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This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Snidely Whiplash in the Dudley Do-Right cartoons.

Other Notable Roles: Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan, Professor Waldo Wigglesworth on Hoppity Hooper, parts in The Phantom Tollbooth and several animated Dr. Seuss specials and a few others.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Conried was a very prolific actor logging hundreds of radio, film and TV appearances, often appearing as himself on talk shows and game show panels. His most notable film appearance is probably his starring role in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and his most famous TV presence was the recurring part of Uncle Tonoose on The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy) or maybe as the host of Jay Ward's Fractured Flickers. He can reportedly be seen briefly in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

Why He's On This List: Hans Conried was one of those voice actors who basically had one voice but it was a great one, developed on stage and radio, including his stint as a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Company. He usually played villains and had a way of making the bad guys uncommonly human and funny. That was one of the reasons he worked so much. Another was that everyone seemed to love having him around.

Fun Fact: There's a theatrical tradition in productions of Peter Pan for Captain Hook and the father (Mr. Darling) to be played by the same actor, thereby suggesting a parallel between the two characters. In Disney's 1953 animated version, the tradition continued with Conried voicing both — which probably went unnoticed by moviegoers, especially since the characters had such different designs. Some sources claim Conried was the first actor to play both roles but that's not true. The tradition dates back to the first stage productions of Sir James Barrie's work. (Just two years earlier in 1951, Boris Karloff played both in a Broadway production starring Jean Arthur as Peter.)

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Goofy

Other Notable Roles: Bozo the Clown (on records), Sleepy and Grumpy in Snow White, Practical Pig in The Three Little Pigs, Gabby in Gulliver's Travels and later shorts, Oswald the Rabbit.  At times, he provided the voice of Bluto in the Popeye cartoons and the sounds of Pluto in Disney cartoons.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Vance DeBar "Pinto" Colvig was a cartoonist for newspapers and animation, a gag man and briefly a circus clown, plus he worked in front of and behind the camera for Mack Sennett comedies and dubbed Munchkin voices for The Wizard of Oz.  He did the voice of Bozo for Capitol Records and played Bozo on-camera for the character's first live TV show but never voiced the clown for animation.

Why He's On This List: The guy had some real funny, memorable voices and he livened up whatever he was in.

Fun Fact: His son Vance Colvig, Jr. followed in Dad's clown-sized footprints and played Bozo on television in Los Angeles in the sixties.  Junior also did cartoon voices, including the gravelly sounds of Chopper the Bulldog in the Yakky Doodle cartoons for Hanna-Barbera.

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Mr. Magoo.

Other Notable Roles: Almost none unless you count the genie in the Bugs Bunny cartoon, A-Lad-In His Lamp.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Dozens of character roles in radio, movies and television, including several regular series like Gilligan's Island, I Married Joan and even The Jim Backus Show.  The dozens of films in which he appeared included Rebel Without a Cause and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  He also appeared in hundreds of commercials and probably made as much money dubbing the voice of "The Little Old Winemaker" for Italian Swiss Colony Wine as he did playing Quincy Magoo.

Why He's On This List: Few theatrical cartoons got so much of their charm and humor from a voice as did the Magoos.  Backus was allowed to ad-lib during recordings and his muttered asides made sure the cartoon was funny even if the visuals and gags sometimes were not.  Tex Avery once called Backus as Magoo the single greatest bit of casting in the history of animation.

Fun Fact: The U.P.A. cartoon studio, where Backus most often recorded his Magoo dialogue, was next door to the Smoke House, a still-extant Burbank restaurant where animation folks were known to gather.  Before a recording session, voice director (and occasional co-actor) Jerry Hausner would take Backus over there to the bar for a few drinks.  Hausner would ask him after each one, "Is Magoo here yet?" and Backus might answer, "I think he might arrive after one more gin and tonic."  When Backus was sufficiently Magooed, they'd go over to the studio and record, and would sometimes return to the bar area of the Smoke House afterwards for what Backus called "the wrap party."

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Roles: (Tie:) Betty Boop, Olive Oyl

Other Notable Roles:  Little Audrey, Casper the Friendly Ghost (at times), many supporting parts in Popeye cartoons including Swee'Pea.

What She Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Lots of character roles in movies and television, including a part in the film, Funny Girl.  But where you really saw her face was in commercials.  She did hundreds of them including a long-running series for Scott Towels as "Aunt Bluebell."

Why She's On This List: A lot of the personality of Betty Boop came from Ms. Questel, who was hired to do an impression of the popular singer Helen Kane but who turned the role into a unique and adorable performance.  And acting in those cartoons wasn't easy because at the Fleischer Studio, they did the animation first and the actors had to perform with personality while matching already-animated lip movements and gestures.  She wasn't the only person who did Betty or Olive Oyl either but after her, when anyone else did those characters, they were trying to replicate Mae Questel.

Fun Fact: A number of actors filled in as Popeye for his main voice, Jack Mercer, while Mercer was in the service.  Ms. Questel claimed that one of the fill-ins was her and she often accompanied this claim with a credible Popeye impression.  No one however has identified an actual cartoon which featured her speaking for the Sailor Man…which doesn't mean it didn't happen.

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Winnie the Pooh

Other Notable Roles: Mr. Stork in Dumbo, The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, Kaa in The Jungle Book and countless commercials, plus he was the original voice of Woodsy Owl.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: He was a great character actor appearing on-camera in hundreds of movies and TV shows. You can catch him in several episodes of the Superman TV series George Reeves, playing — as he did in many appearances — an eccentric scientist and on The Life of Riley.

Why He's On This List: He was a Walt Disney favorite for his ability to infuse a character with personality without ever sounding like someone "doing a voice." He really wasn't doing a voice. He just had the one and it had depth and texture and humanity and the moment you heard it come out of some character, you paid attention.

Fun Fact: Mr. Holloway had a brief career performing on Broadway where he introduced at least two songs by the team of Rodgers and Hart that quickly became standards: "Manhattan" and "Mountain Greenery."

Last March, the Emmy-winning cartoon voice actor Maurice LaMarche challenged me to come up with a list of the All-Time Great folks in his profession and I said I would do so once I figured out what form it would take and I set down some rules. I decided to break it into two lists — one to cover the first forty years of the art form; the other to cover everything since.

The first forty years began with Steamboat Willie in 1928 so it ended in 1968. (The first cartoon voice actor was, of course, Walt Disney…and though Mickey Mouse is probably the most popular cartoon character ever, I still decided Walt wasn't a good enough voice actor to make this list.) I will explain at some point why 1968 is a good cut-off year for the First Generation.

Frank Welker is not on this first list. Frank is by far the "workingest" voice actor who has ever lived and probably, among his peers, the most respected of anyone working today. So why didn't I include him? Because he started his animation voicing career in 1969. That is not the reason I picked '68.

My list only covers motion pictures and television cartoons that were made primarily for the American market employing American actors. I mean no disrespect to foreign performers. I simply am not qualified to do a worldwide list.

My criteria? How good they were, how memorable their work was, how influential they were and how "in demand" they were. Working a lot was not the major consideration but if it had been, the list would not have been that different. All of these folks did an awful lot of cartoons.

In case you'd like some hints on who I put on the list: There are 18 men and two women. All but five of the twenty did a substantial number of roles in theatrical animation and all but three of the twenty were in the regular casts of very popular animated TV shows. Most, of course, did both. I directed eleven of them at least once…and only one of them is alive.

I will post little pieces about each of the twenty here, one per week for the next twenty weeks, starting tomorrow. The list will not be in any particular order but I will tell you that if it was, the top five would include some arrangement of Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Paul Frees and Don Messick. And now you know who one of the women is and who the only person is on the list who's still with us.

A little while after I get through this list, I will start listing actors who got into the industry after 1968 and distinguished themselves in the next forty years. That list will require more than twenty names and may go on for some time.  You may not agree with one or both of my lists.  If you don't, you're free to ignore mine and make up your own.