The Hoyt of Fashion

Composer Hoyt Curtin with William Hanna.

Surely there's a corollary to the famous Noël Coward quote, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," that speaks to the unique power of a television or radio theme song, or even just a snippet of music, to signify and conjure a whole universe. (The Michael Friedman formulation "The song makes a space" has been on my mind lately.) There are current podcasts whose opening music lasts just a few bars but which is as indelible to me as any pop chorus. And what child of the 1970s doesn't have this rattling around somewhere in their brainpan:
Likewise, for every vintage TV theme song that brings back memories of a whole show, for better or worse (Land of the Lost, Diff'rent Strokes, Sherwood Schwartz's big two), there are themes I remember much more vividly than, and even apart from, the shows they introduced, from Petticoat Junction to The Rockford Files to Pink Panther. What these free-floating themes evoke upon relistening, then, is not so much any particular character or fictional setting but the lived world of my 1970s childhood itself—a small cathode-ray TV glowing and blaring somewhere in the picture, yes, but also the shag carpeting, the wood paneling, the vinyl upholstery, the smell of a parent's coffee, the low hum of the fridge, the light of afternoon sun filtering through gauzy drapes into the dusty light of a low-slung ranch-style house, and with it all the uniquely fleeting illusion of all-is-well contentment allowing a small corner for me and my imagination to blossom like a spider plant from a macrame hanger.

Perhaps most evocative of all these half-remembered TV-theme-song madeleines is the butch exotica of Hoyt Curtin's Jonny Quest theme, with electric guitar coiling over taut tom-toms, rude trombone blasts slamming into walls of trumpets, clattering xylophone and wayward flute. I remember almost nothing about the show, except possibly the aggressively horizontal rush of much of its opening credit sequence, though I think the theme's relentless momentum is what seals that sense of motion in my memory. (And yes, I've tried to dip back into the show to jog any residual affection, let alone memory, and find it mostly dry as dust and, not to put too fine a point on it, racist.)

What seals the Quest theme as a favorite, even after all these years, is the way it stretches its thematic material—you can't really call its nervily repeated notes and tritone blurts a tune per se—to the breaking point and beyond, which gives it all a frayed edge. Indeed this fraying is hardly incidental: Curtin apparently wrote the trombone part as a sort of dare, making it essentially unplayable—you can hear it described in this short documentary starting at about 2:52. The sweaty tension we can hear in it is real, then, even as we can also feel the shameless manipulation of upward modulation—E-minor! F-minor! F#m-minor! G-minor!—and, when all else fails, major-minor scare chords on blown-out trumpets.

If it feels a bit like a musician liberated, there may be some truth in that: Curtin was accustomed to being given on-the-nose expository lyrics from his bosses at Hanna-Barbera and fashioning them into sprightly, singalong-able, brass-fronted earworms, from The Flintstones to The Jetsons to Yogi Bear. By contrast, he once explained, Jonny Quest "was instrumental, so I just winged an adventure theme." Winged and took flight, straight from the daydreams of my '70s childhood to the homebound longings of today.