Don Messick was an amazing talent…a guy who could sound like ten different people in a cartoon and carry on conversations with himself. I had the pleasure of working with him a few times and he was a joy. He got it right on every take and there wasn't much he couldn't do.
This isn't the greatest interview of him. I think that's Bill Tush, who was usually pretty good at this kind of thing but he didn't seem to know what to ask Don. Nevertheless, I think you can get the idea of how the voices just came out of him like magic.
I wrote a cartoon special once where we needed to find two voices — a cat and a dog who were very much opposites and who'd be bickering for most of the show. Dozens of actors auditioned for each of the parts. They were recorded and the voices were numbered so that when the folks who made the final selections listened to the tapes, they had no idea who was who. Looking for the perfect contrast, they finally settled on the 9th guy who'd auditioned for the cat and the 14th guy who'd auditioned for the dog.
And when someone went to look up the actors' names and book them, they discovered that both of them were Don Messick.
The Vice-President at the network didn't believe that both of those voices came out of the same guy. They were so totally different. Finally, they decided — don't ask me why — to not hire Don to do either. Here's a few minutes of conversation with this lovely man…