SHOWS FOR YOUNGSTERS AND THEIR PARENTS TOO : From the / town of Downey / Hoyt Curtin has a modern Toon Age melody

You may not know his name, but you probably can sing along with his famous ‘toon tunes: “The Flintstones”; “The Jetsons”; “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” The list goes on.

Hoyt Curtin has never been a Billboard chart topper, but over three decades the composer has penned some of the most identifiable songs hummed by any cartoon-watching baby boomer.

Curtin began writing music for Hanna-Barbera, starting with the company’s first “Rough and Ready” cartoon in 1957 and continuing to “The Smurfs” in 1990.

Kid Rhino’s new release of “Hanna-Barbera Classics Volume 1,” features 46 cartoon title songs, all Curtin compositions. “The songs are wonderful music,” says Bill Burnett, Hanna-Barbera creative director.

And as they evoke childhood memories for boomers, they evoke fond memories for Curtin as well. Curtin recalls that his 33 years as musical director at the cartooon studio “got pretty crazy.”

“I wrote titles for every cartoon and all of the underscoring” until 1972, when free-lance composers became more prevalent, Curtin says from the Westlake Village home he shares with Elizabeth, his wife of 46 years.

The 72-year-old Downey native started playing piano at 5 and began writing shortly thereafter. “Mozart, I was not,” he says. “It was mostly gibberish, but I loved how my older brother would play them, adding to them, making them sound wonderful.” Curtin, who played in orchestras throughout high school, received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from USC. Study for a doctorate, he says, which he began in 1947, is still in works.

All along, Curtin intended to be a movie composer. “I knocked on every door,” he recalls. The door that opened was at an industrial film company. “It was marvelous, with a big orchestra.” Writing advertising jingles eventually led to UPA cartoons.

His first, the theatrical short “When [Mr.] Magoo Flew,” won an Oscar for best animated short. He loved scoring animated shorts with jazz inspirations: “I viewed the cartoon, wrote the music to fit and scored those at Columbia, with the Columbia orchestra. You scored to picture and you played along so the producers could see how the music fit.”

Curtin encountered a different system--composing music to timed storyboards--when he turned to television after meeting Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.

“They were just forming their company,” he says of his first meeting with the duo.”It was 1957 and they’d heard a jingle I’d done and phoned me with lyrics they’d written to ‘Rough and Ready,’ and asked if I could come up with some music.”

After five minutes, Curtin recalls, “I called them right back. It was so obvious how it should go. I sang it. Then there was total silence on the other end and I thought, ‘I bombed out.’ ” But then they asked if he could get it recorded.

It was the start of a long-standing association.

Curtin has a particular fondness for “The Flintstones” (also used in the 1994 movie). “I like it, not because it was so popular,” he says, “but it’s a song that’s jammed on in clubs in every country because the chord changes are fun to play.”

When “The Flintstones” was originally recorded, he recalls, “We didn’t have synthesizers at that time. We just had a room full of timpanists, a whole studio full of them, like Swiss bell players! It was wonderful.” “The Jetsons” theme is another favorite.

While he doesn’t compose music for cartoons anymore, he keeps busy with Tune-Gard, a company he formed in 1955. “If you wrote a song and worry if it sounds like someone else’s, bring it to us and we’ll give our opinion,” he says.

In the meantime, the CD’s release gives others a chance to offer opinions of Curtin’s contributions. But it certainly wasn’t “too much” for Hanna-Barbera. “Music is so fundamentally important to cartoons,” stresses Burnett. “Hoyt’s one of the two giants of cartoon music.” (He cites Warner Bros.’ Carl Stalling as the other.) “What Hoyt does is absolutely smokin’, the greatest pieces of cartoon pastiches that have ever been created.”

“Hanna-Barbera Classics Volume 1” is available on CD and cassette from Kid Rhino. Check local listings--The Cartoon Network, TBS and TNT--for Curtin’s cartoon tunes. For ages 2 and up.