Here's a vintage TV commercial…and a bit of a mystery. As you may know, Time for Beany was a wonderful puppet show that went on the air in Los Angeles in 1949. It was one of those rare kids' shows that adults loved just as much as the young'uns did. It aired live on TV in L.A. where it was done and later, kinescopes were syndicated to some other cities around the country.
For the first few years, the puppeteer-performers were the supremely-talented duo of Daws Butler and Stan Freberg. Daws played Beany and Cap'n Huffenpuff. Stan played Cecil and Dishonest John. Both played other supporting characters and every so often, one of them had to play the other's characters…which they could do because they were both great mimics.
Either late in 1952 or early in 1953, their contracts were up and both chose to leave, in part due to disputes with the show's owner and producer, Bob Clampett. There was some amount of bad blood there. They were replaced by Irv Shoemaker, Jim MacGeorge and Walker Edmiston. Shoemaker assumed Freberg's roles. MacGeorge played Cap'n Huffenpuff. Edmiston played Beany for a while, then left to do a new show Clampett had launched, whereupon MacGeorge began playing Beany. The show ended in either late 1954 or early 1955. You following all this? Fine.
In 1959, Clampett made a deal with Mattel Toys under which he would produce a new show with the characters for ABC, this time with animation instead of puppets. The show was originally Matty's Funday Funnies but later, when the cartoons made for it were rerun, it became known as Beany and Cecil. For this show, MacGeorge did the voices of Beany and the Cap'n, Shoemaker was Cecil and Dishonest John, and both did guest characters, as did some other actors.
Concurrent with the animated show, Mattel flooded the market with Beany and Cecil toys. Below is a commercial from back then promoting the talking Beany and Cecil dolls. That's the great Frank ("Yesssss?") Nelson doing the voiceover but who did the voices that came out of the Beany and Cecil dolls? Surprising answer: It was Daws Butler.
He was not the current voice of either character. He was not the voice of Cecil on the puppet show except for occasional emergencies. He was not even on speaking terms with Bob Clampett (although a few years later, I played peacemaker between them.) So why did Mattel hire Daws?
This was a mystery that bugged me since about 1962 when I noticed that the Beany toy sounded a little like Augie Doggie or Elroy Jetson and the Cecil toy sounded a little like Quick Draw McGraw. Daws, of course, was the voice of all those characters.
When I got to know him years later, it was one of the first questions I asked him: Why did they hire you for that? His answer: He didn't know. He told me he got a booking one day to record some lines for Mattel. He showed up at the studio and found out it was Beany and Cecil. "I thought Clampett would have nothing to do with me then," said he.
The best we could come up with, theory-wise, was that Mattel wanted to just pay one person to do both voices and they figured Daws was the most versatile of the guys who'd worked on either version of the show. (When I got to know Bob Clampett, I asked him. He didn't even know Daws had done it.)
So there's the mystery. Here's the commercial…