Daws Butler was the backbone of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio in the Kellogg’s era. He voiced almost all the main characters and was, indirectly, responsible for most of the others.

Butler’s cartoon career was shifted into high gear at MGM (the studio of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera) when he auditioned for director Tex Avery and was handed a stream of parts, continuing after Avery was let go in 1953.

Avery came up with a low-key wolf with a southern accent for Billy Boy (released in 1954). Butler insisted the voice was borrowed from a neighbour of his wife Myrtis in Albemarle, North Carolina. The character was a heavy influence when Joe and Bill came up with Huckleberry Hound in 1958.

Butler’s cohort at H-B was Don Messick, whom he had recommended to Avery for voice work while still at MGM. And Doug Young, who was the Durante-inspired voice of Doggie Daddy on The Quick Draw McGraw Show in 1959, was also a recommendation from Daws, who had done the same voice for Bill and Joe at MGM.

The Butler family paid occasional visits to see Myrtis’ folks. The local paper, the Stanly News and Press, talked to Daws during one trip in 1960, arguably the height of Huck’s popularity. This is from July 1. Daws gets into the philosophy behind the earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

TV’s Huckleberry Hound Man is Visiting in Albemarle
The voice behind the popular Huckleberry Hound TV series cartoon characters is in Albemarle this week.
He is Charles Dawson Butler, better known under his professional name of Daws Butler.
Currently, he and his wife and four sons are visiting here in the home of his wife's mother, Mrs. E. M. Martin, of 128 Summit Avenue.
Mrs. Butler is the former Miss Myrtis Martin of Albemarle.
The most impressive thing about Mr. Butler, of course, is his voice—after you get over the initial shock that he's only five feet two inches tall.
What he lacks in stature, he makes up for in voice, volume, and in warmth of personality and showmanship that is no less than captivating.
His speech has the glibness of a circus barker, yet, it has the depth and adoritness [sic] of a serious student and practitioner of show-business, one wise and experienced in the life of an actor.
Worldwide Audience
About his work as the voice behind Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and related characters in the syndicated cartoons which reach a worldwide audience, he is most enthusiastic.
Occasionally to illustrate a point, he assumed the voice of one of his cartoon characters and demonstrated his versatility. His eyes laugh and his voice has that extra special lilt to it.
He can talk about cartooning and animation for hours and hours and cover all the intricacies that go into the production of a completed cartoon. Incidentally, the seven-minute cartoon requires about three weeks to complete, from beginning to end.
His part of it, the voice part, requires only a fraction of this time. In fact, he has put the voice in as many as half a dozen cartoons in one day. The day before he left on his current vacation, he taped four or five.
Mr. Butler works very closely with Don Messick, another animator who puts the voice in Bobo Bear [Boo-Boo] and Pixie. Each man also has many secondary and minor talking parts.
Huckleberry Hound is now in its third year. A companion cartoon series, "Quick Draw Drama" [sic], also features voice characterizations by Butler, Messick and Doug Young. About a year and a half old now, the latter series features such characters as Baba-Looey, Super-Snooper, Blabber-Mouse, and Auggie Doggie.
Won An Emmy
This year Huckleberry Hound was awarded an "Emmy" in the children's category by the TV industry.
The name of the outfit which produces the shows is Hanna-Barbera Productions. The producers are Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, both veterans in the field.
"Originally, the show was aimed primarily at kids," Butler said. "But now it has grown into a family show and is reaching a wider audience than ever.
"When we got together to launch the thing, we were looking for something like a Tennessee Ernie for kids. If you remember the old Tom and Jerry cartoons you may see some vestige of them in our show."
Butler considers their early cartoons as primitive compared to what they are turning out today. When their mail and surveys indicated a big upswing in adult viewers, they threw in some adult appeal. A certain level of humor was injected for the adults to balance the show with the strictly juvenile portion.
Character Emphasis
Warmth and close character identification are the attributes most stressed by the producers, Butler says.
"Our characters are not just voices and names," he said. "Each is a distinct personality with obvious tags and philosophies. That is the secret of the whole thing."
Many TV cartoon viewers think the story and animation come first in a cartoon, then the voice. This isn't the case at all. Butler says. The voice comes first and the animation and drawing shaped to correspond.
The Kellog[g] Company sponsors the shows.
Butler does the commercials, also, rather, is the voice behind the commercials.
In addition to his regular work on the two syndicated cartoon shows, he does freelance work commercials.
Huckleberry and the other cartoon regulars are produced by a topflight staff of professionals, Butler said. They constantly inject new blood and new material into the show to keep it fresh, exciting, and secure in its top-spot position.
The few competitors of their shows he termed as crude.
"Ours is pure fantasy," he said, "A never-never land where animals talk and do impossible things and have a whale of a lot of fun. This way, you're not fettered. You do not have to adhere to the norm. You have freedom to experiment and move around in.
"Our show has grown and it has improved. Those little extra touches and subtlies [sic] like a jerk of the head or a special nuance of the voice go a long way toward making a quality product."



Native Of Ohio
Born in Ohio, Butler was reared in Oak Park, Ill., where he emerged from his formal schooling with an ambition to be a cartoonist. Shy and awkward about reciting in school, he later forced himself to participate in talent contests and speaking engagements to overcome his handicap. This self-therapy continued until he joined three other entertainers and founded an act which took them to stage floors over half the nation.
Uncle Sam called in May, 1942 and he was a yeoman in the U. S. Navy until 1946. While working at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., he met his wife who was employed there by the government.
There he immediately went into radio work, auditioning at the cartoon studios every chance he got until he landed a job.
Then it was but a matter of hard work and making the right contacts until his talent was recognized and carried him to top jobs.
Today, he and his family live in a comfortable home in Beverly Hills, a 20-minute drive from his studio.
Sons In TV, Too
The four boys of Mr. and Mrs. Butler are David, 16; Donald, 13; Paul, 10; and Charles, six.
All of them, under the expert coaxing of their father, have been in bit parts in TV commercials. And some not so small parts.
One of them has landed an important part in a Hans Christian Anderson classic now under production.
The Butlers and Mrs. Martin plan to leave Friday for a week's stay on Ocracoke Island on the eastern North Carolina coast.
After returning here, the Butlers will leave on July 12 to return home. Although Mrs. Butler has returned here and her mother has visited them in California, Mr. Butler says this is his first visit back here in 17 years. "I love your wonderful green country here," he said. "It's so fresh and natural and unspoiled. Out where we live much of it is manmade and artificial."
The Huckleberry Hound man sees a very bright future in cartooning. "It's good and American," he said. "It's been tried and proven and accepted as a permanent part of the entertainment world. It's here to stay."

There was a post-script to the story. The paper’s editorial section printed this on July 5. It is a very good assessment of Daws’ abilities.

Fred Morgan’s Musings
That Huckleberry Hound TV cartoon guy is quite a versatile showman and actor. He visited in Albemarle last week and is due to come back here late this week prior to leaving for California.
I enjoyed immensely my brief visit with Daws Butler and his family and the intriguing glimpse into this phase of show-business that he gave me.
Daws is the kind of guy you appreciate instinctively.
He came up the hard knock way through the ranks to his present position as one of the very top cartoon voices in the field, overcoming a latent shyness and fear of anything to do with audio performances before an audience no matter how small.
Daws says there are no hard and fast restrictions and barriers in his shows between him and his co-workers, all seasoned professionals. Their working relationship is always flexible and open to suggestion and change for the betterment of the program.
You have to hear Daws in his various and ludicurous [sic] character voices to fully appreciate this man's talent and capabilities.
My interview with him was a riot of laughs, for I couldn't resist laughing spasmodically during the full hour I was there.
You would have, too.
I'd ask Daws a question and Huckleberry Hound would answer me.
Or Yogi Bear. Or Mr. Jinks. Or Super-Snooper. Or Blabber-Mouse. Or any one of a dozen or more characters.
You ought to hear Huck say, "It's good to be in old N. C."
Or Yogi drawl, "I like the feel of a real Tar Heel."
Or other such gag lines which bubble out of Daws with magnificent ease.
He does more than just say the lines. He puts action and showmanship into it.
This is important, Daws says, not only to give him a more genuine control of tone and nuance of voice that he wants to put into the line, but to give the artists and animators an idea for the actions and facial expressions of the character who is speaking the lines. The artists and animators always watch Daws as he records the voice and note these subtleties which they incorporate into the finished product.
In cartooning as in any successful creative work, Daws says is vital to capture the intrinsic emotions and motivations of your characters. He does this admirably well.
• • •
Marvin Coley had an excellent radio interview with Daws, too [on WABZ], which I managed to catch. That Daws is really a swell fellow and I hope cartooning will continue to kind to him.

Over the years, I’ve talked to people who knew Daws. Everyone praised his kindness, generosity and assistance. As time moves along without a pause, it’s a little difficult to think he passed away 37 years ago. His voice, or at least the ones he gave his characters, is still there. I hope it always will be.

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.

Daws Butler is still with us, in a way, even though he’s been gone physically for 32 years. You can pull out a DVD of one of his cartoons and enjoy his work. His recordings with Stan Freberg (commercials, radio, 45s) are on various websites. It’s still pretty easy to get a smile from Daws.

He was born 104 years ago today and as a little tribute, here’s an interview he gave the Detroit Free Press on June 18, 1964. The article is supposed to be a plug for the coming Yogi Bear movie but the writer seems to have found Butler’s voice work for Hanna-Barbera a more interesting topic.

I’m a little surprised Daws wasn’t high on Super Snooper. Granted he was pretty dependent on Archie of radio’s Duffy’s Tavern (he told producer Mark Evanier there was a good helping of Tom D’Andrea in the voice), but I liked the Snooper and Blabber cartoons. I’m at a loss picking a voice Daws did that I don’t like. If there is one, it would be the last one mentioned in the article below. I preferred Chilly Willy as a pantomime character instead of sounding like a squeaky toy.

'Hello, Yogi Bear Speaking . . .'
BY MORT PERSKY
Free Press Staff Writer
The phone rang, and it was Yogi Bear calling from Hollywood. Not only that. It was Huckleberry Hound. And it was Quick-Draw Mc-Graw. And Babalooey and Mr. Jinks and Dixie the meese (the singular of meeses) and Super Snooper and Blabbermouse. And lots of others.
And, mainly, it was this fellow you probably never heard of, named Daws Butler, who is the voice of all those other guys you probably have heard of. And heard. Because they have been starring on television for a long time now.
So long, in fact, that this fellow Yogi Bear has gone into the movies. The first one is "Hey There, It's Yogi Bear," a sort of transparent title, and it is going to be in Detroit starting next Wednesday.
But don't go away. The movie isn't all Daws Butler talked about. (Not that he didn't mention that it is a pretty schmaltzy venture, in the Disney vein, with a great villain a really evil dog. He mentioned that, all right.)
BUTLER TALKED — like Yogi, Huck, Dixie, Quick0Draw and the rest. His greeting, "Hi, this is Yogi Bear," delighted the operator, who went away giggling. After that, he only did characters by request. Left to his own way, he merely talks like Daws Butler, which is a friendly voice with a touch of Mr. Jinks lurking somewhere in the background.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but Jinks is his favorite character: "Because there is a drollness to him. You can do a lot of things with words — abuse them or elongate them, it's almost like blank verse and Jinks has more sides to his character.
"Yogi, for instances has a sing-songy way of talking. There's almost a triplet in Yogi's sing-song. There's very little variation. Huckleberry Hound, it turned out, is another favorite of Butler's. On the other hand, he's never been particularly enamored of doing Super Snooper. "I've certainly never gone into the studio and said, 'Oh, boy, another Super Snooper script.' "
"But it isn't characters like Jinks who catch the public's fancy. It's always the upbeat characters like Yogi, Huck, and Snagglepuss . . . and Quick-Draw."
HOW DOES one get to be a Yogi-Huck-Jinks-Etc? "Back in high school, I was bashful. I used to make myself get up on the stage and do things. I worked up a routine where I imitated President Roosevelt and Rudy Vallee. Doing the sound effects of a model-T Ford was the top of my act."
After that, he went into radio, playing heavies and heroes almost without stopping for breath taking two or three roles In the same show.
And how do you go about creating a voice for a character never heard nor seen before?
"I WORK closely with the cartoonists. They show me a character, like Yogi, looking big and brash, and I try to sound the way I think the character would sound. Right now we're making Peter Potamus talk. I see this big hippo with a big mouth and I shape my mouth like his and I talk like this."
Clearly, it was Peter Potamus himself.
Butler was born in Toledo in 1916, grew up In Oak Park, Ill. He and his wife Myrtis live with their four boys (David, 20; Donald, 17; Paul, 14, and Charles 10) in Beverly Hills.
Our telephone conversation had to end of course. Butler had a recording session coming up. He had to see a man (Walter Lantz) about a dog (named Smedley) and a penguin (Chilly-Willy). It's all in his line of work.

Daws’ career encompassed more than Hanna-Barbera, or even cartoons (MGM, Warner Bros.). He wrote and voiced TV commercials. He played puppeteer on Time For Beany. He recorded children’s records for Capitol. One of his records was turned into the Mel-O-Toon “Peppy Possum.” You can see it below. The other voice belongs to Billy Bletcher. These cartoons were produced by Art Scott, who moved on to Hanna-Barbera in the early ‘60s.

For a while, it seems like it was impossible to turn on a television set on any given day and not hear Daws Butler. Even in the pre-home video, pre-specialised cable channel days, Hanna-Barbera or Warner Bros. or Jay Ward cartoons were on the air somewhere. Of course, you’d only hear Daws. You wouldn’t see him.

Daws seems to have shied away from being on-camera. In the ‘50s, he appeared on rare occasion on Pantomime Quiz. That was during a time when anybody on radio was expected to make the transition to television. But 40 years ago, he consented to go in front of the camera.

Here’s an unbylined blurb from the Fond Du Lac Commonwealth Reporter of October 12, 1979. This had to be written from some kind of news release because I’ve found Daws’ quote at the end in no fewer than three newspaper stories in three different years. I didn’t see this special so I can’t tell you if it was any good, but I’ve always cringed when TV stars never associated with animated cartoons suddenly pop up as a “host.” “What are they doing there?” I’d always ask myself. After all, would Walt Disney emcee a retrospective on My Favorite Martian?

He's the voice behind Yogi Bear
Huckleberry Hound can't say a word, Yogi Bear is speechless, Quick Draw McGraw has absolutely nothing to say, and Augie Doggie is mute unless Daws Butler is around.
The shy, diminutive 5'2" Butler is a little man with a very big voice, indeed. It is Daws Butler's voice, personality, comedic sense and innate acting ability that has enlivened the popular animated characters of Yogi and his cartoon cohorts, as well as such pen-and-ink performers as Blabber Mouse, Peter Potamus, Super Snoop and Cap 'n Crunch, plus scores of others.
For more than 20 years since William Hanna and Joseph Barbera founded Hanna-Barbera, their highly successful animated production company, Daws Butler has been widely heard but seldom seen in his special world of artistic fantasy. He makes a rare on-camera appearance when he joins host Bill Bixby in a behind-the-scenes visit to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon kingdom on "Yabba Dabba Doo 2," live-action and animated special to be broadcasted Friday on the CBS Television Network.
Being known only as a voice, throughout a professional career that has spanned nearly four decades in radio and in motion pictures and television animation, could cause an ego problem for most performers, but Butler is philosophic about his lack of visibility.
"I've always considered myself a complete actor, he says. "I become the character in expression, gesture and physical action when I am supplying the voices."

Daws was quoted further in a 1982 piece promoting Yogi Bear’s All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper:

In the early stages of development of cartoon personalities, Butler works closely with the animators, who incorporate his facial features into their drawings. Butler creates characterizations; the artists translate them into pictures.
"There was a time in my early career," Butler admits, "when I resented the prospect of going through life known only as Yogi Bear. I got over the resentment long ago. After all, Yogi is still a star, long after hundreds of others have faded away.
"And he needs me," adds the actor. “To Yogi Bear, at least, I am indispensable. That's a nice feeling.”

The Daws Butler PR Machine was pretty busy 40 years ago. Here’s another story about him, again unbylined, published in several newspapers starting around October 21, 1979. I like how Daws did the voice of a Ford on a show sponsored by Chrysler.

Daws Butler Is A Man Of A Hundred Voices
HOLLYWOOD—Chicago couldn't always tell the difference between Daws Butler and the engine of a cold Model T.
That unique confusion pushed Butler into a 40-year career that has seen the diminutive character actor give voice to some of the most famous cartoon creatures in the world of animation, including Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, and Huckleberry Hound. His vocal artistry will again be on display when he "speaks for" Raggedy Andy in the upcoming animated Halloween special, "Raggedy Ann & Andy in the Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile," Wednesday, Oct. 31 on the CBS Television Network.

A shy youngster who was ill at ease in large groups, Butler took public-speaking lessons to buoy his self-confidence and "graduated" to doing impressions (from his own written material) in amateur contests around his native Chicago. In spite of a repertoire that was limited to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rudy Vallee and the aforementioned Model T, he began to win some prizes and a modest following. Then, he formed an act with two other amateur contest veterans. As The Three Short Waves, they specialized in impressions of radio personalities and movie greats.
Butler served in the U.S. Naval Reserve intelligence branch for four years during World War II and then brought his family to Hollywood, where he broke into radio, working as a dramatic actor and capitalizing on his versatility at "doubling" a variety of voices.
In 1948, Butler starred with Stan Freberg in the West Coast's first television puppet show, the multi-Emmy winning "Time for Beany." Also with Freberg, he co-wrote and co-voiced comedy records, including "St. George and the Dragonet," the first comedy recording to sell more than one million copies. Butler's voice has been "behind" hundreds of radio and animated television commercials, and he created the vocal characters for many world-famous stars out of the animation production houses of Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward and other companies.
Butler conducts an actor's workshop in his home and at several adult schools in the Los Angeles area, sharing his expertise on acting, in general, and the special art of dialect and voice characterization, in particular.

There was more of Daws on television that year. Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear was broadcast on a number of stations. And there was Daws on the radio, too. He and other fine actors were hired for Sears Radio Theatre, a series evoking memories of drama on the old networks. Unfortunately, the old networks had affiliates which broadcast these kinds of shows. Sears couldn’t clear enough air time to make the show profitable.

It’s impossible for me to put in words how much I’ve admired and enjoyed Daws’ work over the years. He finally got the tribute he deserved in the documentary Daws Butler: Voice Magician which you should be able to watch below.

Isn’t this a great tribute drawing to Hanna-Barbera’s greatest voice actor, Daws Butler?



I’ll bet this was drawn by H-B writer and sketch artist Tony Benedict. It has many of the same poses of the characters that were in a later drawing.

This one accompanied a fine article on Daws in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin of August 6, 1962. Ignoring the spelling mistakes and a couple of factual errors (Huck debuted in 1958, A Time for Beany in 1949, June Foray and Hy Averback were also in “St. George and the Dragonet”), it’s a nice summary of his career. At this point, his favourite character was Mr. Jinks, which I’ve read in other articles around this time.

My appreciation goes to Kerry Cisneroz for passing along this picture.

Rarely Seen Daws Butler Talks Way to Stardom
By TED KURRUS
Although Daws Butler is rarely seen on either a television or motion picture screen, he is a “star” with probably a greater following than the hip-swinging Elvis.
He doesn't look much like a star—he's not tall, dark and handsome but stands about five-feet-six with features resembling a Michelangelo cherub.
Daws Butler is a voice. In fact, he's 17 voices in 17 different characters. He's Huckleberry Hound or that loquacious cat, Snagglepuss.
Children of all ages laugh with glee when Daws, impersonating the picnic lunch-stealing Yogi Bear, announces “I'm better than the a-a-a-v-e-e-r-a-g-e bear,” or when Mr. Jinx [sic], the feline with mice trouble, growls “I hate those miserable m-e-e-c-e-e-s to p-i-e-e-c-e-s.”
Daws just spent a month here vacationing with his wife, Myrtis, and his four sons, and doing some promotional work for his new television series, “The Jetsons.”
It is a series about the family of the future—sort of the antithesis of “The Flintstones,” said Daws.
George Jetson is a factory worker his job is pressing a button. And when George goes home at night to his wife and kids man, he's bushed. He plops onto the livingroom couch, jerks off his shoes and lies back with a 1-o-o-o-n-g sigh.
“Did you have a hard day at the button dear,” chirps George's little wife, Jane.
“Yeh,” mumbles George, “But these three-hour days are killing me.”
PLAYS TWO ROLES
Daws plays two parts in the series. He is the 8-year-old boy of the family named Elroy.
“They shoot him off in the morning to school in a capsule,” said Daws. “He goes to school all over the world one class may be in Switzerland and he may have lunch on Oahu.”
Daws said his other character is Henry, the old superintendent of the building the Jetsons live in.
“Henry is the link with the past—he remembers things that happened today. He's a contemporary child in a period of automation.
“When Henry talks about jet planes, everyone thinks he's old fashioned.”
Daws said the family also has a maid—a mechanized one.
“She sort of mechanized Hazel,” he said.
With Daws in the show is George O'Hanlan [sic], who used to do the motion picture series, “Behind the Eight Ball.” O'Hanlan plays the father.
Penny Singleton, of “Blondie” fame, plays Mrs. Jetson while Janet Waldo, who was Corless [sic] in the "Corless Archer" series, plays the 15-year-old Jetson daughter, Judy.
The show will be in color, beginning in October on the ABC network.
HIS FOURTH SHOW
This will be Daws's' fourth show—he already has “Huckleberry Hound,” “Quick Draw McGraw” and “Yogi Bear.”
Asked how he got into this business, Daws laughed and said “ironically, I first wanted to be a cartoonist.”
But after he graduated from high school in Oak Park, Illinois, he and two friends formed a variety act and called themselves, “The Three Short Waves.”
They did radio and TV impersonations of dramatic actors or comedians like Charles Butterworth, Jack Oakie and Charles Laughton. The act lasted three years, playing also in night clubs and theatres throughout the East and Midwest.
He went to New York in 1938 “and tried to peddle a couple of radio show ideas which came to very little.
“I spent two years making the rounds and writing shows drama and everything.
“I gained a lot of valuable experience,” he said.
After serving in Naval Intelligence in the second World War, when he met and married his wife, Daws and his family came to Los Angeles.
BROKE INTO RADIO
“Then I hit the radio field I'd never done anything before but guest appearances but I broke into the ‘Doctor Christian’ show with Jean Hersholt as a character actor.”
He said it was nearly impossible to break into comedy in those days because the producers and directors were satisfied with the talent they had and “didn't want to take a chance with someone new.”
However, he said he received many calls “because I was versatile and could do many voice changes and, therefore, play many parts.”
He worked on such shows as “The Whistler,” “Suspense” and a few soap operas.
JOINED FREEBERG
In 1947 [sic] Daws got together with Stan Freeberg [sic] and they did a puppet show called “Show Time For Beany” [sic] on television.
“This was the early days of TV. Stan and I did the actual puppeteering as well as the voices. It was on five days a week, 15 minutes a night.
“At the same time I was doing ‘Tom and Jerry’ and ‘Spike and Tike’ cartoons for M.G.M.,” he said. “There I met Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera and that started me off.”
Hanna and Babera [sic] were the bosses of the cartoon shows and have expanded to the point that now they create all of Butler's shows—including “The Flintstones.”
“Huckleberry Hound” started in 1957 [sic]. Daws said Hanna and Barbara wanted to do this show but wanted a live MC.
“Huck was develped [sic] when they gave up the idea of a live MC,” said Daws. “Huck is sort of an easy going guy like the Tennessee Ernie Ford for kids and wears well with the public.
“If anyone gets hurt, it's him,” he said. “He's been with us ever since.”
Daws said the character he likes best is "Mr. Jinx,” the cat.
“He's sort of a takeoff on the New York theatre-type actor with torn shirt and all.
“You know, like Paul Newman, Marlon Brando or Peter Falk.
“He's a very easy character to adlib with—like an unintelligent verbosity.
“He has no modesty . . . if he uses the wrong word or says something wrong, he's the last guy in the world to know it.
“He's very glib.”
Daws has also been on “The Bullwinkle show,” “Fractured Fairy Tales” and did Waldo in the “Mr. McGoo” [sic] series.
He and Stan Freeberg made the record, “St. George and the Dragonet,” which sold 1 1/2 million copies. It came out at the height of Jack Webb's “Dragnet” series.
“We wrote it ourselves—Stan did the Webb character and I did all the others,” he said.
Daws said he has two records coming out—both done with Don Messick. One is titled “Huckleberry Hound and the Ghost Ship,” and the other is “Quick-Draw McGraw and the Treasure of Sarah's Mattress.”
He said they will be out in October and are on the Halloween idea “and have a lot of spook stuff.”
Daws pointed out that one-thing people don't know about the cartoons is that the voices are all done first.
“They draw up a series of characters and we choose one. Then we modify the drawing to fit the voice and the voice to fit the drawing.
“It's sort of a wedding of the picture and the voice,” he said.
Each character gets a fully developed personality, “but the ones that give me the most trouble are those with two lines—at the beginning and at the end of the show.”

And now, a bonus.

For reasons quite unknown to me, the name “Daws Butler” is not included on the record label you see to your right. Daws’ voice, however, is unmistakeable and you’ll hear him on this two-sided 78 rpm record. He plays Inky Dinky, a bear cub who learns about saving money. The tune on the other side is “Inky Dinky Learns to Save.”

Larry Morey’s name might be familiar. He was not only a lyricist for Walt Disney (Snow White, Bambi), he was in the animation business in the 1940s with John Sutherland, an ex-Disney writer who, arguably, had the finest industrial cartoon studio on the West Coast after Morey broke the partnership and went back to Disney. You may also recognise the name “Norma Zimmer.” You should if you’re a fan of Mr. Wunnerful, Wunnerful. She was Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Lady for years.

We’ve cued past the kid fiddling around with the record so you don’t have to.

It sure is nice—right powerful nice, as Huckleberry Hound might say—to see that Daws Butler got a little bit of recognition in the days when Hanna-Barbera and Kellogg’s teamed up to put some enjoyable half-hour cartoons shows on the air in the late 1950s.

Daws worked steadily when he arrived in Hollywood, but he wasn’t a star. He wasn’t even in the same echelon as Mel Blanc who, besides being the voice of Bugs Bunny, was known for his work as supporting actor in some of the top comedy/variety radio shows produced in California, including Jack Benny’s (Blanc was not in the opening credits, but in the 1950s Benny mentioned his name almost in each each show).

This story comes from the Louisville Courier-Journal of February 15, 1959. Huckleberry Hound had been on the air for about five months and Quick Draw McGraw was still in development. It gives a nice little summary of Daws’ career to that point.

The story claims he “became an animator of TV cartoons.” I don’t know if that’s true, but his panel cartoons did appear regularly in a radio magazine in the late 1940s.

There’s no byline to this story so I couldn’t tell you its origin.

Many Voices Keep Butler In Business
Special to The Courier-Journal
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 14.—The text voice you hear may very well be the voice of Daws Butler—one of his “thousand voices,” that is.
Butler is heard on a myriad of cartoon commercials on television, and provides several voices, on the popular TV cartoon shows “Huckleberry Hound” and “Ruff and Ready.” [sic]
He has been imitating voices since 1935, and has been fooling the sharpest ears in America.
Entered Contest
Uncomfortably shy when in high school in Oak Park, Ill., Butler forced himself into an amateur contest as a kind of self-imposed therapy. He did imitations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Rudy Vallee, both of whom were imitated by more people than any other subjects at that time.
“It worked,” Butler says. “I found it easier to appear before people in a ‘life-of-the-party’ bit if I was appearing as someone other than myself.”
Butler teamed up with two other kids who did imitations, and they formed an act that played around Chicago. The trio wound up with a date at the famous old Blackhawk Restaurant, and Butler found himself in show business.
Forgot Ambition
“I forgot my ambition to be a cartoonist and commercial artist,” he recalls. “I decided I already was a professional entertainer, so I stayed with it.”
During the heyday of radio. Butler studied voices and played the parts of many men in dramatic productions. He likes to recall a solo performance when he played every voice in a radio play which had a dozen characters.
World War II took Butler out of show business for four years. When he returned, he joined with Stan Freberg in 1948 and the two of them did the first television puppet show, a local series on the West Coast.
“We worked the puppets,” says Daws, “did all the voices, and ad libbed like crazy because we had no scripts, and no time to memorize them if we had had them.
Remember Recording?
“We drove directors and cameramen crazy, because when they looked at the scripts and listened to the show, they couldn't find their places in the play.”
The show was successful and made a name for Freberg. The two then collaborated on Freberg's first successful recording, which sold over 1,000,000 copies. Remember “St. George and the Dragnet”?
After this, Butler got back to his first love, cartooning, and became an animator of TV cartoons. He writes and does the voices for over 200 commercial cartoons seen on TV today.
On the N.B.C. show “Ruff and Ready,” Butler is not only the voice of Reddy, but also speaks for Harry Safari, Killer Diller and Pinkie the Elephant. On the companion show, “Huckleberry Hound,” he plays Huck, Yogi Bear, Mr. Jinks and Dixie. Both programs are made by Hanna and Barbera Productions especially for television.

What about the Yogi Bear-Art Carney connection?

Who better to tell you than Daws Butler, the man who voiced Yogi?

Cartoon voice actors who weren’t named Mel Blanc didn’t get a lot of press ink for about the first 35-or-so years of sound cartoons (and it was fairly rare for Blanc, except when he starred on his own radio show, until he almost died in a car crash in 1961). That makes it all the more pleasing to stumble across stories about Daws Butler from the early Hanna-Barbera days.

Here’s one from February 1, 1961 which, coincidentally, wasn’t too many days after Blanc’s horrendous accident. Hanna-Barbera had added to his workload; the article coincides with the start of the Yogi Bear Show on which Daws starred in two of the three segments.

Not only does he talk about Yogi, he mentions the origin of the Huck voice, too. Unfortunately, the columnist ends the story without Daws going into details about his kids and cartoons.

Fans Hound Yogi; He Becomes Star
By FORREST POWERS
Minneapolis Star Staff Writer
Yogi Bear, as most any adult can tell you, is one of the favorite characters on "Huckleberry Hound," a children's television series.
Unfortunately for Huck, Yogi's fan mail grew to such proportions that the creators of the animated cartoon program decided to star Yogi in a series of his own.
Patterned after the Hound format, Yogi's 30-minute series consists of three 10-minute stories. It debuts at 5 p.m. Thursday on channel four. Huckleberry Hound will continue as a Tuesday afternoon feature of the station.
Yogi and Huck were created by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, a couple of animation artists who will gross over 40 million dollars this year. Their company also produces "Quick Draw McGraw" and "The Flintstones" for television.
The voices of Yogi, Huck and Quick Draw are done by a short (5 feet, 4 inches), dark-haired, frustrated cartoonist named Daws Butler. He began his entertainment career as a member of "The Three Short Waves," a trio which specialized in impersonations.
"We stayed together for three years until the war divorced me from show business," Butler said in a phone interview. "When I got out of the navy, I went to California because everything seemed to be centered there.
"I intended to go to an art school on the GI bill, but the schools were loaded. I went to radio school instead." After appearing in character parts on several radio programs, he auditioned for Hanna and Barbera, who were working for MGM at the time. He was hired to do the voices of Spike and Tyke in the movie cartoons. Later he teamed with Stan Freberg on "Time for Beany," a children's program, and on the record, "St. George and the Dragonet."
"When the Huckleberry Hound" television series was in the talking stage, they asked me to come up with a voice for Huck," Butler said. "They wanted an easy-going, sincere, Tennessee Ernie-type character to host the show. "I picked up Huck's dialect from my wife, who came from North Carolina, and Huck became the leading character.
The voice of Yogi Bear, on the other hand, bears a strong resemblance to that of Art Carney. "We wanted to come up with a voice that the public recognized," Butler said. "During our experiments, I did a take-off on Carney, and the producers went for it. The Carney quality is still basic to the voice, but as it developed, I added articulation, spread the vowels and gave it strong exaggeration."
Although Yogi will continue to appear on the next few episodes of "Huckleberry Hound," he will gradually drift out of the picture. His place will be taken by two new characters, a smart-aleck wolf named Hokey and a little fall-guy wolf named Ding-a-ling. Butler will do these voices as well as those of Huck, Mr. Jinks and Dixie. Don Messick, another voice specialist, does the talking for Pixie and Boo Boo Bear.
Butler will do Yogi and Snagglepuss, a mountain lion, on the new Yogi Bear program.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Butler grew up in the Chicago area. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four sons, David, 16, Donald, 14, Paul, 10, and Charles, 7.
"The older boys already have gotten their feet wet in the cartoon voice business," the father said proudly in a voice all his own.

You can’t give one solitary person credit for the huge success of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but you have to wonder if they would have been as successful without actor Daws Butler.

Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear couldn’t rely on the comedic acting that animators like Ken Harris and Virgil Ross brought to the great Warner Bros. cartoons. They had to depend more on words to get laughs. And Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were fortunate enough to hire Daws, who could add a lot to the words he was given.

Daws didn’t start out as a cartoon voice. He was an impressionist, part of a group called The Three Short Waves based in Chicago that did impersonations of various show biz favourites. (A December 1935 story in the Chicago Tribune reported they were appearing at the Blackhawk Café as well as on WGN Mardi Gras). The group broke up, Daws ended up in the military and after World War Two, decided to seek his fortune in Hollywood. He soon got work not only in radio but in cartoons, mainly supplying (uncredited) voices for Tex Avery in his great shorts for MGM.

Daws finally found some measure of fame working opposite Stan Freberg in the puppet show “A Time For Beany,” then with Freberg in various radio, record and commercial endeavours. That brings us to 1957 when ex-MGMers Hanna and Barbera picked him to co-star on their first quasi-cartoon series “Ruff and Reddy” (the show also included a live action host and one old Columbia cartoon). Daws’ obituary in the Los Angeles Times quotes Barbera on the start of the H-B studio:

"Here comes Daws, this little man, and he's so filled with enthusiasm. He helped find the voices for our two original characters, Ruff and Ready [sic], and then when I told him we were going to do a laid back-dog and needed a Southern accent, he gave us versions of dialects for each of the Southern states.
"He was so knowledgeable in the way that he spoke them-one for nearly each state-it helped shape what became Huckleberry Hound. What always amazed me was that his own speaking voice was not inspiring at all . . . kind of non-descriptive. But then he'd do all those wonderful dialects and just fire us all up."

Mimicry helped a great deal with Daws’ early voices. He took some kind of characteristic of a famous voice and changed it a bit to create a whole new character. Comparisons are made between Art Carney and Yogi Bear. Clearly, Carney’s Ed Norton was an inspiration for Yogi (his clothes help provide that impression, too), but if you listen to the two voices, they’re definitely not the same.

What’s really cool is if you hear TV commercial voice-overs Daws did in the mid-‘50s, you’ll hear voices that popped up later in either Hanna-Barbera or Jay Ward cartoons. (Incidentally, the first cartoon producer to give Daws a screen credit was Walter Lantz in 1956 in “After the Ball”).

Let’s back up to February 9, 1951. TV-Radio Life did a cute, brief photo shoot Daws, where he shows his impressions of some of the famous. It’s a shame the picture scans are pretty low resolution.

How to Be an Impersonator
Want to Do a Charles Laughton or an Edward G. Robinson for Your Friends? Daws "Beany" Butler Shows You How
Monday through Friday, 6:30 p.m. KTLA, KFMB-TV
WANT TO learn how to do impersonations in one easy lesson? The man who can show you how is known to TV fans as the voice of "Beany" on KTLA's "Time for Beany."

Daws Butler has a theory that almost anyone with average common sense can do workable impersonations by following a few simple instructions. The main rule is to get your face into some sort of reasonable facsimile of the person you're trying to be. This automatically makes your voice come out of the same mechanical bone and muscle set-up and you're bound to get a pretty good carbon copy.
In posing for the pictures on this page, Daws used only two simple props for his impersonations of George Arliss, Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson and Charlie McCarthy . .. a monocle and a felt hat.
Daws himself was a radio character actor before turning to television and made good use of his "acting is impersonating" theory.
He started with a night-club act in the Middle West about fifteen years ago and never did much with radio until after the war.
Prior to the war he had been a toy and novelty manufacturer in Chicago, selling to Woolworth's and other big chains.
Now he's much in demand at Disney studios, and at Warner Brothers for "Merrie Melodies" and other cartoon productions. In between all his other activities he makes phonograph records for children, with a partner, Marian Richman. Some of the record scripts Daws writes as well as performs.
He's an accomplished cartoonist and some years ago did a series for Radio -Television Life.
During the war, Daws served in Naval Intelligence and after getting out of the service moved to California. He lives in Beverly Hills with his wife, Myrtis, and three children, David, seven; Donnie, four; and Paul, seven months.

By every account, Daws was a caring, generous person in addition to being an accomplished comic actor. He’s been gone for 30 years but still entertains through old cartoons today.

The animated commercials in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows for Kellogg’s could be as amusing as the cartoons themselves. My favourite is the one where Jinksie and the meeces do a Beatles spoof song for Raisin Bran.

Here’s a nice one, too, starring Snagglepuss, who was the spokes-puss for Cocoa Krispies for a time. The writer at Leo Burnett, Kellogg’s agency, came up with a clever premise, where Snagglepuss explains how he got the job on the cereal package balancing a bowl on his finger.



His act started in the circus. He dropped the bowl, then himself.



Then he tried films, kind of a combination of the MGM lion in the Warners shield with the 20th Century Fox fanfare. Did Ed Benedict lay out this commercial? The security guard reminds me of a Benedict drawing.



Finally, Kelloggs hires him and powder-puffs him for his commercial. He keeps dropping the bowl. Not very, cocoa-lossal, Snagglepuss.



You’ll notice the voice credit to Daws Butler. This apparently was the result of Bert Lahr’s prickliness (need I explain that Snagglepuss’ voice is a take-off on Lahr’s?). Lahr got upset that commercials for Lestoil, a cleaning product, starred a cartoon duck that sounded like him. He sued Adell Chemical, the makers of the cleaner, and Robert Lawrence Associates, the New York company that made the commercials. The New York Times of May 29, 1962, tagged its story on the lawsuit with “Mr. Lahr...may also sue the Kellogg Company, manufacturer of cereals. The company is the sponsor of the ‘Yogi Bear’ program, a children’s entertainment. Mr. Lahr contends that a character in the cartoon program, Snagglepuss, also is using an impersonation of his voice without permission.”

Whether Lahr went ahead with a suit against Kellogg and/or Hanna-Barbera is unknown but, as you can see above, he did threaten one. If the credit to Daws was, in fact, because of Lahr’s threat in 1962, then this commercial wouldn’t have been seen on the Yogi show when it debuted the previous year.

It’s been pretty close to 29 years that Daws Butler has been gone. In a way, he’s not gone, because there are plenty of old cartoons to view where you can hear his wonderful work. And though he’s obviously not recording anything new, some discoveries from the past occasionally pop up.

Reader Adel Khan sent me a note about this TV news magazine feature story about Daws. I don’t know anything about it, including whoever posted it originally. Any fan of Daws will enjoy this but what I find fascinating is the portion where he’s giving voice acting lessons and how he suggests extremely subtle changes to make a performance better; it’s stuff I never would have thought of. That’s why Daws was a true master of voice over work.

Thanks to Adel for letting us all know about this.

Note: Keith Scott says this story was from a special week-long piece on Kids TV and aired in early 1978. June Foray had a profile the next day. He didn’t explain what "Kids TV" is/was.

We talked about the very nice Hanna-Barbera exhibition on now at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Writer Tony Benedict (right), who was hired at the studio in 1960, was present for the opening of the exhibit. The opening remarks were recorded on video and if you want to see what Tony had to say, watch the video below. Tony appears at about the 23:57 mark.

Tony was hired to work on The Flintstones to help punch up the scripts submitted by TV sitcom writers hired by Joe Barbera with cartoonish visual gags. He went on to write for Huckleberry Hound (in the original series for Kellogg’s) and many other cartoons.



Daws Butler’s birthday has passed but there’s no reason we can’t hear from him. Here’s a neat phone interview with Daws conducted in 1985 by Ken Behrens of WJBC radio. It’s a half hour long but still way too short.

There’s no doubt about it. Daws Butler was the backbone of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio.

The Huckleberry Hound Show was an instant success in 1958, and from it the studio grew and prospered. Daws performed all the major characters, infusing them with likability and good cheer.

In a way, Daws was his characters. “Likability” and “good cheer” might be used to describe him. Everyone liked Daws Butler. He gave up his time to help others who wanted to follow his career path. He lived his life quietly. He was a nice man off the screen, and a funny man on the screen. He was one of the reasons—maybe the main one—I looked forward to “tuning up” the TV set to watch Huckleberry Hound and those other early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I can’t think of what they would have been like without him.

Daws would turn 100 years old if he were with us today. Let’s mark the day with a couple of newspaper clippings. The first is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution of March 16, 1959. It may be the earliest recognition of Daws’ work. There’s no byline, so it may have been provided by the studio. The second is a combination of stories in the Los Angeles Times of October 10 and 24, 1976. The Times piece includes quotes by Stan Freberg. He and Daws worked together through the 1950s until Freberg moved into stardom on his own (and then advertising) and Daws got work at Hanna-Barbera. Freberg rightfully points out the voices Daws did for H-B—including Huck and Mr. Jinks—had made earlier appearances on records, on radio or on animated TV commercials. And while Daws may not have been hired at Warner Bros. after auditioning for Johnny Burton, a few years later he did begin to provide voices for cartoons for the studio.

No Temperament on This Show
There’s one studio in Hollywood which doesn’t have to worry about temperamental actors.
Producers at this studio simply wipe the frowns off an actor’s face with a bottle of ink eradicator.
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera are the producers in this company which turns out the howlingly funny “Huckleberry Hound” and “Ruff and Reddy” cartoons for TV. Their “Tom and Jerry” cartoon comedies have long been favorites with motion picture audiences.
As creators of the comedies they make sure their cartoon progeny are happy and zany characters who have only one aim—to entertain and make people happy.
Obviously their characters make people—old people and young people—happy. Because Huckleberry Hound, the central character in the TV cartoon series of that name, is one of the biggest stars on television. He’s the biggest, that is, if you can judge his popularity by the fan mail he gets.
LOVEABLE HUCK gets huge stacks of mail each week from throughout the United States, Canada, England and Mexico. Second only to him in the fan mail department is Yogi Bear, another of the stars in the 30-minute cartoon show.
The bulk of the mail does not come from the youngsters, either, Hanna points out. Many of the letters request photographs of the stars. They come from the small fry and from grown-ups alike, sure proof of the family popularity of the sagacious pooch.
While the happy faces of the cartoon animals are responsible in a large measure for the popularity of the shows, Hanna recognizes that the happy voices play a big part in the “happiness” of the shows.
Many of the voices on the shows belong to Daws Butler, a vocal impersonator who has fooled the sharpest ears in the country. Since the advent of TV, he has been the voice of some 200 commercial cartoon characters. Today he runs riot on both “Ruff” and “Huck.” He voices Harry Safari, Killer Diller and Pinkie the Elephant on the “Reddy” show and he is the voice of Huck, Yogi Bear, Mr. Jinks and Dixie on “Huck.”
THE STORY of how Daws began impersonating various voices is almost as intriguing as the stories contained in the cartoons.
Daws says it all began when, as a younger, he discovered that he was uncomfortably shy and retiring.
“I decided to combat this shyness with a self-inflicted therapy,” says Daws. “While in high school in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, I forced myself to appear before groups at amateur contests. My repertoire at the time consisted of a Ford starting on a cold day, President Roosevelt and Rudy Vallee. The theory worked and I found it easier to be extroverted.”
But although he forced himself to become an extrovert, he admits that he is happiest when doing a voice which gives him complete anonymity.
Many record fans might not know it but Daws collaborated with Stan Freberg on a phonograph record which sold more than one million copies. It was “St. George and the Dragnet.” [sic]
It was after the success of this popular recording that Daws moved into the field of animation, writing and voicing many of the cartoon commercial messages.

FOR MANY CHARACTERS
Can't Place the Face, but the Voice Is Sure Familiar
BY KENNETH FANUCCHI
Times Staff Writer
It is one of the injustices of cartoon history that most of its great voices are anonymous men and women.
Credits inevitably are given to the producer-director, frequently the animator, set designer, story developer, layout man, but seldom the man whose voice gives the character his distinctiveness.
Of all the well-known cartoon voices, there is Mel Blanc (Bugs Bunny, et al) and . . . who else? "That's about it," says Daws Butler. "Mel's the only one who has gotten screen credit consistently. I've never known why. It's just one of the practices of the industry.
"I ask my students who is Daws Butler and, of course, they don't know," Butler said. "Then I mention Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear."
And Quick-Draw McGraw, Snagglepuss, Blabber Mouse, Peter Potamus, Lippy Lion, Super Snooper, Augie Doggie, Loppy-de-Loop, Funky Phantom, Baba Looey and Cap'n Crunch, to name a few.
Stan Freberg, Butler's friend of a quarter century, former collaborator and a cartoon voice himself, thinks the lack of credit is particularly shameful in Butler's case.
"You have to realize that Hanna-Barbera worked backward from characterizations that Daws created to come up with Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear," he said.
"He was those characters long before they ever hit the screen. Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear were walking, talking, visual adaptations of what he did for years."
It is impossible to spend any time with Butler, when he lapses back into his famous characterizations to prove a thespian point, and not see that he is, indeed, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear or any of the other hundreds of cartoon characters he has done.
It is equally impossible to detect in him any bitterness connected with the lack of recognition.
"I never really was bothered by it," he said in the Beverly Hills home he has owned since 1950. "You just accepted the fact about the only one who was going to get credit consistently was Mel Blanc.
"If I had an ego problem, it was early on in my career when I was known only as a voice. I felt I shouldn't have to go through life as Huckleberry Hound. But, then, I thought I shouldn't be ashamed of being known as Huckleberry Hound, either.
"I've felt I was always a full actor. I do the characters physically when I am supplying the voices. In the early stages of developing the characters, I worked with the animators, who incorporated my voice and facial expressions into the character.
"I'm proud of the fact that on any date there are three or four of my characters on television. Sometimes I watch them. I think they're still good."
Butler, at 59, is by no means retired. As Cap'n Crunch, he has the second longest characterization in television (17 years, compared to Thurl Ravenscroft's Tony the Tiger, 20 years). He also is Pop on the Snap, Crackle and Pop commercial and the voice, again uncredited, on other cartoons.
But he is branching out into teaching, a field that gives him enormous pleasure. He teaches an acting class Monday nights at the Beverly Hills Adult School and, starting Tuesday, Oct. 12, launches a course, "The Spoken Word: Using the Voice in Speech and Action," at Loyola Marymount University, Westchester. It will run through Dec. 14 from 7 to 9:30 p.m. He also conducts private workshops in a studio behind his home.
"It dawned on me a few years ago that I have been acting all my life, he said. "All life to me is an impersonation, anyway. So, I thought, why not make it easier on the younger people on the way up? Maybe, I can give them some shortcuts in the business. I know I could have used them when I was starting out." That would be in Oak Park, Ill, where Butler was a shy, retiring youth who wanted a career as an artist or writer but got sidetracked into show business.
"From the beginning, I was a sand-lot comic," he said. "I had a knack of making my friends laugh, but I was terribly shy around strangers and large groups.
"To overcome my inhibitions, I forced myself to audition in night clubs in Chicago on Saturdays. I did up to 65 impersonations of Fred Allen, George Arliss, Paul Muni, Charles Laughton, Ronald Coleman, even Charlie McCarthy, and it was a traumatic experience. But I knew I had to do it. It was therapy to me."
Butler earned a few bucks in this way, when he was in high school and after he was graduated. While going this painful route, he met two other guys in the same boat, Jack Lavin and Willard Owitz, and they formed an act called "The Short Waves." Butler is 5-2, the others about the same height.
The group worked Chicago hotels like the Edgewater Beach and Palmer House and supper clubs like the Black Hawk Restaurant until World War II broke up the act. Butler was in naval intelligence during the war, Lavin was killed in Borneo while there with a USO troupe and Owitz toured war areas as a member of an acting group.
Owitz decided after the war he didn't want to continue in show business and moved to Denver, where he is a bank executive.
"Willard never really had the desire to make show business a career," Butler said. "He and his wife occasionally appear in amateur theater productions. That satisfies him. We keep in touch."
Butler got out of the Navy in 1945 with a few dollars and a wife, Myrtis (a North Carolina woman whom he married in 1943), and piled her, their young son, David, and Butler's parents into a car and headed for an uncertain future in Southern California.
"My mother had bronchitis and I figured the climate here would be good for her," Butler said. "As for me, I wanted to enroll in art school on the G.I. Bill. But all the good ones were filled.
"On my father's suggestion, I enrolled instead in a radio school, which no longer exists, at Fairfax Ave. and Wilshire Blvd. From then on, nothing but good things started to happen."
Barely into the school, Butler read for a radio part in the offices of McCann-Erickson, the advertising company, and got it. The man who gave it to him was Neil Reagan, brother of the former governor.
"He didn't realize it at the time, but getting that part meant everything to me," Butler said. "It was 'Dr. Christian,' a series based on the doctor who delivered the Dionne quintuplets.
"With that job, on national radio, incidentally, I got a credit, was able to join the union and go on to other jobs in radio.
"The ironic thing, in the context of how my career developed, is that all the parts I got were serious. I wanted to do comedy but the closest I got to it was generating a laugh in a serious show.
"It turned out to be a break for me, because it gave me versatility and depth as an actor, something lacking in so many people who want to do voices for cartoons today. They are a voice, and nothing else."
After about a year of doing radio, Butler decided to try to break into the cartoon business and went to probably the worst imaginable place, Warner Bros. "I admired Mel Blanc and set up an audition there with Johnny Burton, who was in charge of cartoons at Warners," Butler said. "He told me, after the audition, that I was great, but Blanc did all their voices. Burton, did, however, recommend him to Tex Avery, who was animation director for MGM. After another audition, Avery hired him to do voices for cartoons he was producing and also occasionally on a series that was being started by two young animators, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. The series? "Tom and Jerry."
Catching on at MGM and making the Hanna-Barbera connection is seen by Butler as one of the great breaks in his professional life."
At the time, I didn't know what a break it was," Butler said. "Had I got the job at Warners, it's doubtful if there would have been a Huckleberry Hound or Yogi Bear. Certainly, I would not have been involved in them."
But they came later in 1958, to be exact when MGM shut down its animation department, forcing Hanna and Barbera to form their own company. Out of that union came Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick-Draw McGraw, the latter two spinoffs from the first.
"Norman Lear had nothing on us," Butler laughed. "Yogi and McGraw were our Maude and the Jeffersons."
This was roughly between 1958 and 1964, described by Butler as his golden age and peak earning years.
But one of Butler's fondest efforts occured long before that, in 1948, when television was a mere infant.
Bill Clampett [sic], a television producer, came to Butler with an idea for a puppet series about a little boy and, among other characters, a sea serpent. Clampett's idea was to put the show on live.
"I was to be the voice of the little boy," Butler said. "We needed a voice for the sea serpent. It turned out to be Stan Freberg."
The concept developed, but all of the networks and all but one local station turned it down. Claus Landsberg, one of the most imaginative television owners, bought "A Time for Beanie," for KTLA.
For five years, two of them at KTTV, Beanie, Cecil, Capt. Huffen-puff and a bewildering number of other characters cavorted on the Los Angeles television screen five nights a week, 52 weeks a year.
Freberg, too, remembers the series vividly. "It was an incredible show," he said. "We had a circular set with different scenery and characters and Daws and I would move from one to the other, achieving live animation.
"The animation was so real, people always thought the show was filmed. The setup was marvelous for Daws. Being short, he could move around the set without any problem. I'm over six feet and got a permanent crick in the back. I was hunched over for five years."
The show was the beginning of a long and productive association between Butler and Freberg. They did commercials, comedy sketches for radio and produced one of the first comedy records to sell a million copies, "St. George and the Dragonet," based loosely on a hit series of the time, "Dragnet."
It was an odd, but complementary relationship, Butter, the retiring, warm comic, and Freberg, the wild, far out satirist.
"He is a funny, funny man," says Butler. "Collaboration is difficult, but we were always on the same wave length. What I didn't have, he gave me, what he didn't have, I gave him. He's just a brilliant guy."
Freberg is equally laudatory about Butler and even a bit guilty that he got more publicity out of the relationship than his partner.
“Here I was, pushy and overbearing,” Freberg said. “I was the extrovert, getting all the publicity I could. Daws has always been retiring, never willing to push himself.
“The fact that he doesn’t crave publicity in a business that feeds on it says a lot about him as a man. You cannot dislike Daws. You can get a feel for him in the characters he created. They are warm and compassionate.
“He is an incredibly talented man, whose humor is both subtle and profound. He has done some of the great work in this business. I think he could do a lot more if he would push himself. But that’s not his way.”

Daws’ birthday is being marked today by one of his former acting students, Joe Bevilacqua. One of a number of books he co-wrote, Daws Butler Characters Actor, is available today from Blackstone Audio, with Joe providing narration and doing his take on the characters you loved to hear Daws do. If there’s anyone on the internet who shows his love for Daws Butler and respect for Daws’ work, it’s Joe. I can’t find a link to the audio book, but Joe has a trove of Daws’ memorability on-line that you should really check out. You can find it by clicking here.

Writer-voice director-etc. Mark Evanier knew Daws Butler as well as anyone. He wrote my favourite story about him. We’ve linked to it before, but let’s do it again. Click here.

Daws Butler never really stopped working until he died in 1988. If he wasn’t providing voiceovers, he was providing help and encouragement to the generation of voice actors that would follow him.

Daws’ heyday was the 1950s. The decade was bookended with A Time For Beany on one end and Rocky and his Friends on the other. In between were comedy records and radio shows with Stan Freberg, cartoon commercial work and, as we know, starring roles in just about every Hanna-Barbera series. Daws didn’t get a lot of starring work after 1960; Joe Barbera wanted to expand the studio’s voice repertory company and not rely on a handful of actors, so others were brought in. But he did his old characters when they were needed and originated a few new voices (some of which sounded similar to his old ones).

Best of all, Daws lived to see some recognition in the popular press for the great entertainment he provided. Here’s a feature story from the Associated Press that appeared in newspapers starting November 20, 1978. TV cartoons simply weren’t as good as they had been for a variety of reasons, and Daws reflects a bit on that.

Huckleberry Voice Stays In Hiding
By JAY SHARBUTT
AP Television Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP)—Daws Butler has been on TV 30 years. But viewers never see him acting in a show. Then who is he? Try Huckleberry Hound. And Yogi Bear. And Quick-Draw McGraw. And Capt. Crunch.
He's the voice of those cartoon stars of Saturday kid shows. Old kids now posing as adults heard him in the great Jay Ward cartoon era, in "Fractured Fairy Tales," "Aesop's Fables" and "Superchicken."
This man of several hundred voices currently has 15 playing in four Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows Saturday on all three networks. And he has another one coming at night to CBS on Thursday, Nov. 30.
It's for Andy in a holiday special, "Raggedy Ann and Andy in the Great Santa Claus Caper."
Butler, 62, a small, merry-faced man born in Toledo, Ohio and raised in Oak Park, Ill., doesn't regret he's never seen on his shows.
"I think maybe I was smart," he laughs." You're not typed this way. My whole bit is multi-voice. Of course, I tend to get confused by my own voice."
Daws never set out to speak funny. He wanted to write funny, inspired by such masters as Robert Benchley, H. Allen Smith, Frank Sullivan and Fred Allen, whose works fill his library today.
He's authored funny commercials, dialogue for a voice workshop he runs and, in the 1950s, co-wrote one of the first comedy record hits, "St. George and the Dragonet," with satirist Stan Freburg [sic].
But his voice, in that "Dragnet" spoof, remains his chief asset, though when at mikeside he also tries to do what he calls "writing on your feet." No, it doesn't mean his scripts have laces. It means he improvises, ad-libs and generally tries to make the character he's doing sound unique and spontaneous.
Butler, who began his career as an impressionist, was in radio after World War II with serious roles on such shows as "The Whistler" and "Dr. Christian." He started cartoon voicing at MGM later on.
He began in TV with Freburg in 1948 at KTLA here, in an Emmy-winning local puppet program "Time for Beany," which in its five years gained a show-biz reputation as a very hip kind of Punch and Judy show.
"It was full of Hollywood in-jokes," he recalled with a grin, full of sophisticated craziness that also marked "Fractured Fairy Tales" and the early Hanna-Barbera shows he did 10 years later.
There was a lot of freedom then to improvise, to experiment, he said, "because television was new and we were the people who had the answers. And they came to us and we gave the answers."
In effect, the inmates ran the asylum. Now, he said, a bit sadly, the advertising agencies and networks seem to want things tidy, carefully controlled and pasteurized. The unpredictable is a no-no.
Talent still abounds, he said, "but they're not allowed to do as much as they're capable of doing. It's the straightening out of the (cartoon) characters, of everything being so planned now.
"The excitement to me was having it happen in the studios. You were adding something to the product, putting something in the stew, and made it better." He seemed momentarily gloomy. His face brightened when it was suggested humor and satire seem to flourish when they seem most endangered. "Come to think of it, I'm doing dialect in a new show," he said. Although ethnic groups in the past have griped about the use of various dialects, he said he never uses dialect to make fun of anyone. "I always do it with love, but dialect has been taboo for about five years. So maybe we are getting our sense of humor back." He beamed. "Who knows, we could be in for a Renaissance."