Saturday 28 September 2024

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.


9 comments:

  1. RIP to an unsung early HB voice artist.It's funny how he was paired in "FLINTSTONE & THE LION"(1963) in Season 4 and "SUPERSTONE" (1964) in Season 5 with the same iconic voice actor-Don Messick.Again,RIP.Steve

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  2. The end of an era. Loved his Alvin Brickrock paired with Hoyt Curtin’s variation on the Hitchcock theme. One of the great broadcasters. Not a liner card reader, but a real communicator.

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    1. Yeah, Anon, and there are fewer and fewer guys from that time left. They were really creative. I worked with a number of them (not in the Los Angeles market; my chance to work there is a long story). They're all getting up there and a few are not in good health. A damned shame.

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  3. Thank you for this. My father, Elliot would love this memory.

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    1. Thanks for the note. I enjoyed our on-line chats. You get two old radio guys together and there are a lot of funny stories.

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    2. Don’t I know that. Whenever my old radio gang gets together. We usually laugh so hard with all the old stories and hijinks, it hurts. We can go on for hours.

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  4. This is semi-off-topic (related to the Hanna-Barbera studio itself but not to Elliot Field) but I want to get something off my chest (and I know many people will disagree with me on this unpopular opinion); In my opinion I think Hanna-Barbera's Cartoon Network output (from February 20, 1995 to May 18, 2002) are the most overrated pieces of crap to ever exist. They feel less like trying to "save and improve" Hanna-Barbera and more like they're trying to blatantly copy the look and feel of the Games Animation/Nickelodeon Animation Studio-produced Nicktoons (two Nicktoons in particular being "The Ren & Stimpy Show" and "Rocko's Modern Life").

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