This will probably not matter to you anywhere near as much as it matters to me but this is my blog so up it goes…
One of my all-time favorite performers was a gent named Walker Edmiston who in his day, probably worked as much as any actor who ever lived. He did a fair amount of voiceover work but rarely on famous characters. If he'd focused on just that, I honestly believe we'd now mention his name in the same breath as Paul Frees, Don Messick or a dozen other top thespians of that field. He was that good.
But he also did an awful lot of straight announcing work and he also did a lot of on-camera acting and he frequently dubbed other actors' voices for film and television. He was a master of the "voice match," filling in for other actors who for some reason were unavailable to dub their own voices into scenes that required audio replacement. Here's some of what I wrote here when he passed away in 2007…
You heard him constantly without knowing it was him. He did dozens and dozens of movies where they brought him in to imitate and redub another actor. For example, he looped Orson Welles in Start the Revolution Without Me. Once, when one of Mel Brooks's movies was being released, the studio wanted Mel to do the radio commercials but Mel was out of town so Walker went in and did an imitation, and everyone thought it was Mel Brooks. He was the announcer for years for the Stater Brothers market chain in Southern California. He was several of the Keebler Elves.
He did cartoons — Top Cat, Spider-Man, Plastic Man, The Flintstones, The Transformers and many more. Walker took over the role of Ludwig Von Drake after Paul Frees retired from it…and being an ethical person, he only agreed to take it on after talking to Paul and getting his blessing.
I knew Walker, though not as well as I would have liked. One of the many interesting things about him to me is that he did not care at all about stardom. There are actors who care about nothing but…but Walker was fine with anonymous jobs — which is what most dubbing and announcing is. He just wanted to work…and work, he did. His IMDB page lists 158 credits and I'd guess that's like 15% of everything he did.
There was only one time I know of when he really tried pushing his name to the public. In the early sixties, he was all over local Los Angeles television kid shows. He and his puppets (he made and operated puppets) guested on the shows of every local kids show host and for a period — I'm guessing 26 weeks or so — he did a program called The Walker Edmiston Show on KTLA, Channel 5. It was one of those shows done live and largely ad-libbed and the entire cast consisted of Walker and his puppets.
I have not seen an episode of this show since 1962 or 1963 at best. It was widely believed that all the episodes were lost forever but I'm on the trail of one episode that apparently survived. Anyway, in what follows, keep in mind that I have not seen an episode at least since the Kennedy Assassination.
I remember it as brilliantly funny and clever. Walker had various characters who took turns hosting it but the most frequent was a buzzard (I guess) named R. Crag Ravenswood who sounded a lot like Hans Conried. That's Ravenswood with Walker in the photo above. Sometimes, he'd be spelled by Kingsley the Lion, Barky the Dog or one of the others.
Okay now. In 1976, I was hired as a writer on The Krofft Superstar Hour, a Saturday morning series for NBC starring the Bay City Rollers and a plethora of characters from previous shows produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. Walker Edmiston had voiced many of those characters like Sigmund the Sea Monster and Dr. Blinky and most of the supporting cast of H.R. Pufnstuf so he was engaged to play those roles again. He also voiced the Slee Staks on the Krofft's series, Land of the Lost, and when I found out we had the Slee Stak costumes in the Krofft warehouse, plus we had the voice, I began writing them into the show.
Walker was never in any of these costumes, by the way. Other actors were and Walker — and on this show, Lennie Weinrib — did the voices live from a booth on the stage. On Krofft shows, the voices were almost never added later, which was a bit more expensive but Sid and Marty had learned it made for better synchronicity between character and voice.
The first day Walker was on the set, I walked up and introduced myself. Then I told him how much I'd loved that show he'd done on Channel 5. He said, "You can't possibly remember that show." I said I did…and to prove it, I sang as much of the theme song as they used on the show each week.
He was stunned. He said, "You must have gotten a copy of the record we issued of it. You couldn't have remembered it all this time." I told him I didn't know there even was a record. I had indeed had that song running through my head for well over a decade. Walker promised to dig through his garage and find me a copy of the record but he never got around to it.
If I had written this article two months ago, I would have told you (truthfully!) that though I had not seen even a second of that show for over half a century, I still remembered the part of that theme song they used on that show. But about two months ago, my pal Stu Shostak came up with a ten second video clip of the opening of The Walker Edmiston Show. So I got to hear a bit of it again.
And just within the last week, lo and behold, I found that someone — thank you, whoever did this — had a copy of the record and had put it up on YouTube. That not only gave me a chance to once more hear the first part which they'd used on the show but to hear the entire theme song which I'd never heard before and it is, of course, embedded below. That's Walker doing the vocal as three of his many characters — Kingsley, Barky and Ravenswood. It's a real catchy tune and if it runs around in your head as long as it's been in mine, you'll never get rid of it. Proceed with caution…
