Farewell to Elliot Field

The last of Hanna-Barbera’s voice actors from the 1950s has passed away.

Elliot Field was 97. He died last Monday, the 23rd.

Elliot was the afternoon drive jock at KFWB in Los Angeles when Joe Barbera hired him to play the voice of Blabber Mouse opposite Daws Butler in the Snooper and Blabber segments of The Quick Draw McGraw Show. This was back in a wonderful era in radio when disc jockeys invented characters and did their voices on the air. What became the Blabber voice was apparently one of them.

The Snooper cartoons where you can hear him are Puss N’ Booty, Switch Witch (he also plays the witch, another radio voice), Desperate Diamond Dimwits and Real Gone Ghosts (he is also one of the ghosts). He was also the narrator in the Quick Draw cartoon Scary Prairie, the first cartoon put into production on the series.

Elliot explained to me that soon after being hired, he had to be hospitalised for an illness. At that point, Daws took over both Blab’s role. That wasn’t the end of his time with Hanna-Barbera. Flintstones fans will know him as Alvin Brickrock, the Alfred Hitchcock-esque neighbour. He was also a newscaster on the Superstone episode and provided several voices in Flintstone and the Lion.

Elliot was involved in a strike at KFWB in 1961 and, soon after, took a management job at a radio station in Detroit. He came back west in the late ‘60s and settled in Palm Springs. He served on the city council and was acting mayor at one point.

You can read his obituary here.

Being a disc jockey in the 1970s (and briefly again in 1988), I enjoyed Elliot’s stories of life on radio. There was plenty of creativity on the air and in promotions back in those days before consultants, computerised playlists and liner cards.

Below is an interview with him about his career. Unfortunately, he starts talking about his Hanna-Barbera career at the end when it's cut off. There doesn't seem to be a Part 2.

My thanks to Jeff Falewicz, who maintains some web sites and is one of those veterans who truly loves radio, for passing along the sad news. My sympathies go to Elliot’s family.

Quick Draw McGraw at 65

My favourite Hanna-Barbera series first appeared on television screens 65 years ago today.

The Quick Draw McGraw Show was Hanna-Barbera’s attempt to gently lampoon the types of shows popular on television at the time—detective series, the family sitcom, and the ubiquitous Western.

The name “Quick Draw McGraw” pre-dates the series. It was the name of a character (who doesn’t appear) in the Ruff and Reddy episode “Slight Fright on a Moonlight Night,” which aired March 15, 1958. As the dialogue on the series was written by Charlie Shows, it may be safe to assume that he came up with the name.



Mike Maltese arrived at Hanna-Barbera from Warner Bros. in November 1958. The Quick Draw series was already in development—model sheets were made by Dick Bickenbach, dated Nov. 25—and Maltese ended up writing all 78 episodes of the first season of the series. In one interview he said he was doing two and later three stories a week for the studio.

Kellogg’s agreed to sponsor the show, and it was originally sold on a barter basis to stations across the U.S., the same as The Huckleberry Hound Show (stations got the show for nothing, but had to run the half-hour intact, including the commercials for Kellogg’s). KTTV in Los Angeles, WNAC-TV in Boston, KSD-TV in St. Louis and WTTG Washington, D.C. were among the stations which put Quick Draw on the air on September 28, 1959. Sponsor magazine that month said 150 stations had signed to air Quick Draw (compared to 175 for Huck).

Both Huck and Quick Draw were nominated for Emmys that season, with Huck winning.

The show’s theme song, “That’s Quick Draw McGraw,” was copyrighted on August 24, 1959, with the lyrics credited to Joe Barbera and the music to Hoyt Curtin and Bill Hanna.

There were two slight differences between the two shows. In the press, Joe Barbera said he was looking for new voice actors for the studio; Huck had pretty much exclusively employed Daws Butler and Don Messick in the 1958-59 season. He found some. Hal Smith, Jean Vander Pyl and Julie Bennett show up on a regular basis on Quick Draw’s first season. Barbera cast two new regular voices as well. KFWB disc jockey Elliot Field was hired to play Blabber Mouse opposite Daws Butler’s Snooper, and Daws recommended truck driver and ex-radio actor Doug Young to be Doggie Daddy.

Elliot explained to me his Blabber career (he did incidental voices as well) ended not long after he was hired as he got sick. A decision was made to have Butler do both voices, though Field came back for a Flintstones episode before moving to Detroit. Young imitated Jimmy Durante. Daws had done the same imitation for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at MGM but felt his voice wasn’t up to it and suggested Young, who gave winning performances. Mark Evanier mentioned that Peter Leeds, who was in Stan Freberg’s voice stock company, had auditioned as well, and you can hear him narrating the Quick Draw cartoon “Scat, Scout, Scat.” And Vance Colvig, Jr. shows up in the Quick Draw cartoon Bad Guys Disguise more than a year before he returned to the studio to play Chopper.

The Augie Doggie/Doggie Daddy relationship was based more on Garry Moore and Jimmy Durante's interactions from their variety show on radio for Camel cigarettes than any TV sitcom (which tended to include long-suffering wives and bubbly-but-angst-ridden teenage daughters). “Dat’s my boy who said dat!” Durante would bark to the audience about Moore. Baba Looey sounded like Desi Arnaz’s Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy, except Baba substituted ‘thinnin’ for ‘splainin’ (Arnaz actually talked that way. Before Lucy, he was known for singing "Babalú," hence the character's name). Snooper was a take-off on Ed Gardner’s Archie from Duffy’s Tavern, though Daws insisted there was some of actor Tom D’Andrea in the voice. Quick Draw was just another Western dullard, like Red Skelton’s Clem Cadiddlehopper. [Note: Joe Bevilacqua has written saying Daws created Quick Draw's voice by adding a western twang to Charlie Butterworth. As Joe was a long-time friend of Daws, I don't doubt that's correct.]

The other difference is one you may not have noticed. Hanna-Barbera had been utilizing the brand-new Capitol Hi-Q production library for both Ruff ‘n’ Reddy and The Huckleberry Hound Show. Hi-Q was also heard on Quick Draw, but there appears to have been a deliberate attempt to use different music than what was heard on the other two series. Many of the cues were composed by Englishman Phil Green, and were originally pressed on 78s in the EMI Photoplay library. Like the other two shows, the Langlois Filmusic library, which credited Jack Shaindlin as the composer, was also used.



While Quick Draw was on drawing boards in November 1958, and production of the Quick Draw and Snooper and Blabber cartoons was underway in December, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy needed a bit of time in development. Variety reported on January 8, 1959 that Screen Gems had approved production of the father-and-son series Pete and Repete. By January 28th, the characters were now, according to Variety, Arf and Arf. The March 23rd edition of Television Age mentions the segment was named for Augie Doggie; Augie was named for an in-law of Mike Maltese. Production numbers suggest the Augie cartoons were started well after the other two segments of the Quick Draw show.

Maltese came up with memorable side characters for the show as well. A pink mountain lion named Snagglepuss shows up to heckle in all three segments; in the Quick Draw cartoons, he’s animated by George Nicholas. Quick Draw was assisted in his sheriff-ing by Snuffles, who loved dog biscuits so much he’d float into the air in ecstasy after eating one, and do the bidding of whoever had them, hero or villain. And Maltese told columnist John Crosby he was inspired by the silent Doug Fairbanks’ movie The Mark of Zorro (1920) to invent Quick Draw’s alter ego of El Kabong.

Two cartoons Maltese wrote for Augie and dear old dad featured one of Bill and Joe’s favourite characters—the duck that would become Yakky Doodle, voiced by Red Coffey.

Why do I like Quick Draw? The characters make comments to the viewer, there are lots of wisecracks and puns, Quick Draw is incompetent but enthusiastic about righting wrongs, which makes him likeable.

Now if only the series was available on home video.

{Late note: Jeff Falewicz has written to say that Elliot Field passed away last Monday at the age of 97. He was the last of the studio's pre-Flintstones voice actors].

Jonny Quest is 60

Kids like to laugh. Kids like a bit of adventure, too. That’s why Jonny Quest turned out to be such a success.

You’d think that a TV show that lasted one season was a failure. Maybe in live action it is. But Hanna-Barbera took three cancelled cartoon series—Top Cat, The Jetsons and Jonny Quest—and made them into hits. They were put into front of kids' eyes over and over in reruns and all were eventually re-booted (an all-new Quest series appeared in 1986).

Jonny Quest was filled with humans (and a comic-relief dog) involved in adventure and suspense. Kids ate up this kind of stuff in comic books and the Sunday colour comic pages. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera knew what their staff could do. Their studio had artists who had worked on Sleeping Beauty at Disney so they were familiar with animating humans in some form.

Today marks 60 years since The Adventures of Jonny Quest debuted on ABC-TV. Yes, I was among the viewers even though I had no interest in high adventure shows. But this was a cartoon, so I watched.

Was it Walt Disney who said the key to success in animation is story, story and story? Quest—for my eight-year-old eyes and ears, anyway—had great stories. You wanted to see what happened next. And Jonny had maturity. Television was filled with kids who were "precocious" jerks or goody-goodies. Jonny was capable of thinking and standing on his own in tight situations.

Oh, did I mention the eyeball walking on spider legs?

Way back in the early days of the blog, we reprinted this fine feature story from the Levittown Times a few weeks before the series debuted. Here is a little shorter one from the Anaheim Bulletin, Sept. 12, 1964. As it is unbylined and appeared in various newspapers, I presume it is an ABC press release.

‘Jonny Quest’ To Fill High Adventure Void
Joe Barbera, the ebullient half of the creative animation team of Hanna-Barbera, believes their new half-hour series ABC-TV’s “Jonny Quest” will fill a recent void in entertainment.
“We haven’t had anything where kids can identify with high adventure,” he pointed out. “Jonny Quest is escapism, the stuff of which dreams are made. It’s Tom Swift, the Rover Boys and Jack Armstrong all rolled into one.”
The series is the most unusual and ambitious undertaking at the ink factory that has produced the likes of “The Flintstones,” “Yogi Bear” and “Huckleberry Hound.” It employs 350 artists and costs a third again as much as the firm’s other shows.
The principal difference is in technique. Barbera refers to “Quest” as staged illustration rather than a cartoon style.
“It’s a brand new style for TV,” he added. “Every master shot is a work of art.”
Barbera said the program takes its principals, 11-year-old Jonny, son of an American scientist and international trouble-shooter and his young Hindu companion, Hadji, on an imaginative adventures in a different world-wide locale every week. “There is lots of action,” he said, “and we use the Douglas Fairbanks approach, where in the villains are disposed of in a flamboyant virtually comedy style.
Extensive research safeguards accurate representation of the ethnic and topographic qualities of the areas depicted, Barbara said. This gives a soft-sell educational aspect to the series.
“That is a happy by-product,” he went on. “Our primary target is entertainment.”
Watching and listening to Barbera effuse about the program is an experience in itself.
A swarthy, handsome ex-New Yorker who began his career as an accountant with a bent for drawing, he moves swiftly about his large, tastefully appointed office grabbing for multi-pictured storyboards, character studies or research material to punctuate each point.
Barbera plays all the parts. And he can recite the plots of every one of the 26 episodes without stumbling once.
His partner, quiet, analytical Bill Hanna, a one-time structural engineer from New Mexico, lets the fiery Barbera make the spiels. Both are casual dressers. They don’t believe in reams of inter-office memos. Thus, the atmosphere about their new three-story, $1 ¼-million studio bespeaks quiet efficiency under the burden of a staggering workload.
With the addition of “Jonny Quest,” Hanna-Barbera have 13 TV properties being viewed by 300-million people in 42 countries, plus a feature length film, their first, entitled “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear.”

Hanna-Barbera’s eventual layout chief, Iwao Takamoto, explained the genesis of Jonny Quest in his autobiography. Doug Wildey had been hired to find a way to animate the old kids’ radio serial Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Then Joe Barbera changed his mind. Why not go for something with a little more action, like Milt Caniff’s Sunday newspaper comic Terry and the Pirates?

To quote from Iwao:

“Jonny Quest” was an example of how sophisticated planned animation had become, particularly in the hands of an incredibly clever layout man like Bill Perez. Bill and another artist named Tony Sgroi were exceptional at figuring out how to reuse drawings without making it look like they were being repeated, by “fielding” them, or presenting them in camera range, in different ways. Between the two of them, they used every bit of the trickery that went into planned animation in the first place and came up with a few new tricks of their own. This way they were able to keep their episodes within the budget, which was already high for an animated television show. Some of the other artists, particularly the ones from the comic-book field, who were not accustomed to the techniques of planned animation, tended to run rampant with the budgets, and the costs of these episodes skyrocketed.
Many people have asked why such a great show lasted only one season, and the reason is very simple: it just cost too damned much to continue to do it at the same level of quality. Money proved to be the thing that accomplished what “Dr. Zin” and all of the show’s other villains could not do, which was stop Jonny Quest. When Bill Hanna estimated the price tag for a second season, the network simply said no thanks. Perhaps that is just as well, because that one season of “Jonny Quest,” I feel is a highlight of the studio’s history.

There was another factor Iwao omits. The Flintstones was being crushed under a boulder of higher ratings by The Munsters over at CBS. ABC reacted by moving the Modern Stone Age Family into the Quest time slot to get the numbers needed to ensure renewal for another season (and enable Hanna-Barbera to sell more Flintstones merchandise). Quest moved opposite The Munsters. Cancellation followed. After a bit of a break, Jonny Quest’s old episodes surfaced on Saturday morning re-runs in the 1967-68 season, finding an eager audience.

Bill Hanna once said the prime time run of Quest pushed the studio in a direction which put Space Ghost, The Herculoids and The Fantastic 4 on Saturday mornings. The series certainly should be considered, the Fleischer Superman shorts notwithstanding, the father of action-adventure cartoon shows in North America.

We can't let a post on Jonny Quest go by without referring to the theme song, and composer Hoyt Curtin's desire to make it so complicated for trombonists, there was no way they could play it. The mood library he (and others) created for the series is a true masterpiece. Here are two versions of the opening theme.





Curtin composed another "theme" for Jonny Quest, one that sounds right out of the James Bond movie Dr. No. It can be heard on the H-B Records album Jonny Quest in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. You can hear it by clicking below.


I had thought Greg Ehrbar, who knows more about H-B Records than anyone alive, profiled this album, but I can not find it [Late note: See Greg's comment]. But Greg has done Hanna-Barbera fans a great service and tracked down Jonny himself. He interviewed Tim Matheson about playing the boy adventurer and you can listen it here.

He Was Hadji

Whenever Hanna-Barbera had kid characters in the 1950s, adults who had come from radio did the voices.

Things changed when Jonny Quest came along in 1964.

Someone made the decision to go with boy actors to play boy roles instead of hiring Dick Beals or Nancy Wible or other adults who approximated child voices.

There was a real danger in this (no, we don’t mean Toby Danger). Boys age. And when a boy has aged enough and his voice changes, he’s aged himself out of a role. This didn’t happen on Quest simply because it lasted only one season.

Tim Matthieson was hired for the main role and for the role of his friend and companion, Hadji, the studio cast actor Danny Bravo.

Bravo played Michael Littlebear, a young orphaned native boy, in 20th Century Fox’s For the Love of Mike, released in 1960. The screen credit read “Introducing Danny Bravo as Michael” as if he were a brand-new actor. But that wasn’t the case at all. Some pieces in print about the time the film appeared in theatres or in production as The Golden Touch gave his real name—Danny Zaldivar.

TV viewers might have seen him as a Mexican boy in a 1959 episode of G.E. Theatre called “Beyond the Mountains” (the syndicated TV Key service said his performance made the show worthwhile) or on Alcoa Theatre the following year in “The Storm.” He even did comedy in a parody called “They Went Thataway” on New Comedy Showcase on CBS in the summer of 1960.

The Windsor Star’s entertainment editor had this to say about him in The Love of Mike:

If Danny Bravo ever decides to try to realize his original ambition to become a matador, there’s a great chance the world many yet see another Manuelito in future years—this time from Los Angeles, California. Despite the fact that he has graced this sphere for only 12 years, Danny has all the determination and drive necessary to bring him to the top of any profession he chooses.

Doug Wildey, the creator of the series, talked to Comics Scene magazine about the series. He didn’t explain how Bravo came to be cast, but did reveal to writer Will Murray how and why he invented Hadji:

It was while creating the early cast that Wildey ran into his first creative disagreement on Jonny Quest. Someone at Hanna-Barbera suggested adding a bulldog to the cast for toy licensing purposes. Thus was born the irrepressible Bandit.
“I fought against Bandit quite a while,” Wildey recalls. “He was a cartoon dog. It was a little bit too unrealistic for the characters. As soon as they put in Bandit, I immediately created Hadji. I felt very strongly that we needed someone besides a dog. It’s simply not natural for a kid to talk to grown-ups on the same level.”
The final addition to the cast, Hadji was a Hindu boy with undefined mystical power. Although he first appeared in the second episode, the story of how he saved Dr. Quest’s life and joined the team wasn’t told until episode #7, "Calcutta Adventure.” He was mysteriously absent from other segments. Actually, these were pre-Hadji episodes shown out of production sequence.
Hadji was loosely based on '40s film actor Sabu. "Later on," Wildey recalls, “when we were auditioning for voices on the series, Sabu's son, Paul Sabu, showed up to audition.”

What did Bravo have to say about Jonny Quest? Nothing I’ve been able to find. During the show’s original run, Joe Barbera did all the talking to newspapers; you can find some of those columns reproduced on this blog. No one seemed interested in talking with the actors, less so as the show’s ratings dropped and the series was sacrificed to keep the merchandise-heavy The Flintstones on the air by switching their time slots. I’ve found one unbylined blurb in the Buffalo Evening News, March 28, 1964. I presume this was a PR handout from Screen Gems.

Danny Bravo, the “voice” of Hadji, the Hindu boy who uses his knowledge of the mysteries of the east to great advantage in Screen Gems’ new animated adventure series, Jonny Quest (Ch. 7, Fridays, 7:30 PM), began his career as an actor at the ripe old age of nine. He is in demand in many TV series because of his Latin heritage and his knowledge of foreign accents.

Danny appeared in a few more supporting roles in various TV shows in the 1960s. An unusual “credit” shows up in the Torrence, California paper, The Daily Breeze, of April 30, 1965 in a story about an awards ceremony at a high school in Lawndale. One of the presenters was “Danny Bravo, star of the television series ‘Mamie McPheeters’.”

Star of what?? Did the show actually exist? Maybe it had a dog named Bandit. (Late note: See Top Cat James' clarification about the series in the comments section).

Bravo returned to Hanna-Barbera in The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1968-69 TV season) and vanished from view.

I can’t confirm unsourced information on the internet, so I don’t know where Bravo went after that or what he’s doing today. What I can confirm is we’ll have a post on Jonny Quest’s 60th “birthday.”

Remember, there’s a link to Jonny Quest posts in the right-side column.

Not a Groupie For Loopy

Hanna-Barbera debuted two cartoon series in 1959. One is my favourite—the Quick Draw McGraw Show.

The other is Loopy de Loop.

I’m afraid I’m not a fan of Loopy. He’s a French-Canadian wolf who’s not one of those Disney-type bad wolves. He’s a good wolf. And . . . well, that’s it. Hanna-Barbera managed to stretch this one-dimensional idea into 48 cartoons from 1959 to 1965. He starred in a theatrical cartoon series with a TV animation budget.

The reason I’ve broken my Loopy silence, all the more remarkable because this blog is more or less inactive, is I somehow stumbled onto the first Loopy cartoon. It opened so full of promise. I really like the background at the start.


The artwork is from Fernando Montealegre. I like this because he’s incorporated flatness with some perspective. This, by the way, would have been the first cartoon from Hanna-Barbera Productions seen in colour, as the TV series were aired (in 1959) in black-and-white.

Poor Mike Maltese. In 1959, he wrote 78 cartoons for television (the entire Quick Draw series, one Huckleberry Hound and one Yogi Bear), and then had to write this one, Wolf Hounded. He cobbled together a story with some familiar situations. The sexually-aroused grandma in Red Hot Riding Hood. The jerkish pigs from The Turn Tale Wolf (thanks to Jonathan Wilson for the correction). The “helpless” girl who can beat up someone in self-defence from The Dover Boys. Oh, and Loopy’s aspiration to be a lady-charmer comes from any number of Pepé LePew cartoons (also written by le guesse who?). I’m not saying these are the sources, but they have plot similarities with this cartoon.

Another Monty background.



Something the cartoon has in its favour is the casting of June Foray. It seems odd that Joe Barbera didn’t get Jean Vander Pyl, whom he started employing in 1959. I can’t help but wonder if she voiced Betty in the Flagstones reel about the time she did this. June Foray is a national treasure.

Columbia Pictures had been distributing cartoons made by UPA. Someone at Columbia must have realised this was a silly idea. After all, Columbia had a piece of Hanna-Barbera. Why not have them make theatrical cartoons instead? That’s what happened, although Columbia evidently had a deal permitting them to re-issue UPA shorts it had already put in theatres.

Here’s a full-page ad taken out in several trades.



The most hilarious thing in the ad isn’t the sell-job on Loopy, but the utterly inept drawings in the box for the old Screen Gems Columbia Favorites with the duck and hunter from Wacky Quacky, and the Indian and moose from Topsy Turkey. (Maybe even funnier is advertising “Another Travelark.” Yeah, theatre owners, we haven’t figured out what it is, but get the film anyway).

Maybe you’re one of those people who likes Loopy de Loop. Someone at Motion Picture Magazine guffawed over him. Here’s a review from the December 16, 1959 issue.

WOLF HOUNDED. Columbia Loopy de Loop Cartoon. 7m. This introduces a new cartoon character, a French wolf, who gets his fairy tales all mixed up and meets his match in Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, who much to his distraction, falls for him and causes him to flee. EXCELLENT.

This is the same publication which gave an “excellent” rating to the insufferable UPA short Picnics Are Fun (reviewed somewhere on the Tralfaz blog). Meanwhile, it only gave a “good” to Drag-Along Droopy, my favourite of all the Droopy cartoons, and dismissed Friz Freleng’s High Diving Hare and the Maltese-written Real Gone Woody as “fair.” But it also gave an “excellent” to Avery’s Billy Boy and Three Little Pups as well as Gene Deitch’s stylish The Juggler of Our Lady. These strike me as accurate ratings but, of course, taste in cartoons is subjective.

One other thing the Loopy cartoons did was eliminate the Capital Hi-Q and Langlois Filmusic background music at Hanna-Barbera. Hoyt Curtin was brought in to write a library of cues for Loopy. I love the stock music, but in-house compositions became the policy at H-B and resulted in excellent scores for The Jetsons, Jonny Quest and other series.

And now, you’re in for a treat (?)

Here’s a version of the Loopy theme song with lyrics. No doubt the intended kiddie audience would have said “Loopy who?” so to increase saleability, the 78 is “Yogi Bear Introduces Loopy De Loop.” Everyone knew who Yogi was.

Kids would have been unhappy to find Yogi was an imposter. As this is a Golden Record, Daws Butler is nowhere to be heard. I originally thought it was Gil Mack, a fine New York radio actor, but it seems to me it’s Frank Milano, who provided some voices in Total TeleVision cartoons and who recorded an LP as Yogi, his final album before his death, actually. I will allow you to determine how he performs as “Yogi The Bear.”

Daws Butler: Living the Characters

Daws Butler once told interviewer Larry King that he did not do “voices.” He did “characters.”

If anyone was the glue that held the Hanna-Barbera cartoons together in the early years, it was Daws Butler. He voiced almost all the starring characters before The Flintstones came along in 1960. Even then he auditioned for Fred Flintstone and, the following year, was briefly picked as the voice of Top Cat.

Whatever he picked up about acting with one’s voice, starting on the stage in Chicago in the mid-‘30s, he passed on to anyone who asked for his help. His cartoon career began after the war; he gave credit to MGM director Tex Avery for picking him (though it is understood he narrated a cartoon for Columbia/Screen Gems before that).

Through the 1950s, when he wasn’t performing in theatrical cartoons, he and Stan Freberg were almost a pair, working on the puppet show A Time For Beany, a bunch of records for Capitol and two radio shows. He deserved a writing credit on Freberg’s 1957 variety show but never got one. Then there were numerous animated commercials on TV that Daws also wrote and lent some voices that would be familiar to Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward fans not too much later.

Daws talked about the Hanna-Barbera characters in a number of interviews over the years. Here’s one from the Evansville Press of Oct. 30, 1966. By then, others had taken over the lead roles as H-B moved into Saturday morning programming.

Virtually Living the Part Is Key to Success Says ‘Voice’ of 10 Weekly TV Cartoon Shows
By BILL LYON
Tri-State Editor
MADISONVILLE, Ky.—You’ve heard Yogi Bear boast of being “better than the average bear.” [sic]
And Mr. Jinks vowing “I hate meeces to pieces.”
And Snagglepuss with his “Exit, stage right.”
Now meet the man behind those voices and expressions, as well as those of a dozen other TV cartoon characters. His name is Daws Butler. He’s a short, barrel-chested man with shaggy eyebrows and a face as elastically expressive as his amazing voice.
Chances are you’ve never heard of Mr. Butler before.
But you, and especially your children, hear him five hours a week on television. He does the voices for 10 different half-hour cartoon shows—Quick-Draw McGraw, Dixie, Hokey Wolf, Blabber-Mouse, Super Snooper, Baba-Looey, Snuffles, Huckleberry Hound, Augie Doggie, Fibber Fox and a few others in addition to the three mentioned previously.
Butler also handles the voices for Cap’n Crunch and Mr. Wiggle in the cereal and Jello commercials.
He was in Madisonville the last week with his wife visiting his sister-in-law and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Selby Coffman.
Butler estimates that since broke in the cartoon field in 1951 with Walter Lantz strips he has provided the voices for over 600 cartoons.
The secret to all those different voice characterizations?
“Virtually living the character," Butler said. ”If I had to act them out physically, I could. When I do Yogi Bear I almost walk like he does. Mr. Jinks the cat talks very slowly. So when I do him my whole body relaxes and goes limp.”
Yogi Bear is probably the most famous of Butler’s voices—he’s been translated into 19 languages in 32 countries, and for a time was the only American show seen on TV in Cuba. But Butler’s personal favorite seems to be Mr. Jinks, the cat who spends his time in a frustrating chase after those two mice, Pixie and Dixie.
“He’s the most elastic character. I talk around his lines and have made him exceptionally verbose . . . while occasionally butchering the English language," Butler said.
Contrary to popular belief, voices of cartoon characters are not dubbed in after the animated strips have been made.
“Most people think that the way it’s done, but it would be too confining. Most of the personality a cartoon character has comes from his voice and his attitude of expression,” Butler pointed out.
“So we read the script and the sound track is made first. The writers and animators watch us read, and pick up some additional ideas for illustrations and lines from our facial expressions. That’s why early radio was such great training because you were acting out the lines to put more feeling in them," Butler continued.
Butler’s next project will be the voices of the scarecrow, tin woodman and the wizzard [sic] in an MGM adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz." It will be released in January. Mel Blanc will do the voice of the cowardly lion.
"The big advantage to doing voices is that, unlike an actor, you don't get stereotyped. I can play a prince in shows like Aesop and Son or Fractured Fables then to Yogi Bear or Quick-Draw McGraw," Butler pointed out.
Daws and his wife live in Beverly Hills. They have four sons—David, Don, Paul and Charles.
“They’ve grown up now, but they’ll be having kids who can watch cartoons on TV, and maybe listen to their grandfather," Butler smiled.

Now, for your listening pleasure, here’s Daws in one of his early West Coast projects. Belda Records were 78s that came with a comic book to read along with the dialogue on the record. The comics were drawn by Tubby Millar, a writer of Warner Bros. cartoons in the ‘30s You can see one page of the artwork to the right. And we have the sound from “Chirpy Cricket,” copyrighted on April 20, 1947. The story is by Frank Bonham.


Here’s an interesting bit from Chuck Cecil’s The Swingin’ Years, a big band show that aired, among a number of places, on Armed Forces Radio. Listen to the minute-long drop-in at 17:05. You’ll recognise the voice. I don’t know the context behind the routine.



And from the late Earl Kress comes this 1986 walk around Daws' studio behind his home.