Fred Seibert's Blog

Anyone who knows me is aware of my music habit, and close readers of this blog will pick up on my affection for cartoon music in particular.
Hanna-Barbera Pic-a-Nic Box

So it was extremely gratifying when my friend, Rhino Records founder Richard Foos, agreed to indulge me in the 1990’s with a (now out-of-print) four CD boxed set of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons themes, underscores, sound effects, and other audio ephemera and artifacts of our historic studio. It was compiled and produced with passion and knowledge by cartoon writer/producer Earl Kress.I’ve posted before about my worship and respect for the under appreciated HB music director and composer Hoyt Curtin but I’ve finally gotten around to scanning the great booklet Earl put together for the set. It not only includes a listing of all the sound in the box, but has great essays by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, David Burd, Bill Burnett, and Barry Hansen (Dr. Demento). Plus Marty Pekar conducted an interview about the studio’s unique sound effects library with Joe, Bill, Greg Watson, and Pat Foley. (As we get around to it, you can look at separate transcripts of the essays here.)For a quick preview, here’s a Quick Draw McGraw track from the box set, composed, arranged and conducted by Hoyt:Hoyt Curtain & The Hanna-Barbera Studio Big Band >Quick Draw McGraw (Underscore & Syndicated End Titles)

Last week was a Cartoon Music Week over on my music blog. I tried to survey a bunch of approaches to the classic styles; maybe someday soon I’ll try a more contemporary take. Given your predilections I figure you might like it.

I’ve always loved cartoon music and when more and more public information starting coming out about it during the 80s, I started forming my own theories about it all. Here’s the result of my survey of Hanna-Barbera’s Hoyt Curtin.

A trick question:

NAME THREE COMPOSERS WHO DEFINED CARTOON MUSIC?

(Hint: You can’t. There are only two.)

Ask any reasonably well-informed movie buff who the major film composers are and you’re likely to get a pretty long list of names. You’ll hear Mancini, Williams, Barry, Goldsmith, Bernstein, Steiner, Hermann…

But cartoons? Even the most obsessed cartoon-o-phile comes up short…

(Read more here.)