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, 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 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 astute observations on the sound and 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 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 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 of being little kids when children's records, I mean, they had been around for a long time, Alan Livingston and Capital in the 70 eights and things.

But we had LP's now made for children.

We had bigger art with beautiful storybooks 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.

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 you for doing beautiful art.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 mall to 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 barn on Hwy.

8, and that's where you 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 that I don't even think Hanna Barbera realized how people bonded with those original voices.

And we're like, why is this this way?

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 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 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 classrooms at my elementary school.

And, you know, I was the kid who loved 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.

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.

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 that sound from Disneyland, you kind of had to be at Disneyland unless you had that one particular record that had the soundtrack on it.

Also, for television, if you wanted to hear Mr.

Eds sing Pretty Little Philly, you either had 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 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 that was 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 were trying to find something that 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're not.

But you'll get new arrangements of songs, you'll get different performances, you'll get different interpretations.

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 all these 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 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 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 the records 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 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 California, drove around and got to 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 all the records played at 16 RPM to 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 of ebbed 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, and so I was kind of the one who would 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 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 a picnic at a National Park.

Piney woods table.

I remember being out in the National Park and singing.

Table manners are just no fun, 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, 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.

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 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 now getting to know.

That was a lot to process.

But again, charming.

It was so charming.

And you know, just hearing those melodies, which I had known that the 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 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 Mary Poppins.

Can't wait to see.

And here's Miss Frog singing the whole 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 know, relate to what I'm seeing?

So I don't know that I ever really cracked the nut of why at that 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 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 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.

And that's what kind of clues me into 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 Flintstone Barney Rebel album isn't the 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.

Since Hoagie Carmichael was not available, here comes the beautiful, wonderful work of the Sherman 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 the rooftops and Julie Andrews with the Robin on her finger and everything.

That as a little kid, when you've only seen that, to have 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.

When the day is great, an ordinary Wilma makes the sunshine bright, Believe me.

Now what Bond?

And the basic thing is that Fred thinks he's written the song.

And then Barney says I'll be right back.

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's conceit.

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 be the number one song in the nation.

Chim Chim Cherry.

Then Barney says, remember, last week 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.

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 rolled along and you enjoyed the ride.

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 something about the voices, they were like comfort food, hearing these things.

So having something you love in one discipline and taking it to 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 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 effects on 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 followed make a look gorilla and I 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 know that 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 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.

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 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 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 they would do is they would bunch them because the lion might use the cues more in their cartoon.

And so they did organize them to a 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 because Hoyt Curtain sometimes would do the music in other sessions, but it can pretty much go, OK, OK, this is Flintstones, this is definitely Jetsons, this is 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 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 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 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.

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't have 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.

You've heard it on broadcast, unless it was on a record in which you could play it over and over 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 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.

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.

There is something real pleasant about 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 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.

Barbera helped develop the shows and 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 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 of things.

But every piece of music that's written as a choral arrangement, 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 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 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 of a, a secondary non aggressive tone, 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 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 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 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.

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 the other ones.

You don't want to have the odd voice out.

You know they all have to be in concert together.

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, you know, But you can sure tell 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 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 have to 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 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, 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.

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, you know, unpleasantness involved in 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 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 musical genius, and I'm a huge fan of his the easy listening stuff, the replications of great Hollywood 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 be able to play these things.

And he could find the regular vocal arrangements of stuff, but he couldn't find scores and orchestras.

And as the years went by, he found out that MGM when they had their big auction, you know, in the 70s and sold off not just the lot, but the costumes and the furniture and the everything from all their movies, they couldn't find buyers for their big gobs of paper, including the music library.

So they sold it as landfill.

And I know Michael Feinstein did a 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 paved over and create that on ramp onto the freeway.

So what John Wilson did with his miraculous, 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.

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 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 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 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 the BBC 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 wearing tuxes, you know, knocking plates over but making sure to fulfill the sound of that cartoon music, which was scored to include those specific not only effects but pitches as well.

When you see that cartoon music 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 and Milt Franklin into these cartoons as not background music.

You wouldn't run the whole song.

You'd have just a little clip as like 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 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.

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 Disney film, 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 of these 3 little nephews?

He gives them all quarters to send them to the movies and they sing 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.

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 wet the 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 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 ones that he scored and he gets 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 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.

Proudly making things at not only the top of their game, but to the best of their ability and winning 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 goals were to create things that were 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 many topics need to be explored in this world.

But you know what got America 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 the possibility of better and more 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 of Stacia has that philosophy.

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 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, 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.

It's the thing we can all hold on to and use as a common thread of bonding, I think as the world moves forward and there's so much more to discuss and there's a lot of stuff we all don't know about.

So that's the thing, the more we discuss, the more we learn about and the more joy is waiting for us.

So thank you for inviting me to talk about lovely things.

And thank you everyone for listening.

Thank you for all the nice things, the nice notes that you've been sending.

I'm so glad that you're enjoying what 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.