Hoyt Curtin was hired to compose themes for each series as soon as the studio went into business but the music within the cartoons themselves came from production music libraries used in television and industrial films. Eventually, Curtin was asked to come up with cues to be used in the theatrical Loopy De Loop (1959) and his music eventually displaced stock music in all television cartoons made for the 1961-62 season.

The bulk of the music came from the Capitol Hi-Q library, created in 1956. Some of the music was especially composed for it, some came from other libraries such as EMI Photoplay and Sam Fox (probably the ‘Variety’ series). Most of the rest of what was played in the background of the cartoons was from the Langlois Filmusic library, compiled in 1954, whose credited composer was Jack Shaindlin.

None of this music was found in record stores and it wasn’t designed for home listening. It was only made available to film, TV and radio production companies on a contractual basis and used to set moods in the background.

You’ve been able to listen to many of the cues here on the blog. There are a number that are notably absent because I simply don’t have them, don’t know who might and, in some cases, can’t identify them at all. However, I’m going to post a few odds and ends that I haven’t before and I suspect these will be the last new ones you’ll find here.

A number of the cartoons (especially Huck’s) revolved around plots dealing with Merrie Olde England. Hi-Q had a whole specialty category—the ‘X’ series—where it put international music and a variety of other things. Among them were three English-style cues used by Hanna-Barbera, all of them credited to Geordie Hormel of Zephyr Records. They were on reels X-9 and 10.

ZR-103 PERIOD MAIN TITLE
ZR-126 ENGLISH MAIN TITLE
ZR-127 PERIOD CHASE

I suspect the two or three “American Indian” music cues used in several cartoons (such as the ones with Chief Crazy Coyote and Li’l Tom Tom) came from the ‘X’ series as well but I have not been able to track them down.

Hormel had another short cue that got some play as an introductory piece for western-set cartoons. It was from the Hi-Q ‘M’ series. There were two versions, one medium and one faster. Here’s the faster version:

ZR-39A WESTERN SONG

Music from the ‘M’ series was rarely used; the H-B sound cutters stuck mainly with the ‘L’ (“Light”). The best-known ‘M’ cue was not used in cartoons. It is the theme to The World Tomorrow radio and TV show, one of a bunch of documentary cues written by Bill Loose. Hanna-Barbera picked a different documentary pieces, a lovely, short, majestic fanfare by Phil Green. It can be heard at the start of a number of shorts, including the Huck cartoons ‘A Bully Dog’ and ‘Legion Bound Hound’.

EM-147 DOCUMENTARY MAIN TITLE

An ‘M’ cue by Loose opened ‘Snow White Bear’ and was, as far as I can tell, never used again.

C-71 ROMANTIC MAIN TITLE

Besides the ‘X’, ‘M’ and ‘L’ series, Hi-Q had two others. One was the ‘D’ (“Dramatic”) series. Only a few cues from this one, which found its way into dramatic TV shows and low-budget science fiction movies, were deemed appropriate for cartoons besides Ruff and Reddy and generally didn’t get much use. Here are a few I have only been able to find in one Quick Draw cartoon. The first was at the start of ‘Choo Choo Chumps’. It and the second cue both were used in ‘In the Picnic of Time’ when the ants begin their attack on Doggie Daddy. The third showed up under a bunch of sound effects and dialogue in ‘Scary Prairie’ when Grumbleweed flies into the air to the end of the scene after the boulder crashes on Quick Draw. The fourth was very briefly heard in ‘Masking For Trouble’ when Sundown Sam shoots Quick Draw in Sagebrush Sally’s house. In the first two cases, only the last half of the cue was used. All written by David Rose who signed over the royalty rights to Bill Loose and John Seely. In each case, the first name is what’s on the Hi-Q disc.

TC-14 CHASE-MEDIUM aka ZEALOUS PURSUIT
TC-15 CHASE-MEDIUM aka SPIRITED PURSUIT
TC-9 CHASE-HEAVY aka HURRIED PURSUIT
TC-74 SOMBER aka OPPRESSIVE DEATH

Another ‘D’-series cue only seems to have been used once. It’s a Joseph Cacciola cue that appeared when Aloysius meets the fake Aloysius in the Snooper and Blabber cartoon ‘Puss N’ Booty’. There are three versions in reel D-6; the cartoon seems to have used the slow one. A number of Cacciola’s cues in the Sam Fox library were later imported into Hi-Q and given generic names.

TC-216 TENSION

The other series was the ‘S’ series, which YourPalDoug (who has a wonderful music blog, by the way) says was discontinued by Capitol. The ‘S’ series was for short edits of main cues to be used as intros, extros and bridges to (or from) scenes; you hear this sort of thing on radio and TV sitcoms. The Huck series stayed clear of them and generally went with longer, full music beds, but the sound cutters on the Quick Draw series (especially Snooper and Blabber) loved the little bridging music. The bulk of it originally came from the EMI Photoplay Q-2 discs repacked by Hi-Q and given ‘EM’ or ‘PG’ designations (‘GR’ is the code used in the EMI library). I’ve posted most of them here before but apparently missed a few of them. They’re all by Phil Green. Here are the ones I can find.

GR-454 THE ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 1
GR-455 THE ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 2
GR-457 DOCTOR QUACK SHORT BRIDGE No 1
GR-458 DOCTOR QUACK SHORT BRIDGE No 2
GR-82 FRED KARNO’S ARMY SHORT BRIDGE No 2
GR-85 THE BRAVEST WOODEN SOLDIER SHORT BRIDGE No 1
GR-86 THE BRAVEST WOODEN SOLDIER SHORT BRIDGE No 2
GR-97 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO SHORT BRIDGE No 1
GR-98 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO SHORT BRIDGE No 2
PG-160G LIGHT MOVEMENT
PG-161G LIGHT COMEDY MOVEMENT
PG-161H LIGHT MOVEMENT
PG-177C LIGHT COMEDY MOVEMENT
GR-346 FIRST BUDS

Finally, some odds and ends. Arrangements of several old public domain songs surfaced occasionally, like ‘Oh, Susannah’. One, almost a standard in any old movie’s snake charmer scene, appeared in one third-season Huck cartoon. Bill Loose did the arrangement of Streets of Cairo. It was on the original Hi-Q reel X-4 (Capitol replaced whole reels of cues with newer material; X-4 was replaced in the 1960s).
Spencer Moore concocted an odd version of Pop Goes the Weasel with a clock ticking effect. It’s heard just before the Fat Knight clubs Huck with a mace in ‘Sir Huckleberry Hound.’ You’ll also spot it toward the end of the Goofy Gophers cartoon Gopher Broke (1958), which used the Hi-Q library during a musicians strike. Another Moore cue only appears to have been used once, when Matilda the Kangaroo appears in Snooper’s ‘Hop to It.’
Phil Green came up with an eerie number featuring plucked strings found in ‘Impossible Imposters’ when Snoop and Blab enter the Mad Scientist’s hideout. It’s from EMI Photoplay 6-019 Additional Incidentals.
A western dance theme from the Sam Fox library pops up in a couple of Huck and Quick Draw cartoons. In that library, it’s called ‘Oh, Susannah’ and is by Jacob Louis Merkur.
Finally, there’s a short cue that came from another library, Valentino, from New York. It still sells library music for commercial purposes. It’s not the version of ‘Chopsticks’ you played on a piano as a kid. It was composed by the prolific Roger Roger, a Frenchman who seems to have been employed by many European music companies to compose stock music. It was used in a couple of Pixie and Dixie cartoons, such as ‘Missile Bound Cat.’

C-135 STREETS OF CAIRO
L-992 ANIMATION-CHILDREN
L-1147 ANIMATION-MOVEMENT
GR-57 THE SHADOW OF A MAN
SF-11 LIGHT MOVEMENT
CHOPSTICKS

Unfortunately, there are a number of cues I don’t have, including:
● About a dozen of Jack Shaindlin’s cues from the Langlois library that made appearances in many cartoons; Shaindlin was used on both the Quick Draw and Huck shows. Most are, alas, unidentified.
● There’s a short trumpet fanfare piece in ‘Missile Bound Cat’ I can’t place.
● A Green cue in ‘Space Bear’ when the alien is pointing to the film of Yogi.
● Boo-Boo discovering the ranger inside Whitey and telling Yogi in ‘Bearface Disguise’ is accompanied by what may be another Green cue.
● The brief woodwind bed when Doggie Daddy jumps in the well in ‘Crow Cronies’, though it may be a Clarence Wheeler piece called ‘Woodwind Capers.’
● The creepy muted horn cue when Ranger Smith is on the phone in ‘Space Bear,’ among a number of cartoons, that may have come from the Omar Library (distributed by Capitol).
● A nice little string Western piece at the opening of ‘Doggone Prairie Dog.’ It sounds like a number of similar Sam Fox library cues.
● The opening music to ‘Fast Gun Huck’, a building dramatic bed. I suspect it’s a Spencer Moore or Geordie Hormel cue on a ‘D’ series disc I don’t have.
● A completely inappropriate “1950s Modern Living” style cue that opens the Quick Draw cartoon ‘Slick City Slicker.’ I’m a sucker for music like that.
● ‘The Happy Cobbler’, the Hecky Krasnow composition in a number of Augie Doggie cartoons. There’s another odd cue when Boinga-Boinga climbs the walls in ‘Mars Little Precious’ I don’t have, either, called ‘Swinging Ghosts.’ Both came from the Sam Fox library.
● Latin American music that takes up the first couple of minutes in ‘Bull-Leave Me’ with Quick Draw and a chuckling bull.
● And several Hawaiian music cues by Ed Lund in ‘Hula Hula Hulabaloo’.

So this is the best I can do. I hope you’ve enjoyed the music. It’s taken me a very long time to find it with the help of some very kind collectors who enjoy it as much as I do.

Capitol Hi-Q — Cartoon Music For Huck and Yogi

2022 note: some of the music has been removed by a third party, likely due to a copyright claim.

Life is full of surprises. When I bought Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic and then happened upon a copy of Friedwald and Beck’s The Warner Brothers Cartoons, I had no idea anyone else had the same interest in who made those funny old cartoons. And when the internet piped itself (at first from a BBS at 300 baud) into the Yowp residence, I discovered there are people—lots of them, it turns out—who have an interest in commercial and industrial film music from the 1950s into the ‘60s.

The library music industry exploded with television. Most producers couldn’t afford to hire composers or union musicians. So they turned to less expensive stock music libraries. Anyone could use them who paid the fee. That’s why you can hear the same stock music in old cartoons, commercials and sitcoms.

One of the biggest libraries in North America was the Capitol Hi-Q library. It was divided into five categories—“D” for “dramatic,” “L” for “light”, “M” for “melodic,” “S” for “short” and “X” for “extra,” where cues were placed that didn’t fit anywhere else, eg. international, ethnic and Christmas music. Capitol got cues from other libraries for Hi-Q, so you’ll find stuff from the C & B, Sam Fox, EMI Photoplay and even KPM libraries. New music was added. Some was subtracted, so cues that were in one year were replaced with different ones in future releases.

You’ve read the names of some the composers on this blog—Bill Loose, John Seely (who had written for Sam Fox), Phil Green (EMI), Harry Bluestone and Emil Cadkin (C and B), Geordie Hormel (Zephyr) and Spencer Moore. Later entries were co-written by Loose, Cadkin and Jack Cookerly (OK). There are ‘D’ series cues from others—Jack Meakin, Joseph Cacciola and even Nelson Riddle. And there are a variety of composers who wrote for Sam Fox (Cacciola included) whose cues can be heard.

But there’s one composer—well known at the time—who never received a stick of credit because of the common practice of the day of someone slapping their name on someone else’s music—by legal or illegal means. Such a thing happened with the Hi-Q library. So let’s give you some history, thanks again to a surprise on the internet.

Paul Mandell wrote an insightful chapter on the history of stock music for the book ‘Performing Arts: Broadcasting,’ published by the U.S. Library of Congress in 2002. It’s available in snippets on Google Books. I won’t put the whole thing here, but I’ve snipped together the snippets about the topic at hand.

The Capitol Hi-Q Library
Long before Capitol records moved into its spaceage tower off Hollywood and Vine, it serviced radio stations through its broadcast division with transcriptions of rights-free music recorded in Europe. The service went out of business in 1951.
In 1952, production chief Ken Nelson and library manager John Seely created the Capitol Q Series by leasing the Mutel library from David Chudnow and distributing it on 175 double-sided 78 rpm vinyl records. Q supplied music for radio shows Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, True Detectives, and bumper music for television station breaks. Contractually, however, Capitol was forbidden to track Q as background music for television.
In 1955, Capitol decided to create its own music library and approached Nelson Riddle to write it. Riddle was busy with his groundbreaking arrangements for Frank Sinatra, so Capitol hired Bill Loose, a pop composer-arranger with a good melodic sense. In January 1956, Loose turned in an astounding 5,500 pages of sheet music. The sessions were recorded by Phil Green's orchestra in London and brought back to Hollywood. John Seely cataloged it by mood and packaged it on 110 reels of quarter-inch tape and fifty-five corresponding audition discs. The twenty-two-hour package was christened Capitol Hi-Q, a reference to the new buzz on high fidelity. The entire library was made licensable to film and television producers for as little as 350 dollars.
A major part of Hi-Q was Theme Craft, a name invented by Seely to house powerful mood music by David Rose. “Bill Loose and I paid Rose a bunch of cash,” said Seely. “He had to sell it rights-free and composer-free. It was all on reels of quarter-inch tape. We spent 100 dollars a minute for it. Everybody thought we were crazy, but I insisted that it was worth it. Then Bill agreed to write as much as David did and we put our names on the entire package.”
Rose’s music packed a wallop. TC 2 (“Heavy Chase”) was an ear-splitting horror theme with cascading trombones and sizzling clusters. His “Dreaming Ghost” and “Sparkling Ghost” cues (TC 16-24) with ethereal strings, gossamer harps, and otherworldly woodwinds were used for underwater tension in Sea Hunt.
Theme Craft cues by Bill Loose caught on as signature themes. A light comedy piece with a xylophone “nose twitch” became the theme for Dennis the Menace. TC 430 (“Happy Day”) became the theme for The Donna Reed Show. Loose’s cowriter Jack Cookerly recalled, “We wrote a bunch of cues we jokingly called ‘Music to Wash Windows By.’ We called them ‘domestics’ and the industry really ate them up! The Donna Reed people picked that particular theme; it wasn't written for the series at all! Irving Friedman of Screen Gems made the deal to restrict its use. It could be tracked into an industrial film, but not for broadcast.”
Capitol became the largest distributor of canned television music in America. A 1965 memo to Hi-Q subscribers listed twenty-two supplementary libraries with over two hundred hours of music. There were packages by Fred Steiner, Mahlon Merrick, Jack Meakin, Phil Green, Nick Carras, and outer space music by Ib Glindemann. Also distributed were the KPM, TRF, Synchro, and Omar libraries, Les Baxter’s pop themes and Latin rhythms, and the C-B library written by Emil Cadkin and Harry Bluestone. Producers no longer had to woo independent packagers—they got their music from Capitol and reported the usage on forms supplied with the tape reels.
Some hotshots of Capitol were able to grab performance royalties by bankrolling music packages. George Hormel, a pianist related to the Hormel meatpacking empire, laid claim to Hi-Q music which he financed but did not write. Spencer Moore was another. Composer Nick Carras recalled the scene: “Moore made his money by bringing his investors to Capitol and putting his name on our music. It got to be kind of a joke! We were young and green. I didn’t even know what a cue sheet was! Often you’d see cues listing Spencer Moore and George Hormel as authors in the Hi-Q catalog. Some people in the business might say ‘That looks legitimate.’ It all depended what side of the fence you were on.”

One thing omitted in Mandell’s chapter can be found in a Billboard magazine story, dated November 19, 1955:

Capitol this week acquired a library of music cues from composer-conductor Henry Russell for film use in television. Capitol continues to expand its cue library, one of the largest serving the needs of industrial and TV film producers.

Russell’s stock music ended up on a number of late 1950s TV shows and the Warner’s cartoon Hip Hip Hurry. But I have yet to come across his name in my admittedly-incomplete search of the Hi-Q library. It could be his cues were later replaced with newer material, which happened to a number of the reels/discs, including material by Gene Poddany.

Now, let’s get to the music. Click on the title to play.

The first batch of cues is from reels L-1 and 2. ‘TC’ stands for ‘Theme Craft.’ It would appear these are among the cues ghost-written by David Rose. ‘Pixie Comedy,’ the two ‘Zany Comedy’ cues and ‘Eccentric Comedy’ should instantly bring to mind the early antics of Yogi Bear. ‘Light Movement’ is a great Western cue that will make you think of Quick Draw McGraw. And ‘Rural’ should be recognisable as the theme to the Knockout Mouse cartoon in the Pixie and Dixie short Cousin Tex. Devoted reader Errol points out that Red Skelton used that one his TV show; his musical director was David Rose.

TC-200 WISTFUL COMEDY
TC-203 WISTFUL COMEDY
TC-204A WISTFUL COMEDY
TC-308 WISTFUL COMEDY
TC-302 WALTZ
TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY
TC-202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY
TC-303 ZANY COMEDY
TC-301 ZANY WALTZ
TC-300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY
TC-205 LIGHT MOVEMENT
TC-42 RURAL

Next are Theme Craft cues written by Loose and Seely. ‘Fox Trot’ was used on Ruff and Reddy. ‘Domestic’ is also known as ‘Shining Day’, ‘Light Movement’ is also ‘Holly Day’ and ‘Light Activity’ (TC-437) has the alternate name of ‘Shopping Day.’ There are on reel L-40 along with the Donna Reed theme.

They’re followed by three of the ‘Domestics’ that Jack Cookerly (who is still alive, I understand) mentioned in the history above. ‘C’ is for ‘Capitol’ and these were penned by Bill Loose for reels L-7 and 8.

TC-304A FOX TROT
TC-436 DOMESTIC (SHINING DAY)
TC-437 LIGHT ACTIVITY (SHOPPING DAY)
TC-432 LIGHT MOVEMENT (HOLLY DAY)
C-3 DOMESTIC CHILDREN
C-6 DOMESTIC CHILDREN
C-14 DOMESTIC LIGHT

Finally, there are odds and ends from different reels. The first three are Sam Fox cues. SF-10 may also be known as ‘Ski Galop’ or ‘Skiing Galop’ (I’m still trying to confirm the first word) and is by Lou De Francesco, an Italian whose work on films went back to 1923 with Victor Herbert. Wish him a happy 121st birthday on Boxing Day. He scored the Movietone Adventures for 20th Century Fox in the mid-40s. SF-14 is by David Buttolph, a chorister and operatic who played in Europe in the 1920s, returned to New York to work in radio before going to Hollywood in 1933 to score for movies. Finally, there’s the old chestnet ‘Winter Tales’ by Alphons Czibulka. It was later arranged as ‘Hearts and Flowers’ by Theo Tobani, showing that borrowing music and slapping your name on it isn’t a 20th century concept. The solo stand-up piano version is by Victor Lamont, who did the same kind of tinkly arrangements on other 19th century melodies for Sam Fox. This can be found on Huckleberry Hound Meets Wee Willie.

TC-22 is one of a number of cues with “Ghost” names in reel L-39. With irony, let us note it was ghost-written for Loose and Seely by David Rose.

C-19 by Bill Loose (all cues labelled ‘C’ were composed by him) came from reel L-9 and is one of a number of similar sounding cues. It opens Huckleberry Hound’s Cop and Saucer.

The last four were also composed by Rose for the Hi-Q ‘D’ series, which is famous among some collectors as the home of the soundtrack for ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1969). The first three are from reel D-20, the last from D-8. TC-215A was on Ruff and Reddy only. Finally, TC-221A can be heard on Yogi’s High Fly Guy. There are cues without the ‘A’; are all slower-tempo versions.

SF-10 LIGHT MOVEMENT (SKIING GALOP?)
SF-14 THE COCKEYED COLONEL
SF-? WINTER TALES
TC-22 SUBLIME GHOST
C-19 LIGHT ACTIVITY
TC-215A CHASE-MEDIUM
TC-219A CHASE-MEDIUM
TC-217A CHASE-MEDIUM
TC-221A HEAVY AGITATO

Eventually, out of necessity, Hi-Q had to evolve in the 1960s, simply because of the state of the music business in general. The sound was changing in the world of pop music, thanks to the end of big bands and the rise of rock. The Hi-Q music sounded old fashioned. New, less orchestrated music was added (under various pseudonyms) by Ib Glindemann and Ole Georg, who took over from Bill Loose at Capitol in 1964. Eventually, Capitol divested itself of all the pre-Georg era music and the library became known today as ‘Ole Georg Music’. And television changed, too. Producers had the money or inclination to hire composers for programme-specific themes and/or bumpers. Hanna-Barbera was among them, asking Hoyt Curtin to write his own library of incidental music; first for Loopy De Loop in 1959, then The Flintstones (1960), the Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle elements of the Yogi show (first aired in 1961) and then for all remaining new cartoons.

One final note: Capitol distributed music that was not in Hi-Q but used in Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Most of it is Jack Shaindlin’s material in the Langlois Filmusic Library. Raoul Kraushaar clipped together old movie music for his Omar Library; Huck and Yogi used two cues from that service, sometimes edited together. The ASCAP database says there was a Clarence Wheeler cue called ‘Woodwind Capers’ used in Huck and Yogi cartoons; it appears to been a short flute effect. And a Vancouver native named Edgar Eugene “Eddie” Lund wrote a pile of Polynesian/Hawaiian cues for a library that ASCAP says were in Snooper and Blabber, likely for Hula-Hula Hullabaloo (1960).

Some of Hoyt Curtin’s work is really great, but Snooper, Quick Draw and the others seem to be missing something when you hear the generic Curtin cues instead of the Hi-Q work of Bill Loose, Phil Green—and the man who sold away the rights to his music, David Rose.

The Story of the Men Behind the Music Behind the Stories

Hoyt Curtin’s name will be forever linked to the music of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, thanks to some singable theme songs and burned-in-the-mind underscores for Jonny Quest, The Jetsons, Top Cat and The Flintstones. But before Curtin created the background music for cartoons starting with the Loopy De Loop theatrical series in 1959, Hanna-Barbera antics were filled with stock music from the Capitol Hi-Q library. Curtin never wrote for it. The two biggest names are associated with it are Bill Loose and John Seely.

There’ll be a post on the library itself coming. To keep it from getting unwieldy and lengthy, I’m going to do a separate biographical post on Loose and Seely. All this information is cobbled together from the web and it’s probably more than you wanted to know about them.

JOHN SEELY
Seely may the better known of the pair solely because of his credit on six Warner Brothers cartoons. During a musicians strike, Warners assembled scores from snippets of material in the Hi-Q library and instead of giving individual composer credits, simply credited Seely. As a result, other internet sites have wrongly decided to arbitrarily assign Seely sole credit to other cartoons which feature the Hi-Q library. The fact is little of the music in the Warners cartoons was by Seely; the bulk was composed by Phil Green. However, Seely was manager of Capitol’s Film Music Library Service at the time the cartoons were made. Credit goes to the top, you know.

Seely died in 2004 and the Oakland Tribune published a pretty full obituary:

Composer known for TV tunes dies Oakland native John Seely
OAKLAND -- John Seely's name may not strike a chord, but if you've watched TV over the last 50 years, one of his compositions might.
The noted pianist and composer, who worked on themes and background music for "Dennis the Menace," "The Donna Reed Show" and Looney Tunes, died April 23 at the Lake Park Retirement Residence in Oakland. He was 80.
The Oakland native's work is part of the permanent record at the Museum of TV and Radio.
Mr. Seely was born Aug. 23, 1923, as Seely John Gilfilen, family members said. He graduated from Piedmont High School in 1941 and served in the Army during World War II, said daughter Dori Seely Wuepper of the Seattle area.
He earned a bachelor's degree in communications at the University of Southern California in 1949 and got a job at Capitol Records, where he became head of the prerecorded background music department.
With partner Bill Loose, Mr. Seely provided themes and background music for Warner Brothers cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, Sylvester and Tweety and others. They also wrote music for "Davey and Goliath," "The Texan," "Frontier Doctor" and "Insight."
Mr. Seely's family grew to three daughters with wife Merry Seely. From 1965 to 1968, the couple joined a Catholic lay missionary organization and lived in Kenya. Although the couple divorced, they remained close, his daughter said.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Seely moved back to Oakland and volunteered with Project Safety Net, Goodwill Bags and Stagebridge. He also taught at Westlake Junior High School.
"He was an incredibly accomplished musician with a very particular talent -- which was being able to create a sound score for live performances," said Stuart Kandell, director of Stagebridge, who worked with Mr. Seely since the late 1980s. "He had a huge, huge heart, and he loved working with children. He still really loved performing."
Another vital part was helping others.
"He looked for ways to be a good person. My dad took these kids, who were struggling with family life," his daughter said. "He taught them computer and music skills, made sure they went to school and had a trade. He was a real mentor."
"He opened his heart for a lot of different people," said Frank Huang of Santa Clara. Huang met Mr. Seely as a student 15 years ago.
"There's a group of us who've became his friends over the years," Huang said. "We see him as a very giving person, an important part of our lives."
Along with daughter Dori, Mr. Seely is survived by daughters Pati- Ann Misskelley of Michigan and Kathleen Beeler of Reno, Nev.; and eight grandchildren. Merry Seely preceded him in death in 2001.

Seely’s parents were Hermon Maxwell Gilfilen and Dorothy Seely; her ancesters came to America in 1630. They were married in 1922 and divorced by 1926. Both remarried. His mother was a coloratura soprano (her second husband was artist and amateur baritone Leonard D’Ooge) and his sister Dorothy sang as well.

BILL LOOSE
The world of commercial music composition seems to be filled with extremely talented people who travel from job to and job and take what they can find. Loose was among them, with a stop as an executive at the time the first Hanna-Barbera cartoons were being created.

Loose’s obit in the Los Angeles Times of February 26, 1991 is brief:

William Loose, the Emmy-winning composer-arranger whose music was heard in such TV series as “Your Hit Parade,” “The Untouchables,” “Dennis the Menace” and “The Donna Reed Show,” died Friday. He was 80. Loose suffered a heart attack and died in a Burbank hospital.
A musical arranger for radio stations in the Midwest, he arranged for the U. S. Army Air Force Orchestra in New York during World War II and afterward began scoring for TV. He wrote with John Seely the “Happy Days” theme for the Reed show. He won his Emmy for “In the Shadow of Vesuvius,” a National Geographic Special broadcast on PBS in the 1987-88 season. Jack Tillar collaborated on that score.

William George Loose was born in Michigan on June 5, 1910. The 1930 census shows he was living in Dawes, Nebraska. By 1938, he was in the Dusty Rhoades band and married to Opal Cowell, a Nebraska native (she was a composer who died in 1961). Loose enlisted in the U.S. Air Corps in 1942 and his draft card said he had four years of college and was married. The Western Michigan College of Education shows a William George Loose attending in 1932, and a clarinettist. I haven’t a clue if it’s the same guy.

After the war, Loose’s career went in two simultaneous directions. He did what a number of musicians did at the time—formed an orchestra in the waning days of the big bands. His boys recorded instrumentals for Capitol starting in 1954 and backed such artists as Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae, Gisele MacKenzie and later Dale Darling (1958 on Roulette) and Eartha Kitt (1961 on MGM). Loose arranged for no less than Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin on their Reprise album ‘Guys and Dolls’ (1963). He was evidently well enough known, as his orchestra headlined a couple of editions of the radio show ‘Here’s to Veterans.’

But he was also writing music and several melodies in conjunction with John Seely appeared in the Sam Fox library. Seely then gave him a new job. Billboard magazine of February 11, 1956 reports Seely hired him to be in charge of Capitol’s studio operations on the West Coast, which is the time the Hi-Q Library was in development. Loose stayed at Capitol until 1964 when Ole Georg, the label’s former A&R producer in Copenhagen, took over from him. Variety reported on March 17th that Loose had been hired at Decca as the head of A and R.

In the meantime, Loose continued writing and publishing music, solo and with various partners, including Jack Cookerly (who was Hoyt Curtin’s keyboardist) and Emil Cadkin. He came up with a new-ish theme in 1969 for the game show Hollywood Squares by reworking the old one written by Jimmy Haskell. Syd Dale hired him to write material for his Amphonic library. He conducted the Hollyridge Strings (for Capitol) and the Hollywood Symphonette. In 1975, he produced some records for the Good Music Company, which supplied low-key, uncomplicated instrumentals of pop and rock songs for “easy listening” radio stations.

Loose also found himself writing scores at both ends of the movie spectrum. On one hand, he was responsible for setting the mood for the heart-warming adventures of “Whiskers” in the family documentary Cougar Country (1970). On the other, he scored a bunch of X-rated and soft-core porn movies. Perhaps his experience with sexiness went back to the days when he was Kitt’s pianist at the El Mocambo on the Sunset Strip in the early ‘50s. Anyway, he soon became the composer of choice for the somewhat infamous Russ Meyer, creating musical romps for such epics as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Cherry; Harry and Raquel! (both 1970); Supervixens (1975) and Up! (1976) and for lesser auteurs of the genre in The Adult Version of Jeckyll and Hide; The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (both 1972) and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974). Yes, the same guy who brought you the happy theme to ever-so-wholesome The Donna Reed Show. Well, that’s show biz.

He accepted other low-budget movie jobs, too; you can find a list at the IMDB. One of them was for Alaska Productions’ Joniko and the Kush Ta Ta (1969), whose co-composer was Hanna-Barbera’s Hoyt Curtin. It was the only time they actually worked together.

After Loose’s death on February 22, 1991, there were several court battles over his compositions which apparently had been in the Hi-Q library. We’ve already mentioned one on the blog between co-writer Emil Cadkin and the Loose family. You can read about another one here where widow Irma Loose (his second wife) won a $2 million jury award.

Loose apparently enjoyed boating. He was an active member of the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, California and in 1964 was living on Balboa Island. In the ’50s, they had a place at 4560 Carpenter Avenue, variously described as being in North Hollywood and Studio City. He and Irma were both registered Democrats at the time.

Since we’re now talking recreational activities, houses and politics, it’s probably a good time to bring this post to a close. Suffice it to say, Loose and Seely put together the library which contained stock music heard on many TV shows and cartoons of the mid-to-late 1950s. In a post soon, we’ll tell you how it happened. Oh, and we’ll have music galore, most of which should be familiar to fans of Huck and Yogi.

But since you have been so patient, Santa Yowp will reward you with a couple of Hi-Q cues. They may not sound familiar, as they were never used in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but there’s always the chance they were in some ‘50s TV Show. The first is TC-40 Metropolitan, an atypical urban bustle piece of the era by Loose and Seely. The second is a solo composition by Loose called C-12 Domestic Lite, also known on some record labels as Fashion Fox Trot, which has a very Donna Reed Show quality. I have tried using embedded players but the coding was displayed differently in Explorer and Firefox, so you’ll have to click on the title and let your audio player do the work.

TC-40 METROPOLITAN
C-12 DOMESTIC LITE