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Gerald Fried, the Oscar-nominated, oboe-playing composer who created iconic gladiatorial fight music for the original Star Trek series and collaborated with Quincy Jones to win an Emmy for their theme to the landmark miniseries Roots, has died. He was 95.

Fried died Friday of pneumonia at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut, his wife, Anita Hall, told The Hollywood Reporter.

After meeting Stanley Kubrick on a baseball field in the Bronx in the early 1950s, Fried wound up scoring the filmmaker’s first four features: Fear and Desire (1953), Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957).

Fried also supplied the music for such cult Roger Corman classics as Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), The Cry Baby Killer (1958) and I Mobster (1959). He also worked with directors Larry Peerce on One Potato Two Potato (1964) and The Bell Jar (1979), as well as with Robert Aldrich on The Killing of Sister George (1968), What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?...

Lloyd Morrisett, the co-founder of Sesame Street whose curiosity about whether television could serve as a tool to teach children was piqued when he observed his young daughter staring at a TV test pattern, has died. He was 93.

Morrisett’s death was reported by Sesame Workshop. No details of his death were immediately available.

Morrisett, then an experimental educator for the nonprofit Carnegie Corp. of New York, and Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer for a New York public TV station, were the driving forces behind the Children’s Television Workshop, which began in March 1968.

Out of that, Sesame Street debuted on Nov. 10, 1969, reaching more than half of the nation’s 12 million 3- to 5-year-olds in its first season.

At a dinner party hosted by Cooney and her husband in their Manhattan apartment in February 1966, Morrisett, who had a background in psychology, told a story about waking up early on a...