When I was a kid, I loved records featuring my favorite cartoon characters and felt cheated when I bought one and found phony voices on it. By "phony," I mean the cover would suggest I'd be getting the actual folks who did the voices on the cartoons but the record would instead feature impersonators.
This was often (not always but often) the case with Golden Records. When Capitol Records did discs of the Warner Brothers or Disney characters, they usually engaged the same actors working on the cartoons. Mel Blanc did most of the Bugs Bunny records for Capitol…though not all. For reasons unknown, there's at least one where Dave Barry did Bugs. Colpix had the original Hanna-Barbera voices on their H-B records — not a surprise since Colpix was a division of Columbia Pictures which was part owner of Hanna-Barbera…though there is one oddity. They issued one Yogi Bear public service record with Chuck McCann playing Yogi instead of Daws.
(Later, Hanna-Barbera had its own record label for a time and things got inexplicably screwy. Daws Butler was, of course, the voice of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and many others…and Daws was on a number of the H-B records. But on their Huckleberry Hound record, Huck was voiced by Paul Frees and they did a Yogi Bear record with Allan Melvin as Yogi and June Foray as Boo Boo! Meanwhile, Daws voiced Top Cat on an H-B record even though Arnold Stang was the voice of Top Cat on TV. No one's ever figured out why they made these and many other cast substitutions.)
Anyway, Golden Records usually hired phony voices. Most of their H-B records which should have had the voice of Daws Butler had instead someone named Gil Mack. He wasn't terrible but he sure wasn't Daws. There probably was no one alive who could have replicated all of Daws's roles with any real degree of success.
Today's video link is really an audio one in two parts: Side A and Side B of a Golden Record called "What's Up, Doc?" with Bugs and other WB characters played by someone who is not Mel Blanc. I'm not 100% sure who it is but it's probably Gil Mack again. The choral singing is by the Sandpipers, which was not the same group that had a few hit records for adults in the sixties. This Sandpipers group consisted of Mike Stewart, Ralph Nyland, Dick Byron and Bob Miller, all under the musical direction of Mitch Miller. Yes, that's the same Mitch Miller who later had a hit TV show called Sing Along With Mitch These Sandpipers were heard on an awful lot of kids' records as well as commercials produced in New York.
Speaking of which: It's usually reported that Mel and Daws weren't on Golden Records because they were under exclusive contract to Capitol Records. That's possible but I doubt it. I'm pretty sure whatever deal Daws had once with Capitol was long expired by the time Golden put out records of Hanna-Barbera properties and I would think Mel's deal ended when Capitol stopped doing records of his Warner Brothers characters. My theory is simpler: Golden didn't want to spend the money. Mel and Daws got paid more than a Gil Mack. More significantly, Golden was set up to produce their records in New York but Mel and Daws were in Los Angeles…and working so steadily there that Golden couldn't have afforded to take them away from that work in L.A. and fly them back to Manhattan.
Golden did issue a few albums recorded in Los Angeles (a Flintstones album and a Rocky and His Friends, both with the real original casts of those shows) but those were either occasional extravagances or, I suspect, records produced by someone else and then acquired by Golden. For the most part, it was surely cheaper to work in New York with Gil Mack at whatever facilities Golden had back there. I do know that Hanna and Barbera would never have objected to impersonations so the folks at Golden may have felt, "If they don't have a problem with it, why shouldn't we use an imitator?"
Here's an imitator pretending to be Mel Blanc. It's kind of a cute tune otherwise and it's in two parts which should play one after the other in the player below…
