Another danged obit but this one is a belated one. Comic Leo DeLyon died last September 21 at the age of 96. Leo (whose real name was Irving Levin) had a long career as a comedian and a musical sidekick. For a long time, whenever Phil Silvers played Vegas or any night club, Leo was the guy at the piano, playing for him and bantering and getting his own laughs. He performed similar duties at times for Sandler and Young, Dean Martin and others.
We are especially interested in him because he occasionally did voices for cartoons. In the original Top Cat series in 1961, he did the voices of the characters Spook and Brain. That's them above with Leo between them. He did other voices now and then for Hanna-Barbera…on The Smurfs and Paw Paws, and on a few specials when they needed voice actors who could sing. He was also the voice of Flunkey the baboon in the Disney version of The Jungle Book.
He was a sweet, funny guy and I'm sorry I missed the news when he left us. He had one of those careers that lasted a long, long time but it was usually in supporting roles so I think a lot of the press missed his passing.
I only found out about it because Georgi Mihailov, a loyal reader of this site, wrote to ask me who else remains of the voice casts of early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Georgi wrote, "I can only think of three people — Tim Matheson, Jimmy Weldon and Danny Bravo, who voiced Hadji on Jonny Quest." Since we lost Julie Bennett to COVID in April of 2020, that's about it, I'm afraid. Of course, that depends on what you consider "early."