There are many stories about the world being a lousy place. I could tell some. You could tell some. But this is a story about the world being a less lousy place because there are still kind and generous people out there.

This blog was started because of an affection for the stock music heard in the backgrounds of The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Quick Draw McGraw Show. To make a long story short, after a search that took several decades, I discovered the origin of the cues, acquired copies where I could and started documenting which ones were heard on specific cartoons, moving my efforts to this blog in 2009.

The easier way, of course, would be to have copies of the cue sheets that Screen Gems had to submit to ASCAP and BMI so royalties could be paid to the composers.

One of the greatest cartoon music scholars out there, if not the greatest, is Daniel Goldmark. He has written several books and, wonderfully, penned a thesis where the appendix contained a list of the music (except that composed in-house) heard in every single Warner Bros. cartoon (except the “Seely Six”) from 1930 to 1969, compiled from cue sheets. This is such an incredible resource. He was also the music coordinator on the Spümcø cartoons “Boo-Boo Runs Wild” and “A Day in the Life of Ranger Smith.” Music by Capitol Hi-Q! (the Smith cartoon opens with ZR-49 LIGHT UNDERSCORE by Geordie Hormel).

After years and years, I finally had the courage to ask Dr. Goldmark—we have corresponded about one his projects—if maybe he had any Hanna-Barbera cue sheets from the Capitol Hi-Q days.

He did. And, to my astonishment and extreme delight, he e-mailed me 135 pages of cue sheets for the first three seasons of the Huck show, before Hoyt Curtin took over. Not for all the cartoons, but a good percentage of the first two seasons.

At last, I could learn the identity of some of the music I have not been able to find.

Here are a few discoveries.

The sheets are for each half hour show. That means they list music for themes and bumpers in addition to the cartoons. The opening themes always run 24 seconds, meaning each cartoon had credits. The sheets also note the order in which the individual cartoons aired. They confirm what many people have said—there was a rotation each week, with Huck being the first cartoon one week, Yogi the next, and Pixie and Dixie the next.

The sheets for the first two years say “revised.” I don’t know why. I do notice some cues on the sheets are different than what you hear in the cartoons from the Huck DVD or any Huck cartoons that aired on American cable TV. I don’t have a copy any more, but a version of “The Runaway Bear” (E-29) was on-line that had a substitution for a Jack Shaindlin cue. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cue sheet for that cartoon.

Guyla Avery, according to the sheets, was part of the studio’s music department. Guyla was actually Bill Hanna’s secretary, and Iwao Takamoto told a story about how Bill would shout at her from inside his office until it was agreed to protect eardrums by installing an intercom. Hanna never quite figured out to operate it, so he continued to yell out at Guyla. She later married artist/designer Alex Toth.

Until June 3, 1960, the studio’s address on the sheets is 1416 N. LaBrea, which was the old Kling/Chaplin studios. The sheets for the third season, starting in September, reveal the company was now operating out of the window-less cinder-block building at 3501 Cahuenga (not to be confused with later new building down the street on Cahuenga we all associate with Hanna-Barbera).

Somewhat maddening is the fact the sheets only list names of music if they don’t contain an alpha-numeric. That means the sheets don’t actually tell us most of the names. For example, a sheet will read “6-ZR-50” and not tell us the name is “Light Underscore.” With that in mind, let me try to clear up the identities of some the music as revealed by the cue sheets.

● Not one, but two short pieces by Raoul Kraushaar were heard on the Huck show. They have an MR prefix: 7-MR-183 COMEDY MYSTERIOSO and 8-MR-377 COMEDY. They were on the Hi-Q reel L-58 published in 1959 and came from the Omar library, co-founded by Kraushaar in 1956 (he is the “R” in “Omar”). They both sound like they were recorded in the back of a room, with a clarinet, strings and muted trumpets. In some cases, they were edited together to sound like one cue. Hi-Q removed them from the library.
● The sad trombone music heard as the sneaky dog limps with a crutch in “Nuts over Mutts” is Jack Shaindlin’s LAF-72-3.
● “Oh Susanna” heard as Cousin Batty chats with Pixie and Dixie is Shaindlin’s LAF-88-7.
● George “Geordie” Hormel is responsible for ZR-21E SUSPENSE when the alien’s spaceship lands in Jellystone Park in “Space Bear.”
● In the same cartoon, the cue that the late Earl Kress said contained the name “Fireman” is LAF-1-2. He never could remember the complete name.
● The light symphonic music, memorably heard as the skunk is flying on a paper airplane in the Augie Doggie cartoon “Skunk You Very Much” is LAF-113-3. The cue sheet lists as the composer “Langworth” instead of Jack Shaindlin, and it doesn’t remind me of any of Shaindlin’s work.
● LAF-6-16 is a mystery. The cue sheets assign the code to two completely different pieces of music; Dr. Goldmark warns that cue sheets are not always accurate. One is the medium circus march that opens “Goldfish Fever.” But it’s also the code assigned to the brief piece in “Rah Rah Bear” where the players enter the field. That cue starts off the same but ends differently than Shaindlin’s “Boxing Greats No. 2.” On top of that, the medium circus march is reported as LAF-1-8 at the end of “Boxing Buddy.” The same cue is at the start of “Mark of the Mouse” but I don’t have a cue sheet for that. I don’t know what to think; I only have the sheets for the three cartoons mentioned above. For now, I will assign both codes to the march and leave the boxing cue without an LAF number.
● Mr. Jinks is sitting in a basket in “Party Peeper Jinks” while LAF-93-2 plays underneath. It starts with a flute and has quacking muted trumpets.
● A cue in the same cartoon between choruses of a birthday song to Jinks is LAF-93-15. It features woodwinds and strings.
● A fast circus-type chase cue called LA-74-4 is heard in a pile of cartoons, in some cases only the second half is used when the melody goes F-G-A-Bb-C and comes back down. Part of it is in the final scene of “Nottingham and Eggs.”
● Shaindlin provides the seagoing medley which opens “Pistol Packin’ Pirate.” It is LAF-65-7.
● The dramatic cue during the showdown between Sheriff Huckleberry (in the cartoon of the same name) and Dinky Dalton is L-31 SOMBER MOVEMENT by Spencer Moore.
● “Brave Little Brave,” with its specialty cues, doesn’t follow the Capitol Hi-Q numbering system. The music for about the first 4½ minutes is a Geordie Hormel piece labelled 11-ZR-K7C. The rest of the music is Q-743 by Spencer Moore. The closest cue I can find is L-744 MELODIC WESTERN UNDERSCORE. Same tempo, same orchestration, same double tom-tom beat, but the melody doesn’t quite match. My guess is the “Q” cues were in the original Capitol “Q” library, which was replaced by Hi-Q in 1956.
● “Show Biz Bear” features silent film serial style music played on an upright piano. These are Shaindlin cues entitled “Silent Movie Piano”; Shaindlin recorded a commercial album of these.
● Clarence Wheeler’s “Woodwind Capers” turns out to be a solo flute, four seconds long. It’s heard in “Hoodwinked Bear.” At least, that is all that was used.
● The version of “La Cucaracha” in several cartoons is an Omar library cue labelled OK-787 by Bill Loose and Jack Cookerly, who later played keyboards for Hoyt Curtin.

Whew! I think that’s it.

All this wonderful information is going to take some time to update the cues on the blog, as I’ll have to change some Quick Draw shows and other Huck cartoons for which I don’t have cue sheets.

People who like lists and lists of cartoons can stand by for just a moment.

You can see most of the music referred to was composed by Jack Shaindlin. We’ve posted about Shaindlin before, but a brief summary of his stock music career is he recorded with the March of Time orchestra for the Lang-Worth Mood Music library in the ‘40s, then formed a library music company in 1947 called Filmusic. The November-December 1952 edition of Film Music revealed:

The Hollywood office of Filmusic Co. of New York is making 1500 recorded selections available for TV and non-theatrical producers. The company, the largest independent music-on-film library in the country, is headed by Jack Shaindlin and features his sound tracks. Mr. Shaindlin has been musical director for the March of Time, Louis de Rochemont and the major studios in the east since 1937. His Filmusic sound track is used exclusively by NBC-TV.

The problem with trying to identify names of his cues (you won’t find my favourite Shaindlin cue, “Toboggan Run” in a copyright catalogue or in the BMI database) is simple. Shaindlin told Business and Home Screen magazine once that “the music was never published and hasn’t been ‘kicked around.’” Filmusic combined with Lang-Worth to become Langlois Filmusic in 1954 and Cinemusic in 1960. Shaindlin seems to have copyrighted only select cues for the sake of royalties, and certainly not the 1,500 mentioned above, including a good many of the ones heard in the Huck and Quick Draw shows.

Here are the Shaindlin cues that have been partially ID’d and a couple that have not been. These were sent to me years ago by Earl. I have held off posting them until I knew what they were, except for one cue he asked me not to post.

One cue I like has been half identified. It is two cues edited together. The first part of it is “Chump Chimp Title.” I have it on a Langlois collection, arranged a little differently but unmistakeably the same music. But my two-part Langlois cue includes “And Some Doings.” That part of the cue is different than what’s heard on the cartoons; that part you can hear at the end of “Baffled Bear,” as Yogi runs a gas station. Included is a vaudeville or circus dance cue that got a workout on the Quick Draw McGraw series; all Earl could remember was it contained “fireman” in the title. I cannot help but wonder if it comes from a different chimp short, The Rookie Fireman, shot in New York in 1936. As noted above, Shaindlin worked on the Shorty the Chimp series, but I can’t find the film on-line. LAF-25-3 is a fun cue, reminding me of little busy animals skipping through the woods. I’ve also attached “Six Day Bicycle Race,” heard several times in the Snooper and Blabber caper “Puss N’ Booty.” If I don’t have the real names, you’ll see quotation marks around fake ones. Don’t accept these as valid.

Two bonus cues are below, thanks to reader Evan Schad. With his help, I acquired a Synchro library 78 rpm disc containing the two Hecky Krasnow cues heard on several Augie Doggie cartoons.


LAF-1-2 "fireman"


LAF-6-16 "circus parade"


LAF-25-3 "dance of the forest squirrels"


LAF-74-2 LICKETY SPLIT


LAF-74-4 "race to the finish"


LAF - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE


LAF - "the greatest show on earth"


LAF - CHUMP CHIMP TITLE "and other cue"


HAPPY COBBLER


SWINGING GHOSTS


L-71 SOMBER MOVEMENT

Again, I am extremely appreciative to Daniel Goldmark for his generosity and selflessness in providing this valuable documentation.

Since people love lists, here are the cartoons for which we have a list of the cues with production numbers and episode numbers in brackets. Alas, only one of the three Yowp cartoons is present.

E-1 Pie-Pirates (003)
E-2 High Fly Guy (008)
E-3 Tally Ho-Ho-Ho (007)
E-4 Pistol Packin’ Pirate (005)
E-5 Judo Jack (002)
E-6 Little Bird Mouse (007)
E-7 Yogi Bear’s Big Break (001)
E-8 Big Bad Bully (004)
E-9 Slumber Party Smarty (002)
E-10 Kit-Kat-Kit (003)
E-11 Big Brave Bear (006)
E-12 Scaredy Cat Dog (006)
E-13 Baffled Bear (009)
E-14 Cousin Tex (001/012)
E-15 Foxy Hound Dog (005)
E-16 Jinks’ Mice Device (004-021)
E-17 The Ghost with the Most (009)
E-18 The Buzzin’ Bear (013)
E-19 Jiggers It’s Jinks (008)
E-20 The Brave Little Brave (010)
E-21 The Stout Trout (012)
E-22 The Ace of Space (010)
E-27 Jinks the Butler (013)
E-31 Sheriff Huckleberry (005)
E-32 Sir Huckleberry Hound (004)
E-33 Lion-Hearted Huck (002-013)
E-34 Rustler-Hustler Huck (006)
E-35 Huckleberry Hound Meets Wee Willie (001/010)
E-37 Tricky Trapper (003)
E-38 Cock-a-Doodle Huck (008)
E-39 Two Corny Crows (009)
E-40 Freeway Patrol (007)
E-41 Dragon Slayer Huck (012)
E-47 Birdhouse Blues (021)
E-49 Prize-Fight Fright (021)
E-52 Brainy Bear (022)
E-53 Nice Mice (022)
E-54 Postman Huck (022)
E-55 Robin Hood Yogi (023)
E-56 King-Size Surprise (023)
E-60 Robin Hood Yogi (023)
E-61 Scooter Looter (025)
E-62 Mouse-Nappers (025)
E-63 Little Red Riding Huck (025)
E-64 Hide and Go Peek (026)
E-65 Boxing Buddy (026)
E-66 The Tough Little Termite (026)
E-70 Papa Yogi (030)
E-71 Ten Pin Alley (027)
E-74 Show Biz Bear (027)
E-76 King Size Poodle (030)
E-77 Nottingham and Eggs (032)
E-78 Rah Rah Bear (032)
E-79 Hi-Fido (027)
E-80 Stranger Ranger (031)
E-81 Somebody’s Lion (030)
E-82 Batty Bat (033)
E-84 Mighty Mite (031)
E-85 Bear For Punishment (033)
E-87 A Bully Dog (031)
E-89 Bird Brained Cat (032)
E-90 Huck the Giant Killer (033)
E-97 Hoodwinked Bear (037)
E-98 Piccadilly Dilly (037)
E-99 Goldfish Fever (037)
E-100 Snow White Bear (038)
E-101 Wiki Waki Huck (038)
E-102 Pushy Cat (038)
E-103 Space Bear (039)
E-104 Puss in Boats (039)
E-105 Huck’s Hack (039)
E-107 Booby Trapped Bear (041)
E-109 High Jinks (043)
E-110 Legion Bound Hound (041)
E-111 Price For Mice (041)
E-112 Gleesome Threesome (042)
E-113 Science Friction (042)
E-114 Plutocrat Cat (042)
E-115 A Bear Pair (043)
E-117 Spy Guy (044)
E-118 Nuts over Mutts (044)
E-120 Knight School (043)
E-122 Party Peeper Jinks (044)

Sheets are missing for Huckleberry Hound Shows K-011, 014 through 020, 024 in the first season, and K-028 through 030, 034 through 036 in the second, and K-040, K-045 to 52 in the third. .

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 to Chase Meeces By” could very easily have been the title of a record album by Jack Shaindlin. It could have been the title of several of the hundreds of albums Shaindlin made over the years.

Unless you worked in the radio, television or film industries, you would never have seen any of these albums. Shaindlin was a composer and conductor who had several simultaneous careers—one of which was being in charge of a music library service, first called Filmusic, then Langlois Filmusic. Anyone who wanted Shaindlin’s mood music for the background of their movie or TV show could buy it. And Hanna-Barbera did; using stock music was a common (and comparatively inexpensive) practice on television in the ‘50s. There were maybe 15 of Shaindlin’s cues which were cut into the sound tracks of Pixie and Dixie and the other pre-1960 cartoons; Joe Ruby once said the cutters themselves picked the music.

Shaindlin was certainly known to the public in the late ‘40s for some of his work. He was employed by Lang-Worth Feature Programs where he conducted for a couple of musical shows the company transcribed for sale to radio stations, especially small ones without a network affiliation. The music varied from pop favourites to waltzes from ballets but was so generic, stations could play them for years; I found one was still running the discs in the mid-‘50s. At the time, Shaindlin was also conducting the Carnegie Pops. He was famous enough for newspaper columnists to write about him. We went into Shaindlin’s life in this post but have saved the newspaper stories until now. First, from 1951:

BROADWAY . . . . by Mark Barron
NEW YORK, June 2 (AP) — The audience in Carnegie hall which saw and heard maestro Jack Shaindlin conduct an all-George Gershwin concert tonight were witnessing one of the few times that this notes Broadway musical director has been seen in public in full formal dress.
In show business, Shaindlin has long been known as “the shirt-sleeve” conductor because the attire he usually wears when he mounts the podium is more appropriate for a gymnasium instructor.
Despite these “strip tease” appearances in front of his orchestra, he probably is heard by more people who listen to music than any other conductor in show business. Besides such occasional formal concerts as the Gershwin program tonight, he provides music for more than a hundred films a year. Fresh in mind are “Teresa,” “Lost Boundaries,” “The Roosevelt Story,” “Farewell to Yesterday,” and “Whispering City.” Two recent ones are “The Whistle at Eaton Falls,” which was filmed in New Hampshire and “The Man With My Face,” which was filmed in Puerto Rico.
But the greatest “circulation” for Shaindlin’s music comes from his putting sharps and flats onto the sound tracks of “The March of Time,” Fox-Movietone and Universal newsreels and innumerable short features and documentary films.
Export on Timing
Watching this tall, sun-tanned conductor set the music on a March of Time release—a story on Morocco—the other day was a lesson in precision timing.
“In conducting an orchestra on radio or in a Broadway musical show,” he said, “I do not have to worry particularly about a margin of time. But for films I must synchronize the music to each portion of the film to one twenty-fifth of a second’s precision. The problem of timing sometimes gets me into serious trouble.
“Once when putting music to a March of Time film on Brazil I was told five minutes before we recorded the music that a sequence to be accompanied by the Brazilian national anthem had been cut 24 feet or 16 seconds less time—and that’s a lot of time.
“I had to record immediately and wondered how I could cut a piece of music which is sacred to a whole nation. I decided, instead, to quicken the tempo and just made it. Later I got a letter from an indignant gentleman in Rio De Janerio [sic] bawling my out unmercifully for playing his national anthem at a galloping pace. He said the next time he was in New York he was going to avenge the insult by pounding me in the nose. Needless to say, I haven’t been answering the phone to any Brazilian gentlemen since.”
Shaindlin, who looks more like a Texas cowboy than a Russian was born in the Crimea where his father was a wholesale oil dealer. That was during the revolution and Shaindlin, then a youngster of twelve, found it difficult to keep at his piano lessons while so much shooting was going on outside.
Led Army Band
“One day the commander of one of the Red army units was killed,” Shaindlin said, “and it was necessary to have some music at his funeral. There was a six-piece army band but no one to lead it. Although I was only 12 they drafted me for the job and the fellows in the band all said I did fine.
“My father was killed by a bandit, so my mother decided to take the family and join her brother in Chicago. We got to Constantinople before out money ran out. I played piano in waterfront dives for eight months to get money to get us as far as Rome. There I played piano some more to get us to Marseilles, and then piano some more to get us to Chicago.
“There I entered a musical contest being run by a newspaper and I won only to discover that the first prize was a trip to Europe, the place I had worked so hard to get away from. So I traded in first prize for the second prize, a baby grand piano.
“Then I started hiring out with my piano to work my way to Broadway and I’m nailing my piano to the floor here. I’m not moving again. I’ll let my music on films, records and radio do all my traveling henceforth.”

Shaindlin must have had some stock stories. The one about winning a trip to Europe (to study music) was reported in Leonard Lyons’ Broadway column in 1947. And the Brazil tale appeared in a June 15, 1947 column, one very similar to what was written four years later.

Up and Down Broadway
By Jack Gaver
United Press Staff Correspondent
MOVIE CONDUCTOR.
Jack Shaindlin reversed his usual procedure when he conducted one of Carnegie Hall “Pop” concerts by donning a coat and tie before he mounted the podium. Ordinarily he shucks down to a wide open collar and rolled-up shirtsleeves before he lifts a baton.
For Shaindlin is not accustomed to public shows. When he conducts, the only people around are the musicians, the place is a studio and the work at hand consists of scoring movies.
His work probably has been heard by more persons than that of any other conductor, for he specializes in assembling, arranging and conducting the background music for newsreels, short subjects of various kinds and “The March Of Time.” When you do this for a dozen years or so, your work gets around even if the general public doesn't know you from a cymbal player.
The walls of Shaindlin’s office are lined with cabinets containing musical scores all carefully labeled so that he can immediately lay his hands on a chunk of whatever type of music the newsreel of the moment calls for.
“I use only the best musicians in New York,” Shaindlin said. “About 30 of them at a time. I hardly dare tell you how few out of the hundreds of members of Local 802 I can use. I have to have men who can get a score perfect the first time. A few, but by no means all, are symphony orchestra men.”
Shaindlin appreciates the musical art as much as the next one, but his present work is strictly a business with him and he refuses to waste any time and money fussing around with numerous false starts the way they do in Hollywood. His theory is that if a conductor knows what he wants and he has men who can deliver it, there’s no need for a second take.
The conductor comes by his impatience with dawdling naturally because he grew lip in a hard school. He was a piano-playing kid in Russia when the revolution caused him and his family to flee by degrees to the United States. They had to stop in practically every country along the way to earn more money to keep going.
“I never got much of a chance at a formal musical education after we got here,” Shaindlin said. “Therewas always the need to work. I used to play the piano accompaniment to silent movies and graduated from that to pit bands in movie and vaudeville houses. You don’t learn how to waste time being fancy in that sort of work.”
Scoring short subjects may seem like an easy job, but Shaindlin has to give them extreme care. Even though his music is merely for background purposes, somewhere there are a few sharp-eared critics just waiting to catch mistakes. There was the Brazilian incident, for example:
“It involved a ‘March of Time’ documentary on Brazil,” Shaindlin explained. “There was one spot just long enough for the Brazilian anthem. I had it all worked out, then just as we were ready to record I was advised that the footage of that sequence had been cut and I had 12 seconds less time for the anthem. Rather than cut it short, I decided to get the whole piece in by stepping up the tempo ever so slightly. Who would notice?
“Well, one Brazilian did. The company got a hot letter from this fellow, who said the conductor had insulted Brazil by playing the anthem too fast and that he was taking the next boat for New York to erase the blot by assassinating the conductor. Needless to say, I didn’t meet the boat.”

A sense of humour had Shaindlin, at least according to Broadway columnist Earl Wilson, who quoted him on occasion. One column included the random witticism: “Jack Shaindlin offers his psychology on humility: ‘The only thing you’ll get by asking for it in a low voice is a low salary’.”

Not much in this post has had something to do with Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but let’s change that. Prior to the release of the Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound DVDs by Warner Home Video and the Pic-A-Nic Basket music CDs by Rhino, the late Earl Kress had been responsible for researching background music in the cartoons so the rights could be acquired. In the course of his work, he was given copies of the original Hanna-Barbera music clearance sheets. They were found going through Earl’s effects and were sent to me by Earl’s buddy Rick Greene.

The sheets are for music from the very first Huckleberry Hound show, which would have been in 1958, but the sheets are from June 1960. Perhaps the little cartoons-between-the-cartoons were changed for rebroadcast, meaning a change in music.

You’ll notice Charlie Shows gets a composing credit on the theme songs, and that each of the cartoons had a 20-second before cue before them, indicating that individual credit titles appeared before each cartoon, not just a title card. And only one cue has a formal title. I suspect that’s because it didn’t come from Langlois Filmusic or Capitol Hi-Q, which used alpha-numeric titles. It came from the Sam Fox library, probably the Variety series.

If I recall, Guyla Avery was Bill Hanna’s secretary.






Earl, unfortunately, never collected these sheets for all the cartoons. But it’s nice that he photocopied one set and would no doubt be very happy that fans of Jack Shaindlin, and his fellow stock music composer, are getting the chance to see what played when Jinksie chased them miserable meeces.

Yowp note: The music in this post is NOT public domain and is provided as a public service for audition purposes only.

Music evokes memories. Music in cartoons included. Play Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse for someone and see if they can Name That Bunny in four notes.

The music of the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons is no different, despite being originally designed to linger in the background while setting moods for TV westerns and sitcoms, industrial films and low-budget movies. But because the composers were so adept, the music not only does its utilitarian job, it sticks in people’s minds (especially after endless viewings of the cartoons).

If I had to name a melody that epitomises the early H-B cartoons, I’d have to actually name two. It’s difficult to picture Yogi Bear in action without hearing the tippy-toe xylophone and laughing clarinet of ‘Zany Comedy’, credited to Bill Loose and John Seely. The other instantly conjures the sight of Pixie and Dixie running past the same wall socket for the eighth time—‘Toboggan Run’, credited to Jack Shaindlin.

While Loose and Seely were the masterminds behind the Capitol Hi-Q library, whence Hanna-Barbera found much of its music, Shaindlin was the man responsible for the other library, Langlois Filmusic, which also made its merry way into countless Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw escapades. Not coincidentally, it was distributed by Capitol.

Shaindlin’s story is a little less complicated than that of his library. According to Music and Dance in New York State, edited by Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth, Shaindlin was born April 14, 1909 in Russia. He attended the Crimea Conservatory of Music and then studied piano privately with Glenn Dillard Gunn in Chicago. The International Motion Picture Almanac (1948 edition) further reveals he went to high school in Chicago, then the Chicago Conservatory of Music; from 1926 to 1929 he was the conductor of the N.Y.U. Orchestra and conducted orchestras at movie houses; worked as a scorer for RKO and Universal from 1929 to 1936; was Director of Music for Columbia and Universal (eastern productions) in 1937, then moved on to The March of Time in 1941. It also mentions (unlike later editions) he produced musical shorts and operated a musical scoring service from the Fox Movietone offices in New York.

The book Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music by Naomi Musiker and David Adès, page 244, adds the following:

Shaindlin was born in Yalta but moved to America after the Russian Revolution. Shortly after landing in America, he won first prize in a newspaper-sponsored piano contest. He began his professional career by playing piano in small clubs and landed his first movie job at the age of sixteen, playing an organ at a theater. At the age of eighteen he joined a large orchestra and became a conductor. He subsequently performed at the Palace Theatre playing the piano, writing and acting in skits.
At the age of twenty-two, he started working for Universal Pictures and thereafter for RKO, Columbia and Louis DeRochemont as well as a twelve-year association with OWI films as musical director. In 1947 and 1948, he received critical acclaim for his conducting of pops symphony concerts at Carnegie Hall. He also lectured on movie music and was associated with the Ford Foundation’s television series. He was credited with the music of films such as Lost Boundaries, Teresa and Cinerama Holiday.

This only hints at Shaindlin’s involvement in the music library business. Stock music expert Paul Mandell, in a chapter of a book published by the U.S. Library of Congress, reveals:

Shaindlin (1909-1983) began scoring the March of Time newsreels [released by RKO] in 1942 and served as music director of Fox Movietone News in New York. Around 1950, Shaindlin and his composer-partner Robert McBride organized their news-reel and documentary tracks and started Filmusic, “the largest sound-on-film library in the US with over 2000 moods for dramatic, news, and comedy films.”

As a side-note, Shaindlin replaced Lou De Francesco on The March of Time. De Francesco wrote music for the Sam Fox library and one of his cues, Ski(ing) Galop, was used in some of the first Huck and Yogi cartoons. Before McBride arrived in 1945, Shaindlin worked with Ernest Fiorito, another composer for Sam Fox.

With all the music Shaindlin and McBride composed for newsreels for three studios (including the Bill Stern World of Sports one-reelers at Columbia) and the De Rochemont shorts, they had a ready-made library.

We now have to back up for a second and make a side-trip along the path of old time radio. A couple of guys, Cyril Langlois, Sr. and radio announcer Ralph Wentworth, branched out from the radio ad agency business in 1935 to create Lang-Worth Feature Programs, Inc., which supplied radio shows and music on transcription. Wentworth sold out to Langlois in 1942 and the business carried on. Among the orchestra leaders who supplied musical material for Lang-Worth in the later ‘40s was Jack Shaindlin. It was perhaps inevitable the two joined forces in the library music business.

Business Screen Magazine in 1954 unveiled the big announcement:

Formation of Langlois Filmusic, Inc.
Provides a Major Music Source
The combined music scoring facilities and all sound track of FILMUSIC Company and LANG-WORTH Publications, Inc. have been merged under the new name of LANGLOIS FILMUSIC, Inc., with headquarters in the Warner Brothers Bldg., 619 West 5th Street, New York 19.
The merger of two of the largest companies in the field of picture scoring makes available a service to film producers that provides the largest library of sound track in the world, produced specifically for television, theatrical, industrial and sound slidefilm use.
Jack Shaindlin, formerly operator of Filmusic Company, has withdrawn from active participation in picture scoring from library track to devote himself to original scoring with "live" musicians [Shaindlin became a live-action producer as production head of Triumph Films on West 54th in New York, with McBride as his musical director]. He has turned over all customer accounts and facilities to Langlois Filmusic, Inc. Mr. Shaindlin will continue to serve the new corporation in an advisory capacity for "live" picture scoring.
Jumping off to a fast start, Langlois Filmusic furnished music scores for over five hundred film productions, including business motion pictures, t.v. films and commercials and slidefilms during its first month of operation in January.

This was the library that was tracked by Hanna-Barbera for the Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows—and by syndicators such as ZIV.

Paul Mandell’s meticulous research explains more about Langlois Filmusic:

The fanfare for the “torch lady” logo at the end of every Screen Gems television show was a celebrated piece from this collection.
What made the library famous were the sneak-alongs with spooky clarinets and brass stingers used in Mr. And Mrs. North, Boston Blackie, Science Fiction Theatre and the final year of Superman. “In Cold Blood,” “Closing In,” “Crime Lab,” “Manhunt,” and “Sweating It Out” were typical cue titles. McBride wrote most of them and Shaindlin orchestrated them. They were shrewdly crafted works, remarkable for their economy, with repeated pauses and abrupt hits to facilitate the seemless editing of one with the other.
As Shaindlin's key tracker Frank Lewin observed, “Jack never wrote anything himself. He always had a stable of writers working for him.” Among them were Louis Applebaum, Rick DuPage, George Chase, Lan Adomian, and German composer Richard Mohaupt. Charles Strouse of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie fame ghostwrote much of Shaindlin’s show music. Even Morton Gould lent a helping hand with the light comedy cue “Toboggan Run.”

Mandell’s research shows Langlois Filmusic folded about 1960, though industry catalogues still list it into the ‘60s. But this didn’t end Shaindlin’s involvement in the library music business. Somehow, he maintained or retrieved the rights to his old music and in 1965, Cinemusic was born (though trade ads insist it was founded in 1949; that may be the year of Shaindlin’s original company). He began to repackage—and occasionally re-record, it seems—some of the Langlois library. 20 LPs containing 385 cues of different lengths in 34 moods were advertised in 1965, with a second set in 1966 and a third in 1968. Further volumes followed with a more up-to-date sound than some of the themes designed for fashion shows, sports contests and war footage on newsreels.

Now, let’s take a listen to some of the Shaindlin music that you’ve no doubt heard behind the Yogi, Huck and the Meeces. This is not, alas, The Compleat Cartoon Shaindlin. I have about another half-dozen music beds which are unidentified and, frankly, I don’t have the permission of the person who sent them to me to post them. But they don’t represent all of Shaindlin’s work on cartoons, either; there are cues I simply don’t have. What you can hear in this first batch comes from three different sources and the last two cues are not great in quality.

Langlois Filmusic provided cues on film (hence “filmusic”) and on 78s. Click on the title and whatever you use to play MP3s on your computer should pop up.

MAD RUSH No. 1
MAD RUSH No. 2
MAD RUSH No. 3
UNTITLED TUNE
EXCITEMENT UNDER DIALOGUE
ASININE
CAPERS
PIXIE PRANKS
FUN ON ICE
CRAZY GOOF
FISHY STORY
GROTESQUE No 2
COMEDY SUSPENSE
TOBOGGAN RUN
RODEO DAY
RECESS

Because I promised this post so long ago, I will try to make it up to Jack Shaindlin fans with some bonus Langlois tracks. These were not used by Hanna-Barbera but I know at least a couple were in industrial cartoons produced by John Sutherland.

CHILDREN’S SCAMPER
THOROUGHFARE
LIGHT ‘N’ AIRY
MOTOR BOATING
MILD ACTIVITY
WALKING BRISKLY
HARDWARE

Finally, I’m going to leave you with a little story about Jack Shaindlin. This is from the book The Art of Writing Music by John Cacavas and Steve Kaplan. Cacavas was, among other talents, a composer for the Sam Fox library.

About proofing music....
I remember one time at a recording session in New York, the well-known film conductor Jack Shaindlin was recording Morton Gould’s score to Windjammer for the soundtrack album. I had been working for Gould as an orchestrator at that time, so I went along with Morton to the studio. This was in the early 1960s, when stereo was in its infancy, and the sound coming from the orchestra was glorious. During a break in the recording, a woodwind player raised his hand and shouted, “Hey Jack, I gotta wrong note in bar 46.”
“Well, play the right one, for God’s sake!” shouted Shaindlin in response.

The first and last screen caps are from a kinescope of an appearance on The Wendy Barrie Show where Shaindlin received the 1956 Clef Award for his work on Cinerama Holiday. The middle one is from the mid-1950s game show Make the Connection hosted by Gene Rayburn.

Jack Shaindlin died in New York on September 22, 1978.