Ted Nichols, who composed, conducted and arranged music for such beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoons as The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Josie and the Pussycats, has died. He was 97.
Nichols had a long battle with Alzheimer’s and died Jan. 9 in hospice care in Auburn, Washington, his daughter, Karen Tolleshaug, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Nichols worked at Hanna-Barbera Productions from 1963-72, serving as the company’s musical director for the last eight years of his tenure. He started out working alongside another legendary H-B composer, Hoyt Curtin, before succeeding him and then being replaced by him.
Nichols composed the score for the sixth and final season (1965-66) of the original primetime run of The Flintstones on ABC as well as for the 1966 feature The Man Called Flintstone.
He is probably best known for his work on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, which premiered on CBS on Saturday mornings in September 1969.
“Ted Nichols’ underscores [for Scooby-Doo] are what I consider to be a near perfect set of music for a cartoon,” Cade Utterback says in his comprehensive 2021 documentary about Hanna-Barbera music. “It’s perfect for the show it was in. You can’t tell me it doesn’t help set the mood.
“There are a few tracks that run for a few minutes and have several sections. And the music editors knew this was a bonus as they mixed and matched parts from all the tracks to make a beautiful Frankenstein monster of a music bed in each episode.”
Utterback notes that Nichols’ music would continue to be used on every Scooby-Doo series through 1985.
Ted Nichols soon after he joined Hanna-Barbera in 1964.
Courtesy Karen Tolleshaug
An only child, Theodore Nicholas Sflotsos was born on Oct. 2, 1928, in Missoula, Montana. He and his parents, Nicholas and Josephine, moved to Spokane, Washington, and he started playing the violin at age 10.
He graduated from John R. Rogers High School and in 1946 joined the U.S. Navy, for whom he performed in a swing band based in Corpus Christi, Texas. And during the Korean War, he was commanding officer of the U.S. Air Force Bandsmen Training School, recruiting musicians from Juilliard and other schools.
Along the way, he picked up music degrees from Baylor University and Texas A&I and taught public school in Corpus Christi, where he directed a youth symphony. Nichols then moved to California, directing the band at Santa Ana Junior College and singing with the Dapper Dans of Disneyland from 1958-60.
While working as minister of music at the Church of the Open Door in Glendora, California, he first met Hanna-Barbera co-founder William Hanna.
In 1964, Nichols teamed with Curtin to write the score for the first incarnation of the adventure cartoon Jonny Quest before Curtin left the company in 1965, with Nichols becoming primary musical director.
He went on to work on Space Ghost, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Herculoids, The Fantastic Four, The Secret Squirrel Show, Shazzan, The Atom Ant Show, Wacky Races (and the spinoffs The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Dastardly and Muttley and their Flying Machines), Josie and the Pussycats and The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show and the live-action series The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Nichols left H-B to write operas and gospel works and serve as the musical director of Campus Crusade for Christ, organizing music groups for kids.
“Ted’s music bridged the transition between science-fiction and slapstick programming on Saturday morning as demands for greater social control and regulation of media violence surged in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968,” Kevin Sandler, co-editor of the 2024 book Hanna and Barbera Conversations, noted in a statement to THR.
“He used less brass and more high woodwinds and violins in his instrumentation for Scooby-Doo and other comedy series to achieve a less intense, funnier sound.”
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his son, David; grandchildren Tawny, Kevin, Brian, Alex, Carson and Cammie; and six great-granddaughters. He was married twice, to Doris from 1950 until her death in October 2009 and to her younger sister Catherine from 2011 until her death in December 2020.
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