Here’s one for the ages. Literally.
Ted Nichols died on January 9th at 97 years old, in Auburn, Washington, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. And if that name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, I promise you his music does. You heard it every Saturday morning. You heard it when the gang split up to search the haunted house. You heard it when Shaggy and Scooby ran — again — from whatever rubber-masked villain was chasing them down a corridor.
That propulsive, perfectly calibrated underscore that made Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! feel like an actual adventure? That was Ted Nichols.
Born Theodore Nicholas Sflotsos in Missoula, Montana, in 1928 — a name he’d legally simplify to Ted Nichols by 1948 — his path to cartoon immortality was anything but straight. Navy swing band in Corpus Christi. Air Force Bandsmen Training School commander, recruiting musicians from Juilliard. Youth symphony director. Barbershop singer at Disneyland, occasionally having coffee with Walt Disney himself on Main Street. Minister of music at a 4,000-seat church in California.
And then, through a chance introduction via a choir member, he met William Hanna. And everything changed.
From 1963 to 1972, Nichols was the musical engine of Hanna-Barbera — composing, conducting, arranging for The Flintstones, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Birdman, Wacky Races, Josie and the Pussycats, and dozens more. His Scooby-Doo cues were so well constructed, so modular and intelligent, that music editors were still cutting them into new Scooby episodes as late as 1985. Sixteen years of continuous use. That’s not filler music. That’s craft.
He was 97. He lived a full, extraordinary, genuinely remarkable life. He got to hear his music come out of televisions in living rooms across the world for decades. Not many composers get that.
Doo-be-doo-be-doo, Ted. Rest well.