Tralfaz Sunday Theatre – The Front Line

In 1956 Capitol Records, under the supervision of John Seely and Bill Loose, put together a library of stock music cues called “Capitol Hi-Q” designed for use in industrial films and television shows. We’ve written about it extensively in this post on the other blog.

You’ll hear it in the earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons, on the original Gumbys and, infamously, on six Warner Bros. cartoons which gave credit to Seely, though he composed few of the cues. It provided one of the themes for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Donna Reed Show (the theme for Dennis the Menace written by Loose and Seely was a Sam Fox cue). And it seems to have been very well used by industrial producers.

One example is in the training film, The Front Line, produced in 1965 by Fred A. Niles Communications and funded by Reader’s Digest in co-operation with something called the Super Market Institute. It’s a nice little time trip to the days when my mother could pay $20 for a week’s groceries, and supermarket chains had different sized paper bags in slots at the end of the checkout counter (They stopped using paper bags to save trees and the environment, and switched to plastic. We know how well that’s saved the environment).

There’s a little bit of humour with a dyspeptic shopper in this industrial short, which won an Honorable Mention at the 1966 San Francisco International Film Festival. But it’s chock-full of Capitol Hi-Q goodness. The opening and closing theme is PE-283 Bright Beautiful by Phil Green, Ken Thorne and Geoff Love, a trio of English composers who worked for EMI. Green wrote a lot of stock music on his own. A partial list of cues:

6:20 – TC-430 Happy Day (Loose and Seely, the Donna Reed theme)
7:44 – GR-63 The Giraffe (Green)
7:56 – TC-431 Light Activity (Loose and Seely)
9:33 – TC-437 Light Activity (Loose and Seely, a Yogi Bear cue)
11:02 – PE-289 Whistling Boy (Green-Thorne-Love)
11:39 – TC-436 Domestic (Loose and Seely, a Yogi Bear cue)

Checkout counters at supermarkets have changed since this film was made (as lines get clogged by people whose debit cards don’t work) and, of course, so has background music. Hi-Q continued to add albums until the late ‘60s and finally discontinued it. But it’s still around and turns up in the most unexpected places if you like industrial films of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

My thanks to Tim Lones for inadvertently suggesting this Sunday Theatre entry.