Hoyt Curtin
Based on Wikipedia: Hoyt Curtin
The Man Who Made Cartoons Sing
Quick: hum the Flintstones theme. Go on. "Meet the Flintstones, they're the modern Stone Age family..." You can hear it, can't you? The bouncing melody, the way it just swings. Now try the Jetsons. "Meet George Jetson!" with that space-age orchestral whoosh.
If these tunes are living rent-free in your head decades after you last watched these shows, you have one man to thank: Hoyt Curtin.
Curtin wasn't just a composer. He was a jingle wizard who understood something profound about music and memory. In his own words: "In a commercial you have one minute, or forty seconds, to sell the product. Every single note has got to mean something, and has got to do something. And that's exactly how I approached one-minute main titles: it was to sell the show."
And sell them he did. For over three decades, Curtin served as the primary musical director for Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio that essentially invented the Saturday morning cartoon as we know it. His fingerprints are on nearly 250 cartoon series. The Flintstones. The Jetsons. Scooby-Doo. Jonny Quest. Top Cat. The Smurfs. Super Friends. Space Ghost. Quick Draw McGraw. Yogi Bear. The list seems almost absurd in its scope.
From Big Bands to Bedrock
Hoyt Stoddard Curtin was born in Downey, California, in 1922, and he started playing piano at age five. Almost immediately, he began writing his own music—or at least trying to. As he later admitted with characteristic humility: "Mozart, I was not. It was mostly gibberish, but I loved how my older brother would play them, adding to them, making them sound wonderful."
That self-deprecation masked serious talent. By high school in San Bernardino, Curtin had formed his own orchestra—cheekily named the "Cornfed Sextette"—and was playing in local jazz bands. During his senior year, he wrote and conducted new arrangements of show tunes for the school's annual musical production. His classmates elected him vice-president of the senior class.
Then came World War Two.
Curtin joined the Navy at nineteen, earned a commission as an ensign, and served aboard a destroyer in the Pacific. Before enlisting, his draft registration listed his employer as the Ken Baker Band at the Windsor Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona. He was, in other words, already a working professional musician as a teenager.
After the war, Curtin faced a crossroads. He'd been accepted to Juilliard, the legendary New York conservatory, on the G.I. Bill. But when he went to enroll, the admissions officer asked him a pointed question: Why go to Juilliard when the University of Southern California had composers like Ernst Toch and Miklós Rózsa teaching right there in Los Angeles?
Curtin drove back to California "at about a hundred miles an hour" and enrolled at USC. He earned his master's degree in music, studying under Rózsa—the Hungarian composer who would go on to win three Academy Awards for film scores including Ben-Hur and A Double Life. It was an education in craftsmanship from a master of the form.
The World's Worst Film
Curtin dreamed of becoming a film composer. He knocked on every door in Hollywood. His first score was for a 1952 movie called Mesa of Lost Women.
"It's the world's worst film, I think," Curtin said years later. "It was really bad when I wrote it but now it's worse. As I remember, it was about ladies on an alien planet who turned into tarantulas."
He had no budget. Zero. So he recruited his friend Ray Rasch—"one of the real great jazz guys"—and they recorded the entire score with just two pianos. "We really had fun doing that."
That scrappy, make-do-with-what-you-have attitude would serve Curtin well in animation, where budgets were always tight and creativity had to fill the gaps left by money. His Mesa of Lost Women music was later reused in Ed Wood's Jail Bait, credited to "Hoyt Kurtain"—apparently nobody bothered to check the spelling. Curtin also contributed two background tunes to Wood's notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space, though he was embarrassed by the film's quality.
Disillusioned with the film industry, Curtin pivoted to television advertising. He found work at Cascade Pictures in Hollywood, one of the pioneering commercial production houses in the early days of TV. "It was marvelous," he recalled, "with a big orchestra." By the mid-1950s, he had become one of the most in-demand composers for television commercials.
The Jingle Philosophy
Here's the thing about advertising jingles: they're engineered for maximum memorability in minimum time. Every note, every beat, every musical phrase has to work overtime. There's no room for filler. No space for self-indulgence. You have seconds—not minutes, seconds—to plant a hook in the listener's brain.
This training proved invaluable when Curtin began scoring cartoons at United Productions of America, better known as UPA Studios. UPA was famous for its modernist, stylized approach to animation—shows like Mr. Magoo that broke from the lush, realistic style of Disney. Curtin's first score there was for a 1950 short called The Popcorn Story.
In 1954, he scored When Magoo Flew, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Curtin loved the process: "I viewed the cartoon, wrote the music to fit and scored those at Columbia Pictures, with the Columbia orchestra. You scored to picture and you played along so the producers could see how the music fit."
Traditional film scoring is painstaking work. The composer watches the movie, notes every scene change and emotional beat, then writes music precisely timed to match the action. When you hear a musical sting the exact moment a character opens a door to reveal something shocking—that synchronization was carefully planned and executed.
This was the world Curtin came from. But television animation was about to demand something different entirely.
Meet Hanna-Barbera
In 1957, Curtin received a phone call that would change his life. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera—two veteran animators who had created Tom and Jerry at MGM—were starting their own studio. They remembered a jingle Curtin had written for a Schlitz beer commercial they'd worked on together.
Now they had lyrics for a theme song for their new show, something called The Ruff and Reddy Show.
Hanna and Barbera read the lyrics to Curtin over the phone. Could he write a tune for them?
"I called back in five minutes and sang it to them," Curtin recalled. "Silence. Uh oh, I bombed out."
The next thing he heard was an offer to record it.
"We'd go back and forth like that," Barbera later explained. "Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, etc. We'd all have a good time, and I think the music shows it."
Hanna gave Curtin simple instructions that would guide their entire collaboration: "We'll put the pictures on it. You make it happy."
Inventing the Cartoon Soundtrack Assembly Line
Here's something most people don't realize about classic television animation: the music budget was tiny. Film composers had orchestras and weeks of recording time. Saturday morning cartoons had neither.
The solution was something called "needle drop" music—pre-recorded library tracks that editors could purchase and splice into their shows. Need a chase scene? Drop in Stock Chase Music #47. Romantic moment? Stock Romance #12. It was cheap, but it sounded generic because it wasn't composed for the specific show.
During production of the Loopy De Loop cartoons in 1959, Curtin revolutionized this approach. Instead of just writing opening themes, he composed entire libraries of "musical cues"—short pieces of music that could be combined and rearranged to score complete episodes.
Think of it like building with musical LEGO bricks. Curtin would write a suspenseful piece, a comedic piece, a chase piece, an emotional piece—dozens of them, all in the same style, all designed to flow seamlessly into one another. Editors could then assemble these cues to match the action on screen without hiring an orchestra for every episode.
Each Hanna-Barbera cartoon episode required twenty-two minutes of musical cues and background music. Curtin created all of it. And he designed the pieces with a craftsman's understanding of how they'd be used. As cartoonist Mike Kazaleh observed: "The music he did was not only well written but designed in such a way that if you cut it into bits and pieces and rearranged them, they would still flow. That's planning."
This innovation allowed Hanna-Barbera to save enormous amounts of money while maintaining musical quality far above what stock libraries could provide. It also meant that every Hanna-Barbera show had a distinctive sonic identity—you could recognize a Flintstones episode from the music alone, even with your eyes closed.
The Flintstones: Written in a Panic
When The Flintstones premiered in September 1960, it made history as the first animated sitcom to air in prime time. (The Simpsons wouldn't arrive for another three decades.) The show was essentially The Honeymooners transplanted to the Stone Age, with Fred Flintstone as a working-class everyman, Wilma as his patient wife, and Barney Rubble as his loyal best friend next door.
The iconic theme song—"Meet the Flintstones, they're the modern Stone Age family"—almost didn't happen the way it did.
"I wrote that sucker in a real panic because we were way behind," Curtin admitted. "I did the music first with timpani—boom boom BOOM boom boom boom. Then I decided to go with the jazz band and singers."
Timpani are the big kettle drums you see at the back of an orchestra—huge copper bowls with drumheads stretched across them. Curtin filled an entire studio with timpanists. "When The Flintstones was originally recorded, we didn't have synthesizers at that time. We just had a room full of timpanists, a whole studio full of them, like Swiss bell players! It was wonderful."
The result was that distinctive Stone Age thump that anchors the whole song. Combined with the swinging jazz arrangement and those earworm lyrics, it became one of the most recognizable television themes ever written.
"It's a catchy little tune, just a simple thing," Curtin said. "I like it, not because it's popular, but it's jammed on in clubs in every country because the chord changes are fun to play."
The Jetsons: Into the Space Age
If The Flintstones looked backward to the Stone Age, The Jetsons looked forward. The show premiered in 1962 and imagined a Space Age future of flying cars, robot maids, and three-hour workweeks. The aesthetic was pure Googie architecture—that mid-century modern style of sweeping curves and starbursts that you still see in old bowling alleys and coffee shops.
Curtin's first attempt at the theme song used a small musical combo. William Hanna rejected it. He insisted Curtin use a full orchestra instead.
It was the right call. The Jetsons theme has a grandeur that a small combo couldn't have achieved—that swooping orchestral whoosh that sounds like a rocket taking off. "Meet George Jetson!" The horns practically sparkle.
But the show also gave Curtin one of his oddest brushes with pop culture success. In a second-season episode called "A Date with Jet Screamer," teenage daughter Judy wins a date with a rock star. The star performs a song called "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You)."
The song was written in 1962 by Curtin, Hanna, and Barbera. It's a goofy, catchy novelty tune—alien-sounding nonsense syllables with a bouncy melody. And then something strange happened.
Twenty-four years later, in 1986, radio stations across America "rediscovered" the song. It climbed to number nine on the Billboard Top 100 sales chart. A cartoon song from a 1962 episode became a genuine pop hit in the Reagan era.
The Dickies covered it in 1988. The Violent Femmes covered it in 1995. Today, the song plays in a space travel exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul.
Jonny Quest: Murder in E-Flat Minor
If The Flintstones and The Jetsons were comedies, Jonny Quest was something else entirely—an action-adventure series following a boy whose scientist father worked for a secret government agency. The show featured genuine peril, exotic locations, and a level of violence unusual for children's animation.
It also had one of the most thrilling theme songs in cartoon history.
Curtin assembled his usual crew of Los Angeles studio musicians: four trumpets, six trombones, five woodwind players who could double on multiple instruments, and a five-piece rhythm section including percussion. He recorded at the RCA studios in Hollywood.
But for Jonny Quest, Curtin had a special challenge in mind for his trombonists.
"I wrote it in a killer key because I know how to play trombone," he explained. Trombone is a slide instrument—you change notes by extending or retracting the slide to different positions. Some positions are natural and comfortable. Others are awkward, requiring precise placement in odd spots.
"I know the hardest place to play is all of the unknown, odd positions. There wasn't anything open. Just murder, E-flat minor."
The result during the recording session? "They killed themselves because nobody wanted to make a mistake. Nobody wanted to get carved."
"Getting carved" is musician slang for being shown up or replaced—for demonstrating that you can't handle the part. Curtin was deliberately pushing his players to their limits. And you can hear it in the theme: that driving urgency, the way the trombones seem to be straining with dangerous intensity.
There's another footnote to the Jonny Quest sessions. Curtin's pianist, Jack Cookerly, built a contraption to generate unusual sounds for the show's science-fiction elements. According to Curtin, it was "made of orange crates with a keyboard and thousands of vacuum tubes." Curtin credited Cookerly with inventing "the synthesizer as we know it."
This is almost certainly an exaggeration—Robert Moog and Don Buchla were developing their synthesizers around the same time—but it speaks to the spirit of experimentation in Curtin's studio. They were making up new sounds because the old ones weren't enough.
The Jazzer
Composer John Debney, who would go on to score films like The Passion of the Christ and Iron Man 2, offered a revealing insight into Curtin's musical DNA: "Hoyt was a jazzer, 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."
This is the key to understanding why Curtin's cartoon music has aged so well. He wasn't writing down to children. He was writing jazz—sophisticated chord progressions, swinging rhythms, the kind of harmonic complexity you'd hear in a smoky nightclub, just wrapped in a package that happened to accompany animated characters.
Jazz musicians today still jam on "Meet the Flintstones" because the chord changes are genuinely interesting to play. The music respects the listener's intelligence even when the visuals are silly.
Bill Burnett, Hanna-Barbera's creative director, put Curtin in rarefied company: "Music is so fundamentally important to cartoons. Hoyt was one of the two giants of cartoon music." The other giant? Carl Stalling, who scored Looney Tunes at Warner Brothers—the musical mastermind behind Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
"What Hoyt does is absolutely smokin'," Burnett continued. "The greatest pieces of cartoon pastiches that have ever been created."
The Departure and Return
In 1965, after nearly a decade with Hanna-Barbera, Curtin left the studio. The split reportedly involved a dispute over ownership of his musical work and residual payments—the ongoing royalties that composers receive when their work is rebroadcast.
He started his own production company, Soundtrack Music, Inc., in Los Angeles. The company employed eight composers and provided music for both television programs and commercials. Ted Nichols succeeded Curtin as musical director at Hanna-Barbera.
But seven years later, in 1972, Curtin returned. Whatever disagreements had driven him away were apparently resolved. He resumed his role as the studio's musical director and stayed until his retirement in 1989.
During this second tenure, Curtin composed music for new generations of shows—The Smurfs, Super Friends, various Scooby-Doo spinoffs. He also took on outside projects when permitted. In 1978, he composed the music library for Battle of the Planets, an American adaptation of the Japanese anime Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. The original Japanese score didn't have enough content for the expanded American version, so Curtin created themes and cues to fill the gaps.
The Legacy in Numbers
The scale of Curtin's output is staggering. During his five-decade career, he wrote, conducted, and produced thousands of unique theme songs, musical cues, and libraries of incidental music. As of recent counts, 2,047 of his compositions are still registered with BMI, one of the major performance rights organizations that tracks and licenses music. Another 1,102 are registered with ASCAP, its counterpart.
That's over three thousand discrete pieces of music—and those are just the ones formally registered. The actual number of cues and variations he created is probably much higher.
Jean MacCurdy, who was president of Warner Bros. Animation in 2002, summed up his gift: "Hoyt was the king of jingle-making. His strong suit was coming up with the themes that almost anyone on the street could sing at the drop of a hat. He was really quite remarkable."
Joseph Barbera, his longtime collaborator, was more effusive: "Few people ever have the chance to work with a genius. All of us at Hanna-Barbera who worked with Hoyt are among those few."
The Inventor
Here's a detail that seems to come from an entirely different biography: between 1974 and 1981, Hoyt Curtin was granted six United States patents for his novel designs of pipe couplings.
Pipe couplings. The devices that connect lengths of pipe together.
There's no obvious connection between jazz composition and plumbing hardware, but apparently Curtin's inventive mind worked across domains. The same creativity that let him hear Stone Age drumbeats in timpani also let him see better ways to connect pipes.
It's a reminder that people are rarely just one thing. The man who made The Flintstones sing was also, apparently, an amateur mechanical engineer tinkering in his spare time.
The Sound of Saturday Morning
Hoyt Curtin died on December 3, 2000. He was seventy-eight years old.
His music outlives him in the most intimate way possible: lodged in the memories of everyone who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. The Flintstones theme. The Jetsons theme. The Scooby-Doo theme. These aren't just songs. They're Proustian triggers for millions of people, instant transporters back to childhood living rooms and bowls of sugary cereal.
And that was always the point. Curtin understood, from his jingle-writing days, that music could bypass conscious thought and plant itself directly in memory. "Every single note has got to mean something," he said. Every note had to sell the show.
It's easy to dismiss cartoon music as trivial—kid stuff, literally. But consider what Curtin actually accomplished. He took the harmonic sophistication of jazz, the efficiency of advertising, and the narrative demands of film scoring, and synthesized them into something new: a musical language perfectly suited to television animation.
He invented systems—those modular libraries of cues—that made it economically possible for studios to produce animated shows at television scale. Without that innovation, the economics might not have worked. There might not have been a Saturday morning cartoon tradition at all, at least not in the form we knew it.
And he wrote melodies that have proven essentially indestructible. More than sixty years after The Flintstones premiered, you can still hum the theme. That's not an accident. That's craft at the highest level—the craft of a man who knew that every single note had to count.
"We'll put the pictures on it," William Hanna told him. "You make it happy."
He did.