Tom Bosley voices Harry Boyle (center), a harried suburban dad on Love, American Style.
There are two basic types of classic sitcom dads: the grouchy, cantankerous ones who yell at their kids and the calm, reasonable ones who say things like, "Gosh, I'm very disappointed in you." In the early days of TV, most sitcoms had the second type. Witness such series as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963), My Three Sons (1960-1972), and Father Knows Best (1954-1960), all of which had even-tempered patriarchs. Danny Thomas started to change that with Make Room for Daddy (1953-1964), and by the 1970s, we were finally ready for Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) on All in the Family (1971-1979).
Meanwhile, over in the world of animation, Hanna-Barbera shows like The Flintstones (1960-1966) and The Jetsons (1962-1963). were allowed to have agitated, grousing husbands and fathers. You could say that Fred Flintstone and George Jetson made the world safe for Harry Boyle, an overworked, overstressed suburbanite voiced by Tom Bosley on Hanna-Barbera's syndicated series, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home (1972-1974).
As it happens, the pilot episode for Wait aired as a segment on ABC's comedy anthology Love, American Style (1969-1974). Yes, this was the same place where the Happy Days pilot had aired back in 1971! This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I give our opinions on that pilot. Click below to hear our take on "Love and the Old-Fashioned Father."
Fonzie (Henry Winkler) meets Sherlock Holmes in Victorian London.
Contemporary critics may see the animated series The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang as a disappointment or even an outright failure because it "only" lasted 24 episodes between 1980 and 1981. Apparently, to be successful by modern standards, a show has to accumulate many dozens of episodes spread out over numerous seasons. The live-action Happy Days, for instance, ran for 11 seasons and 255 episodes. Now that's an impressive run! Its cartoon counterpart didn't survive nearly so long.
What people overlook is that it was the norm at Hanna-Barbera from the 1960s to the 1980s to produce only a handful of episodes for each of its series and then rerun those same episodes over and over for years. Long-running series like The Flintstones and The Smurfs were the exception, not the rule. The original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? only ran 25 episodes from 1969 to 1970. Jabberjaw and Hong Kong Phooey ran 16 episodes apiece. Josie and the Pussycats ran 31 episodes, but that's only if you count Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. Wacky Races only ran 17 episodes, and that got two spinoffs! By those standards, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang did respectably.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we arrive at the final episode of the animated series, entitled "Give Me a Hand, Something's Afoot." This time, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and his friends travel to 1894 London and meet the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes (Henry Polic II). If you were hoping for an epic Sherlock/Fonzie team-up, however, this episode may be a bit of a letdown. The characters do meet, but they don't really work together for long. The famous detective's archenemy, Professor Moriarty, is here, but Holmes' sidekick, Dr. Watson, is mysteriously absent.
Does this mean "Something's Afoot" is a bad episode, though? Listen to the latest installment of the podcast to find out!
Fonzie and cavewoman Bruta on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.
It's me, okay? I wasn't ready to let the Happy Days podcast go. I had to keep it going somehow! So now, my poor cohost has been wrangled into reviewing the animated spinoff The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang episode by episode. Don't feel too bad. This entire podcast was my cohost's idea in the first place. Now it's become sort of like a Chinese finger trap. The more you try to escape, the more it clings to you.
My memories of TFATHDG are vague at best. I do remember watching this very goofy Hanna-Barbera show when it was new in the early 1980s and being excited that both Richie (Ron Howard) and Ralph (Don Most) were on it, since they'd just left the live-action Happy Days. The focus here is obviously on Fonzie (Henry Winkler), who gets to be more like he was in the early days of the sitcom, i.e. impossibly cool, irresistible to women, and seemingly in possession of magical powers. The cast is rounded out by a ditzy "future chick" named Cupcake (Didi Conn from Grease) and Fonzie's irritating dog, Mr. Cool (animation legend Frank Welker). All these characters are bouncing around through history in a time machine that looks suspiciously like a flying saucer.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we review what is essentially the pilot for the animated series, the prehistoric adventure "King for a Day." I say "essentially" because this barely qualifies as a pilot. The theme song (narrated by Wolfman Jack) sets up the premise of the show, but there is no further explanation for why Fonzie and pals are traveling through time in a spaceship. They just are, and we have to be fine with that.
Were we fine with that? Find out by listening to our latest podcast below.
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.
