The other day here, I was asked about cartoons that were totally voiced by one person and I mentioned Deputy Dawg as an example. Today, my pal Greg Ehrbar has an article on the web about the LP record that came out about the series.
I remember the show with some fondness when it came on in 1962. Then again, I was ten in 1962 and liked a lot of things that I would not like as much when re-viewed at a later age. I still love the early Jay Ward and Hanna-Barbera cartoons I loved then. Deputy Dawg is one of those shows that grew a bit less wonderful as I grew older and upward, though I still like it more than some other faves of my childhood. It had a wicked sense of humor, being funny in ways that few other TV cartoons were.
Some of that probably came from comedian Dayton Allen, who did all the voices in all or most episodes. (I'm told Lionel Wilson — who did do all the voices for Tom Terrific — can be heard in a few episodes.) Allen, who was part of Steve Allen's TV stock company and a cast member on Howdy Doody, passed away in 2004 and here's one paragraph of the piece I wrote about him then…
Dayton more or less retired from performing in the early eighties. Around then, I had occasion to offer him a role in a TV show I was writing and it led to what is easily the most hilarious hour or so I ever spent on the phone. Our casting director was unable to track down an agent for Mr. Allen so I called a friend who furnished me with what turned out to be Dayton's home number. I made the call to him and he politely declined the job, saying that thanks to wise real estate investments, he had plenty of money…and he didn't feel like flying to Los Angeles to be funny. He could be funny in his own toilet, he said. He was sure funny on the phone, and he seemed to enjoy the audience. He kept coming up with anecdotes and jokes, and he kept me on the line for so long that I felt like I should have paid a cover charge. Weak with laughter, I finally begged off…but only when he announced he had to go to the toilet and be funny in there. I'm sure he was…just as I'm sure it was our loss that he decided to retire when he did.
Funny man. And there was another funny man responsible for Deputy Dawg. A gent named Larz Bourne reportedly did all the scripts — all hundred or so of 'em. I say "reportedly" because I have no proof of that and the show credited Tom Morrison for "story direction," a title which has meant different things on different cartoons. But I always heard Larz wrote them all and Larz, whom I knew briefly when we both worked for Hanna-Barbera, said he did. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd say that if it wasn't true. When he died in 1993 at the age of 77, the New York Times reported…
Mr. Bourne created Deputy Dawg and other cartoon characters for television and comic books. After studying at the Chicago Professional School of Cartooning, he began cartoon drawing and animation at the Max Fleischer Studio in Miami in 1937. Later he worked for CBS Terrytoons in New York City and Hanna-Barbera Productions in Hollywood, where he retired as a story editor and writer 12 years ago.
For H-B, he wrote on Wacky Races, Dastardly and Muttley in the Their Flying Machines, Scooby Doo, Jabberjaw, Speed Buggy, Hong Kong Phooey and many more. One of his last jobs was story-editing H-B's 1980 Popeye cartoons, which brought his career full-circle (sorta) because he'd started in animation working for Fleischer on Popeye and contributed to other, later incarnations. He was more than a little frustrated that in the Hanna-Barbera version, there were so many restrictions on what Popeye could hit and how much he could move and there were, Larz said, endless debates over whether the sailor could even have his trademark pipe.
Larz was one of those folks who worked in animation and comics his entire life…and he probably made a decent (though not lush) living doing so, then he left behind an impressive and vast body of work but without a whole lot of recognition. Shortly, we will be announcing the recipient of this year's Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, which seeks to correct a smidgen of that lack of proper recognition. Larz isn't this year's posthumous winner but at some time in the future, he deserves to be. There are so many worthy candidates, it could take decades to get around to them all.
Anyway, if you read Greg's article on Deputy Dawg and watch any of the embedded cartoons, think of Larz Bourne. Those are probably his words and jokes you're hearing there. And it wouldn't surprise me if Dayton based a little of the title character's southern drawl on the way the character's creator talked. I remember thinking that over some of those lunches with Larz.