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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C-43A UNDERSCORE
CB-88A PUZZLED PUP

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

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

EM-131I EERIE

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

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

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

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

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

SF-83 MYSTERIOSO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZR-39A WESTERN SONG

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

EM-147 DOCUMENTARY MAIN TITLE

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

C-71 ROMANTIC MAIN TITLE

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

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

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

TC-216 TENSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Yowp request line has been ringing off the hook, or would be if phones had hooks any more.

Actually, it’s a metaphoric phone. For people have been writing wanting to hear more of the music in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons before Hoyt Curtin wrote underscores starting in the 1960-61 TV season.

Much of the music came from the Capitol Hi-Q Library. I’ve promised a full post on the library and that’ll come in the weeks ahead. But suffice it to say the library was created in 1955 and released for commercial use, from what I can tell, the following year. Hi-Q featured cues written for it as well as some from other libraries, including Capitol’s sister company, EMI. And the music for that library is credited to composer Harry Philip Green.

Phil Green wrote gobs of music for the EMI Photoplay series of 45s. Most were written in what he called “suites,” perfect for films and, especially, television. Green would start with a theme. Then he would arrange one version for a main title and another for end titles. He’d then expand a bit with an underscore version, perhaps some bridges to be used in and out of scenes, and a couple of variations on the theme, say a comic or a dramatic version or a romantic arrangement.

One whole series of discs—EMI Photoplay Q2—was designated ‘Comedy Cartoon.’ These found their way into the Hi-Q library, along with a bunch of his suites in other Photoplay Q series (music companies sure loved the letter ‘Q’ back then). And starting with the Quick Draw McGraw Show, Hanna-Barbera widened the number of cues it had been using to include material written by the very prolific Green.

I’ve posted links to some of them at this post but below you’ll find a bunch more. I’ll avoid boring you with the minutiae of these cues but I’ll mention a couple of things. The “GR” designation was used only by EMI. Capitol renamed Green’s material either “EM,” “PG” or “UP” (what the difference is supposed to be, I don’t know, other than “UP” are replacement cues in updates of the library). Three of the cues in Big City Suite No. 2 (there were six in all, GR-247 to GR-252) were put on Hi-Q reel L-27 with the names EM-130 Metro M.T., EM-130A Metro E.T. and EM-130B Light Activity. All three are below with EMI names, though only GR-248 was used in cartoons. I don’t have EMI names for some of the others, so I’ve had to use the Capitol names.

EM-107D has left me baffled; I had presumed when Rhino released it in 1996 as part of the ‘Augie Doggie underscore’ in its H-B music collection that it was from of one of the Big City Suites. But it doesn’t fit the description of any of the cues in the two Suites in the EMI catalogue.

The longer Green material below was placed in the Hi-Q ‘L’ series, but the bridges were put in the ‘S’ (for ‘short’) series. Hanna-Barbera used them in exactly that manner; they were used to bridge from one scene to the next. Most of these cues in this post are bridges and under 30 seconds.

The volume varies on the cues as they came from different sources. Just click on the cue name and it should download into your media player in glorious mono. My personal favourites are EM-107D, GR-248 and GR-58.

EM-107D LIGHT MOVEMENT
GR-154 PICNIC OR COUNTRY SCENE
GR-155 PARKS AND GARDENS
GR-247 BIG CITY SUITE No 2 TITLES
GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY
GR-252 BIG CITY SUITE No 2 END TITLES
GR-58 GOING SHOPPING
GR-75 POPCORN SHORT BRIDGE No 1
GR-76 POPCORN SHORT BRIDGE No 2
GR-78 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS BRIDGE No 1
GR-79 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS BRIDGE No 2
GR-81 FRED KARNO'S ARMY BRIDGE No 1
GR-88 SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD BRIDGE No 1
PG-168J FAST MOVEMENT
PG-171 PERIOD FANFARE
PG-181F MECHANICAL BRIDGE
PG-182D LIGHT MECHANICAL BRIDGE
GR-333 BUSTLING BRIDGE
GR-334 LIGHT AGITATED BRIDGE
GR-347 GATHERING THE PRODUCE
GR-348 EARLY MORNING

NOTE: The music in this post is not public domain. One can find the same audition-quality versions on the rights-holder’s web site. Yowp.

Everyone knows who Hoyt Curtin is. “Yeah, Yowp,” you’re saying. “He’s the guy that wrote all the music for Hanna-Barbera. You know, like that Flintstones song: ‘Let’s ride with the family down the street. Through the, um, something-or-other.’ There are CDs of the stuff out there.”

Does anyone know who Phil Green is?

He wrote a bunch of music in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, too. But there aren’t CDs of the stuff out there. Until maybe now.

When H-B Enterprises began to develop its first show, Ruff and Reddy in 1957, it did what many TV producers of the late ‘50s did. Instead of hiring a composer, it used music from stock libraries because that was cheaper. There were several libraries around at the time, and one of them was the Capitol Hi-Q library.

Not all the music in the library was composed specifically for it. Capitol either bought or leased library music from other companies. One of them was EMI—which might have been expected given the relationship between the two companies. EMI’s production library was called ‘Photoplay’ and the music was composed by one Harry Philip Green. Read Phil’s biography here. The music was designed solely for background use and not for at-home listening, so that’s why it—and other production libraries—are not commercially available like the latest überhyped pop junk.

For some reason, Hanna and Barbera didn’t use the Green cues in the Ruff and Reddy cartoons, nor in the first season of The Huckleberry Hound Show with one exception. Several cartoons opened, such as High-Fly Guy and Tricky Trapper, with a rolling bass drum and horns. In the Hi-Q library, it was known as “EM-147 Documentary Main Title.” But a year later in 1959 when they were developing a second half-hour show, Quick Draw McGraw, Green’s music started showing up (on both the Quick Draw and Huck shows)—most of it originally from Photoplay’s Q-2 ‘Comedy Cartoon’ set of discs.

A chap who has been mentioned on these cyber-pages before by the name of Earl Kress managed to help get several of those tunes released on Rhino’s Pic-A-Nic Basket of Cartoon Classics in 1996. Personally, I was delighted to hear these for the first time and to learn a little about them. Alas, since then, trying to get music clearance for all the pre-Curtin background melodies in the Huck and Quick Draw series has proven to be impossible; it’s one of the reasons the Quick Draw cartoons are not available on DVD where they belong.

However, I have been alerted by faithful reader—and Hi Q obsesso—Steve Carras that some of these Capitol/Photoplay Q-2 cues are, in audition quality, on-line.

For reasons I’ll never understand, companies re-name old production music when it’s re-released; Capitol did it to all the Photoplay stuff, too. So, as a public service, I am going to link to the music, and list the original Photoplay name. Click on the song name and listen (The “GR” is some kind of numerical code used by EMI):

GR-80 FRED KARNO’S ARMY
GR-84 THE BRAVEST WOODEN SOLDIER
GR-258 THE TIN DRAGOONS
GR-253 TOYLAND PARADE
GR-259 AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER
GR-254 CLOCKWORK CLOWNS
GR-93 DRESSED TO KILL
GR-74 POPCORN
GR-64 WINDLASS AND CAPSTAN
GR-456 DOCTOR QUACK
GR-453 THE ARTFUL DODGER
GR-87 SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
GR-90 THE CHEEKY CHAPPIE
GR-255 PUPPETRY COMEDY
GR 256 TOYLAND BURGLAR
GR-472 HICKSVILLE
GR-99 THE DIDDLECOMB HUNT
GR-96 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO
GR-77 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS
GR-65 BUSH BABY
GR-63 THE GIRAFFE
GR-459 DAWN IN BIRDLAND
GR-257 BEDTIME STORY

Now, this isn’t the only material of Green’s that was used in Quick Draw, Augie or Snooper—the wonderful overture to what’s generally dubbed ‘Big City Suite 2’ isn’t here—but this is a pretty good sampling.

And, no, this isn’t intended to be a full history of all the music on the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons before Curtin wrote his own (somewhat inferior) tracking library. We’ll try to get around to discussing that in a future post.