Search Results for: mel blanc

June Foray died this morning, just 54 days shy of what would have been her 100th birthday. This was not unexpected. I saw her just six weeks ago and she was very small and very frail and just about ready to go. Her sister had died not long before and her brother-in-law died shortly after that visit.

She was, of course, the premier female voice talent of her era. I don't know who the runner-up was but whoever it was, she was in a distant second in terms of hours logged voicing cartoons and commercials, dubbing movies, doing narration, appearing on radio shows and records…even providing the voice for talking dolls. A few years ago when Earl Kress and I assisted her with her autobiography, we foolishly thought we could whip up a near-complete list of everything she'd done. Not in this world possible. I know more of June's credits than most people and I'd be surprised if I know 10% of it.

She was Rocky the Flying Squirrel. She was Natasha Fatale. She was Nell Fenwick. She was Jokey Smurf. She was Cindy Lou Who. She was Granny, owner of Tweety. She was Witch Hazel. She was Chatty Cathy. She was thousands of others.

Most of all, she was June Foray, a talented workaholic who for decades, drove into Hollywood every weekday early in the morning and went from recording session to recording session until well after dark. Everyone hired her because she was always on time, always professional and what she did was always good. It was her good friend, director Chuck Jones who said, "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc is the male June Foray."

June Foray was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on September 18, 1917. The talent she exhibited at an early age was encouraged by her parents and by age 12, she was appearing on local radio dramas playing children's parts. By 15, she was working steadily on a wide array of series and was playing roles that were often older — much older than she was.

When she finally graduated high school, her family moved to Los Angeles, California so that June could break into national radio, which she did in no time. A short list of the programs on which she was heard would include The Cavalcade of America, A Date With Judy, Sherlock Holmes (with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce), Mayor of the Town (with Lionel Barrymore), The Whistler, The Billie Burke Show, The Rudy Vallee Show, Stars Over Hollywood, The Al Pearce Show, This is My Best (with Orson Welles), Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Baby Snooks (with Fanny Brice), Dr. Christian (with Jean Hersholt), I Deal in Crime (with Bill Gargan), Jack Haley's Sealtest Village Store, Glamour Manor (with Kenny Baker), Phone Again Finnegan (with Stu Erwin), The Charlie McCarthy Show (with Edgar Bergen), The Dick Haymes Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Bob Hope Show, The Penny Singleton Show, Presenting Charles Boyer, Tex Williams's All-Star Western Theater, Red Ryder, The Screen Directors' Playhouse, The Screen Guild Theatre, The Lux Radio Theater, The Great Gildersleeve, My Favorite Husband (with Lucille Ball), Richard Diamond: Private Detective (with Dick Powell), and Martin Kane, Private Eye. She was a regular on the popular comedy series, Smile Time, which introduced her longtime friend Steve Allen to much of America.

When television came along, June was there with roles on Johnny Carson's first TV series, Carson's Cellar, and dozens of other programs including Andy's Gang, where she worked with the man she'd soon marry, Hobart Donavan. They were married until his death in 1976.

Experts disagree as to when June did her first animation work. She usually cites the role of the cat Lucifer in Disney's Cinderella (1950) and she did much work for Mr. Disney, both in front of the microphone and also posing occasionally as a model to aid the animators. In 1955, she began voicing dozens of characters for Warner Brothers cartoons and then in 1959 came Rocky and His Friends, the show on which she first played Rocky the Flying Squirrel. In fact, she not only voiced the plucky squirrel but most of the female (and even a few male) voices for the many cartoon shows produced by Jay Ward.

June was in fact heard in the cartoons of every major animation producer located on the West Coast for years, including MGM, UPA, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera. She continued to work in animation well into her nineties and in 2012 won her first Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Cauldron, a witch seen around the world on The Garfield Show. Some claim that victory made her the oldest performer to ever win an Emmy. She was later awarded an honorary one.

Her voice was also heard on hundreds of live-action TV shows, including Baretta, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Green Acres and The Twilight Zone. For the latter, she was the voice of "Talky Tina" in a memorable episode that called for June to play the evil side of the popular talking doll she voiced for Mattel Toys, Chatty Cathy. She has been heard (but not seen) in dozens of motion pictures including Jaws, Bells Are Ringing, The Hospital and The Comic.

June was active in the film community, having founded the Los Angeles chapter of Association Internationale du Film d'Animation (the International Animated Film Association) and serving multiple terms on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was also a wonderful lady and someone I loved dearly. A lot of us are going to spend the rest of our lives bragging unashamedly that we got to know and/or work with June Foray.

I try to hold down the plugs for stuff that makes me money but I have some comic books out or coming out. The first issue of the new Groo mini-series, Groo: Play of the Gods will be released to coincide with Comic-Con. It's a four-issue series in which, you may find it hard to believe, Groo does some stupid things and causes vast amounts of destruction. Surprising, I know but we thought it would be a novel change from all those issues in which Groo causes vast amounts of destruction and does some stupid things.

I continue to write Garfield stories for the occasional Garfield specials that Boom Studios issues. And Boom has partnered with Dynamite Comics for a Garfield & Grumpy Cat crossover mini-series and I wrote that, too. That'll be out in a few months. I'll let you know when we have a precise release date.

One or two e-mails a week ask me why I so rarely mention these things here and one guy just asked if I was ashamed of them. Certainly not, guy. I just sometimes find the pushing of one's own products on the Internet a bit tacky. When I see a really egregious example of it — and it's hard not to — it make me uncomfy to be doing that myself. I probably need to get over this.

Meanwhile, DC Comics has collected in one volume, Superman Meets Bugs Bunny, a mini-series I wrote for them back in the year 2000. I didn't mention that here before it came out because I literally didn't know about it until I got a box from them filled with copies. It's a nice little series, owing largely to fine illustration work by Joe Staton, Tom Palmer and Mike DeCarlo.

I dunno if I've mentioned this here before but there's an interesting difference for me in writing a character like Superman as opposed to a character like Bugs Bunny. This is above and beyond the fact that the latter is supposed to be funny. It's that famous cartoon characters all speak with familiar voices, whereas characters who are primarily from comic books or strips do not. We all know what Bugs Bunny sounds like. He either sounds like Mel Blanc or someone imitating Mel Blanc. But Superman has had dozens of voices and no one of them is definitive.

When I write Bugs, I hear his voice in my head and when you read a Bugs Bunny comic, you probably hear that exact same voice. We agree on what all those animated characters sound like. You might have a voice in mind for, say, Batman. You think he sounds like Adam West or Kevin Conroy or Michael Keaton or Someone Else but the writer probably doesn't have that same voice in mind. I'm not saying any of this is good or bad or anything; just that it's something I find fascinating. (And there are exceptions. I never thought the Donald Duck of the comic books sounded anything like the voice Clarence Nash did for the Donald Duck cartoons. The cartoon voice was semi-unintelligible, whereas I could understand every word the Donald of the comics uttered since it was right there in print.)

Moving on: August is the month when Jack Kirby would have been 100 years old. Here's a paragraph I swiped off this website…

DC Comics recently announced six special one-shot comic books set to release throughout August, the month of Kirby's actual 100th birthday. Each issue will tell a new story about one of Kirby's famous DC creations: Darkseid (from Mark Evanier and Scott Kolins), the Newsboy Legion (Howard Chaykin), Sandman (Dan Jurgens, Steve Orlando, John Bogdanove, and Rick Leonardi), Manhunter (Keith Giffen, Dan DiDio), Orion and the New Gods (Shane Davis and Michelle Delecki), and the Black Racer (Reginald Hudlin and Denys Cowan).

Each issue will also contain some Kirby reprints and an essay by Yours Truly. Some of the issues, by the way, have a couple of new stories and other creators are involved beyond those named above. It looks like a fun and highly appropriate project and I was pleased that they asked me to be involved.

Also, Abrams Comicart Books is issuing an updated, revised edition of Kirby: King of Comics, the book I did about Jack in 2008. It has smaller pages, softer covers, a better cover, a new chapter, some new art and I've rewritten a few hunks of it based on the realization that I could say some things clearer than I did the first time around. Copies will be available at the Abrams booth at Comic-Con next week (next week!) and maybe at other places in the hall, as well. My longer, more in-depth bio of Jack is almost finished but I'm not making any more guesses as to when it will be out.

And that concludes our personal plugging on this blog for the next month or two. Thank you for your patience and we now return you to stuff that I don't make any money off of.

Brian Trester sent me this question…

I was wondering how you cast for a voice when the original actor has passed away. I am sure it's difficult. I am thinking of Garfield. I have seen the new Garfield show and while it is good, I still can't get used to the art or his voice. To me, Lorenzo Music will always be the voice of Garfield. This is why I am asking the question.

What I am driving at is it must be hard. You want someone to resemble the voice but at the same time do not want the person to be a carbon copy of the actor. Either way, it seems like a lose-lose situation. If you get a sound-alike, people will complain you're disrespecting the original voice. But if you get a new voice, they complain it doesn't sound like the original or they hate the new voice.

I know Hanna-Barbera had this problem with Scooby Doo and even Shaggy. I also know when Mel Blanc died they had a huge problem with the new voices and complaints. Since you have done a lot in this field, I was wondering how you handle or handled this problem.

In the case of Garfield, Jim Davis made the decision to hire Frank Welker and to have him do a voice that was similar but not exact. Believe me, Frank can do exact. It took me a while to get used to it. The whole first season of the new show when Frank took over, I heard Lorenzo in my head when I wrote dialogue for Frank. It wasn't until we had some finished episodes with Frank doing the voice that I began to hear him as I wrote for him.

I can't say I've ever heard anyone say it was disrespectful to closely imitate a voice. I have heard plenty of complaints when the imitation ain't so good. A lot of us grew up with certain voices burned into our childhood memories and it can be jarring — and even despoiling when the new guy is too far from what we expect.

There's a whole science and a raft of considerations involved in casting a replacement voice for an established character and I could go into it here. But as it happens, it's the topic for discussion the night of March 2nd at the The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences out in North Hollywood. There's a panel there that evening called "…But the Characters Live On" and it's all about new voices in old legends.

The list of those discussing this topic isn't complete yet but so far, it includes Matt Craig and Gary Hartle, who produce the TV series, Wabbit; Andrea Romano, who has cast and voice-directed more cartoon shows than any human alive; Bob Bergen, who now speaks for Porky Pig and Tweety; Dee Bradley Baker, who speaks these days for Daffy Duck; Grey Griffin, who plays Daphne on the Scooby-Doo show; Jeff Bergman, who has voiced Fred Flintstone, George Jetson, Bugs Bunny, and many more, and Mallory Lewis, who inherited the talent of her mother, the great Shari Lewis, and also inherited Lamb Chop.

There will be a few others…and the moderator might have something to say, as well. The moderator is me.

This will disappoint some who read this site but the event — which you can read about here — is only open to Television Academy Members with valid membership cards. Sure hope I can find mine. It will however be watchable by all on the Academy's website and I'll let you know how and when to do that.

Brian, you'll probably get many of your questions answered there and then. If you have more, I'll try to address them on this here blog.

Every actor, producer or writer who ever knew or worked with Gordon Hunt is tonight mourning the loss of a very good and gifted man. Gordon did many things but he was, first and foremost, a director. He directed hundreds of plays, mostly in and around Los Angeles, and for a long time was the Voice Director at Hanna-Barbera.

Before they hired Gordon, they'd had several Voice Directors who hadn't worked out and when there was no one in that job, the producers of the various shows would direct…with mixed results. Among other problems with the latter situation was that no one was in charge of scouting or auditioning new talent for the studio. When Gordon was brought in, he instantly brought order to chaos and new actors into Hanna-Barbera. He tapped into the local pool from improv groups and theatrical productions and now there's a long, long list of voice actors who owe Gordon for "discovering" them.

I remember him as a very patient man who understood performers, how to talk to them and what it takes to get the best from them. When I got my chance to voice direct, I drew on two sources to guide me in how it should be done. I had been in recording sessions with directors other than Gordon. I did nothing that they did. I had also been in recording sessions with Gordon. I did everything that he did..or at least, I tried to. I am not, I swear to you, exaggerating.

I watched him direct old pros like Mel Blanc and Daws Butler and strike just the perfect note of correcting them without disrespecting them. I watched him direct children and coax them into fine performances without scolding or making them feel bad when it took five takes to get a line right. (One of many things I learned from him: Once an actor is uncomfortable or feeling like they're screwing up, you're going to be there all night doing it over and over. So better to never make them feel that way.)

I watched him once directing an actor who was belligerent and hostile. It was not because of anything Gordon had done but the actor, who was upset about the "deal" for his services, kept snapping at Gordon, who'd had nothing to do with the negotiations. Gordon kept his cool and, when the angry actor began turning on other performers in the session, drew his fire and kept things as comfortable as they could be. The session finished on-time and the work was fine. What Gordon had done was to remain a Grown-Up at all times.

As I said, he directed a lot of local plays. I went to a lot of them and every one I saw was first rate. He was rightly proud of all of his work but he was proudest of his daughter, the popular actress Helen Hunt. And vice-versa. I said this a few paragraphs ago but it bears repeating: He was a very good and gifted man.

Here's a Warner Brothers cartoon directed by Chuck Jones that you probably haven't seen. It's called "Drafty, Isn't It?" and it was made in 1957 for the U.S. Military. The voices were done by Daws Butler, who actually gets a screen credit. Daws was in a lot of WB cartoons and sometimes had the largest roles but only Mel Blanc's name got into the credits back then.

The lead character is Ralph Phillips, a daydreamer kid who turned up in five (I think) of Jones's cartoons — this one, one other for the military (for which his voice was done by Mel), and three "regular" WB cartoons where he was younger and voiced by Dick Beals. He never caught on and you won't particularly like this film but you might to watch a little of it because (a) it's a Warner Brothers cartoon from back when they were doing great ones and (b) the way things are going in this country, they may be reinstating the draft soon.

Here's an interview with Penn Jillette about how he and his partner Teller work together. I find those guys kind of fascinating in the way they work…and how much they work. I don't mean how often people want to hire them. I mean the sheer volume of things they say yes to.

My pal Keith Scott is not only a top voice actor but probably the leading historian out there about those who preceded him in that profession. Here, he writes about Mel Blanc, specifically about Mel's many contracts over the years and how his fame and fortune rose. It has been widely believed that Mel's various deals with Warner Brothers precluded the other voice actors in those cartoons from getting credit — a belief spread by many of those other actors saying that was the case. Keith says it's not so.

Aidan Colvin is a 16-year-old boy with dyslexia, who has been writing to successful dyslexics for advice on how to cope with his condition. He got some sound advice from Jay Leno.

Here's a handy-dandy guide to Donald Trump scandals. In another year with another candidate, any one of these would lose him the support of many of those who now hail him as their savior.

Two film critics rate all of Woody Allen's movies from worst to best. This is one of those lists that you read just so you can go, "Are they insane? They think Interiors is better than Radio Days?" But it does remind us of something amazing; that Woody Allen has made 47 movies…and made them pretty much on his own terms and without pandering to any visible notion of what's commercial.

Two days before 9/11/01, George Carlin performed in Vegas, prepping and honing lines he'd perform on his forthcoming HBO special, which was tentatively called, I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die. Ian Crouch fills us in on what happened to that material when a lotta people did die.

Lastly for now: Wen Ho Lee is a Taiwanese-American scientist who in 1999 was indicted, first in the press and then in courtrooms for allegedly stealing secrets about the U.S. nuclear arsenal and passing them on to the People's Republic of China. He spent nine months in solitary confinement and had his life largely ruined by the accusations…but eventually everyone had to apologize to him and some paid him a lot of money, though he probably did not receive enough of either. Lowen Liu looks back on this injustice and how it impacted the way Chinese-Americans view the United States.

Mark Thorson has a question…

I've asked before, and you replied you'd do it, but you haven't. Repeating my request, have there been cartoons voiced by one voice actor? When you consider how talented some voice actors are and how cheap some studios have been, it seems to me this must have happened a few times if not frequently. I don't know of any examples, but if it were done well I wouldn't have noticed. Maybe the Road Runner cartoons, but they don't count because there were only two characters and they didn't talk.

Yeah, there have been plenty of them, mostly prior to 1968. Lots of theatrical cartoons were just one guy, usually Mel Blanc. On TV, you had things like the Tom Terrific cartoons (all voices by Lionel Wilson) or the Felix the Cat cartoons (all voices by Jack Mercer) or Deputy Dawg (all voices by Dayton Allen) and there were some episodes of Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw where all they needed was Daws Butler.

Once upon a time, voice actors working under the Screen Actors Guild contract were paid by the session. The actor received a flat fee for the cartoon whether he did one voice or twenty. Most of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons had a cast of two: Daws Butler and Don Messick did the Pixie & Dixie cartoons. The Secret Squirrel cartoons were voiced by Paul Frees and Mel Blanc. The Atom Ant cartoons were Howie Morris and Allan Melvin until Howie quit H-B, at which time they became Don Messick and Allan Melvin. Once in a while, they'd spring for a guest voice — usually a woman — but the writers were told not to write in too many female parts so that wasn't necessary. (There are early H-B cartoons where small female roles were voiced by men.)

Most cartoons were done with small casts. The Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons were voiced by June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Scott, William Conrad and no one else. I don't think there's a single other actor in any of them…and in some, some of those folks play five or six roles.

In '68, the SAG contract was changed to limit the number of voices one actor could do for one fee. The math changed over the years but it pretty much came down to three voices per session fee per actor. Before, if a cartoon called for twelve speaking parts, you could have Daws and Don each do six and it cost you two session fees. After '68, you were going to have to pay four session fees…so you could pay Daws and Don each two fees per session or for the same money, you could bring in four actors. In most cases then, they would hire four actors.

This made things better for the kind of actor — like Hans Conried or Gary Owens — who couldn't do multiple roles. A voice actor no longer had to be like Blanc, Butler, Messick or Frees — guys who could do a couple hundred different voices. It also increased the opportunities for women since it led to shows having more female characters. And it even led to some of the multi-voiced guys making more money. I wrote a CBS Storybreak once which had a ton of tiny roles and we decided that we didn't want to bring in a parade of voice actors to each do 1-3 lines. It was easier to have Frank Welker do them all so that day, Frank — who was in the studio for about 90 minutes — played twenty characters and was paid for seven sessions.

And yes, there are still short cartoons that use only one voice actor…but if it's a SAG show, he or she usually doesn't do eleven voices.

Since I have no interest in seeing it, I'm not the guy to spend a lot of time discussing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I suspect a lot of industry folks and industry observers are wrestling with a dilemma this morning. The movie made a ton o' money over the weekend — more than enough to be considered a smash hit on one level.

Then again, its grosses also plunged over the three days suggesting that bad word of mouth kept people away, as did the mostly-contemptuous reviews. At WonderCon, I heard from some who loved it but there seemed to be a lot of "buzz" that it's not only a bad movie but one that defaces its lead properties. A lot of people didn't exit the theater disappointed so much as angry.

So now you have the question: Is this film a model to be emulated in the future? Or an example of what you shouldn't do if you get to make the next movie of Batman or Superman or any established character with a lot of history? The level of box office drop-off in the coming days may help some answer that. The ancillary income from merchandising that ties-in with the movie may provide additional clues. But right now and maybe for a long time after, heads in Hollywood will be spinning over this conflict.

Big companies which own big properties need to deal with the fact that a great character has his or her breaking point; that you can devalue a precious commodity by letting this producer do one version of it, another writer do that version of it, another director do yet another version of it, etc. The more that is changeable about a character, the less he or she is really about. And the more different interpretations you have out there, the greater the chance that some will damage the affection that audiences have for the character or that the variance will water it down to the point where it's not very special at all.

Is Superman a dark, gritty, maniacal character or is he a sunny, positive force with a personality as grand as his powers? If he can be one in some appearances and the other in others, eventually he becomes not about either. He's just a name and maybe a visual which can be altered a lot.

Characters like that can go from hand to hand. The creator(s) usually has/have the best take…though admittedly there have been creators who didn't seem to know what they'd created or didn't care what you did to them. If you made Batman into a Transvestite Nazi, Bob Kane would have probably praised it as true to his vision if his credit and the amount on his check were both of sufficient size.) Thereafter, the character's value has a lot to do with the sensitivity and skill of those entrusted with him or her. Ideally, you hope they land with someone who can and will say to the right proposals, "No, no…that's not right for this property!"

The problem when a character like Superman or Batman (or Bugs Bunny or Yogi Bear or a thousand others) is controlled by a company the size of Time-Warner is that so many different parties have input or temporary control that some are by the sheer law of numbers, going to be wrong. And at times, there may be no one who can take the long view of the character and say, "No, no…that's not right for this property!" Since Mel Blanc passed, no one at Time-Warner has even settled on one actor to talk for Bugs. Every time a different producer or director is in charge of a Bugs Bunny project, he picks from about eighteen people who do Blanc imitations of varying fidelity. The wabbit no longer speaks with one voice and from appearance to appearance, he varies in other ways as well.

I'm not writing this to say that Superman and Batman are wrong in the new movie. Well, maybe I am but since I haven't seen the film, my opinion there ain't worth even as little as it usually is about anything. Still, when so many people walk out of a movie saying, "That's not my Superman and/or Batman," something is wrong. If even half the moviegoers walked out of a James Bond film saying, "That actor is not James Bond," that actor would probably not be 007 in the next installment in the series…because it's supposed to be a series. There's supposed to be some consistency and continuity and there are certain things about James Bond that make him James Bond.

Just as there are certain things about Superman and Batman that make them Superman and Batman and it's not just the names and an approximation of the visuals. Great characters have great premises and great concepts and there are things about their stories that cause people to fall in love with them. The audiences will put up with a certain amount of variance and interpretation and modernization but if you lose the basic core of Superman and Batman, you've done something wrong.

Those of us who love Superman and Batman are used to seeing versions of him that seem wrong to us. There are Batman lovers who bought his comic book through whole decades when they thought he was in the creative custody of writers, editors and other folks who didn't understand what the Caped Crusader was all about. The same is true of Superman…but it's easy to shrug off a thirty-two page comic book that defaces your favorite hero. There's another issue going on sale next week and someone else is writing that one and eventually, someone comes along who does it right and sales go back up. As one of his editors once said of Superman, "He's indestructible! Even bad stories can't harm him."

A string of bad movies? Maybe. A lot of superstars have found that to be worse than Kryptonite.

The passing of our friend Joe Alaskey led to a number of news stories that were a little confused or confusing. Joe was a voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester, Marvin the Martian, etc. At times, he was probably the most frequent voice of certain characters but he was not the only voice of any of the characters originally done by Mel Blanc. Since Mel left us, at least twenty different actors have spoken for all those animated superstars.

Why not one guy? Or at least, one guy for each character? There are two reasons, one being that if no one has a lock on any one role, it makes it harder for that one person to demand a whole lot o' money for any particular gig. Mel did that the last decade or two of his career. They weren't paying him residuals for the eleven-millionth rerun of What's Opera, Doc? so when they needed him to speak for Bugs in a new Kool-Aid commercial, he adjusted his fees upwards…and good for him.

They paid him well because he was Mel Blanc and it seemed so wrong — and possibly injurious to the properties — to get somebody else. It doesn't feel equally wrong to cast one guy who wasn't Mel to speak for Bugs instead of a different guy who also isn't Mel. So money is one reason.

Also, there is no one person at Warner's who makes all the decisions on this kind of thing. One person producing a cartoon may think Jeff Bergman does the best Bugs. Another one who's in charge of a Bugs Bunny videogame may think Billy West does a better Bugs while down the hall, someone supervising a commercial with Bugs in it may favor someone else. My late friend Greg Burson, who did Bugs an awful lot before he left us, used to complain incessantly about how he had to constantly audition for the same parts: "I did eighteen jobs for them as Bugs last month but I still have to go in today and read for the job for a different boss."

Joe endured a lot of that. He seems to have done Daffy more than anyone else but for example, in Space Jam, it was Dee Bradley Baker. (As you may have noticed, some of the folks making the casting decisions have very different ideas of what some of these characters should sound like. On one of my panels, Joe once demonstrated a couple of variations in Daffy's voice. Some directors, he explained, wanted the duck to have the voice Mel gave in the 1940's, whereas some wanted the way Mel did him in the sixties.)

I don't think this is a great way to handle this and when I've discussed it with actors or those who do the hiring, none of them seem to, either. But that's how they do it. Disney tends to have one official voice for their characters at a time but at Warner's, it's always a jump ball.

Another great talent has been wrested away from us: Emmy-winning Voice Actor Joe Alaskey died earlier this evening. He was 63 and the cause was cancer.

Joe was an on-camera impressionist and comic actor but he achieved his greatest fame doing voices for animated cartoons, including the role of Grandpa Lou Pickles on Rugrats (following the late David Doyle) and many of the major Warner Brothers characters, especially Daffy Duck. Joe won his Emmy in 2004 for his portrayal of Daffy on the series, Duck Dodgers.

Joe was born in Troy, New York and like many impressionists, learned at any early age that one could overcome great shyness by becoming someone else. One of his best was Jackie Gleason and as he got older, he could not only sound like the man they called The Great One but look like him, as well. When Gleason's voice needed to be replicated to fix the audio on the "lost" Honeymooners episodes, Joe was the man.

A few years after that, Joe was called upon to redub an old Honeymooners clip for a TV commercial. When he got the call, Joe assured the ad agency that if they needed him, he could also match the voice of Art Carney as Ed Norton. He was told they already had someone to do that — someone who did it better. Joe was miffed until he arrived at the recording session and discovered that the actor they felt could do a better job as Art Carney…was Art Carney. Joe later said that playing Kramden to Carney's Norton was the greatest thrill of his life, especially after Carney asked him for some pointers on how to sound more like Ed.

Voice matches were a specialty of Joe's, ranging from a few lines on a TV show to supplying the voice of Richard Nixon in the Academy Award-winning film, Forrest Gump. He often redubbed actors for the TV or airline releases of movies when "naughty" words had to be replaced — Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross, for instance. In cartoons, he was one of several actors who inherited Mel Blanc roles — in Joe's case, before Mel had passed on. Blanc voiced Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Tweety in Who Framed Roger Rabbit but decided that Yosemite Sam was too taxing on his throat so Alaskey spoke for that character and also for Foghorn Leghorn in a deleted sequence.

After Mel was gone, Joe was one of several actors who played Bugs, Daffy and most of the others. On The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, he spoke for both Sylvester and Tweety. (His greatest challenge? I once watched Joe for a while as he recorded lines as Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam for a G.P.S. It tooks days and thousands of lines for each…and after he finished as Sam, he couldn't speak for almost a week.) He also created the Daffy-like voice of Plucky Duck on Tiny Toon Adventures.

He was also heard in many commercials and non-animated TV shows. Recently, he was working as the narrator of Murder Comes to Town, a series seen on the Investigation Discovery Channel. He was also flexing a few of his non-vocal skills as a writer and as a cartoonist.

He loved voice acting and did not regret that he'd largely abandoned his work in clubs as an impressionist and acting in front of the camera. Two of his most visible roles were as the star on the 1988 cult film, Lucky Stiff, and the role of Beano Froelich on the TV situation comedy, Out of This World.

I was delighted to know Joe for many years, to have him on several of my Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con, and to work with him in 2014 on The Garfield Show. Joe was temperamental and fiercely insecure at times, and you might hear of problems with directors and other actors. I can only tell you that when I hired him, he was an absolute professional. The only problem we had was that Joe had so many different voices that it was sometimes difficult to choose which one we wanted out of him.

The one I liked best was when he sounded like Joe Alaskey. He had a long, long list of voices but that's the one I will miss the most.

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: Junior Bear.

Other Notable Roles: Pete Puma, The Beaver (in Lady and the Tramp), half of the Goofy Gophers (Mac & Tosh), half of Hubie & Bertie, many more.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: What didn't he do? Puppeteering (Cecil the Seasick Serpent and Dishonest John on Time for Beany), dozens of best-selling comedy records, acting for movies and television, hundreds of popular commercials produced by his advertising company, etc.

Why He's On This List: Stan was the other, unbilled voice in dozens of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, holding his own alongside Mel Blanc. Even after he was the highest-paid talent in the advertising business, he always made time for any cartoon voice job that came along.  He was one of the best comic actors to ever lend his voice to an animated cartoon.

Fun Fact: Stan got his first voice job in 1945 — a Warner Brothers cartoon — only weeks after getting out of high school. Stan passed away in April of 2015 but before he did, he did his last voice job for an episode of The Garfield Show that is scheduled to air in 2016.  That's a span of 71 years and a longevity record that will never be broken.

Before there was YouTube, there was Public Access TV. Here from a 1979 public access broadcast is a half-hour with Mel Blanc. Mel tells the story of how he invented Porky Pig's voice by deciding that a pig's grunts were not unlike a stutter. That's not true. Porky was created as a stuttering pig and originally voiced by a stuttering comedian until Mel was called in to replicate what the previous guy had been doing.

But apart from a few of those, it's a good conversation with a great, talented man. The interviewer is Dennis Tardan, who is still doing interviews, now in podcast form…

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: Fred Flintstone.

Other Notable Roles: Dum-Dum (sidekick to Touché Turtle), Boris the Russian Wolfhound in Lady and the Tramp, not much else.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Reed was primarily a radio actor who segued into television.  He appeared on hundreds of radio programs but was best known for playing Falstaff, the poet on Fred Allen's shows and as Pasquale, the Italian immigrant on Life with Luigi.  On television, it was mostly guest star roles.  You can see him (and fellow voice actor Howard Morris) in the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show entitled "The Masterpiece."  That's the one where Rob accidentally buys a seemingly worthless painting at an auction.  Reed played the auctioneer.

Why He's On This List: Fred Flintstone was one of the most popular animated characters ever and a lot of that had to do with the casting of Reed, who was just plain a great comic actor.

Fun Fact: Reed wasn't the first choice for Fred.  Bill Thompson, who voiced Touché Turtle, was. But after several episodes were recorded, Thompson was having trouble sustaining the chosen voice and Joe Barbera also decided they needed a more natural-sounding voice for Fred. So Reed was hired — and at the same time, Mel Blanc replaced the first choice for Barney Rubble, who was Hal Smith. The first few episodes were re-recorded and no one ever regretted the change.

Additional Fun Facts: Late in his career, Reed sometimes shared the role of Fred (especially when the character had to sing) with Henry Corden, then Corden took over entirely after Reed died in 1977. Reed was also the first voice of Fillmore Bear on Jay Ward's Hoppity Hooper cartoons but when he got a raise and/or too busy as Fred, that role switched over to Bill Scott.

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.

Gary Owens left us in the middle of February. This afternoon, a tiny percentage of his friends attended a memorial gathering. As the emcee John Rappaport remarked, they couldn't have let all of Gary's friends in because the Coliseum was booked. I'm not sure even that place would have held them all.

It was a nice, intimate celebration. Gary's sons Scott and Chris spoke. His beloved wife Arleta spoke. And then came the friends and co-workers.

Some of us who spoke or were present wrote for Gary's radio show when we were starting out, then went on to careers in television and elsewhere. John Rappaport, who was one of Gary's closest friends, has had a very impressive career and he was a very impressive host, introducing — in this order — Monty Aidem, George Schlatter, Joanne Worley, Ben Fong-Torres, me, Fred Willard and Arnie Kogen.

You know Fred Willard and you probably know that George produced Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and that Joanne was a cast member. Ben Fong-Torres was a friend of Gary's for fifty years and he got a huge laugh with the opening line of his speech. He said, "Even though I work for Rolling Stone, what I'm going to tell you is true." The rest of us are comedy writers. Here's what I said, following a montage of Gary's work in animation…

You just saw a tiny sampling of the hundreds of cartoons in which Gary's familiar and friendly tones were heard. True, Mel Blanc probably did more but Mel cheated a little. Mel had nine hundred and ninety-nine more voices than Gary did. Gary got hired for his one great one.

Gary was heard on dozens of shows — and what's interesting is that not only did all those characters sound like Gary but a few of them even looked like him. There were commercials for Flintstones cereals directed by his friend Scott Shaw! here with Gary essentially playing himself. It looked just like him except that he was barefoot, wearing a mastodon skin and the hand over his ear only had four fingers.

Oh — and you know how in the Flintstones world, everyone's name has to have a rock pun in it? Well, the name didn't get into the commercials but on the model sheets, it said that he was Quarry Owens.

Now, in the midst of all this praise, I think someone ought to tell you something they didn't like about Gary. I didn't like how modest he was. It's just not right to be that good and that beloved and not be at least a little arrogant.

When Gary showed up for one of our breakfast gatherings or a Yarmy's Army meeting or a lunch, we'd all say things like, "Hey, Gary! What's wrong? I just heard someone doing a voiceover and it wasn't you." This is how you know you've really made it in this business: When the only thing your friends can find to ridicule you about is that you have way too much work.

And Gary would always say, "Well, I've been lucky." No. Nobody is that lucky. Nobody works all the time unless they're the absolute best at what they do. Okay, maybe Will Ferrell. But nobody else.

Here's why Gary worked so much. Those of us who cast and direct voices live in constant fear of something. It's when the person above us — the producer, the sponsor, the network, whoever it is — says, "Why did you hire that jerk?" No one ever got in trouble hiring Gary. Ever. He was the safest casting selection you could possibly make.

He was always on time. Actually, he was always early and he never complained about anything. If you asked him to read the copy fifty-seven times, he read it fifty-seven times even though he knew the first one was fine and you'd probably wind up using Take Three. He made it so easy for everyone on the other side of the glass. Here's how you directed Gary…

"Hi, Gary. Here's the copy. Use that microphone. All right, let's roll tape…"

[SHORT PAUSE]

"Great. Let's do one more for protection."

[SHORT PAUSE]

"Perfect. Thanks, Gary!"

The man was so good at voice over that he even became a direction that was given to other announcers and voice actors on those rare occasions when someone else got a job. More than once, I heard a director tell someone, "Do that line again and try to give it a little Gary Owens."

That meant, "Put a little more smile in the voice. We want to like the announcer more."

Still, as impressed as I was by Gary at a microphone, I think I was more impressed with Gary not at a microphone.

I met him in 1970. I recognized him in the old Collectors Bookshop up on Hollywood Boulevard and we stood there and talked about comic books for about an hour — until he had to hurry off to KMPC and talk to everyone else in Los Angeles. He was disarmingly polite and friendly and funny and this is not a brag on my part because he treated everyone that way. Everyone in this room. Everyone he met. Even people he probably didn't like or at least shouldn't have.

Working with him was always so educational. Not only could you learn about how to be funny…you could also learn a little something about being a truly good, decent human being.

Like most of us, I haven't really mastered it either but I think I know the secret. Be generous with your time. Treat everyone with respect. No matter how poorly you may feel at a given moment, give everyone a smile and a kind word…and whenever possible, make it a funny one.

In other words: As you go through life…as you meet people…always try to give it a little Gary Owens.

The best line of the afternoon was probably Arnie Kogen's. He itemized a list of favors that Gary had done for members of the Kogen household, many of whom are in the entertainment industry. Then he concluded, "I realized Gary's done more for my family than I have."

Well actually, Gary got the biggest laugh. The ceremony concluded with the playing of this famous clip from one of his eighty zillion radio broadcasts…

It was a great afternoon. But then, how could a bunch of people talking about Gary not be a great afternoon? Boy, do we miss that guy.