It was sometime after
Hanna-Barbera made
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You and sometime before their
Ted Turner and
Cartoon Network phase when, apparently in order to distract from the
crappy nature of their output during that period, every
theme song to come out tied to a program from that company carried an impossibly over-the-top
brass score.
Trumpets blared forth at the highest possible
volume and
pitch to declare the
ascendancy of
Scrappy-Doo and
worse. Yes,
worse.
These were the days when Hanna-Barbera produced such notable cartoons as Laverne and Shirley. (It is not commonly remembered that there once was a cartoon starring the sitcom characters as privates in the army, long before women were allowed in the non-animated military. Their sergeant was a pig who bore more than a slight resemblance to the afore-mentioned scooby-demon.) Then there was the I Dream of Jeanie cartoon, whose characters are now only remembered as “guest stars” in a particular episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, the only cartoon of the era to continue to get air time on CN. And the Pac-Man cartoon, which is similarly only remembered in its ill-advised Christmas Special format on Cartoon Network around yuletide when they try to fill as much airtime as possible with lame holiday fare. For the sake of good relations with the aliens who get all their information on human culture through Everything, I will not describe the cartoon that featured Casper the Friendly Ghost and a phantom sidekick teaming up with two female outer-space police officers...
All of these shows, and a good deal more besides (such as HB’s varied, shameful recreations of Popeye) had a fair degree of Hanna-Barbera Brass in the theme music. The most fondly remembered of these shows was, is, and always will be HB's various editions of the Superfriends, in which the music actually fit the cartoon. The last known Hanna-Barbera program to feature the remarkable ear-splitting din was Smurfs’ Adventures.