Here's another of those mysteries of life that few people will care about but I happen to be among the few…
In the fifties, when the Time for Beany puppet show debuted, its cast mainly consisted of Daws Butler and Stan Freberg, two great cartoon voice actors. Daws provided the voice of Beany. Stan was Cecil. After several years of this, they left and the show's producer-owner Bob Clampett replaced them with other actors. Beany was done by either Jim MacGeorge or Walker Edmiston (they switched off) and Cecil was done by Irv Shoemaker.
In the sixties, several years after the puppet version had gone off, Beany & Cecil came back in a new animated version that Clampett produced under a deal with Mattel Toys. For this show, MacGeorge provided the voice of Beany and Shoemaker spoke for Cecil. Butler and Freberg were in no way involved. In fact, they and Clampett weren't even on speaking terms.
As part of the show's commerce, Mattel put out dozens of Beany & Cecil playthings, many of which were in the toy company's "chatty" line. These were dolls that talked when you pulled a little ring. Today's clip is for a commercial for Beany and Cecil dolls that talked. But here's what's odd. The voices of both dolls were not recorded by MacGeorge and Shoemaker who were concurrently doing the voices on the cartoon show. The voices of both dolls were recorded by Daws Butler. You can even note how Beany sounds like his Elroy Jetson voice. For Cecil, he approximated the voice that his old partner Stan had done for the puppet show.
Why did Daws do this? There's the mystery and it was one of those things I wondered about when I was a lad. I was able to recognize voice actors and I couldn't figure out why they hired Daws. He certainly wasn't cheaper than the other guys would have been. He surely wasn't picked by Clampett.
When I met Daws, I asked him and he said, "I have no idea. They called me to do it so I went out and did it." I also asked Bob Clampett. Bob was a pretty sharp guy but on this one, he just looked baffled and said, "You know, someone told me that was Daws on those and I never knew how that happened." Both men have since passed away and I don't know of anyone else I could ask…so I guess that's it. Just one of those puzzlements with which we all must live. Here's the commercial…
