I mentioned the other day here that Walt Disney never liked people to see him when he did the voice of Mickey Mouse. Here's what may be the only footage around of him performing as his most famous character…a bit of footage shot at a recording session.
The other actor in this clip is Billy Bletcher, who was heard constantly in cartoons and on radio shows for many years. He played an awful lot of villains in Disney cartoons including The Big Bad Wolf. He also did a lot of overdubbing of actors in movies, including a couple of Munchkin voices in The Wizard of Oz and…well, I could waste a lot of bandwidth listing places you heard Billy Bletcher's voice.
One place you never heard him was on a TV cartoon. He did a few TV commercials (voiceover and on camera) and a few acting jobs. (He played Pappy Yokum in one of the nine thousand unsold Li'l Abner TV pilots.) But for some reason, no one ever hired him for an animated project on television.
But I tried. One of the first cartoon shows I wrote was Plastic Man and for my first script, the producer allowed me to suggest an actor to play the villain…a living plant creature called The Weed. A week or so earlier, a friend of mine had done an interview with the then-long-retired Mr. Bletcher and told me that Billy still sounded like he'd always sounded…and that he had lamented how no one ever called him for cartoon work anymore.
You can almost guess where this one's going. I asked the producer to hire Billy Bletcher. He agreed. Billy was called and booked…and then he took ill and was unable to do the job. He passed away about a week later at the age of 85. I did get to speak with him once on the phone and, sure enough, he sounded exactly like he did in this clip with Mr. Disney…