Newman's first small screen music credit was for an untitled sax instrumental written for the popular series Dobie Gillis, starring Dwayne Hickman. The episode, "Northern Comfort," aired in December 1962.
From 1964 through the summer of 1966, Newman worked part-time outside Metric working in the TV music library at 20th Century Fox, running a Thermofax machine (an early photo- copier), carrying music to the soundstage and helping mark up scores for an engineer there. Once he settled in, Newman began to write some cues and rock and roll themes for a few Fox television productions, most notably for the popular TV soap Peyton Place. To capitalize on the show's success, an album of primarily Newman-penned instrumentals was issued in 1965 under the windy title The Randy Newman Orchestra Plays Original Music From Peyton Place (Epic 24147). Newman professes to have been oblivious to the album's existence at the time; that he would burden his blossoming career with such dated elevator-ready organ muzak as "Let's Dance", "Blue Watusi", "The Slurp", and "Randy's Riff" lends his disavowal some credibility. Two other non-LP tracks, "Do You Know" (cowritten with his uncle Lionel) and "Contemplative Elliott" were recorded for the show though not released.
Some nondescript incidental music (one piece is entitled "Monster") was written for an episode in the classic camp sci-fi series Lost In Space: "Lost Civilization" first aired in April 1966.
Newman contributed the deathless instrumental "Divers Find Trouble" to episode 12 of the cult adventure series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, originally aired in December 1967.
Two incidental music tracks also date from this period: "Bad Injuns" and "Jesse James." The former piece is believed to have been written for the TV show Daniel Boone; Newman claims the latter (another collaboration with his uncle Lionel) was based on the popular folk ballad.
A number of mysterious television-related instrumental tracks dating from 1963 to 1969 are also logged in Newman's records; beyond titles such as "Mobile", "Mongrel", "Wound Up", "The Spy", "Curfew", and "Summer Stomp" (and the fact that many were broadcast as far away as Australia!), no other information exists to indentify either the programs the music was written for or any specific air dates.
Aside from Peyton Place, Newman's most recurrent TV scoring was for the late '60's law drama Judd For The Defense. His incidental music appears in four episodes (entitled "Swim With The Sharks", "Sound of The Plastic Axe", "Commitment", and "Between The Dark") that aired during the 1967-69 seasons. Randy also supplied music (lyrics by James Miller) for a song used in one episode, a true relic of its era entitled "Sally Baby" ("Some people say that we just travel on/An infinite thought/An infinite sun/And you never are gone/Are you nothin'?"); as intoned by some drugged-sounding studio band over lightly distorted psychedelic guitar riffs, the song deserves proper time capsule burial somewhere in L.A.