Above is a photo of Clayton "Bud" Collyer…looking more like a demented gigolo than a busy radio actor/announcer. Anthony Tollin, who knows more about this kind of thing than I do, writes the following with regard to the Superman cartoon just featured on this here site…
Actually, Bud Collyer only did the early Fleischer cartoons, and departed around the time Famous Studios took over. Collyer reportedly quit voicing the cartoons because he couldn't get a raise that would compensate his traveling time to the New Jersey recording studio. Sounds likely, since he was one of the busiest actors and announcers in NYC radio, and lost time equaled lost money for someone who was sometimes doing a half-dozen radio shows a day. It's clearly not Collyer in most of the Famous Studios Superman cartoons. It's less clear in this cartoon since the Man of Steel has only a couple of lines, but it doesn't sound like Bud to me. I've seen unconfirmed claims in print that Michael Fitzmaurice played Superman in some of the Paramount cartoons. It certainly doesn't sound like Fitzmaurice announcing this cartoon, based on how he sounded in his surviving Adventures of Superman episodes (actually just one and a short fragment of another) and announcing Nick Carter, Master Detective.
It does sound like Joan Alexander as Lois, though I rather doubt that Dan McCulloch did voices in these cartoons. He was a commercial announcer, not an actor, and didn't become involved with radio's The Adventures of Superman until some time after Kellogg's Pep came aboard as sponsor beginning January 31, 1943. Of course, McCulloch only did the Kellogg's Pep commercials while the story narration was handled by Roland Winters (aka Charlie Chan), then scriptwriter and director George Lowther and finally my late friend, Jackson Beck. Most of the early syndicated Superman transcriptions were narrated by writer/director Jack Johnstone, while the final 1950-51 ABC season that starred Michael Fitzmaurice was narrated by Ross Martin (of Wild, Wild West fame).
BTW, Jackson Beck told me that Bud Collyer was suffering from Aphasia when he reprised his famous radio role in the 1960s TV cartoons produced by former Adventures of Superman radio director, Allen "Duke" Ducovny. Jackson couldn't believe that Ducovny would consider using Bud under these circumstances, but Duke correctly insisted that Bud would come through when the Bud could barely get out any words at all in conversations with his fellow actors, but through sheer will power was near letter perfect when performing as Clark Kent and the Man of Steel.
Anthony's probably right. My knowledge of the New York based cartoon voice actors ain't as good as it oughta be. But here's something of a mystery: The voice of Jack "Popeye" Mercer is fairly obvious in this cartoon and since he also worked as a storyman, he was probably living wherever the cartoons were produced…which at this point in time was Florida. Joan Alexander, Bud Collyer, Michael Fitzmaurice and all the other radio actors who have been identified in those cartoons were working — sometimes, seven days a week — in New York.
I can't imagine them being flown down to Miami to record — as Tony notes, Collyer couldn't even spare the time to get to New Jersey — nor would they have flown Mercer up to New York to record a voice that a thousand other actors there could have handled. So where were the voice tracks for these recorded? And were they, like the concurrent Popeye cartoons, post-dubbed — meaning that the voices were recorded after the animation was completed? There's virtually no precise lip-sync so I suspect the latter…but for that, they really had to get all the actors together in the same session. They wouldn't have recorded some in New York and some in Florida.
Anyone know what the deal was there?