This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.
Most Famous Role: Space Ghost.
Other Notable Roles: Roger Ramjet, Blue Falcon, Powdered Toast Man and the Narrator/Announcer on an awful lot of shows.
What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Just about everything but he was most notably a popular disc jockey, an on-camera personality, an off-camera announcer and a guy who did thousands of commercials, film and TV trailers and promos, and even a game show host. His most memorable job in front of the cameras was as the announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.
Why He's On This List: There are countless guys out there with All-American, testosterone-flavored male voices but very few who can underscore all that macho with a great sense of humor or, in the case of a show like Space Ghost, a convincing sense of drama. And most of those other guys wind up sounding alike, whereas Gary was so distinctive that his inflections became a direction that other vocal talents would receive from their directors: "Can you give it a little more Gary Owens?"
Fun Fact: Gary started out to be a cartoonist but his voice seemed to be too valuable for that profession. So he got into reading the news for radio and when programming directors discovered how witty he was, he became a d.j. He was remarkably successful at it but still retained a strong love of cartoons, animations and old comic books. He was one of those kids who had Superman #1 and Batman #1 and all those early issues which would later be worth zillions but his mother threw them out. In this case, it was because Gary was a sickly kid — his parents were once told he wouldn't survive into his teens — and the smell of old pulp paper was actually having an adverse impact on his health — so out the comics went. In the seventies when comic book publishers began reprinting old comics on good paper, Gary happily bought every volume.