Facts and Figures About Hanna-Barbera, 1966

One of the people responsible for many of the posts on this blog never lifted a pencil or a paint brush at Hanna-Barbera. He was Arnie Carr, the man responsible for getting the studio free publicity in the media (that’s him to the right with Fred Flintstone).

Carr was with Ziv Television in 1955 when he joined Irving Fein’s staff at CBS radio before migrating to KABC-TV, Screen Gems and then directly for Hanna-Barbera in March 1960. In September 1962, he opened his own PR agency (originally at 3487 Cahuenga Blvd.) but kept the cartoon studio as a client. Perhaps Arnie’s big claim to fame (or was it a publicity stunt) was signing the breakaway African country of Biafra as a client in 1968.

Arnie retired from the movie/television press agent game and opened an art and jewellery gallery in Santa Monica in 1991. We lose track of him after that.

He and his staff would have, among other things, churned out press releases about the H-B shows and studio, some of them written like newspaper stories that papers could use as much as they wanted to fill column space. They wouldn’t have been bylined, although there would likely be a contact name and number at the bottom. However, we’ve found one flack job that has Arnie’s name on it. He garnered a full page in the May 1966 edition of Studio magazine (“for and about people in the industry”) with two stock photos. It’s really a big ad, but we presume Hanna-Barbera didn’t pay ad rates for it.

A bear by the Tail!
OVER 300 MILLION VIEWERS WATCH ANIMATED TELEVISION
By Arnold Carr
When you grasp the fact that more than one-third of the total population of Europe, North and South America and Japan each week voluntarily glues itself to the animated television antics produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, you know you’ve got a bear by the tail!
It’s true. More than 300 million men, women and children watch one or more of 15 H-B concoctions on television in some 47 lands.
Now consider this:

The consumer products carrying the likenesses of such diverse Hanna-Barbera characters as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Fred Flintstone have mushroomed during the past seven years into the largest merchandising Operation of its kind in the world. Projected gross retail sales via more than 1500 licensed manufacturers of some 4,500 products ranging from Flintstone window shades to Yogi Bear bubble bath in 1966. More than $150 million.
And this:
The soaring success of the Hanna-Barbera combo actually dates back just seven years to the day they were relieved of their duties at MGM Studios — although the partnership first flowered 25 years ago when they created the seven-times Oscar winning cartoon short, “Tom & Jerry,” at the same studio.
Today, Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., owns and fills a Contemporary 3-story, $1,250,000 building on a 2 1/2 acre plot in North Hollywood, California; and employs some 350 artists, technicians, writers and directors in the largest animation studio operation in the world.
Additionally, H-B is engaged in the production of commercials and industrial films, both animated and live-action, for many of the nation’s leading corporations. In fact, total H-B production budget for 1966 will hit approximately 20 million.
Moreover, Hanna-Barbera is currently producing two live-action pilot films for the 1967 season. It is also entering into the production of live action, full-length feature films.
The Hanna-Barbera record label, established in 1964, is already one of the fastest growing Companies in the business. It adds up to an impressive achievement which started in the spring of 1957, when out of work and out of necessity, Hanna and Barbera began thinking in terms of cartoon shows for television.
H-B’s first television offering was “Ruff and Reddy.”
In rapid succession the nation took to its heart the likes of “Huckleberry Hound” (the first half-hour animated series on TV), “Quick Draw McGraw” (the slowest horse in the West) and “The Flintstones,” “Yogi Bear,” “Top Cat” and “The Jetsons” “Touche Turtle,” “Lippy the Lion” and “Wally Gator.” “Magilla Gorilla,” “Peter Potamus,” “Atom Ant,” “Secret Squirrel,” and “Johnny Quest” [sic] bringing the total of 15 TV series from Hanna-Barbera on the world’s airwaves concurrently.
It is a notable sidelight to this smashing success in visual imagery that neither Hanna nor Barbera began his career as a cartoonist or artist.

Bill Hanna was born in Melrose, New Mexico, and spent his school years studying engineering and journalism and accidentally turned to cartooning.
Joe Barbera was born in New York City and attended the American Institute of Banking. An inveterate doodler and dreamer, Barbera started submitting gag drawings to leading magazines and managed to sell one to Collier’s. This led Barbera to a brief huddle with himself (about seven seven minutes) during which he determined to seek a career in cartooning as opposed to the world of finance.
In 1937, Bill Hanna was hired by MGM as a director and story man in the cartoon division, and Joe Barbera simultaneously was employed as an animator and writer at the same studio.
During their 20-year tenure at MGM, the team turned out more than 125 segments of the aforementioned and highly acclaimed “Tom and Jerry” theatrical cartoon. Their annual animation production of approximately 45 minutes per year at MGM compares dramatically with an output at Hanna-Barbera Productions of that much material each week.
Operating a multi-million dollar entertainment empire without inter-office memos and with a consistent open-door policy is considered unorthodox even by Hollywood Standards.
But the warm comraderie of the H-B operations has produced artistic and economic success as impressive to Hollywood as to the business world and the 300 million weekly viewers of all their shows.

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, January 1970

Dennis the Menace a Hanna-Barbera character? Well, young Allen does have some distinct similarities in the Yogi Bear newspaper comics from January 1970. Boo Boo has the month off, but we see Mrs. Ranger Smith twice. We also get some silhouette drawings, multiple Yogi heads in one panel and the idea that Cindy Bear’s dad wants to get her out of the house.

The colour comics come from Richard Holliss’ collection.



January 4, 1970.



January 11, 1970.


January 18, 1970.



January 25, 1970.

Click on any of the comics to blow them up.

Note: We’re unable to do the comics from 50 years ago this month as I don’t have access to decent copies of them.

Don Lusk

The last surviving animator on The Jetsons’ debut cartoon in 1962 has passed away. Don Lusk was 105.

We know he worked on the “Rosey the Robot” episode because his name is preserved in the cartoon’s review in Daily Variety (whether the frame to the right is Lusk’s, I don’t know). Expert Howard Fein says he also animated on one of my favourite Jetsons, “Elroy’s TV Show.”

Lusk was born in California on October 28, 1913, the second son of Percy Knox and Louise Opie (Ross) Lusk. His father was from Brooklyn and his mother from Canada. His father died when he was young, his mother remarried and was left a widow again. Don was supporting his mother and grandmother while at Disney in 1940, pulling down $3,900 a year. One of his assistants at Disney was Gene Hazelton, who later ran the comic strip department at Hanna-Barbera.

He left Disney to work on shorts at the Walter Lantz studio in the early ‘60s before his stop at Hanna-Barbera. Without getting into an endless list of credits, we’ll simply say he animated on both H-B features of the mid-‘60s—Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear and A Man Called Flintstone.

There are so few veterans of the early days at Hanna-Barbera still around; background artist Sam Clayberger, who worked on some of the first Huckleberry Hound cartoons, died earlier this year, as did Gerard Baldwin, who animated several cartoons on the Huck and Quick Draw shows in 1959 before he left to work for Jay Ward.

Our sympathies go to the Lusk family.

Boss Cat

Is it true that Top Cat was really known as Boss Cat when it first aired in England? The answer: yes.

At the time the cartoon series was made, there was a brand of kitty food in the U.K. known as “Top Cat.” The BBC, in an attempt to avoid any hint of commercialism, changed the show’s name to The Boss Cat (and later omitted the article). To the right you see the TV listings for June 13, 1962, which was perhaps when the series made its debut.

This begs the question about how the Auntie aired the cartoon. Was the voice track altered with “Top Cat” removed and a voice edited in saying “Boss Cat?” What about the theme song and the opening and closing titles?

As ridiculous as it sounds, the soundtrack was left intact. Kid audiences were apparently supposed to deal with the confusion by bearing the old British stiff upper lip. The credits were dealt with by having a title card jarringly edited into Ken Muse’s animation.

One English critic was not going to put up with the BBC’s foolishness. Here’s a portion of the television column from The Spectator of December 21, 1962 dealing with, in part, the Hanna-Barbera prime time shows.

Child’s-Play
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
‘TOP CAT’ has returned, an even which clearly has more importance for television’s largest audience than any of the high-toned experiments in drama or education on either channel. Non-human heroes continue to have the edge over mere people among the youngest viewers, and I regularly confirm this old discovery by sitting with my back to the screen and watching my sample audience during the children’s programmes.
‘Top Cat’ interests me strangely too. (The BBC retitles the show Boss Cat, for reasons which I have not discovered.) It seems we aren’t going to have any more Bilko, but the immortal sergeant lives on in this two-dimensional moggie, which doesn’t only speak with Bilko’s voice but has the Bilko character precisely duplicated, including the cunning, the idiot lechery, the gambling fever and the loyal suckers gathered round him.
Is it possible that this represents a Trend? Even the best human series wears out in time...But you never have any trouble, personal-releations-wise, with line drawing....
The case of the Flintstones is not really so different. Barney and his mates are, if I may use the phrase very loosely, original creations. But take away the prehistoric gimmick and all you’ve got left is a perfectly ordinary old-fashioned domestic situation comedy, a Lucy-Joan-Jeannie amalgam. Thus form of entertainment, with human beings, died of inanition over five years ago, but the cartoon reincarnation isn’t only durable, it has capture an intellectual audience which would never have wasted a moment on live Lucy.
As an old cheap gag-writer I find the Flintstones wearisome, and I feel I ought to disapprove of them in principle, as I disapprove of ‘Top Cat.’ All the same, I find myself watching both programmes with a puzzled interest if they catch my eye. I too am a sucker.

Incidentally, Top Cat had unexpected competition on ITV Border Television, which served the area along the England-Scotland boundary. John Holmstrom wrote in the British publication New Statesman in its issue of April 3, 1964, referring to children’s television:

The most entertaining things just now – and it’s a sad reflection on our native talent – are the American animal cartoons. Boss Cat (BBC) is great fun, but A-R’s 5.25 Friday session is richer, featuring Quick Draw McGraw (Eccles-voiced horse sheriff), Snooper and Blabber (imperturbable cat-and-mouse sleuthing partnership) and Auggie Doggie (sneaky pip with moralising Pa). The scripts are splendidly outrageous parodies of favourite Hollywood styles. It’s superb for adults, and kids, missing some of the side-swipes, rightly relish the puns and slapstick.

The BBC put out Boss Cat in August 1967; the show was the network’s third-ranked children’s programme at the time with an audience of 2.4 million (number one, incidentally, was Dr. Who). The series returned, as Boss Cat, to the beeb four years later. In the meantime, the series began airing in November 1969 on R.T.E. in Ireland as Top Cat; certainly the Irish weren’t about to let some Englishmen tell them how to air a TV show. The BBC seems to have continued using Boss Cat as late as 1989, according to listings in The Guardian. However, from what I gather from reader Andrew Morrice, the term fell into disuse some time ago.

One other Top Cat-related note: animation historian Jerry Beck recently told webtv host Stu Shostak that Warner Home Video is putting out Jonny Quest on Blu-ray with the correct closing titles. He says depending on sales, Warner may release “single-season, Hanna-Barbera prime-time series” on Blu-ray as well. Does this mean “Where’s Huddles?” No. Does this mean “Wait ‘Til Your Father Gets Home”? No. That doesn’t leave an awful lot, except for The Jetsons and, yes, Top Cat. Could they be next? Jerry’s not hinting but, and I have absolutely no clue, but as Mr. Kitzel used to say on the Al Pearce radio show, “Hmmmm, could be.....”

How Hoyt Curtin Made Music

Hoyt Curtin may have made as big an impact on Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the early 1960s as anyone else at the studio.

Curtin began writing libraries of underscore music for various series in 1960 but had composed theme songs for the company since its first show, Ruff and Reddy, debuted in 1957. All the great music for Jonny Quest, Top Cat, The Jetsons and The Flintstones was all the product of Curtin and his arranger. Later, things changed as the workload got bigger, and Curtin contracted others to compose for him.

Film Score Monthly profiled Curtin’s work at Hanna-Barbera in its February 2001 issue; he had been dead for only two months. A portion of what’s a very long article is transcribed below.

It seems to be a Christmas tradition here on the Yowp blog to include music in our posts of the 25th of December. I’ve posted a number of Curtin cues that aren’t available elsewhere. I don’t have many good ones left but you’ll find them sprinkled in between paragraphs. I haven’t tried to embed a music player; simply click on the title and it should come up in your computer’s player.

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Working with Hoyt Curtin at Hanna-Barbera
By Jeff Bond
When Hoyt Curtin died in December of last year, the world lost a cultural icon. But the composer of such instantly recognizable TV show themes as Jonny Quest, The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Magilla Gorilla was largely unknown to audiences. The fact that he was often listed as a music supervisor on the various Hanna-Barbera cartoon series he worked on — making it unclear whether or not he had actually composed music on the shows — didn't help matters. Curtin did, in fact, Curtin did, in fact, compose most of the themes and a great deal of the music for Hanna-Barbera cartoons at the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Over the years he also pulled into his orbit other composers, musical directors, producers and a veteran group of musicians to assist him in supplying music for Hanna-Barbera's massive factory of animation.
Curtin's training for the world of cartoon theme songs couldn't have been more effective: He came from the world of commercial jingles, eventually becoming perhaps the most successful West Coast producer of catchy advertising songs.

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Trained to boil down the appeal of a product in 30 seconds, Curtin applied his knack for simple yet indelible melodies to his first cartoon for for Hanna-Barbera, 1957's Ruff and Reddy. He went on to provide themes and music for cartoons like The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958), Top Cat (1961), Wally Gator (1962), Magilla Gorilla (1964), Peter Potamus (1964), Yogi Bear (1964), Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles (1966), The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (1968), Wacky Races (1968), The Cattanooga Cats (1969), Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969) and Hong Kong Phooey (1974).
After a period of semi-retirement, Curtin did music supervision and themes for The Smurfs (1981) and other Hanna-Barbera series. During that period, Curtin worked with such composers as Ron Jones (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Family Guy), John Debney (Spy Kids, Heartbreakers), Mark Wolfram (Piercing the Celluloid Veil: An Orchestral Odyssey), Steve Taylor (Tiny Toon Adventures), John Massari (Killer Klowns From Outer Space, The Ray Bradbury Theatre) and Tom Worrall (The Tom and Jerry Kids Show, The Wild Women of Chastity Gulch) among others. For some of these composers, working with Hoyt Curtin was their first major gig. And while they generally did not receive screen credit for their work, the job turned out to be an invaluable training ground for future composing [employment].
Some of the composers knew Curtin's reputation and pursued him for the job, while others just knew they might be able to get a job writing cartoon music. "I was familiar with the shows, but I didn't make the connection between Hoyt and the shows," Ron Jones admits. "I was new to the business, but when you watch all that you don't really pick up all the names. You pick up all the bigger names and Hoyt's kind of goes right by you."

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A Tireless Creator
John Debney was one who was familiar with Curtin's work. "Hoyt was like a Mike Post," Debney says, relating Curtin to the man who has written countless familiar TV themes and acted as a music supervisor and brand name for their background scores. "You know who he is and you know what he's done — and I worked for Mike Post, too.
Hoyt had been around a long long time by the early 1980s, and by that time he had really retired. I certainly knew who he was." Ron Jones became one of the mainstays for Curtin in the early 1980s. "I worked on more than a hundred different series with Hoyt," Jones says. "I worked on The Smurfs, Scooby Doo, The Trolkins, Richie Rich, Pound Puppies — the list goes on and on. My resume is so ridiculous with all the listings that people have told me to actually delete stuff — it's like two single-spaced pages of Hanna-Barbera credit. And they're all network shows. The first season I worked for Hoyt, I got a break and went home and was watching TV on a Saturday morning, and I had shows on ABC, CBS and NBC simultaneously."

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Jones was attending a professional arranging school and doing copying to make ends meet when he saw the opportunity to get into animation. "The copyist copied all of Hanna-Barbera's stuff, and I looked at it and thought, I could do that," Jones says. "So I asked if I could deliver it. I cornered Hoyt Curtin and he gave me a shot." At the time Curtin was working with producer Paul DeKorte at Group Four Studios. "At Group Four he'd be on a break and I asked if I could hang out and I'd be asking him little questions. And over a period of sitting there watching I told him I'd been taking film scoring and orchestration and that I understood all this," Jones recalls. "I didn't know that everything was scored with storyboards and cassette-slugged dialogue. He told me to come back next Tuesday, and I came back next Tuesday... and he said to come back next Thursday, and I came back next Thursday... and he told me to come back next Tuesday. The third time, he said, 'Let me go out to my office.' And his office was his Lincoln Continental in the parking lot. He handed me some storyboards and a tape and said, 'Here you go.'"

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Scoring by Numbers
Jones quickly discovered that scoring Hanna-Barbera animation involved more work on the composer's part than he'd anticipated. "I got home, and the storyboards from Hanna-Barbera are very cryptic," he notes. "You don't really understand what's going on. I was used to film footage but this was ridiculous. The storyboard would say six feet of somebody swishing by, and then it would go to the next panel and it would say the dialogue, and there was no continuous accounting for that time. So I realized I had to take a stopwatch and time that and add up the footage and make this huge map. It took me about four days to figure out how to do that."
Mark Wolfram found the key to entering the world of Hanna-Barbera literally at his feet. "I sent Paul DeKorte a letter at one point and on my demonstration tape I put an example of a commercial I had done for a sneaker called Snorks, which just happened to be a Hanna-Barbera character at the time," Wolfram remembers. "It sat on a shelf for a year and eventually Hoyt heard it and called me up. Hoyt said we should meet, and we had a nice breakfast at Smokey Joe's on Riverside and Coldwater. He filled me in on his career about his early days as one of the biggest jingle guys on the West Coast, and he asked if I wanted to go to work for Hanna-Barbera. At the time Curtin and his crew were working on an updated version of Jonny Quest, the classic adventure series that had aired in prime time in the '60s.
"The first thing I did was three or four episodes of Jonny Quest," Wolfram says. "It was kind of adventure music. There were more modern effects around the edges than in the '60s version, some synth drums just for some touches. Obviously at that point we were using EVI or EWI [a woodwind synthesizer] rather than three or four woodwind players, but that was really the only concession to contemporary."
Wolfram was faced with the same working approach Jones and the other composers met. "We basically had to be our own music editors and make our own cue sheets and from that you try and hit as best you could," he explains. "But you didn't want to get too specific because everything would be used for the library, so you tried to serve the episode as best you could but still keep it broad enough to have multiple uses."

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Cartoons Are a Funny Business
John Debney likewise fell into the working routine quickly, sharing scoring duties on individual cartoon episodes with the other composers. "There could be anywhere from three to four of us," he says. "Someone would get four minutes and I'd get three or Ron Jones would get three, and once you had done it for him a number of times and knew what his vocabulary was and knew the kind of endings you had to do, it was very specific the way Hanna-Barbera did it. They were librarying this music and they would use it on other shows, so every few bars you'd have to put a hole in the music because they could take that and cut to another piece of music. It was very formulaic, but it was really fascinating and I learned a lot by doing it."
The sheer volume of music that needed to be produced made a major impact on most of the composers. "I would try to do a minimum of 20 pages a day and during the summer I'd end up working six or seven days a week, so it would be 130 pages of finished score every week," Jones recalls. "Mostly you'd get an act to work on, the whole act or sometimes a whole show. Or sometimes it would just be generic themes, like 'Can you write a bunch of chases? Can you write a bunch of dialogue cues?' because once they had a few shows scored they'd track it. That came in handy when I did Duck Tales because when I got there, they said, 'How can you score nine shows and track a hundred of them?' and I said, 'Watch.' They'd say, 'Why did you do that Arabian cue?' and 'Why did you do that other and I'd say, 'Look, trust me, you're gonna need that.' All that training really allowed me to envision what needed to be done."
Jones developed his own system for keeping track of exactly what show he was working on at any given time. "You keep a notebook or a manila folder and put the themes in there," he recalls. "They'd be right there next to the piano, and I'd say 'What show are we doing?' and then any shows I'd make up themes [for] I'd put them there too so there'd be a folder with dialogue themes, one with Hoyt's themes, one with my themes and so on."
Though Curtin was only writing bits and pieces and providing show themes by the 1980s, Debney notes that Curtin's work during his first decade or so with Hanna-Barbera was far more extensive and involved a long-standing collaboration William Hanna, a founding partner of the animation factory with Joseph Barbera.

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"I was told by Paul DeKorte that Hoyt used to write most of the music himself," Debney explains. "I got to know Bill Hanna really well too, and Bill would really work with Hoyt on those themes and write lyrics for them even though you might never hear the lyrics. Bill was a musician and an old-school guy and he knew how to read animation charts. He's have storyboarded things for a two minute main title or theme and he'd actually time it out.
Debney notes the Curtin's background in jazz was invaluable both to his jingle work and his fashioning of some of television's snappiest theme songs. "Hoyt was a jazzer," Debney says. "He was a keyboard player for one of the big bands and he was in the service. That's why his music sounds the way it does, he always loved those jazz chords, and they're fabulous."

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Even in the '80s when Curtin wasn't writing most of the music, he conducted all the scoring sessions with a group of veteran players with whom he had long-standing relationships. "Hoyt conducted everything and Paul DeKorte was in the booth," Jones says. "Before MIDI stuff came in, he and Paul DeKorte budgeted things so they could have a pretty good-sized band, but we did The Smurfs with six violins and a little band, and it was all take-downs of Berlioz and Rachmaninoff and Beethoven. The Smurfs gig was about how many classical themes can you use, because the Smurfs were these little characters they did in Europe and they tracked it all with classical music." Paul DeKorte was also a talented singer who sang on and contracted vocals for all of Curtin's sessions. "As far as musicians, I recall Gene Cipriano on woodwinds, Frank Capp and Steve Schaeffer on drums, Jerry Hey, Chuck Findley, Rick Baptist and Charlie King on trumpets. Lloyd Ulleate on trombone, Tommy Johnson on tuba and bass trombone, Vince DeRosa on horn, Clark Gassman on keyboards and Chet Record on percussion," Jones says. "The concert master on violin was Sid Sharp."

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The Boys in the Band
Jones says he learned a great deal of his craft just by talking to Curtin's team members. "We had the best players on earth and that's how I'd learn," the composer says. "I'd write for them, and then I'd talk to Tommy Johnson and say, 'What did you think of my tuba part?' And he'd say he liked this part and maybe I could do this other part better. Or I'd go sit with Chet Record who was the percussionist, who had to play like a million instruments, and I'd say, 'How do you get from the timpani over to the xylophone in time?' and he'd say 'I draw these arrows.' It was like a master orchestration class. I'd work with Lalo Schifrin on these French orchestration books, and then I'd go practice what I learned in terms of transparency and amplitude and intensity with all that writing each week. It was really a school unlike anything I've ever seen. The players were all great sight readers. They all loved the work. He made it fun and musically interesting."
According to the composers, Curtain made the job interesting in other ways as well. "Hoyt used to do certain things," Debney laughs. "I'd finish my allotment for the week, maybe 10 minutes of music, and he'd always call me on a Sunday night as I was getting ready to sit down for dinner and say "Hey, Big John!" You think you could squeeze out another two or three minutes of Pound Puppies? I always knew he'd call, too, because Hoyt always intended to do some writing himself at that time, but somehow he never got around to it.
Curtin also reportedly had his own idiosyncratic ideas about Los Angeles geography. "He'd always say, 'John, can you come out and meet me halfway?' I lived in Burbank and he lived in Westwood, and 'halfway' would somehow always mean about three minutes from his house," Debney recalls. "But he knew it, he was just a character."

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Ron Jones points out that Curtin had to try to keep his home life and professional life separate. "His wife thought that music was dirty," Jones says. "That somehow it was the red light district. Hoyt wasn't allowed to keep any musical instruments in the house. He kept a beat-up upright piano, where every third note didn't work, in his hall closet. But he had perfect pitch so he wrote everything from perfect pitch. We'd be at Denny's or Jack's Deli, and he would take the napkin, flip it over, write out the clef and say, 'Here's the bad guy theme' or 'Here's the Smurf lick,' then you'd take the boards and that's what you had to go by."
Debney found himself dealing with Curtin's legacy years later when he wrote the score to the feature-length animated version of The Jetsons. "When I did Jetsons: The Movie, I was in a room with a bunch of suits, and I had gotten the job to score the movie, and it wasn't a great movie but it was a movie," Debney recalls. "They were in this meeting and they went, 'Now what are we gonna do for the main title?' And they all look at me. And I said, 'I think we should do the Jetsons" theme.' And they were like, 'I don't know if we really want to do that. I mean, we do have Tiffany.' They were actually proud of that! I said, 'I really think we should do the theme. I mean I'll use a bigger orchestra and fill it out a bit more, but I think we should stay true to it because when people are in a darkened theater, when this thing comes on, they're going to cheer.' I said, 'If you really want that cheer, you're going to have to play the theme.' They were really fighting me on it. And when I went to the screening and they played the theme, people clapped."

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The Undying Spirit of Adventure
Debney says he's even seen Curtin's effect on live-action directors who grew up listening to the composer's themes. "When I got called in to work on Spy Kids I was sitting with Robert Rodriguez and talking, and Rodriguez said, 'Maybe we could have kind of a Jonny Quest theme,' and my eyes lit up and so did his. He went over to his computer and he had the Jonny Quest theme on it. He said he used to listen to that while he was writing Spy Kids."
Debney still carries a flame for Curtin's themes. "For my money I think that Hoyt was completely under-appreciated for what he's done," the composer says. "The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Jonny Quest. . .plus there are ones that you don't talk about but you'd remember if you heard them, like Magilla Gorilla, Wally Gator, and all that stuff we grew up on. It's so great and so catchy.
"Hoyt was a great communicator," says Ron Jones. "His themes are like perestroika—where one word means an entire paragraph. In English we don't have a word for it so I would say in music it's the musical equivalent of direct communication. He would always tell me to keep it simple and that there's a main thing and another thing and that's it—there's nothing else. I never heard anyone else say that except Lalo Schifrin. He would emphasize a lot of melody and then say, 'What else is left?' I try to be in that mold."

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For Mark Wolfram, Curtin's joy in his work made the most lasting impact. "This is a guy who really loved what he did. There were problems on sessions. Things didn't always go the way he wanted to, and he'd have to make some changes. But most of the time this was a guy who was just having a great time. All the musicians felt the same way."
And for a man who could write music that sent chills down the spine (like Jonny Quest) or simply make the viewer bust out into laughter. Curtin's personal sensibility couldn't have been more appropriate. "He truly was loved, and he was just hilariously funny," John Debney says. "The beauty of Hoyt was that he took the music seriously but he had a great time doing it. He kept it light, and the musicians loved him."

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Since it is Christmas Day, let me extend my thanks to you for reading this blog over the years and wish you a peaceful and healthy 2019. Here’s a great Dick Bickenbach festive season sketch of the Hanna-Barbera stars of 1958 from the collection of Bill Wray.

Santa and the Stone Age

If you’re going to buy the fact that people in the Stone Age celebrate Christmas, you might as well jump in and buy the fact that the Sphinx, the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa date from the Stone Age, too. Because we see all that in “Christmas Flintstone.”

The show aired as a regular episode of The Flintstones on Christmas Day 1964 (the first time the show aired on a Friday night after swapping spots with Jonny Quest). It was repeated on Christmas Eve 1965, so we can only presume ABC and Screen Gems intended this to be an annual thing. Of course, 1965-66 was the final network season for the show.

It’s evident that Hanna-Barbera pumped more money into this episode than usual. There are a couple of original songs by John McCarthy. There are a few imaginative overhead layouts, something Hanna-Barbera rarely engaged in. And despite the anachronisms, a few plot holes, inconsistencies in the names of Santa’s elves, and the non-presence of Bea Benaderet, the episode has its charms. Alan Reed gives a fine performance (his off-key singing suits Fred’s character, to be honest), the background artwork is top-notch and the songs are kind of cute. And Barney’s mantra of “good will to your fellow man” is appropriate but not strident.

Warren Foster’s plot involves Fred Flintstone, fill-in department store Santa, filling in for the real Santa Claus who can’t make his Christmas Eve delivery because of a bad cold. Fred jumps in Santa’s sleigh and pours toys out of a huge bag that are swallowed up by chimneys. No need to animate Fred going in and out of houses; some cycle animation of falling parcels and toys does the trick. The cartoon makes good use of silhouettes as Fred drops presents upon various places in the world. The presents include Pebbles dolls. Ideal Toys needs their product placement!



The Flintstones was starting to run on fumes by season five, but this episode is a pleasant half-hour that is worth watching at Yuletide time.