The Musicality of Hanna-Barbera with Stacia Martin

Renowned artist/music historian STACIA MARTIN discusses the musical aspects of Hanna-Barbera scores and voices in The Flintstones,  Tom and Jerry, and Hanna-Barbera Records, with keen insights into the artistry of such composers as Scott Bradley and Hoyt Curtin.

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna
Barbera. Welcome to the fantastic world
of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah,

(00:31):
Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Airbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony,
welcome to the fantastic world. This is Greg Airbar, author of
Hanna Barbera, the Recorded history now on audio at your

(00:52):
favorite bookseller or audio bookseller.
Today we have a really, really special guest very close to my
heart, a long time friend and fellow record collector.
She is an artist, a historian, but more than anything else, she
is a music expert and she is in the book because she has lots of

(01:15):
astute observations on the soundand the music of Hanna Barbera,
as well as the visual. Because it's art.
I'd like to welcome Stacia Martin.
Wow, what do I say after an intro like that?
Golly. There's so many things we can
talk about because there's just so much audio and visual when it

(01:35):
comes to the subject. But what I like to do on the
show is go back. Go back and just tell us about
the young Stacia and her vinyl and her cartoons.
Wow. Well, you're very correct in
saying I am a record collector. I actually started, I think,
collecting records when I was about four.
And I dated to the time when I liberated a record for my

(01:58):
brother's room and decided to keep it, which I still have.
And that began my personal record collecting.
But you and I are of a similar age.
So we had the great advantage ofbeing little kids when
children's records, I mean, theyhad been around for a long time,
Alan Livingston and Capital in the 70 eights and things.

(02:18):
But we had LP's now made for children.
We had bigger art with beautifulstorybooks in them.
We had all kinds of things that were also unbreakable as opposed
to the older records. So, so we could really play with
our records. And I know in the case of some
of the Disney records, they had the magic crayon wipe off backs.

(02:39):
And you know, you, you really had fun with your records in a
way that was more than just the listening.
You had activities and visual stimulation to accompany it.
Talking about the Hanna Barbera records, those beautiful
paintings, you know, especially,you know, I've, I've told Willie
Ito on many occasions, thank youfor doing beautiful art.

(02:59):
And you know, Ron Diaz did so many beautiful things and just
it, it was stuff you could look at and enjoy.
And being as my career path did follow visual art, I very firmly
feel that all the that time looking at record illustration
and packaging and color choices and graphic layout and all these

(03:22):
things really influenced what I thought was pretty and what I
tried to produce when I myself was creating anything visual.
It might not have been the same type of material, but just the
layout and the feel and the palette really was something
that influenced me in a way that's got to be really
profound. And I still collect records.

(03:44):
I'm still running around the planet going to swap meets and
secondhand shops. And I always carry a 12 inch
square vinyl, not vinyl canvas tote bag with me just in case I
get something so that the records have a nice Safeway to
travel. And it's it's the gift that
keeps on giving because it's nowadays not only beautiful art

(04:06):
and layout and color from the past and music and sound and
stories and voice talents from the past, but it's joy.
It's happiness because these records were created to make you
happy. And in many cases based on the
television shows which and movies that already made you
happy. So it's just a continuation of

(04:27):
something I have found lovely and wonderful throughout my
whole life. And as you know, you walk into
the new second hand store that you've never been into, there's
always more. There's always something you
don't know. It could be, you know, a
Disneyland record or a Hanna Barbera record or ATV soundtrack
or, you know, anything. And it could be something
straight, straight from the studio or my favorites, the

(04:49):
cover versions of things, the admiring bands or local talent
that wanted to do the same song that we all heard on TV and did
it on their own small label. There's no category that you can
go for that hasn't had a myriad of cover versions done, and
there are no catalogs telling you what regional group

(05:11):
performed this. You just got to find it.
And you do that by digging. I travel from work a lot and I
tell people I'm off to go shopping.
They think I'm going to the mallto buy socks or something and
the people who really know me. So no, she's going to go dig in
this old milk crate in the basement of this antique mall
that's located next to this barnon Hwy. 8, and that's where you

(05:33):
find the goodies. Yeah, that's true.
You mentioned the cover versions, and that comes up a
lot with Hanna Barbera. And my theory is that while
people certainly wanted the original Disney voices, and not
all Disneyland records always had that either, the bond
between the home viewer of television cartoons was so new

(05:55):
that I don't even think Hanna Barbera realized how people
bonded with those original voices.
And we're like, why is this thisway?
However, some of the records, there was no other way to have
it on the record than not have the original cast.
There's a certain fascination about the ones that were not the
original. Now I will say now there's a

(06:17):
fascination when I would get a record and it wasn't the film
voices or the TV show voices, I remember being severely
disappointed. I'm like Jimmy Timmins.
Where is my Yogi Bear song? That is not what I bought this
for. It was disappointing.
And I even remember in elementary school I had the
Disneyland record of It's a Small World and songs from

(06:37):
around the world sung by the Disneyland Voice Choir, which is
a wonderful youth choral choir singing international songs,
Great educational, musically terrific, but it is not what you
hear when you're on the attraction at Disneyland.
And I remember to this day very well.
I was in, I think about third grade and that song was being
played on a big industrial turntable outside one of the

(07:02):
classrooms at my elementary school.
And, you know, I was the kid wholoved cartoons and Disney and
television and, you know, ran home so I could watch bugs and
his buddies and things like that.
And a lot of other kids didn't necessarily care for that.
So sometimes they were a little snarky about, oh, you're the
cartoon girl. Well, it wasn't always the cool
thing. It was really cool.

(07:23):
No, no, no, not. Until Roger Rabbit and Spielberg
and all that. Right, right.
By which time all these guys were like, oh, but that small
world Records was playing outside, and we were on the
playground, and one of the snarkier girls said, listen to
that. They're playing.
It's a small world from Disneyland.
Does that make you really happy?And I said, well, no, actually,
because it's not the attraction soundtrack.

(07:43):
And then I went away, and I'm sure they were just like, what?
What does that mean? You know, it was disappointing
when it wasn't the sound I was hoping to hear.
Now, granted, this is before there was video, before there
were a lot of retrieval systems for entertainment.
And when you wanted to hear thatsound from Disneyland, you kind
of had to be at Disneyland unless you had that one

(08:04):
particular record that had the soundtrack on it.
Also, for television, if you wanted to hear Mr. Eds sing
Pretty Little Philly, you eitherhad to catch that one episode,
which might or might not be airing in syndication yet, or
you had to have that one record that was issued with that
television show soundtrack on it.
And so when you had the possibility to meet these

(08:26):
characters and hear them, be it an attraction, be it a show, be
it a standalone short cartoon, you wanted it to be the thing
you were hoping to get that you never could find.
So when you heard something thatwas a cover version, or shall we
say off brand, you know, it was disappointing for a while, but
that's as a kid because you weretrying to find something that

(08:47):
you wanted. You knew what it was, but you
just couldn't find it. Now, of course, we can find
everything. So it is exciting to hear the
cover versions of things, especially the Golden Records.
They did a lot of that with the TV show theme songs and
alternate voices. And you know, sometimes they're
famous voices, sometimes they'renot.
But you'll get new arrangements of songs, you'll get different
performances, you'll get different interpretations.

(09:09):
And people interpret Shakespeare.
Who would have thought we would have been interpreting the Yogi
Bear theme song in so many ways,you know, And beside O
orchestral, I can sing this myself before there was karaoke.
So now it's exciting to have allthese versions.
But as a little kid, you were seeking to trap the thing that
you loved wherever it had been that you could see it, because

(09:33):
you really didn't have any access to it other than on those
fleeting moments when you were in that place or broadcast
television gave you that present.
Yeah, that's something that in our era, I don't think a lot of
recent young people understand the sorrow and the fleeting.
This you mentioned when something was going to be on for

(09:53):
that amount of time and then it wasn't going to be on till next
week or next year. Forbid it was a special, maybe
next year. Maybe, maybe.
So it was like that and your therecords were the equivalent of
home video. That's really the only way you
could hear them. There were books, plenty of
books. Do you have memories of specific

(10:14):
like the HBR series or any of those?
Well, it's a weird record memory, but I'll say hold.
I am here. But in the summer of 1966, my
very brave parents took myself and my two brothers on an
enormous car trip. We of course lived here in
Southern California. So we started out from Southern

(10:34):
California, drove around and gotto Nebraska, went to Illinois
and was all visiting relatives up to Canada and around into
British Columbia, into the Pacific Northwest and down and
around again and home. That's a large car trip.
So there were no, well, I guess there was that one in dash
turntable system, which certainly we didn't have, where

(10:56):
all the records played at 16 RPMto avoid bumping, you know.
You know, you had a few radio stations playing popular music.
But again, remember as you got out of range of the major
cities, the signals just kind ofebbed away.
And so you had to make your own audio fun in the car.
So we would sing a lot. And I already had quite a few
records by this time. I was, you know, 5, almost 6,

(11:18):
and so I was kind of the one whowould always volunteer to sing
in the car to the great joy of my siblings sometimes, but they
would join in. They were good guys.
But there was one record. It was a single 45.
The B side was a song called Table Manners.
And I thought it was really, really funny because it's about

(11:39):
how to have fun having bad manners.
Of course. I of course, being a very good
little girl, had good table manners all the time, but I
would sing about the table manners song every time we would
stop on the trip and like have apicnic at a National Park.
Piney woods table. I remember being out in the
National Park and singing. Table manners are just no fun,

(12:01):
but I guess certain things must be done.
Mommy scolds me when I'm not neat every time I eat table
manners. And there's a whole thing about
my hands aren't clean and you know, I won't eat this and I
won't eat that. And I tell mommy she's getting
fat and I wouldn't ever do that to my dear mother.
But you have to sing the song properly here.
And oh, I remember my dad kind of snickering and my mom going,

(12:24):
are you going to sing that song every time we eat on this trip?
Oh my gosh. And so that is my travel record
torturing my family. I'm so sorry.
Fun memory because that was the hand of our Bear record that I
quoted the most, shall we say. I was thrilled to find Fred and
Barney sing the songs from Mary Poppins.

(12:44):
Yeah, let's talk. About Oh my goodness, yes.
And you know how many inputs as a child, and this is like 666565
OK, so I would have gotten it probably in 66, which means I'm
five to six years old again. And if you're just learning
where music comes from, where movies come from, how things

(13:06):
sound, where, you know, you can see this type of music, we can
hear this type of music, which is the soundtrack, which is the
cover version. Then to have a television show,
the characters of which, you know, work their way into a
story from a whole different place, from a whole different
time, which you're also just nowgetting to know.
That was a lot to process. But again, charming.

(13:30):
It was so charming. And you know, just hearing those
melodies, which I had known thatthe Poppins music, which of
course is peerless and wonderful, I had actually first
met on the second cast LP, the DQLP with Marnie Nixon and Billy
and Richard Sherman singing the songs because the Vista
soundtrack 498, you know, I was a child, I got the DQ version

(13:53):
198. That's why I learned it.
And the first picture I had to put with the Poppins record,
other than the cover of the LP, was Miss Frog, the hand puppet
lip syncing 2, I believe, Spoonful of Sugar on Captain
Kangaroo. And, you know, and that was very
exciting. Oh, I hear, I hear, you know, a
clip of that song regularly on the commercial for the new movie

(14:16):
Mary Poppins. Can't wait to see.
And here's Miss Frog singing thewhole thing.
And oh, here comes my mom with the dollar 98 record for me,
which I play ad infinitum. And so getting to know the Mary
Poppins music, which culminated in me getting to see Mary
Poppins finally on my birthday, the film was just astronomically
important. But then there's The
Flintstones. How does this in any way, you

(14:39):
know, relate to what I'm seeing?So I don't know that I ever
really cracked the nut of why atthat age.
I don't know that I cared why, but I enjoyed it because I
enjoyed The Flintstones. I enjoyed certainly Mary
Poppins. I enjoyed all these things.
So it was just more to love and I don't think I minded that.
Edwardian England and the world of bedrock really didn't mesh

(15:02):
well. I'm going to assume because
there are British records that have the Disney songs, Peter
Pan, Cinderella with the original book story.
So it's the Barry story, the Disney songs.
They don't name the characters the same.
They stick to the book. Let's just an issue with music

(15:24):
publishing then, isn't it? They well.
They just, they license the songs, but I would assume that
the story was also copyrighted. And those were on like
Wonderland Riverside, they were on Wonderland Golden and in
England they were on World Record Club, things like that.
And MFP sometimes. MFP yeah.

(15:44):
And that's what kind of clues meinto why didn't they just tell
the Disney story? Well, they didn't specifically,
like, you know, they didn't say Anastasia Gisella.
They're just stepsisters. I think in the case of a Disney
thing, the story itself is copyright.
This is my guess, and this is what's so clever about the Hanna
Barbera 1 is the Fred FlintstoneBarney Rebel album isn't the

(16:07):
story of no. They're not meeting Mary Poppins
on Cherry Tree Lady at all. No, it's actually supposedly
real time 1965, only it's the Stone Age, which is really the
60s, you know, as far as the grooviness of the Flintstones.
And it's the hit songwriters episode, right?
They want to write a hit song and the whole first side is.

(16:30):
Since Hoagie Carmichael was not available, here comes the
beautiful, wonderful work of theSherman Brothers.
So yeah, it didn't try to be Mary Poppins story, but those
songs are so indelible and so instantaneously conjure up the
pictures of Dick Van Dyke on therooftops and Julie Andrews with
the Robin on her finger and everything.
That as a little kid, when you've only seen that, to have

(16:53):
something else going on with that, it didn't mesh because
those were our stars. You know, Fred Flintstone and
Barney Rebel were TV stars to us.
Now, of course, granted, somebody could have gone on
Hollywood Palace, Bing Crosby could have gone on Hollywood
Palace and sung Chim Chim Churi.That wouldn't have bothered me
because that's like me standing up and seeing Chim Chim Churi.
You know, that's a person, a friend, Barney.
It's a jolly holiday with Wilma.Wilma makes your heart so light.

(17:20):
When the day is great, an ordinary Wilma makes the
sunshine bright, Believe me. Now what Bond?
And the basic thing is that Fredthinks he's written the song.
And then Barney says I'll be right back.

(17:40):
He comes in with a record and then he plays it and it plays
all the way through. And then Fred does another one
and each one of them is Barney'sconceit.
And at the very end, they turn on Dallas Butler doing his great
Ed Sullivan. And now the featured hit song on
tonight's Yogi Bear show will bethe number one song in the

(18:04):
nation. Chim Chim Cherry.
Then Barney says, remember, lastweek we went to the Drive in
movie, we saw Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins.
That's right. No wonder those songs came to me
so easy. So here's that thing about
people saying, well, how do the Flintstones celebrate Christmas
if they're pretty? It's it's Hanna Barbera.

(18:27):
There is no Canon. There's no continuity.
Wilma's got two last names depending on the show.
That's the fun. Just sit back and enjoy the joy.
Exactly, and as a 5-6 year old, even if you caught a continuity
error, which you might or might not, as long as it was nice and
fun and pleasant, it just rolledalong and you enjoyed the ride.

(18:49):
It was entertainment made and crafted for you, and everybody
else could enjoy it too. But it was not pretentious or
overly lofty or anything. It was just fun.
And you know, you said somethingabout the voices, they were like
comfort food, hearing these things.
So having something you love in one discipline and taking it to

(19:12):
where other things you love live, it was just two pluses
coming together to make it even bigger plus.
Plus on the HBR's they had that wonderful White Curtain and Ted
Nichols background music. And also I think Jack D'amelo,
the editors were doing the cartoons while they were doing
the records. So whatever they were putting
into Granny Sweet and Adam Ant, they were putting on the

(19:35):
records. That was a big thrill as a kid
to hear that background music, which was just as indelible as
the voices and the sound effectson your very own record and
background music even today. On the me TV tunes show I find
myself if I have it on and like oh look, it's Flintstones and

(19:56):
followed make a look gorilla andI love the color palette that
opening titles. He said beautiful with the sun
going up and. When I hear a cue, just just a
transitional little instrumental, not like a full
out song or anything, but I knowthat it was written or say The
Flintstones and I hear it in a different show.
It makes me stop a second. I go, oh, wait, that's for

(20:16):
another show. And then like, well, it's the
same studio, They're allowed to do that.
But it is odd how completely in the space, those little bits of
music aisle away and live in your brain so you can know
they're indelibly associated with their source material.

(20:37):
You know, they say scent is one of the strongest memory cues.
You can smell something and it will take you back to where you
first smelled it. But sound is just as strong
because you can place it. You can remember where you were
when you heard it, and if you heard it out of place, out of
context. It's strange.
I really enjoy watching them on me TV tunes and looking at the

(20:58):
Blu rays and the DVD's. The editors create this little
best of sweet for every cartoon and the more you know the
context. And it's something that we tried
to do in the book was to give you the chronology of where that
music comes from so that after you read it, you'll go, oh,
that's a loopy the loop. If you watch a lot of loopy the

(21:21):
loop, especially the 1st 1520, Ah, that's where that little kid
music comes from. That's where.
And so then when you see the Hokey Wolf's or the Wally
Gators, and apparently what theywould do is they would bunch
them because the lion might use the cues more in their cartoon.

(21:42):
And so they did organize them toa degree.
Depends on which characters are generally in peril and which are
not, right? Right?
We use those running. And they play, they're climbing
in my head now. They're.
Just. Right.
There and. It's not an exact science

(22:03):
because Hoyt Curtain sometimes would do the music in other
sessions, but it can pretty muchgo, OK, OK, this is Flintstones,
this is definitely Jetsons, thisis Top Cat because that's
strings. And as you go into the mid 60s,
you've got the Ted Nichols cues and the D'mello cues from
McGill. OK, this is Magilla.
And then Alice in Wonderland in 1966 yielded an entire score in

(22:26):
the background, got cut up into queues so suddenly you're
hearing. And that's loads of fun to play.
Name that cue and name where it's from.
But it was also something they did in early 50s and 60s
television. Sometimes they borrow cues.
You would hear a Bewitched cue on The Flying Nun or on I Dream

(22:49):
of Genie. The other process they would do,
some episodes would be completely scored and then a
bunch of them didn't have to be.The music supervisor would cut
in earlier cues. And famously John Williams did 4
Lost in Space episodes. But for the entire run of the
show, you are hearing, you know,and just like cartoons, they put

(23:12):
them in throughout the series. There's one where Will goes back
to Earth at Christmas time. One of my favorites.
And not the Carrot episode. It's not, but when he goes back
to Earth, they're playing cues from Miracle on 34th St.
Really. Yeah.
Wow. Because it was Fox.
OK. So there you go.

(23:33):
But it was no more. I guess the word would be
blatant. So to remember, let's say it
again, before there was video, before there was cable, before
there was anything people didn'thave the over and over and over
viewership of these things. So you wouldn't recognize it
because you've only heard it on this scant occasions.

(23:55):
You've heard it on broadcast, unless it was on a record in
which you could play it over andover and over in your house.
And then you'd hear it, unlike an episode of Yaki Doodle and
Go, that's on the Cinderella album or that's on the Winsome
Witch album, because those cues were on your record.
Right. You know, Speaking of Yaki
Doole, I have to say, just the other day I saw Yaki Doodle

(24:17):
cartoon on the Yogi Bear show with its title cards and
everything like that. And I have not seen or heard
that in forever. And I was taken again by how
cute that little muted horn quack quack sound is just in
there. Like in there, adorable.

(24:39):
They had fun scoring these. They weren't Shakespearean
tragedies. They were sweet.
They were fun, and they were signatures for these darling
characters that they wanted to bring you running in from the
other room holding your Kellogg's cereal with the sound
of oh, here comes Jackie Doodle,or here comes this one, because
I know what that little musical signature is.

(24:59):
There is something real pleasantabout having them on, having the
music play, hearing the voices in a lot of cartoons.
It's just there is something wonderful about that.
It is Saturday morning, it's after school watching.
There is something wonderful about that.
And it's in your house. It's not at the movie theater.
So it's a little home year. That's right.
The other thing that Hanna Barbera did was, and you

(25:21):
describe this so beautifully in the book, See, Hanna was a poet
as well as a guy, was in construction, and then became
the sort of the production manager times 10 of the studio
and a master of timing because he was a musical person and he
wrote verse and he wrote lyrics and Hoyt Curtin wrote with him.

(25:42):
Barbera helped develop the showsand the characters, and they
were germane to what the songs would be.
But what Barbera really had a talent for was, as you
described, the musicality of a cast of characters.
Right. It's like putting together a
choral vocal arrangement for a choir.
If you're doing, you know, an all female choir, you could have

(26:04):
1st and 2nd soprano, first and second Alto.
And so you arrange the parts based on the timbre of the
voices. When you expand to Sopranos,
Altos, tenors, basses, you can have four part, or you could go
crazy and have two or three parts within each and then a
desk can't and all those sort ofthings.
But every piece of music that's written as a choral arrangement,

(26:25):
for example, has voicings that are extremely important to the
Sonic result that you're going to get.
Do you want it to sound ethereal?
Do you want it to sound robust? Do you want it to sound playful?
And so that's what the arranger does, is he puts in not only
chords that evoke those emotions, but also the lyric

(26:47):
line and through line and the volume with which the high or
the low or the mid range voices come through.
And when you're orchestrating music, you have a through line,
you have rhythm, you have a longer term exposure to it.
But going back to the voice casting here, even though we

(27:07):
don't have like the Rebels and The Flintstones, just to use
another example, singing barbershop quartet for part
harmony, every episode you listen to how they sound.
You have the mellower tenor tones of what Mel Blanc is doing
with Barney. And then Fred, of course, down
there, you know, he's the base. And then you have Wilma and
Betty, both B Benedaret and Jerry Johnson, as Betty had kind

(27:32):
of a, a secondary non aggressivetone, you know, which is good
for Alto, whereas Gene Vanderpiel was Wilma had a very
strident, not ugly, but a more strident, more nasal based based
tone that was higher. And so when you put all those
voices together, you hear a conversation that rises and

(27:53):
falls much like music does, because you're hearing different
vocal types orchestrated to create a musicality in non non
sung perception. I don't know if I'm saying that
correctly, but you're you don't sense that it's music, but your

(28:14):
ear is delighted by the variety,just like it's delighted by the
variety of what a choral music sound gives you.
Yeah, and he had replaced some people on Johnny Quest.
Originally, John Stevenson was Doctor Quest, but the story goes
that he thought he sounded a little bit too much like Mike

(28:35):
Rode as Rayce Bannon and Don Messick came in.
Who has a very different timber to his voice.
And then you've got Michael O'Shea, the original Top Cat,
and he recorded some. But Barbara just felt like they
had to find somebody. And Arnold Stang came in, and
Top Cat has a big voice cast, big regular for a cartoon.

(28:57):
That's a lot of voices. Lots of cats.
You know, so you've got, so you've got to have a character
that doesn't sound like any of the rest of them, but also gets
the comedy timing. And doesn't grate against the
flow of the audio quality of theother ones.
You don't want to have the odd voice out.
You know they all have to be in concert together.

(29:18):
It's interesting about the substitutes.
Just you were mentioning about how John Stevenson was out on
Johnny Quest the other day, again on the TV tunes.
I saw one of the Flintstones episodes that was recorded while
Mel Blanc was recovering from his accident.
And they had Doz Butler, right, who was subbing for him as
Barney. Doz Butler was brilliant and he
does a very credible Barney, youknow, But you can sure tell

(29:42):
there's, I won't say sound, I will say texture.
That gives it away to me. The texture of his voice just
isn't the same. It's higher in pitch, Dodds
Butler's Barney, but it's not grounded.
It doesn't have the security of flowing along.
It sounds like somebody doing a voice as opposed to a real
person speaking. And I've mentioned this before

(30:05):
and Alan Reed's autobiography, when he tested for The
Flintstones, he felt that the voices needed to be close to the
natural speaking voice with an enhancement for the characters
because he thought this is a sitcom.
These are characters people haveto identify with.
It's going to be different than the seven minute cartoon.
And really up until then, maybe the UP as did that and the

(30:27):
Disney features with human characters, you know, they did
it, but in the seven minute cartoon it's different.
So they ended up going along with that.
Because if you think about the four main characters, it does
sound like them. It's just affected a little bit.
And that was a landmark choice because if you think about it,

(30:49):
it's what The Simpsons does. It's just what Bob Burgers does.
It's what Family Guy does. They are character Y, but they
have to be closer to regular or you couldn't do what they do.
Yeah, they're grounded and real in a way that will sustain 1/2
hour sitcom. Yeah.
And Doz Butler doing. And by the way, he did it for
free as a favor, you know, because of, Yeah, his Barney.

(31:13):
It's not Yogi, it's not Art Carney.
It's a different Barney. And the reason I feel that way
is because the Mary Poppins album, he's Barney with Henry
Cordon. And in some ways, Henry Corden
and Dos Butler have a chemistry that's different than Alan.
Reed Yeah. The higher voices, it's like not
there was any shrillness or, youknow, unpleasantness involved in

(31:35):
these voices. Not at all.
But higher tones carry better than lower tones, just the way
that the frequency of the sound waves move.
Dos Butler has a higher Barney, so it's a different waveform, so
to speak. All you guys with editing
machines. Now you can see the waveforms on
your computer and it carries through and it's a little more

(31:57):
aggressive in an auditory way than Mel Blanks would have been.
So it does hit you differently going back to the original MGM
years with Tom and Jerry. You know Scott Bradley, what a
genius Musical scores. Do you know John Wilson and his
orchestra? Yeah.
Oh yeah, there's that. Sweet.
That they did. That sweet John Wilson is a

(32:19):
musical genius, and I'm a huge fan of his the easy listening
stuff, the replications of greatHollywood scores.
His early specialty was in taking film music that he'd
grown to love growing up in England watching the scratchy
print theater, you know, after school back in the day.
He wanted to find these. He was a just a genius.
And he wanted his little band that he was putting together to

(32:41):
be able to play these things. And he could find the regular
vocal arrangements of stuff, buthe couldn't find scores and
orchestras. And as the years went by, he
found out that MGM when they hadtheir big auction, you know, in
the 70s and sold off not just the lot, but the costumes and
the furniture and the everythingfrom all their movies, they
couldn't find buyers for their big gobs of paper, including the

(33:05):
music library. So they sold it as landfill.
And I know Michael Feinstein dida wonderful series about the
Great American Songbook. And he opens one episode
standing on an on ramp to I believe it's the one O 1 freeway
here in California. And he says, I am standing on
top of one of the greatest treasure troves of music in the
history because The MGM music library went as landfill to be

(33:26):
paved over and create that on ramp onto the freeway.
So what John Wilson did with hismiraculous, wonderful ear is he
rewrote and scored all of those things by ear.
And then as he used went by, he got an orchestra and all these.
And so at the BBC Proms, he premiered some of these things.

(33:47):
The reconstruction of, say, the entire Broadway ballet from
Singing in the Rain, only it's live.
When they recorded these things for the movies, of course they
did it in the segments because the studio musicians, genius
they were, and sight readers they were.
But it's hard to change tempos 85 times in one piece and have
it not sound a little ragged when you only have maybe 2 times

(34:08):
to go through it during the production schedule.
So they would do things in tempo, specific segments, and
then the editors would assemble them.
But what John Wilson did is he made these things big, coherent,
cohesive arrangements that had his orchestra so well rehearsed
that they could play them. And plus, we all now know them
like the back of our hands anyway, and there they are, live

(34:29):
in the room and, you know, in stereophonic reproduction for
your sound system at home. So what he did early on is he
got a Scott Bradley score from MGM and he rescored it from
scratch using his incredibly attune ear.
There are musical cues that involve stacks of plates being

(34:49):
knocked over and suction cup plungers and all these wonderful
cartoon sound effects that were not necessarily Foley work, but
they were part of the rhythmic beat of the music.
And I think it was on one of theBBC Proms that John Wilson and
his orchestra performed those with stacks of plates, with the
giant wash tub, with everything there in the orchestra, guys

(35:12):
wearing tuxes, you know, knocking plates over but making
sure to fulfill the sound of that cartoon music, which was
scored to include those specificnot only effects but pitches as
well. When you see that cartoon music

(35:55):
being so orchestrated for what most classical musicians would
consider utter nonsense, you know, I guess it just shows you
the great serious work and effort that was put into making
goofy whimsicality by these highly professional, wonderful
artists. And that continued on, you know,

(36:18):
with all of the Hannah Barbera cartoons.
You think of the Disney Music Library, which fortunately still
exists intact today. It is not in a landfill.
The Oliver Wallace's and the Paul Smith's and, you know, just
on and on and on. These were artists at the top of
their form. Sure, they were writing
background music for ducks to dance to, but it's wonderful.

(36:39):
And I encourage anybody who hasn't seen this to look up the
John Wilson, BBC Proms, Tom and Jerry piece.
I don't really think it has a title beyond that.
I don't remember which film it was, but it's not only wonderful
to hear, but it's tremendous to watch because these people are
pros. They are concentrating and to
make cartoon mouse and cat mayhem sound as effortless as it

(37:04):
does is really something you can't see much of nowadays
because people just aren't writing or recording music like
that anymore. And again, it's a lot of
material to communicate in a 7 minute cartoon.
So the action is fast and furious, but yet you also
integrate popular songs of the time.
Anytime anybody eats or drinks anything like, say, in a Warner

(37:26):
Brothers cartoon, you know you're going to, from the Warner
Brothers publishing catalog, a cup of coffee, a sandwich in
you, or, you know, first person I ever heard sing the Doris Day
Standard. It's magic.
Yeah, it was. Funny.
Yeah, carrots are divining. Doesn't for a diamond.
It's. Magic, yeah.
Yeah. Oh, and then Doris Day, I was

(37:47):
hysterical because she was singing Love.
You're 998 All if you only know.Which Granny said in the 20
cartoons. Yeah, So many of the things when
I was running home to watch the cartoons after the school there,
these American popular songs, the Warren and Ruby songs, all
these things that were properties of at that Time,
Warner Brothers specifically, were integrated by Carl Stalling

(38:09):
and Milt Franklin into these cartoons as not background
music. You wouldn't run the whole song.
You'd have just a little clip aslike a subliminal nod to the
activity going on the screen. No little kids going to know
what that is. But the adults that were
watching these films in the theaters would get maybe a small
little rye grin going. Oh, I know that song.
Scott Bradley did it too, with The MGM musical songs because it

(38:33):
got out of bed on the right side.
That's right. The worry song Over the Rainbow
off to see the wizard. They would pop up all kinds of.
We didn't sadly have the exposure to those cartoons as
repetitively as we did the Warner Brothers cartoons because
of their massive, not only the Saturday morning show, but the
massive syndication packages that were out there.

(38:53):
Even a few of the Disney ones you'll have like Shrimp Boats,
which was a popular song that was owned by Walt Disney
Publishing, wasn't in any Disneyfilm, but in was it Donald's
Diary, when Donald is trying to bribe Huey, Dewey and Louie to
go away and go to the movies so he can have a nice date with
Daisy. Who's at this playing the sister

(39:14):
of these 3 little nephews? He gives them all quarters to
send them to the movies and theysing Dream boats that come.
And there's movies tonight, which is a quote from Shrimp
Boats. And no one really needed to do
that. It was just funny and it was a
property they had and they were allowed legally to use.
So gosh, what a great education we got.
We sure did, not realizing what we were hearing.

(39:37):
Well, you know what Scott Bradley is also not noted for
enough is that he did score major films in specialty
categories in Dangerous when wetthe soon as it's the animated
sequence with Esther Williams and Tom and Jerry.
That's Scott Bradley's music, the.
Swordfish Chase. Oh, the swordfish chase, which

(39:57):
if you saw a Little Mermaid, I get a feeling they probably
watched that too. There's also in the worry song
and the Can You Couldn't dance segment.
There was obviously. Obviously, because he knew how
to score for that. Also the movie Courage of
Lassie, the sequences that take place in the forest and with the
animals, just those are the onesthat he scored and he gets

(40:18):
credit on screen. But he loved working in
cartoons. He did not see it as like, oh,
someday I'll do big stuff. He thought it was a new kind of
art form and was sort of the up and coming future thing to do.
He spoke about it a lot. He wrote dissertations about it,
and he worked on the first cartoon where it had an original

(40:39):
score that drove the cartoon, and that was Dance of the Weed,
You know, I mean, Fantasia was that way, but that was
established music. This score came first and it was
created with the story in mind, and then the animation came out
of that. It is kind of a landmark.
Yeah, no, these were not guys who were being punished by being
assigned to the cartoons. No, these were real artists.

(41:04):
Proudly making things at not only the top of their game, but
to the best of their ability andwinning Oscars and things along
there with Best Animated Cartoon.
They didn't break those down into subcategories.
And it was, of course, many years before you had things like
the Annie Awards or anything like that.
The celebration of people whose skills were so well honed, whose

(41:29):
goals were to create things thatwere delightful.
I mean, yes, it was a business. Yes, they had to make money, but
it was all about entertainment and happiness.
And you know, back in the days when entertainment generally
meant happiness. I mean, there are serious films
and serious film makers and manytopics need to be explored in
this world. But you know what got America

(41:50):
through the Great Depression? Shirley, Shirley Temple, World
War 2. It's Ben Grable.
Yeah, what got America through the 60s?
Bewitched Gilligan. Genie, You need something that's
just, you know that. Refreshing.
Entertainment for entertainment.And giving you, even if you
don't realize it, giving you thepossibility of better and more

(42:12):
fun things around the corner. Because here's something that's
lovely, and it's going on right now in my world.
It shows you that maybe there can be something that could be
maybe even 3% better coming. Because if this exists, maybe
this exists. It's just accentuate the
positive, I guess that's sort ofStacia has that philosophy.

(42:32):
It's not fake, which is very unusual in Los Angeles, but.
And I was born here. I have to say no, it's true.
And when I feel down, Stacia will not let me.
No, no, she is Pollyanna and it's not sickening.
Sappy. Well, Greg, I have to say, in
order to repay the compliments here too, I'm going to speak in
the language you understand. And in honor of Fred and Barney

(42:56):
and Alice in Wonderland, I will say they'll never split us
apart. Exactly.
Thank you. Oh, that's a great way to sum it
up. Gosh, I love that score too.
Oh my goodness, that's that's a personal.
One as long as these old straw hats, yeah.
Oh, I just like butter. I like when he goes butter.
Yeah, like you're hearing. We could go on and on and on,

(43:18):
but right now I just want to thank the marvelous and magical
Station Martin for joining us. Well.
Thank you, Greg for having me. I will be back.
Take that as a threat and a hope.
I wish joy to everybody out there who understands and has
been given as much of A gift from this wonderful music.

(43:38):
It's the thing we can all hold on to and use as a common thread
of bonding, I think as the worldmoves forward and there's so
much more to discuss and there'sa lot of stuff we all don't know
about. So that's the thing, the more we
discuss, the more we learn aboutand the more joy is waiting for
us. So thank you for inviting me to
talk about lovely things. And thank you everyone for

(44:02):
listening. Thank you for all the nice
things, the nice notes that you've been sending.
I'm so glad that you're enjoyingwhat we're doing here.
And until the next time we get together, bye bye.
We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and
Barbera with Greg Airborne. Please join us again and Many
thanks for listening.