Someone named "jonesr" writes to ask…
I'm watching the complete Bullwinkle DVD box set, and everytime the credits roll for an episode, Daws Butler is conspicuous by his absence.
Was Daws moonlighting with Jay Ward while exclusive to Hanna-Barbera, and left out of credits for that reason? Were the credits taken from some repackaging where segments that may not have had Daws were not included?
I swear I hear Cap'n Crunch and Elroy Jetson, etc, amongst the set occasionally.
As far as I know, Daws was never exclusive to Hanna-Barbera but there was a period there when he was on so many of their shows, it sure seemed that way. He was concurrently doing shows for Jay Ward and on some seasons of Rocky and His Friends, his name was in the credits — misspelled, in fact, on one year of shows. After a while though, he decided that since he was becoming known as the voice of Hanna-Barbera, it would be an act of loyalty to Bill and Joe to not take credit on work he did for other studios. So he asked the Jay Ward folks to leave his name off.
This is a good place to remind folks that screen credits on old TV cartoons are often unreliable. In some cases, that's because they were never right in the first place. In others, the credits have been changed. None of the prints you see on TV from Top Cat have the real end credits on them. Those film elements were lost. Fortunately, they had the animation and music for the ending without the superimposed names so someone assembled a re-creation…but they only re-created one episode's end credits and then spliced that ending onto every episode. So every Top Cat that's rerun now says, for example, "Written by Kin Platt" on the end even though Mr. Platt only wrote a couple of episodes. Paul Lynde did voices on two cartoon shows for Hanna-Barbera — The Catanooga Cats and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. The two shows were done at the same time but for some unknown reason, his name only appears on the former. It's absent from Ms. Pitstop's series even though Lynde had a larger part on that show. Mel Blanc's name is mysteriously absent from many episodes of The Flintstones on which he was heard. There are plenty of other examples.