Today, we have three Captain Crunch commercials, one of which you saw here the other day. All feature the voice work of Daws Butler, June Foray and Bill Scott, and the first one has Shepard Menken doing the voice of Robinson Crusoe. If he sounds familiar to you, it may be because he used essentially the same voice (a near-impression of actor Richard "Edwin Carp" Haydn) for the character of Clyde Crashcup, the genius inventor on The Alvin Show.
Shep was one of those prolific on-camera actors who pretty much gave it up when he began making a fortune in voiceover. He had done movies and TV shows, including several appearances on I Love Lucy, but he began to devote himself to announcing and animation. At one point, he had dozens of national commercials running, including most of the Jack-in-the-Box spots, but was best known for a long series of ads that ran only on this coast. They were for Western Airlines and in them, a rich bird was seated on the tail of a plane where he was served caviar and champagne. To close each spot, he would intone — in the dulcet tones of Shep Menken — "Western Airlines…the oooonly way to fly!" Shep was also in the cast of the historic comedy album, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Part One, which he called, "the high point of my career." That's an actual quote, uttered to me when I hired him to do a Crashcup-style voice on a show in 1989.
Anyway, he's in the first commercial, no one special is in the second…and I linked to the third one the other day but it's good so you might want to sit through it again. Here's the Captain…
