Biography

March 31, 1930 · Belleville, Ontario, Canada

September 5, 2019 · Lindsay, Ontario, Canada

Arthur Rodney Coneybeare

He started out on a CBC radio show and sold a radio script to NBC. He worked at various Ontario radio stations, supplementing his income with work in the theater.

He was also Rusy the rooster in Friendly Giant and would do both voices in a dialogue.

[on 'The Bananas'] I was trying to create a program that was wry, ironic and sardonic - something to get the audience to question things around them. It represented a sort of civilized iconoclasm that I believe kids should be exposed to. It was quite successful with audiences, but it died for lack of funds - it was expensive for the time. We probably should have changed the title after the U.S. program aired, but the CBC really liked the name, so we stuck with it.

[on 'The Friendly Giant'] The program started out with another puppeteer. This man was not tall. He didn't have a long enough arm to make Jerome appear as a giraffe. Jerome would come up to the window, slump down, and look more like a horse or a cow.

[on 'The Friendly Giant'] we used two puppeteers until I took over for Rusty as well. At that point Bob [Homme] and I realized we could ad lib the program and dispensed with scripts, which gave the show a different ambience.