A lot of obits lately and I have one more to post after this. I was a fan of David Lander's before he ever Squigged on Laverne & Shirley. He was part of a wonderful comedy troupe called The Credibility Gap which was big — but not as big as it deserved to be — beginning in the late sixties on KRLA radio here in Southern California. It consisted of David, Richard Beebe, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Michael was David's longtime friend and later played Lenny to his Squiggy.
Individually and as a duo, Michael and David did an awful lot of television and a number of movies. I don't remember them not being good in anything. David also did an awful lot of cartoon voice jobs, starting with (I think) supplying the voice of Jerry Lewis on the 1970 cartoon show, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down. In the late eighties, he began appearing as Doc Boy, the brother of Jon Arbuckle, in the prime-time animated Garfield specials.
I didn't work on those but I worked on all the daytime Garfield cartoons, none of which featured Doc Boy so we never called David for them. In 2011 when I was working on The Garfield Show for worldwide syndication, I was asked by the execs at the studio to do a few episodes with Doc Boy. We recorded the shows here in L.A. but the studio was in France.
I told the folks there that it would be no problem to write Doc Boy into some shows but I wasn't sure if we could get the fellow who'd done the voice. By this time, it was well-known than David Lander was suffering from multiple sclerosis. He'd tried to hide it for a while but eventually, it got so serious that that was not possible. He'd even written a book about it called Fall Down Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn't Tell Nobody. It's very good but very sad and they seem to have copies of it for sale on Amazon.
The folks in France understood and suggested that roles can be recast. They're right but I felt that if David Lander was able to work, he should play the part again. This was not easy to make happen because, as I found out when I called, the Screen Actors Guild had no agent listing for David, nor could (or would) they give me his personal contact info.
I hit a few other dead ends before I thought of calling Paul Doherty, who's the head of one of the biggest agencies for voice actors, CESD Talent. He said, "No, David's not with us but I think his agent is Acme Talent." That's not the name he gave me but in light of what comes next, I thought I should disguise the real name of the agency. If there is a real Acme Talent somewhere — and there probably is — it wasn't them.
So I called the Acme Agency and the receptionist said, "No, we don't represent him." I tried some other agencies and the answer was the same.
I was running out of time and close to giving up when I chanced to talk to Paul Doherty again about something else. He asked me, "Did you ever manage to book David Lander?" I said no, Acme said they didn't represent him. Paul said, "It wouldn't surprise me if they did represent him and didn't know it." Paul is wise so I called back Acme and had the following conversation with a lady who may or may not have been the same receptionist…
HER: No, we don't represent him."
ME: Are you sure? His name's David Lander…he sometimes goes by David L. Lander and he was on the TV show, Laverne & Shirley.
HER: I'm afraid I've never heard of Laverne & Shirley, sir.
ME (after one of those "I'm older than I feel" sighs:) Maybe you've seen him around the office. He may have been in a wheelchair.
HER: I'll connect you with our Handicapped Department, sir.
That was their name for it, not mine. I was soon talking with an agent there who told me that, yes, they represented David Lander from the Laverne & Shirley show. Having multiple sclerosis isn't the only thing that can prevent an actor from getting work. Sometimes, no one knows how to find them.
I asked as delicately as I could if David's health would allow him to do a voiceover job. The agent wasn't sure and wound up taking my number and promising David would call me. I suspect the agent didn't want to say "Of course he can" in case he couldn't and I would accuse the agency of something. This way, I could hear his client on the phone and answer the "can he do it?" decision myself. An hour later, David called and he sounded fine. He did caution me though that he might take more than a few takes to get a line right. I told him, "If you keep it under a hundred, we'll be okay."
"Hey," he said. "I'm a professional and I always get it in ninety-nine or less." So I knew there was nothing wrong with his sense of humor. "But there's another problem," he said. "I don't drive and I may not have anyone who can take me to your studio."
I asked him where he lived. He lived three blocks from me. During those days I was searching for him, I'd walked past his house at least twice. I may even have been on my cellphone, asking someone if they knew how to get in touch with David Lander as I walked past his house.
So a few days later, I picked him up and took him with me to the session. This was not long before my mother passed away and the trunk of my car always had her wheelchair in it so we used it to get David in and out of the recording studio.
There was no problem with his performance. Yes, he did take four or five tries to get some of the lines right. I've worked with actors who didn't have multiple sclerosis who took six or seven or more.
Once or twice, it took a lot more and he got way more impatient with himself than he should have…but so what? We got what we needed. In fact, we wrote Doc Boy into some other episodes and had him back. If you check out his IMDB page, you'll see that a lot of cartoon producers got what they needed from him. He was real good. He just wasn't real good immediately all the time. There's a lesson here for all of us.
So as I was sitting here one minute ago, trying to figure out how to end this, I received a text message from Jason Marsden, who did the voice of Nermal and other characters on The Garfield Show. Jason wrote, "I'm sad to hear about Mr. Lander. Thanks to you, I can say I worked with him a couple of times. What a fun talent he was." Thank you for my closing paragraph, Jason. You're absolutely right. What a fun talent he was.