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Hoyt Curtin

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Hoyt Curtin
Born
Hoyt Stoddard Curtin

September 9, 1922
Downey, California, U.S.
DiedDecember 3, 2000(2000-12-03) (aged 78)
Thousand Oaks, California, U.S.
Alma materUniversity of Southern California
Occupations
Years active1957–1989
EmployerHanna-Barbera

Hoyt Stoddard Curtin (September 9, 1922 – December 3, 2000) was an American composer, music producer and the primary musical director for the Hanna-Barbera animation studio from its beginnings with The Ruff & Reddy Show in 1957 until his retirement in 1989.[1][2]

Hanna-Barbera creative director Bill Burnett praised Curtin's work, saying "Music is so fundamentally important to cartoons. Hoyt (was) one of the two giants of cartoon music. (Burnett cited Warner Bros.' Carl Stalling as the other.) What Hoyt does is absolutely smokin', the greatest pieces of cartoon pastiches that have ever been created".[3]

Curtin was also an inventor who was granted six US patents for his novel designs of pipe couplings from 1974 through 1981.[4]

Early life and education

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Curtin was born in Downey, California, the third of Mary "Louise" (née Draper) and Frank Montgomery Curtin's three sons.[5]

Starting to play the piano at the age of 5, Curtin quickly began "writing music". He explained "Mozart, I was not. It was mostly gibberish, but I loved how my older brother would play them (his songs), adding to them, making them sound wonderful".[3]

Curtin graduated San Bernardino High School in 1940. While a student there, Curtin formed his own orchestra - the "Cornfed Sextette" and played in local jazz bands.[1] During his senior year, Curtin wrote and conducted new arrangements of show tunes from the movie Down Argentine Way during the school's annual musical extravaganza. Curtin was elected vice-president of his high school senior class.[6]

Curtin attended the University of Southern California and entered the V-7 Navy College Training Program in September 1942.[7]

After WWII ended, he returned to the University of Southern California, earning both bachelor's and master's degrees in music.[3] While attending USC, he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.[8]

Military service

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Curtin was 19 when he registered for the draft in 1942. At the time, he listed his employer as the Ken Baker Band at the Windsor Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.[9]

Curtin joined the Navy, was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve with the rank of LTJG and served aboard a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II.[7][10]

Career

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Commercial jingle writer

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Curtin had planned to become a film composer. "I knocked on every door". Instead, Curtin first found work at an industrial film company. "It was marvelous, with a big orchestra".

In 2002, Jean MacCurdy, then president of Warner Bros. Animation said "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".[1]

Curtin's experience writing musical jingles for advertising eventually led to his scoring cartoon music at United Productions of America, better known as UPA Studios. His first musical score was for the 1954 cartoon When Magoo Flew which helped the work win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Curtin said he greatly enjoyed scoring cartoons. "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".[3]

Hanna-Barbera

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By the 1950s Curtin had become an in-demand composer for TV commercials. He first met William Hanna and Joseph Barbera while writing the musical score for a Schlitz beer commercial they were producing for MGM in 1957.

Curtin recalled the beginning of his career scoring Hanna-Barbera cartoons: "They were just forming their company. It was 1957 and they'd heard a jingle I'd done and phoned me with lyrics they'd written to Ruff and Reddy..."[3]

Hanna and Barbera read the theme song lyrics over the phone to Curtin and asked "Could I write a tune for it? I called back in 5 minutes and sang it to them ... silence ... uh oh, I bombed out ... the next thing I heard was a deal to record it - Ruff & Reddy!. At that moment they had quit at MGM and started their own company. All of our first main titles were done in that fashion. Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, etc.".[11]

Curtin quickly became Hanna-Barbera’s music director and enjoyed a close relationship with the pair. Barbera said of Curtin "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".[12]

While composing his musical cues, Curtin would refer to pre-production storyboards or watch film and videotape previews to make sure his scores enhanced the Hanna-Barbara cartoons' action and mood.

Curtin was the composer of many of Hanna-Barbera cartoon theme songs, including The Flintstones until 1981, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Super Friends, Josie and the Pussycats, The Smurfs, and The New Scooby-Doo Movies and all its spinoffs until 1989. Beginning in 1960, Curtin also composed many of the stock tunes used as incidental music in the various Hanna-Barbera series, along with the jingle heard underneath Hanna-Barbera's closing logo in 1979. He also composed two of the tunes heard in the background in 1959's Plan 9 from Outer Space, although he was embarrassed by the film's poor quality. The following year, Curtin was the composer for the animated series Q.T. Hush, one of the first cartoons to appear in color.

His other credits include the score for the science-fiction film Mesa of Lost Women (1953), Ed Wood's Jail Bait (1954, as Hoyt Kurtain), Timber Tramps (1975), C.H.O.M.P.S. (1979), and the music for the 1978 Sandy Frank cartoon Battle of the Planets for which a soundtrack was released in 2000. He also composed and conducted the music for Thrillerama Adventure, a two-projector attempt at replicating Cinerama, in 1955 with a 38-piece orchestra.

The Flintstones

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Curtin said of his Flintstones theme "It’s a catchy little tune, just a simple thing arranged for jazz and singers. 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".[1] Curtin recalled "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".[3]

Jonny Quest

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Curtin composed the music for the 1964 Jonny Quest television series. In a 1999 interview Curtin said, "My pianist, Jack Cookerly,[13] invented the synthesizer as we know it for Jonny Quest. It was made of orange crates with a keyboard and thousands of vacuum tubes!"

Curtin recalled the Jonny Quest recording sessions took place at the Hollywood RCA studios using "...a regular jazz band of 4 trumpets, 6 trombones, 5 woodwind doublers, 5-man rhythm section including percussion. Alvin Stoller or Frankie Capp usually played drums. I always tried to get the same guys where possible. They were the ones who could swing and read like demons".[14]

Inventor

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Curtin was granted six US utility patents for his inventions of water-tight pipe couplings for irrigation and sprinkler system plumbing. The couplings were designed for use in in-ground sprinkler systems and included coupling designs for both primary installation and system repair. Among them: US-3857588 "Pipe Coupling", December 31, 1974,[4] US-4035002 "Pipe Coupling", July 12, 1977[15] and US-4260181 "Pipe Coupling", April 7, 1981.[16]

Accolades

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Death

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Curtin died on December 3, 2000, in Thousand Oaks, California, at age 78.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e Woo, Elaine (December 11, 2000). "Hoyt Curtin; Composer of Cartoon Music". LA Times. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
  2. ^ Doll, Pancho (June 2, 1994). "REEL LIFE / FILM & VIDEO FILE : Music Helped 'Flintstones' on Way to Fame : In 1960, Hoyt Curtin created the lively theme for the Stone Age family. The show's producers say it may be the most frequently broadcast song on TV". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2010-11-10.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Mendoza, N.F. (July 23, 1995). "SHOWS FOR YOUNGSTERS AND THEIR PARENTS TOO: Hoyt Curtin has a modern Toon Age melody". Los Angeles, California: Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 21, 2025.
  4. ^ a b "Pipe Coupling, December 31, 1974" (PDF). Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  5. ^ "Hoyt S Curtin in the 1940 United States Federal Census". Ancestry.com. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  6. ^ "Hoyt Curtin in the U.S. School Yearbooks, 1900-2016". ancestry.com. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  7. ^ a b "Hoyt Curtin at Destroyer Base". San Bernardino Sun. June 6, 1944. p. 11. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  8. ^ "U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-2016, California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, 1943". ancestry.com. p. 357. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  9. ^ "Hoyt Stoddard Curtin in the U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947". ancestry.com. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  10. ^ "Hoyt Stoddard Curtin in the U.S., Select Military Registers, 1862-1985". ancestry.com. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  11. ^ Gary Karpinski - email interview with Hoyt Curtin, 1999
  12. ^ "Hoyt Curtin". Variety. December 14, 2000. Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  13. ^ "Jack Cookerly".
  14. ^ "A Conversation with Hoyt Curtin".
  15. ^ "Pipe Coupling, July 12, 1977" (PDF). Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  16. ^ "Pipe Coupling, April 7, 1981" (PDF). Retrieved January 22, 2025.
  17. ^ "Cartoons Considered For An Academy Award – 1954 -". cartoonresearch.com.
  18. ^ "Hall Of Fame". thescl.com.
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