Hoyt Stoddard Curtin (September 9, 1922 – December 3, 2000) was an American composer, music producer and the primary musical director for Hanna-Barbera from its beginnings with The Ruff and Reddy Show from 1957 to 1965, and again from 1972 to 1986 until his retirement in 1989.
Curtin composed many of the theme songs for Hanna-Barbera's cartoons, including The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Yogi Bear Show, Quick Draw McGraw, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Super Friends, Josie and the Pussycats, The Smurfs, and The New Scooby-Doo Movies. In 1960, Curtin also started composing the incidental music for many Hanna-Barbera animated series.
During his five decade career, Curtin wrote, conducted and produced thousands of unique theme songs, musical cues and libraries of incidental music used during the production of animated cartoon shows. For instance, there are currently 2,047 of his compositions still registered with BMI and 1,102 of his compositions still registered with ASCAP.
Curtin's experience in advertising jingle writing honed his work in creating animation show theme songs. He said "In a commercial you have one minute, or forty seconds, to sell the product. Therefore every single note has got to mean something, and has got to do something. And that's exactly how I approached one-minute main titles: it was to sell the show".
Hanna-Barbera's co-founder Joseph Barbera said of Curtin "Few people ever have the chance to work with a genius. All of us at Hanna-Barbera who worked with Hoyt are among those few". Hanna-Barbera creative director Bill Burnett praised Curtin's work, saying "Music is so fundamentally important to cartoons. Hoyt (was) one of the two giants of cartoon music. (Burnett cited Warner Bros.' Carl Stalling as the other.) What Hoyt does is absolutely smokin', the greatest pieces of cartoon pastiches that have ever been created".
In 2002, Jean MacCurdy, then president of Warner Bros. Animation, said "Hoyt was the king of jingle-making. His strong suit was coming up with the themes that almost anyone on the street could sing at the drop of a hat. He was really quite remarkable".
Composer John Debney said of Curtin, "Hoyt was a jazzer, he was a keyboard player for one of the big bands and he was in the service. That's why his music sounds the way it does, he always loved those jazz chords, and they're fabulous."
Curtin was also an inventor who was granted six US patents for his novel designs of pipe couplings from 1974 through 1981.
Curtin was born in Downey, California, the third of Mary "Louise" (née Draper) and Frank Montgomery Curtin's three sons.
Starting to play the piano at the age of 5, Curtin quickly began "writing music". He explained "Mozart, I was not. It was mostly gibberish, but I loved how my older brother would play them (his songs), adding to them, making them sound wonderful".
Curtin graduated from San Bernardino High School in 1940. While a student there, Curtin formed his own orchestra, the "Cornfed Sextette," and played in local jazz bands. During his senior year, Curtin wrote and conducted new arrangements of show tunes from the movie Down Argentine Way during the school's annual musical extravaganza. Curtin was elected vice-president of his high school senior class.
Curtin attended the University of Southern California, where he earned an accelerated bachelor's degree. While attending USC, he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Curtin entered the V-7 Navy College Training Program in September 1942.
Curtin was 19 when he registered for the draft in 1942. At the time, he listed his employer as the Ken Baker Band at the Windsor Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.
Curtin joined the Navy, was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve with the rank of LTJG and served aboard a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II.
After WWII ended, he returned to the University of Southern California, earning a master's degree in music. Curtin explained his decision to return to USC, saying "I studied piano all my life, of course, and went to USC's school of music and studied composition... I was supposed to go to Juilliard after the war, on the G.I. Bill, and the man who enters you asked me why I was going to Juilliard when USC had people like Ernst Toch and the biggies at the time. Why go to Juilliard? ...So I called up my friend who let me enroll late at USC and drove back there at about a hundred miles an hour and went to lake my masters degree. It was great! We had some marvelous teachers. I studied with Miklós Rózsa and I just kept writing all I could, trying to get a job and that's not easy.
Curtin originally planned to become a film composer. "I knocked on every door". His first film composition was the score for Mesa of Lost Women (1952). Curtin said "It's the world's worst film, I think. It was really bad when I wrote it but now it's worse. As I remember, it was about ladies on an alien planet who turned into tarantulas... I didn't have any budget so I had to do it with two pianos. A friend of mine, Ray Rasch — one of the real great jazz guys — played the other piano. We really had fun doing that". Curtin's score music was later reused in the Ed Wood film Jail Bait (1954, credited as "Hoyt Kurtain").
In 1956 Curtin was musical director for Thrillarama Productions in Houston, Texas. He conducted a 38-piece orchestra while recording the score he composed for the company's film Thrillarama Adventure, a Cinerama style travelog which used two cameras and two projectors. Curtin also composed two of the tunes heard in the background in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), although he was embarrassed by the film's poor quality.
Disillusioned with film work, Curtin next found work at Cascade Pictures, Inc. in Hollywood, which was one of the pioneer commercial production houses in the early stages of television. Curtin said "It was marvelous, with a big orchestra". By the 1950s Curtin had become an in-demand composer for TV commercials.