I received this question from "Disneyfan94 The Muppets Forever." I don't usually answer questions from people who hide behind handles but I'm going to take the chance that that's this person's real name — Mr. and Mrs. The Muppets Forever had a child and named him or her Disneyfan94. It's probably a very common given name these days. Anyway, here's what he or she wrote…
First off, I'm a huge fan of your blog. I know you worked with Arnold Stang on Garfield and Friends and due to him arriving at the recording studio early, you were able to discuss many aspects of his career including Top Cat. Could you please share some of the stories he told about voicing T.C.?
That was a great day for me. In fact, I spent a great week in New York then, visiting the DC offices, the MAD offices, the Marvel offices, the offices of David Letterman's show, and I think I even had lunch with Joe Simon. And of course, I went to Broadway shows. I took Imogene Coca (yes, the Imogene Coca) to dinner at Sardi's and then to see the musical, Crazy For You. And I took my friend Carol Lay to see Neil Simon's then-latest play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor in which Nathan Lane played Jackie Gleason playing Sid Caesar.
Then on Thursday, I recorded the voice tracks for three cartoons for our show with East Coast talent. It was something I wanted to do and even though it cost a lot of money, our producer was nice enough to indulge me. This is Lee Mendelson I'm talking about…the best producer I ever worked with.
Thursday morn, I checked out of my hotel in New York and was picked up by a limo (paid for by Lee) which took me to a recording studio in New York (paid for by Lee) arriving at 10 AM so I could check and make sure everything would be ready for our first actor to arrive at 11 AM. To my delight, everything was ready and the first actor was already there. The first actor was Arnold Stang. He was sitting there, reading a magazine, looking exactly like Arnold Stang.
We couldn't start until the other actors were in place in the studio we used in Los Angeles. The two studios would then be linked by some sort of ultra-strong digital phone connection and I could direct everyone at once. If you saw the finished cartoons, you would never imagine that one of the actors and the director were 2,815 miles away from the other actors and the main recording engineer.
Call time for the West Coast actors — Lorenzo Music, Thom Huge, Gregg Berger and Howard Morris — was 8 AM (L.A. time). Thus, I had an hour to talk with Arnold about a whole range of things but mostly Top Cat, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and working with Milton Berle. No, I did not ask him about Berle's genitalia but we did talk about the recording studio — the name of which I don't remember, sorry — where he'd recorded voice tracks for Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip" and many other shows.
The main thing I recall from our Top Cat discussion is the fine line they walked to not echo the Sgt. Bilko show too much. As you may know, the first episode or two were originally recorded with an actor named Michael O'Shea voicing the title character. Mr. O'Shea does not seem to have done any produced cartoon voice work for Hanna-Barbera or anyone and many different stories have circulated as to why his voice tracks were dumped and Arnold was hired.
Daws Butler had told me that at one point he was going to be Top Cat's voice. He recorded either an episode or a demo of some sort using what was essentially the same voice he used for Hokey Wolf.
My great friend, the late Earl Kress and I used to puzzle about another piece of this puzzle. On Top Cat, H-B used Maurice Gosfield, who'd played Duane Doberman on the Bilko show, to voice Benny the Ball. Obviously, that was because of the Bilko connection…so why were none of the voices of Top Cat's cronies done by his fellow Bilko cast mates, Allan Melvin or Harvey Lembeck? Melvin was then doing a lot of voices for H-B and Lembeck, though I don't think he ever received any screen credit there, can be heard voicing minor roles on one or two concurrent H-B shows. (Before anyone asks: Joe E. Ross, who was a semi-regular on Bilko and later did voices for H-B, was filming Car 54, Where Are You? in New York while Top Cat was recording in L.A.)
The answer to all this, I learned from Arnold that day, was that Top Cat vacillated between being too much like Bilko and not enough like Bilko. "The lawyers couldn't make up their minds," he told me. "One week, they wanted me to sound more like Phil Silvers and the next week, they wanted me to tone it down."
Apparently, Daws sounded too much like Phil Silvers and Mr. O'Shea didn't sound enough like him. Arnold was the compromise. Arnold didn't know anything about Melvin or Lembeck ever being part of the cast but that might have been before his time there. He was good friends with both of them. (He also was occasionally recorded separately from the other actors because he was sometimes commuting from New York. At the time, technology did not allow them to be able to record the way we did in '94. Some of Arnold's later voice work for H-B was done that way.)
Arnold was also good friends with Howard Morris, who was in our regular Garfield and Friends cast and was in the studio in Los Angeles that day. Once we had the L.A. folks online, Howie and Arnold got to talking about all the times — and there were a lot of them — they'd been up for the same parts. Howie had beaten Arnold out for the title role in the Beetle Bailey cartoons and the voice of the koala in the Qantas Airlines commercials. Arnold had beaten Howie out for the role of Hysterium in the national touring company of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and a part in the cinema classic, Skidoo. Of Skidoo, Arnold said to Howie, "I should have let you have that one."
I told of other memories of that day in this post. Before he left, Arnold was nice enough to record an answering machine message for me…
After we finished recording, the limo took me to the airport and I flew down to Orlando, Florida for a Garfield conference. Many moons ago, I wrote a column about what happened down there. I've never posted it on this website but in the next few days, I will. And if I remember anything else Arnold Stang told me that day, I'll post it. He was a great talent and I'm so glad I got the chance to spend time with him and work with him. I have worked with no one else in the animation business who would have spent the money that Lee Mendelson spent to make that happen.
