Early Tuesday morning on GSN, they ran an episode of To Tell the Truth from 1957 and one of the segments featured Harold Karr, who wrote the music for the Ethel Merman Broadway show, Happy Hunting. Of somewhat greater interest to me was that one of the impostors — one of the men who claimed to be Harold Karr and wasn't — was Alexander "Sascha" Burland. Mr. Burland was also a composer and a lot more successful at it than Harold Karr. He wrote TV themes, including the theme for What's My Line? He wrote advertising jingles, the most successful of which was a tune called "No Matter What Shape Your Stomach's In" that was used to sell Alka-Seltzer for many years.
But I first knew the name of Sascha Burland from childrens' records. He wrote and sometimes performed on a lot of them. Sometimes, he was one of those mysterious New York actors who impersonated Daws Butler and played Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and other characters on Little Golden Records. When Ross (David Seville) Bagdasarian scored a hit with his Chipmunks, Burland and a partner (Don Elliott) came out with a series of knock-off records featuring the same kind of sped voices. They called them The Nutty Squirrels and they generally had jazzier instrumentation and arrangements than Mr. Bagdasarian's rodents. The Squirrels didn't have anywhere near as much success but they sold a lot of records for a while.
They even had their own cartoon show. In 1960, a company called Transfilm-Wylde produced 150 short cartoons called The Nutty Squirrels Present. Each episode had a brief spot with the squirrels and then the rest would be a translation of some foreign cartoons that Transfilm-Wylde had acquired. I don't recall them even running on Los Angeles TV but apparently they were successful for a while in some markets.
Here's an episode. The image is a little dark but at least the opening is worth a peek. The song they sing — "Uh-Oh" — was about as close as The Nutty Squirrels ever got to a big hit, reaching (briefly) into the Top 20 on the charts. Burland and Elliott kept the act going long enough to cover a couple of Beatles songs, then gave it up…and that's about all I know about them. I don't know if Mr. Burland is still with us and I can't find him in the databases of either ASCAP or BMI, which should include about 98% of everyone who ever wrote songs professionally in this country.
You now know as much about his career as I do. Watch the cartoon. At least, the first minute or so…