Hoyt Curtin

Hoyt Curtin
Born	Hoyt Stoddard Curtin September 9, 1922 Downey, California, U.S.
Died	December 3, 2000(2000-12-03) (aged 78) Thousand Oaks, California, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Southern California
Occupations	Composer Conductor Producer Inventor
Years active	1957–1989
Employer	Hanna-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.

Curtin composed many of the theme songs for Hanna-Barbera's cartoons, including The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Yogi Bear Show, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, Super Friends, Josie and the Pussycats, The Smurfs, and The New Scooby-Doo Movies. In 1960, Curtin also started composing the incidental music for many Hanna-Barbera animated series.

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".

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".

Composer John Debney said of Curtin, "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."

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

Early life and education

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

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".

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. 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.

Curtin attended the University of Southern California where he earned an accelerated bachelor's degree. While attending USC, he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Curtin entered the V-7 Navy College Training Program in September 1942.

Military service

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.

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.

Later education

After WWII ended, he returned to the University of Southern California, earning a master's degree in music. Curtin explained his decision to return to USC, saying "I studied piano all my life, of course, and went to USC’s school of music and studied composition... I was supposed to go to Juilliard after the war, on the G.I. Bill, and the man who enters you asked me why I was going to Juilliard when USC had people like Ernst Toch and the biggies at the time. Why go to Juilliard? ...So I called up my friend who let me enroll late at USC and drove back there at about a hundred miles an hour and went to lake my masters degree. It was great! We had some marvelous teachers. I studied with Miklós Rózsa and I just kept writing all I could, trying to get a job and that's not easy.

Career

Film scoring

Curtin originally planned to become a film composer. "I knocked on every door". His first film composition was the score for Mesa of Lost Women (1952). Curtis said "It’s the world's worst film, I think. 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... I didn’t have any budget so I had to do it with two pianos. A friend of mine, Ray Rasch — one of the real great jazz guys — played the other piano. We really had fun doing that". Curtin's score music was later reused in the Ed Wood film Jail Bait (1954, credited as "Hoyt Kurtain").

In 1956 Curtin was musical director for Thrillarama Productions in Houston, Texas. He conducted a 38-piece orchestra while recording the score we composed for the company's film Thrillarama Adventure, a Cinerama style travelog which used two cameras and two projectors. Curtin also composed two of the tunes heard in the background in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), although he was embarrassed by the film's poor quality.

Commercial jingle writer

Disillusioned with film work, Curtin next found work at an Cascade Pictures, Inc. in Hollywood, which was one of the pioneer commercial production houses in the early stages of television. Curtin said "It was marvelous, with a big orchestra".

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".

Hanna-Barbera

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..."

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.".

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".

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.

In 1960, Curtin was the composer for the animated series Q.T. Hush, one of the first cartoons to appear in color. That same year, 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.

The Flintstones

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". 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".

Jonny Quest

Curtin composed the music for the 1964 Jonny Quest television series. In a 1999 interview Curtin said, "My pianist, Jack Cookerly, 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".

Later film work

Curtin's later film score credits include 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.

Inventor

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, US-4035002 "Pipe Coupling", July 12, 1977 and US-4260181 "Pipe Coupling", April 7, 1981.

Accolades

• 1955: Academy Awards – Winner - Best Animated Short Film (Cartoon) – When Magoo Flew

• 2000: Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award - 28th Annual Annie Awards

• 2024: Society of Composers & Lyricists - Hall of Fame Inductee

Death

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

External links

• Hoyt Curtin at IMDb
• Hoyt Curtin at Find a Grave