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How the Smurfs got their iconic theme song
La la la la la la!
In his memoir From Mister Magoo to Papa Smurf: A Memoir, Gerard Baldwin discussed his extensive career as a cartoon producer and director at Hanna-Barbera. Baldwin is the one who was chosen to be, as he phrased it, the Guardian of the Smurfs.
Fred Silverman, then-President of NBC, saw Smurf toys at a toy store in Colorado and learned of the popular brand. Silverman made it his mission to include the Smurfs in NBC's Saturday morning lineup and tasked Hanna-Barbera with bringing it to life. Hanna-Barbera selected Baldwin, who had proven himself as a director on Herculoids and Super Friends, and seemed like the perfect fit to recreate the world of the little blue guys as a cartoon.
The first issue Baldwin faced was that certain executives at NBC were not excited about The Smurfs joining their lineup. Baldwin recalled, "All I was certain of was that the Smurfs were charming and unlike any of the slam-bam stuff like Super Friends that was being fed to America's children. The folks at NBC were totally convinced the Smurfs had no appeal."
Baldwin jumped into creating the pilot, and since The Smurfs takes place in the Middle Ages, he chose classical music, specifically pieces by Vivaldi and Beethoven. The music was selected because Baldwin wanted to set the tone for kids, letting them know that they are going back in time to the Middle Ages; classical music sounded old and would signal to the viewers that this story took place in the past.
Finishing the pilot, Baldwin presented it to NBC, which immediately showed it to a test audience of children. The pilot tested well, but Mickey Dwyer, the vice president of Children's Programming, wanted one major change: no classical music. She argued that kids liked rock n' roll and they didn't like classical music.
When Baldwin tried to argue for the importance of classical music in a show about the Middle Ages, Dwyer allegedly responded, "Gerard, if you put ANY classical music on that show, I'll break your arm!"
Most of the show's music budget had been spent on the now-banished classical music, so the Hanna-Barbera team now faced the challenge of quickly coming up with their own theme song. Baldwin worked with Hoyt Curtin, the main musical director for Hanna-Barbera, and they struggled through it: "(Curtin) was having difficulty finding an old piece of classical music, just the right musical phrase and tempo that would express the 'spirit' of the Smurfs."
In the midst of trying out different songs, Baldwin remembered the storyboards that showed the Smurfs lined up in a parade and had a eureka moment and said, "How about 'LA LA, LA LA LA LAAAAA, LA LA LA LA LAAAAA." They created the theme song from there, and the rest is cartoon history.
