“I Always Had a Real Urge to Compose and Write”: Ted Nichols, 1928–2026

If you’ve ever watched Scooby-Doo, you know The Chase Scene. People pop in and out of doors, hide in unexpected corners, often running almost past each other (and sometimes straight into one another).

Parodied, homaged, crossed over, The Chase Scene has become a staple of cartoon (and sometimes live-action) havoc.

In many of the earliest Scooby-Doo series, The Chase Scene often was accompanied by an actual song with lyrics, like these scenes from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

But if you listen, you’ll realize that even in these sequences, there’s additional music that sets up the tone and gets the listener ready for the action to come. That’s the kind of thing that’s not as easy as it looks, and was a key part of Ted Nichols’ work. Nichols died in January at the age of 97, after decades in the music business. 

Born Theodore Nicholas Sflotsos in Montana¹, Nichols learned music as a child and began to want to compose music while playing violin in high school. He joined the Navy after graduation and played saxophone in his base’s swing band. He studied music at Baylor University and joined the Air Force ROTC in the wake of the Korean War. (I was unable to find why he decided to change branches.) He joined the Air Force after recieving his Bachelors’ degree, and rose to Commanding Officer of the Air Force Bandsmen Training School. After his discharge from the Air Force, he earned a Master’s degree at Texas A&I University. He and his family moved to California, where Nichols had an eye on both a doctorate and a career in Hollywood.

Before that, he worked in public schools and at Santa Ana College; he also found work as a barbershop singer at Disneyland². He served as a music minister at Church of the Open Door in Glendora, California, where he met an animator for Hanna-Barbera. His gentle teasing—more or less “Why don’t you introduce me to your boss, if you like my music so much?”—got him an introduction with William Hanna. Hanna hired him to work with Hoyt Curtin, who composed some of Hanna-Barbera’s most famous themes, including The Flintstones, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, The Jetsons and The Smurfs. When Curtin left, he took over as musical director.

“I used to take the score and sit down with my music editors and we’d count the frames and we’d say, ‘well here I got to hit Flintstone here or here he’s climbing up this,'” he explained to the Williams, Arizona Williams News. He also told the Williams News that he would look at character designs, including Scooby-Doo’s, to get a better feel for the character before determining a musical style.

His music was playful and light, and he had a good ear for where to put a noodling clarinet or a chipper goof on the marimba. Kevin Sandler, an associate professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Arizona State University and author of an oral history about Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, told the Hollywood Reporter that Nichols “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 Kenndy’s assassinations in 1968,” noting that Nichols softened the Hanna-Barbera soundtrack with less emphasis on heavy brass and more violin and woodwinds.

He left Hanna-Barbera in 1972 and became the musical director of Campus Crusade for Christ; he didn’t do much in the secular world after that. He composed five operas and wrote scores for Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures. As late as 2013, he was conducting music for his local community. Nichols was married to the same woman for 59 years, until her death in 2009, and then married her sister in 2011; they stayed married until her death in 2020. He’s survived by a son, six grandchildren and six great-grandaughters. 

Hoyt Curtin set the overall musical soundscape for Hanna-Barbera, but Nichols did much of the work to establish the eventual ‘sound’ of Hanna-Barbera. His musical themes, including those for The Chase Scene, were used in every Scooby-Doo series through 1985.

Cade Utterback’s documentary is a much deeper dive into the sound of Hanna-Barbera and is well worth checking out. Curtin and Nichols were part of the musical soundscape of countless American children, and their cultural impact will linger on much longer than any of Scooby-Doo’s phony ghosts.

1. He would change his last name to Nichols in 1948. ↩︎
2. He was a Dapper Dan man! Really.  ↩︎