When I was a kid, I loved Hanna-Barbera cartoons…pretty much everything they produced until about half-past The Cattanooga Cats and I loved Little Golden Records. Little Golden Records were these yellow records for kids which their maker claimed were utterly unbreakable. Some of my friends and I proved that to be false advertising.
So I loved the Little Golden Records based on Hanna-Barbera shows but only if — and this was a very big IF for me — no one was trying to imitate the voices of the characters on TV. A lot of Little Golden Records had very mediocre and sometimes bad imitations of Daws Butler and the other great H-B actors. I could hear five seconds of some Little Golden Records and say with great outrage, "That's not Yogi Bear!"
But on a lot of them, no one tried to sound like the characters I knew and loved. On a lot of them, it was just unknown singers singing the show's theme songs with interesting arrangements and, sometimes, lots of new lyrics and bridges added. My pal Greg Ehrbar assembled a little medley of some of these songs and here it is…