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Russell Garcia started out in music as a child prodigy, teaching himself the cornet, as well as how to read music, while still a young boy. He later received formal training with figures such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and got his first formal job in music through the radio, taking a conductor's spot on a popular program. Best known since the 1950s as a conductor, composer, arranger, and trumpeter, he has worked with figures such as Roy Eldridge, Stan Kenton, et al. He also spent more than a decade at Universal Pictures as an arranger and composer in their music department. He had two early low-budget composing credits at the outset of the 1950s, but it wasn't until the early '60s that Garcia got to show his real abilities in this area, on a proper cinematic canvas, with the scores for a pair of George Pal-produced fantasy films, The Time Machine and Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Those soundtracks might well have established him as an important name in the scoring of such genre movies, but he was never able to follow them up, and apart from two subsequent scoring credits (one of them a Western) in the middle of the 1960s, Garcia's major film composing career was limited to that pair of George Pal productions.