Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 70: 'Jail Bait' and the music of Hoyt Curtin

Hoyt Curtin and his misspelled credit from Jail Bait.

A tribute to Curtin.

For some composers, it pays to specialize. You simply find something the public likes and keep doing that thing for as long as you can. Johann Strauss will forever be known for his waltzes. John Philip Sousa's name is synonymous with marches. For California-born-and-bred composer Hoyt Stoddard "Hoyto" Curtin (1922-2000), that specialty was cartoon music.

As the musical director for Hanna-Barbera from 1957 to 1986—excepting a sabbatical from 1965-1972—Curtin labored on such familiar shows as The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, The Smurfs, and Superfriends. His themes and background cues are known to generations of viewers and will hopefully be earning royalties for his family for years to come. The marvelous 1996 Rhino boxed set Hanna-Barbera's Pic-A-Nic Basket of Cartoon Classics is a tribute to all that Curtin accomplished. As you'd expect, much of his music is jolly and circus-like, appropriate for cheerful children's programming, but he was adept at writing jazzy or suspenseful music as well. I'm still holding out hope that his indelible score for Challenge of the Superfriends (1978) is released someday.

A World War II Navy veteran, Curtin studied to become a film composer at USC but wound up writing advertising jingles (with great success) instead. Then, in 1957, animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera asked him to compose a theme for their groundbreaking 1957 series The Ruff and Reddy Show. That series truly established the viability of made-for-television animation. From there, Hanna-Barbera built an empire with Curtin in tow.

But television animation was merely an outgrowth of theatrical animation, and Hanna and Barbera had already been doing plenty of that at MGM before branching out on their own. Hoyt had worked with them (sans screen credit) on numerous Tom & Jerry cartoons since 1954. Before that, he'd been toiling at lower-budget UPA, a studio best known for Mr. Magoo. In other words, he was hardly an animation novice by the time Ruff and Reddy came along.

So how did Hoyt Curtin, the king of cartoon music, wind up working for Edward D. Wood, Jr. on the sordid 1954 crime drama Jail Bait? In short, he didn't. The Jail Bait score is borrowed entirely from Ron Ormond's 1953 film Mesa of Lost Women. The connections between Jail Bait and Mesa are numerous. They were released by Howco Productions just a year apart, with J. Francis (or "Frances") White and Joy N. Houck "presenting" each film. Shared cast members include Lyle Talbot, Dolores Fuller, and Mona McKinnon. Interestingly, Hoyt's name is spelled correctly in Ron's film but rendered as "Hoyt Kurtain" in Ed's.

Spelling aside, this music is shockingly different from the rest of Curtin's music. It's shockingly different from just about all music: a cacophonous, queasy combination of flamenco guitar and avant garde piano jazz. Sometimes, it sounds like two different bands have been locked in a broom closet together and are fighting to get out. Ed Wood ladles on the music very heavily during Jail Bait to the point that it becomes a major distraction, but Curtin's curdled score—even though it was written for a different movie entirely—is perfect for this project. Jail Bait is a story of guilt, restlessness, and discomfort, and the score captures all of that. That trilling guitar sounds like a spider crawling up your back.

A tense moment from Footmen.

Ormond must have liked the score, too. As late as 1971, when he was making the truly outrageous and bizarre anti-communist propaganda film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? with Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle, he was still recycling the Mesa of Lost Women music from 1953. At about the halfway point in Footmen, there's a memorable sequence in which a vodka swilling commie soldier staggers into the home of a God-fearing American couple and demands to spend the night with the wife. Curtin's clattering music on the soundtrack tells us that we're a long way from The Jetsons here.

Did Hoyt Curtin have a career outside of cartoons and those early commercials? It should have been possible. After all, he had his own orchestra by the age of 14 and went on to study under Miklos Rozsa, the Hungarian-born composer for such epics as El Cid (1961) and Ben Hur (1959). But, no, it would appear that Curtin did not really flourish outside of the confines of Hanna-Barbera. His live-action credits are vanishingly rare. The top of his IMDb profile now shows the posters for such titles as Pixels (2015) and St. Elmo's Fire (1985), but these are just some of the many movies and shows to recycle Curtin's cartoon music.

Mesa of Lost Women appears to be Curtin's first live-action feature film credit, but it wasn't exactly his last. Over 20 years later, in 1975, Hoyt wrote the score for a very manly lumberjack movie called The Timber Tramps, starring Claude Akins, Tab Hunter, and Leon Ames. Amazingly, this film was originally distributed by Howco, too. Maybe they kept Curtin's name in their Rolodex? I first became aware of this movie in 1999, when I found a musty VHS copy lingering on the shelf of a Family Video in Flushing, Michigan. At the time, my IMDb review called Curtin's jaunty music "totally inappropriate" for this gritty film, but it's closer to what he was doing for Hanna-Barbera at the time. With appearances by Rosey Grier, Cesar Romero, Joseph Cotten, and Stubby Kaye, Timber Tramps is an oddity worth seeing. Based purely on this score, however, Curtin didn't seem to have much of a future as a screen composer.

Hoyt's last big chance to score a non-animated film came in 1979 with C.H.O.M.P.S., a rare attempt by Hanna-Barbera to break into live-action theatrical movies. This largely forgotten children's adventure film centers around a highly advanced robotic guard dog and features a cast chock-full of small screen stars like Conrad Bain, Valerie Bertinelli, and Jim Backus. Neither Hanna nor Barbera was too enthused about this project, but they were talked into it by producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, coincidentally Ed Wood's old business nemesis from the Bride of the Monster days. Curtain's score is exactly what you'd expect for a movie of this vintage: lots of "wocka-chicka" guitars and maybe a faint echo of Henry Mancini's Pink Panther music. Not only did this film fail to establish Hoyt Curtin as a big screen composer, the title character isn't even the most famous robotic dog in the Hanna-Barbera canon. That would be Dynomutt, Dog Wonder from 1976.

Hoyt Curtin retired without regrets in 1986, choosing instead to concentrate on developing lawn sprinklers. (No, really.) When he died in 2000, his obituaries focused solely on his cartoon work for television, neglecting Mesa of Lost Women, Jail Bait, Timber Tramps, and C.H.O.M.P.S. Hoyt's one weird quasi-flamenco score from the 1950s seems to have been an anomaly in a three-decade-long career. That's not an entirely bad thing. While I've come to love the music in Jail Bait, I'm sure Curtin would rather be associated with compositions like his adrenaline-fueled Jonny Quest theme, which continues to challenge trombone sections to this very day.