Don Messick was Hanna-Barbera’s first major supporting character actor. Except when Joe Barbera went on a kick of finding “different voices” in 1959 (hence the hiring of Doug Young and Elliot Field, Hal Smith and several others), Don M. seems to have been the go-to guy in almost every series for incidental and one-shot roles. Finally he became a star when a Great Dane series hit the CBS airwaves in 1969.

I only met Don Messick through my TV set and what I see in the papers, as Will Rogers would say, but he always strikes me as a pretty unruffled and helpful guy, unaffected by the pitfalls of egos and celebrity-ism that make some show-bizzers feel oh-so-superior. If you’ve never read Mark Evanier’s Messick memorial, go here. Even if you have, it’s excellent and worth reading again.

Don flew to Racine, Wisconsin in 1990 to help in a benefit. It appears a local hospital brought him in his Christmas fund-raising drive against cancer. He doesn’t say an awful lot in this story by the Journal Times but any comments from him are good to see in print. This appeared in the November 26th edition, along with the photo.

Messick would succumb to a lengthy illness in 1997.

The house imagination built
Animators draw theme of Christmas House
By Jans Rider
Journal Times
Don Messick's first inkling that his voice had the potential to someday team up with some of the nation's top animated characters came after a crackle and a change of pitch during his teens.
It was then Messick began to realize his voice flexibility and possibilities.
Today he can be heard as the voice of Scooby Doo, Bamm Bamm, Astro the Dog, Boo Boo Bear, Papa Smurf, Dr. Benton Quest from "Johnny Quest" [sic] and Ranger Smith from "Yogi Bear."
He was just one of several talented voices and animators Sunday at St. Luke's Hospital's 1990 Christmas House for Cancer, at 11th and Main streets, and the Spectacular Salute to Animation at the Masonic Lodge, 11th Street and Wisconsin Avenue.
Familiar phrases
As a stream of guests flowed through the hall, Messick uttered the familiar phrases of his characters into a microphone and signed autographs for the public. At the young age of 15, Messick, who was raised in Maryland, wrote and performed on his own radio show. After high school he decided to attend acting school in Baltimore. Through the years he did live television puppet shows and radio shows.
By 1957, he began working for Hanna Barbera cartoons.
His favorite cartoon character voice is Scooby Doo, he said with a grin, a voice he has done for 20 years.
"Perhaps it's because he is my longest running voice-over. He also has so many human-like qualities, and I think I'm particularly partial to dogs," he said, smiling.
Currently, Messick does the voice of Hampton J. Pig, a character on a show called "Tiny Toon Adventures," produced by Steven Spielberg for Warner Brothers. "It's a No. 1 show that just began airing nationally in September," he said.
Just a few feet from Messick's booth were three animators for Walt Disney Studios.
Captive audience
Ed Murietta, of Burbank, Calif., who worked on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "Oliver and Company," had a captive audience as he took less than a minute to draw a quick clear sketch of Mickey Mouse.
Murietta has worked seven years for Disney studios, he said. On display at his table were a few of his sketches including Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse and Roger Rabbit. He said he enjoys drawing Roger Rabbit the most.
Mickey Mouse is the most difficult to draw because the rodent is so identifiable to his public and any alteration in the character will be spotted quickly.
"Disney artwork is very structured. Every character is structured because they have to animate. Every character is designed with animation in mind," he said.
24 drawings per second
To cover one second of onscreen animation, Murietta and his assistants must produce 24 drawings of the character which, for example, might be blinking an eye of cracking a smile, he said.
Pat Boelter, a hospital spokeswoman, said the hospital decided to salute animation this year because there are so many anniversaries of shows and characters in 1990. To name a few, the Flintstones turned 25, Betty Boop became 60, and Disneyland is celebrating its 35th anniversary.
Boelter said Messick was invited to the salute because he has been a legendary voice for many of the country's animated characters.
"We wanted him to be a part of the celebration," she said.
Joining Messick and animator Murietta were Michael Horowitz, an animator who has worked on Disney mainstays such as Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and Dave Pacheco, the creator of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "The Little Mermaid."
Demonstrations, appearances and displays will continue through Dec. 9 at the Masonic Temple. Boelter expects attendance to reach 40,000, up about 10,000 from last year's events.

My thanks to Devon Baxter for clipping the article.

What’s the connection between the Jetsons and Soupy Sales? Let Don Messick tell you.

Messick was, of course, the voice of Astro on the series. The voice was borrowed a few years later for another dog character. So how can two characters have the same voice? Let Don Messick tell you.

The Asbury Park Press conducted a full page interview with Messick for its May 15, 1994 entertainment/lifestyle section; it was part of a push for the Flintstones movie coming out. Don M. was, more or less, handed sidekick roles when he was hired by the brand-new H-B Enterprises in 1957 but he had a long career at the studio, and elsewhere in animation. This story gives a lovely summary of his work at the studio to date, as well as a mention of his puppet work.

Not long after this interview, Messick suddenly retired. His health deteriorated and he passed away in 1997.

MAN OF A THOUSAND VOICES
By MARK VOGER PRESS STAFF WRITER
How many of the following unmistakably-Don Messick voices would you recognize? Bamm-Bamm. Scooby Doo. Astro. Boo Boo. Ranger Smith. Muttley. Precious Pupp. Ricochet Rabbit. Dr. Quest. Bandit. Pixie. Ruff. Hoppy. Mr. Twiddle from "Wally Gator." Multi-Man from "The Impossibles." And, from "The Herculoids," Gleep, Gloop and Zok.
Voice wizard Messick, 67, has done characterizations for more than 100 series, in episodes numbering more than 4,000.
Messick — who won an Annie from the International Animated Film Society in 1990 — does not "catalog his many voice characterizations in any way. "Most of it is in my head," the actor tells SECTION X over the phone from Santa Barbera. "I don't catalog them in writing or by com puter or anything else. I just pull it out when the character is called for."
Born in Buffalo, raised in rural Maryland, Messick worked up a ventriloquist act at 13 after receiving a dummy for Christmas. "That interested me, when my voice changed," Messick says in announcer-perfect tones. "I discovered its flexibility."
Messick soon won a radio contest, which led to a weekly radio sitcom, "Dynamic DeForrest the Diligent," for which he did all voice characterizations. After a stint in the Army, he landed the radio role of Raggedy Andy on "The Raggedy Ann Show," in 1946. Radio led to television, which led to his association with kiddie show producer Bob Clampett.
Recalls Messick, "I'd been working under contract to Bob, who had several live television puppet shows, which were as near to a cartoon as you could get. We'd move from set to set — three sets with different backgrounds — and create all of the action. This wasn't just a thing like 'Punch and Judy.' It was expensive to produce.
"But that era was coming to an end, because it was cheaper for independent stations to buy or rent old theatrical cartoons — such as the 'Popeyes' and so on — and hire just one person to be the emcee of the afternoon kiddie shows, instead of doing what we were doing."
(Years later, in 1962, Clampett created "Beany and Cecil," providing the voice of Cecil).
No longer under contract, Messick began to call on various film studios in an attempt to scrounge up free-lance work. One studio Messick happened to visit was MGM, "little knowing that at about that time, MGM was closing down its cartoon department, because they figured cartoons were too expensive to create for television."
Heading up MGM's cartoon department at the time were William Hanna and Joseph Barbara, who were themselves about to make the leap to television and — fortuitously for Messick — were soliciting voice actors.
"They were talking to people such as Daws Butler," Messick says of the late actor who created the distinctive voices of Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and many more. "And then I came along. I had known Daws since about 1944. So, it turned out that Daws and I became the first two voice men for Hanna-Barbera Productions."
The year was 1957. The show was "Ruff and Reddy."

"At the time, Hanna and Barbera began depending much more heavily on voice characterizations, rather than a lot of action," Messick explains. "So, that's why there was such simplicity in those early series, such as the 'Yogi Bears,' the 'Huckleberrys,' etc.
"Actually, I like them. When I see those old ones, there is a charm, I think, in the simplicity, the backgrounds. And the characters come through, in spite of the lack of rapid animation."
Messick has done voices for just about every Hanna-Barbera series produced, including the 1960-66 series "The Flintstones." At first, Messick had one recurring "Flintstones" role, that of Arnold, the paperboy who always got the best of Fred.
Messick also supplied voices for most of the unnamed, one-shot characters that typified a "Flintstones" episode: the cops, the bystanders, the little animals that doubled as appliances, etc.
" I was on just about every episode," Messick recalls, "being kind of a roving fielder, you might say." That situation would change by 1963.
"They were planning for Pebbles to make her appearance on the show," Messick recalls. "On one of the 'Flintstones' sessions, Joe Barbera said to me, 'Don, you can do baby voices, can't you?' I said, 'Oh, sure.' Of course, I'd already been doing the high voices, like Ruff on 'Ruff and Reddy' and Pixie mouse on the 'Huckleberry Hound' series.
"So, Joe said, 'Well, we want Pebbles to have a playmate. So, we thought the next-door neighbors — Barney and Betty Rubble — would adopt a little boy, and he would become Pebbles' playmate.'
"So, it turned out to be this super-strong little guy. Joe described the character, that he's carrying this club, and playfully — because he doesn't know his own strength — he would, maybe, pick his dad up and swing him around, going, 'Bam! Bam!' "
(Messick adds Bamm-Bamm-style baby gibberish).
"That's how it was born. Joe just gave me the idea the character, and and I just ad-libbed an audition right then and there."
Messick says of the late Alan Reed, who created the role of Fred Flintstone: "He was not one of those actors who always had to be the center of attention, always 'on.' Alan was a very down-to-earth person. He came up through the radio ranks. He was very warm and very lovable, kind of like a big teddy bear. But, still, he didn't lord his talent or importance over anybody."
It seems that every character Messick has created over the years has an anecdote to go with it. Take, for instance, Boo Boo, sidekick to "Yogi Bear" (1961-63).
"They wanted a kind of naive, friendly little guy who was a contrast to the big, sort of clown, Yogi, bluffing his way through Jellystone Park," Messick explains. "So, as Daws would often say, 'Boo Boo was Yogi's conscience.' Boo Boo would chide Yogi. (In character) 'You'd better not do that — Mr. Ranger wouldn't like it.'
"In the beginning, Joe Barbera wanted kind of a nasally voice for Boo Boo, so some of the earlier episodes have that. I didn't like the voice that way. So, gradually, as the series went on, I eased out of the stuffed-up-nose, into more of a back-of-the-throat."
What of Astro, the playful family pooch on "The Jetsons" (1962-67)?

"Astro preceded Scooby Doo," Messick says. "I had to come up with what I call 'growl talk.' The words were there. Joe liked things starting with R's, for the dogs especially. He got that from watching Soupy Sales. He (Sales) had an offscreen dog; all you would see was the paw, and he talked with 'R' talk.
"So, Joe decided that Astro should have that kind of attitude. (In character) 'Rello, Rorge! I ruv roo, Rorge!' "But then along came Scooby Doo, my favorite voice. So then, when we were doing later 'Jetsons' episodes, I had to pitch Astro a little bit higher. Because, Scooby had the 'growl talk,' though his was more of a barrel-chested thing."
(Here, Messick launches into an impromptu scene as both Astro and Scooby Doo — what a treat!)
And speaking of dogs, what about Bandit of "Jonny Quest" fame (1964-65)? Bandit never spoke (not even "growl talk"), yet Messick supplied his "voice."
"In the earliest 'Jonny Quests,' they used a recorded, real-dog bark," Messick recalls, "which, to me, sounded tinny, and less like a real dog than I could have done. But I did the whimpering and the panting. "Then, later, we reprised the series. We did 13 more episodes to add to the original 26, to make a better syndication package. This time, I did all of the barking for Bandit, which was more of a high-pitched bark."
(Messick barks, whimpers and pants).
"But Bandit didn't talk. He was not a talking dog because the 'Jonny Quest' series was one in which only the humans talked.
"Sort of like real life most of the time."

Now, a real treat. Here’s an interview with Don M. from a local TV show. My thanks to Mark Christiansen for spotting this. Messick shows off his ventriloquism talents while one of the hosts doesn’t know his Smurfs (I imagine a production aide heard about it afterward). Even one of the guests starts asking questions in this far-too-brief interview. I wish he had done more of these.

Here’s a Boo Boo take from Scooter Looter (first aired in 1959). Bill Hanna holds the second drawing for four frames. We’ve skipped a few frames. The animator is Carlo Vinci.



Boo Boo, as you likely know, was voiced by Don Messick, who was the number two voice man (out of two) at Hanna-Barbera at the time. Daws Butler got most of the starring roles at the studio pre-1960—Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Mr. Jinks, Quick Draw McGraw, Super Snooper. Messick contented himself with Ruff and one of the meeces; Boo Boo wasn’t a regular character in the first season (1958-59) of Yogi Bear cartoons (and Ranger Smith wasn’t invented until the 1959-60 season).

Yet Don M. had staying power. He provided major and incidental character voices through the 1960s, including on Hanna-Barbera’s non-comedy series, then won the role of a clumsy Great Dane who many exposit is the studio’s most popular creation of all time. In the 1980s, he co-starred on The Smurfs, perhaps H-B’s biggest Saturday morning success of the decade, before veering into Warner Bros.’ so-called “Silver Age,” voicing Hamton in Tiny Toons Adventures. Alas, by this time Daws had passed away.

Messick’s career paralleled Butler’s after World War Two. Both had series on radio. Both worked for Bob Clampett in the 1950s days of televised puppet shows. Both voiced MGM cartoon characters. And both were commercial voices.

By 1978, things had changed at Hanna-Barbera. The voice department wasn’t a two-man operation any more. Things had changed in commercial voice-over work, too. In the early days of TV, advertising was deemed beneath the dignity of most actors. But then they looked at the cash windfall commercials paid. Money wins over dignity every time.

Here’s Messick talking about in an article in Backstage by Robert Goldrich, dated September 8, 1978.

Nearly 130 voice actors are working for Hanna Barbera Productions this season. By contrast, 10 years ago the studio only hired about 20. “The networks want more characters in the cartoons,” explained Art Scott, VP and recording director of many H-B programs. “While years ago the average program had five characters who could be voice by two people, Hanna-Barbera is now producing shows like ‘Challenge of the Superfriends,’ which has a regular cast of 19, plus many incidental characters.”
Yet while the market for cartoon voices is on the rise, major star personalities are making gains in another long time vehicle for voice actors—namely commercials.

Business Week recently noted that the number of TV spots featuring celebrities has jumped from one in five to one in three in the past five years, and this trend has undoubtedly seeped into the voiceover industry. ...
Yet there are some firmly entrenched voice actors who remain unscathed by this inundation of well-known stars. One is Don Messick, cartoon voice of Boo Boo Bear, Scooby-Doo, Mumbly, Astro on the Jetsons, Bam Bam of the Flintstones, and an assortment of other characters too numerous to mention. Don’s recent spot credits include the voices of Lava Soap’s “Wise Old Towel,” Kelloggs Rice Crispies Crackle of “Snap, Crackle & Pop” fame, a cat for Purina’s Special Dinners, and an owl for Green Giant’s Nibblets Corn.
“I see major accounts out to get the best of both worlds,” Messick explained. “For instance Kelloggs is using Dick Cavett’s voice on some radio commercials but they are continuing the highly successful ‘Snap, Crackle & Pop.’ Animated commercials are as effective as ever and thus there is still a market for the voice characterizations artists like myself can provide. For me, the creative challenge is that it is more difficult to establish such a voice in a 30-second spot than it is in a series of cartoons.”
Pointing out another difference, Messick noted that cartoons put more of a strain on the voice than commercial work. For instance, Don has done as many as seven voices for one Laff Olympics cartoon. This is a common practice. It’s economical for the studio to have the actor do several voices. The cartoon pay scale is set up so that actors are paid a fixed rate for providing one to three voices. There is a higher rate for four to six voices, and so on. Thus even if the actor is doing three voices, he is paid the same rate as someone doing one voice.

Don M. expanded his career as time went on. Unlike Daws Butler, or even Mel Blanc for that matter, he appeared on camera in a weekly role in a sitcom. His career could have taken a different turn, but The Duck Factory didn’t jell and was cancelled. He was cast in re-enactments of old radio shows on a Los Angeles station. He narrated stage productions of “Peter and the Wolf.” And he even toured parts of the U.S. with animation exhibitions, demonstrating some of his famous voices and talking about his life in cartoons.

As you can see, he continued to accumulate all kinds of credits and was in great demand. His career ended only because of his health. He suddenly retired one day and then died of natural causes at the age of 71 in 1997. Hanna-Barbera took out a full-page ad in Variety in his honour, a drawing by Iwao Takamoto of Shaggy and Scooby-Doo bowing their heads. He brought to life almost innumerable characters for the studio, including a dog that only said “Yowp” and a small ursine friend who was run down by an out-of-control Jellystone Park scooter.

If you’ve taken a look at the unpublished photos that we’ve linked to on the blog from a 1960 Life magazine shoot promoting Hanna-Barbera, you may have missed one of the cornerstones of the studio’s early success. Noticeable by his absence is the studio’s star voice, Daws Butler. However, if you look closely enough at one picture, Hanna-Barbera’s other original workhorse actor can be spotted in the background through a recording studio’s sound-proof glass at the door of the control room. We’ve blown it up for you.



Yes, it’s Don Messick. And this picture provides a perfect excuse to post another newspaper feature story about him.

This is a piece by the National Enterprise Association’s Hollywood writer and was published on March 31, 1983. By then, Mr. Messick had made his name as the voice of a number of H-B cartoon dogs, beginning with everyone’s favourite, Yowp (okay, Woolly on “Ruff and Reddy” was probably the first one), and then moving on to Astro, Bandit, Precious Pupp, Muttley and some Great Dane (whatever happened to that dog anyway?). Naturally, there were other dogs and other voices as Don M. was incredibly versatile.

By 1983, he had added another major character to his résumé. “The Smurfs” had become a huge hit for Hanna-Barbera. In this story, Mr. Messick talked about his role on the show and gave a little background about his career.

Speaking for Other People is Big Job for Don Messick
By DICK KLEINER
HOLLYWOOD—Hollywood is full of pretty faces. And pretty voices. The faces you recognize on sight. Not the voices.
And so it’s high time you got to know Don Messick, one of the most popular and busiest voice men in town.
You would probably recognize Don Messick’s voice, if he did one of his characters for you.
He’s the voice of Papa Smurf on that big hit Saturday morning show. He’s the voice of another of the all-time biggies of cartoondom, Scooby-Doo.
And he’s also heard dozens of times every day via commercials. He is proud of the fact that he is Snap, on those Snap-Crackle-and-Pop cereal commercials.
He was, when we talked, just about to go off to the studio to do a commercial for an insect spray. He said they hadn’t told him what he was going to be that day—a flea or a roach.
It really doesn’t bother me,” Messick says. “I can do a flea just as well as a roach.”
It’s a good life, but it was a long time coming. Don Messick was born in Buffalo, N.Y., but grew up mostly on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
As a boy, he was intrigued by one of those “throw your voice” ads in a magazine, and he sent away for the device and got it. He still has the booklet that came with it.
He got a few dummies and began doing a ventriloquist act and, eventually, while still a teen-ager, landed a spot on the local radio station, WBOC, in Salisbury, Md.
Messick’s dummy, incidentally, was named Woody DeForrest. He earned enough so he could go off to an acting school in Baltimore.
He went into the Army, then, taking his dummy with him, and he spent most of his service career entertaining the troops. The Army moved him around, and he got his first taste of California, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
“Seeing California was an awakening for me,” Messick says. “It was like a person who has only seen black-and-white movies seeing his first color movie. When my service was over, I came back to California as far as I could, and I’ve been here since.”
He started working here as a puppeteers voice on a TV station back in the early days of Los Angeles television. And he has been specializing in voices since. Don Messick would like to be on camera once in a while—he is, after all, a genuine actor—and he hopes that will happen eventually.
But it is not something frustrating him or gnawing at him. In fact, he has had opportunities to do real acting roles, but turned them down.
“I turned them down,” he says, “because they interfered with my social plans.”
Messick lives about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, in Santa Barbera, and his life is centered there. He makes the drive down to L.A. two or three times a week, and tries to do all of his voice-overs on those trips.
He is, as you might expect, a master of his voice and can do wonders with it. When he auditioned for the Papa Smurf job, he used one voice, a voice he felt was appropriate. It was, he says, a whimsical voice.
He did a few episodes with that voice, but then the producers felt Papa S. should be more authoritative. So they asked him to use a more authoritative voice. No problem.
Messick takes very good care of his voice, which is his fortune. He hasn’t smoked in years. He is careful about not getting colds. And he doesn’t strain his voice.
The result is that he is famous—or sounds famous—but has no problem moving around without getting recognized. It is, he thinks, the best of both worlds.

Don Messick did get on camera a year and a bit after this story was written, appearing on “The Duck Factory,” which won two Emmys but lasted only 13 episodes despite some good talent in front of, and behind, the screen. To me, the characters never seemed that well-defined, likeable or even interesting, to be honest, and someone needed to tell NBC the laugh track didn’t need to jump in constantly. Despite the show’s failure, it’s happy to see that Mr. Messick got a chance to fulfill an ambition of doing some live-action work. A nice guy deserves to meet some of his life goals.

Don Messick entertained countless kids on screen for years so it’s pleasing to see he could entertain kids off-screen as well.

Here’s a neat story from the Oxnard Press-Courier of January 7, 1993. It sounds like a fun show.

Scooby’s voice takes stage
By DAVE MASON
Entertainment Editor
SANTA BARBARA—The real Scooby Doo made kids laugh as “Peter and the Wolf” hit the Lobero Theatre stage Sunday.
Don Messick of Montecito slipped effortlessly into his cartoon voices as he narrated the ballet Sunday with the Montecito School of Ballet and the West Coast Symphony, conducted by Christopher Story VI. The orchestra and dancers also performed “A Gypsy Fantasy” in the one-time only performance.
On “Peter and the Wolf,” Messick used the voices of Boo Boo Bear for Peter, Ranger Smith for the Duck, Papa Smurf for Grandpa, Azrial the Smurf for the Cat, Pixie Mouse for the Bird and Scooby Doo for the Wolf. Messick created all these voices for Hanna-Barbera animation studios.
The voices work well for “Peter and the Wolf,” although young children were asking parents where the cartoon characters were. They heard Scooby Doo but didn’t see him.
Serge Prokofiev’s music and fairy tale tells about a young boy, Peter, who tries to save a bird, duck and cat from a wolf. Different instruments express themes for each character, and the ballet is often used to introduce children to orchestras. Cherie Moraga of Oxnard, the principal oboist, played the duck’s theme.
Messick’s cartoon voices Sunday added wit to a fun, smooth performance.
“Scooby, Scooby, Doo—er, I mean, Wolfy, Wolfy Wolf,” Messick said in his famous Scooby Doo voice as the wolf danced onto stage.
The adults and kids roared.
Messick, in his mid 50s, has created the voices for the West Coast Symphony production for six years.
During an interview at intermission, Messick casually joked around in his Droopy Dog voice. His cheeks puffed up when he spoke backstage like Scooby Doo in front of a visitor, Sarah Sanchez. The young Ventura girl laughed.
His career started early. At age 15 in 1941, he hosted the Don Messick Show on a local radio station in Maryland.
“I gravitated to it (voices in animation) after starting out as a ventriloquist,” Messick said.
“I could do a lot of different voices.”
As television animation began in 1957, it was natural for him to do cartoon voices, Messick said.
Animation has improved greatly since the 1960s, Messick said. “It’s got to be much, much better.”
The 1960s showed a rough transition from the high-quality animation of movie studios to assembly-line, less fluid television animation. Messick first provided a voice for the Ruff ‘n’ Reddy Show.
He went on to create voices such as Boo Boo Bear and Scooby Doo.
Scooby Doo is the oldest animated character in continuous run on television, Messick said.
More recently, Messick has performed the voice of Hamton Pig in Tiny Toon Adventures, a young generation version of classic Warner Brothers characters. He also has revived a classic character, Droopy Dog, in a new Droopy and Drippy series.
Messick said he creates an original voice for each character after seeing several sketches. Animators then finish drawing the character to match Messick’s voice.
Not everyone creates original voices from scratch like Messick. As the Genie in Walt Disney’s “Aladdin,” Robin Williams relied on impersonations. “I never try to do impersonations,” Messick said. “I always do original voices.”

Don appeared in the very first Hanna-Barbera cartoon as Ruff and the narrator in “Planet Pirates.” There doesn’t appear to have been much written about his work there, but I found this squib in the March 15, 1958 edition Knickerbocker News of Albany, New York. “Ruff ‘n’ Ready” would have been on the air three months at that point. There’s no byline, so it may have come from a press handout from NBC or series bank-roller Screen Gems.

2 Actors Provide Voices for Cartoons
All the voices for the television cartoon series, Ruff and Reddy, are provided by talented actors Daws Butler and Don Messick. They record up to six cartoons at one session, playing a dozen characters each, moving quickly from one trick voice to another. Toughest voice, admits Messick, was that of a mother elephant.

The elephant falsetto voice was first heard in “The Gloom of Doom,” the 25th instalment of the show. You might recognise it as the mother eagle in the Yogi Bear cartoon “High Fly Guy.”

Don M.’s cartoon work wasn’t restricted to Hanna-Barbera. You may recall he provided dialogue for “Spunky and Tadpole” (1958). But what must be his most bizarre cartoon work was looping dialogue for “Ken the Wolf Boy.” It was produced around 1963 in Japan as “Okami Shonen Ken.” I have no idea if it ever aired in North America; I’ve found listings for it on Australian television in 1968. Watch a clip of it below. It almost defies description. I suspect Don prided himself on his performance as a wolf and tried to forget his performance as a wolf-boy.

And, yes, that is Daws Butler, too.

When you think of TV producers, Don Messick’s name likely doesn’t come to mind. Sure, he must have played several over the course of his career at Hanna-Barbera, but he actually co-owned a production house at one time.

The business was the brain-child of one Robert Emerson Clampett. Bob Clampett is, of course, known partly for directing some wild theatrical cartoons at Warners Bros. But he also got into the TV business as early as 1944, in a failed and premature venture with someone named Patrick Michael Cunning to develop cartoons for TV. He finally did it about 16 years later when he opened Snowball, Inc. and made Beany and Cecil cartoons. Snowball had a short life and Clampett had to bring in his brother-in-law (see Animation World Magazine, October 1999) to keep the studio afloat financially. Clampett’s biggest success in the ‘50s came with the Beany and Cecil puppet show. He developed a couple of other puppet shows for KTLA in Los Angeles that were syndicated in other U.S. cities. But he also tried another puppet venture and he convinced Don Messick to invest in it. Messick had been working for Clampett on a KTTV morning show in 1956; on one edition in February, Clampett introduced Messick as a hypnotist regressing a puppet to its former life in a spoof of the Bridey Murphy case. Broadcasting magazine announced in its issue of April 30, 1956.

Clampett Starts New Firm To Produce Commercials BOB CLAMPETT, producer of Time for Beany and other shows starring puppet and cartoon characters including "Cecil, the Seasick Sea Serpent," has announced his entry into the field of radio and tv commercials. Following formation of his new producing and distributing organization, Clampet-toon Commercials, Inc., Mr. Clampett revealed he has developed a new process of producing puppet commercials for tv in a fraction of the time required by the various animated cartoon drawing systems. Mr. Clampett said he will utilize the new process in production of commercials for national advertisers, using a number of newly- created characters and voices in addition to those already developed. Three of his key "Beany" staff, Don Messick, Walker Edmiston and Bill Oberlin, are associated with him as stockholders and vice presidents of the new firm. John R. Jacobs, Hollywood attorney, will serve as business manager. A nationwide sales organization is being set up under the head of Chris Haywood, distributor of tv films.

Whether the company ever produced anything or whether Messick got any return on his investment is a question lost to the ages. Suffice it to say, Messick never worked for Clampett again.

No, Don Messick is best known as a voice actor, one who fortunately got a little bit of national press recognition during the later years of his career when, frankly, the cartoons he worked on didn’t measure up to Yogi Bear or Quick Draw McGraw (even the Yogi of the ‘80s didn’t measure up to the Yogi of the ‘50s).

Here’s one of several feature newspaper stories I’ve found; this was published by the Utica Sunday Observer-Dispatch on June 30, 1985. If I had to pick a favourite voice of Messick’s (besides Yowp, of course), it wouldn’t be the ones he picked.

His voice is very smurfy
By MARK J. ROCHESTER
Gannett News Service
Recognize these lines?
“Yogi, Mister Ranger isn't going to like this!”
“TRALFRAZ-YUK!”
“Let’s all have a Smurfy day.”
The next question is harder. Who spoke those lines?
Nearly everyone has seen his work, yet no one knows who he is.
Don Messick, one of Hollywood’s leading voice characterization artists, has been creating the personalities of cartoon characters for more than 30 years. He has been the voice behind the role of Boo Boo Bear and Mister Ranger, Astro of the “Jetsons,” Scooby Doo and most recently the blue-skinned, pint-sized Aesop, Papa Smurf.
Messick smurfed into Cincinnati recently as part of the 1985 Colonel Sanders Memorial March of Dimes Campaign. The fund drive is to help children with birth defects, and in support of clinical research. As part of a 10-city tour, he also will be entertaining hospital children. Theater and stage shows were the early training ground for Messick, whose cartoon career included one of the earliest Hanna-Barbera shows, "Ruff and Ready.” [sic] He was the voice of Ruff.
He has appeared in more than 3,000 cartoon episodes but he admits he has a particular fondness for two of his characters.
“For different reasons, I think Scooby Doo and Papa Smurf (are my favorites). I’ve gotten letters from youngsters who, when they have a personal problem that they can’t solve, will go up to their rooms, cry or whatever and ask themselves — ‘Now what would Papa Smurf do?’”
After three decades in the industry, Messick’s voice still is in demand. He is the voice of Snap, in the Kellogg’s Snap, Crackle and Pop Rice Crispies commercials. He has noticed a change in cartoons: some he feels are too violent. But that, he said, is only a reflection of our society.
“Children have been playing with toy soldiers and ray guns ever since I can remember ... It’s to be expected, it’s so popular in the movie theaters.”
The golden age of radio was a strong influence for Messick; it is one of the tools he uses to create his voices. “Those radio stars were my idols; it was such a pleasure to sit back and imagine; the mind was such a screen for the imagination then.”
His current role as the popular Papa Smurf will be joined next fall with the return of an old role, that of Astro. Messick said Hanna-Barbera has just finished the filming of 56 new episodes of “The Jetsons” featuring the original cast of 20 years ago. He will be part of the coming Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera.
Married 32 years, Messick and his wife have a son, 29, and live on the California beach, 90 miles from Hollywood. They have a dog, Dina, and Merrick notes he has played a number of dog characters.
“It’s so nice to have a dog to come home to,” he said. “You don’t have to put up any pretenses with a dog.”

It’s nice to see Don M. doing something for young viewers off the screen as well as on.

Actually, there’s one other thing that doesn’t come to mind when you think of Don Messick: the ballet. No, he didn’t dance. But we’ll have something on that in a future post.

It’s a long way from the oyster grounds of Chesapeake Bay to the sound stages of California’s film studios—but that’s the trip that Don Messick made.

Members of the Messick family had been harvesting oysters in that part of Maryland since the 19th century. Don’s grandfather John was a life-long oysterman, starting by age 11. But Don’s imagination took him to radio and that took him to Hollywood and that took him to microphone at Hanna-Barbera to voice some of the most enjoyable TV cartoon characters you’d ever want to meet. Daws Butler may have played the title roles in the Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw shows but Don was indispensable in the early days at Hanna-Barbera and eventually starred as one of the biggest characters in TV cartoon history (Scooby Doo).

Don was born in Buffalo, New York on September 7, 1926 to Binford Earl and Lena (Hughes) Messick. They were living in Manhattan in 1930 but soon relocated back to Maryland to be near all the relatives. In fact, Don and his parents lived with his grandfather for awhile. His father wasn’t in the oyster business; he was with the Washington and Electric Railroad when the U.S. got involved in World War One and was painting houses in 1940. His father never saw Don’s success. Earl Messick was accidentally killed with two other men on the morning of June 28, 1944 when a 35-foot metal pole being lowered for painting at the Nanticoke High School came out of a socket and hit a high-tension wire carrying 6,900 volts.

Don was doing cartoon voices before he was doing cartoons. He was a teenaged ventriloquist and was soon performing on the radio (it worked for Edgar Bergen, after all), though his occupation was listed as “clerk” when he enlisted for military service on January 11, 1945. After his discharge, he decided to head west. He met Daws Butler doing radio work and Daws, it seems, got him in to MGM to voice cartoons for Tex Avery. Along the way, he got married. It’s interesting to note his middle name was Earl but, unlike his father, he spelled it with an “e” on the end.

His family, including his younger brother Floyd Thomas Messick, stayed in Jesterville while Don made a career of voicing cartoon characters seen by millions. So Don had a reason to head back to Maryland. That’s what he did in 1975 and it was a big enough deal for the newspaper in Salisbury, the biggest nearby town, to interview old friends and do a profile of him. The Salisbury Sunday Times even dug up his picture from the High School Annual, but the copy I have is a scanned photocopy from the paper and not really viewable.

This story was published on April 6, 1975. Somehow, it omitted Don’s fine performances as Yowp.

Don Messick Knew What He Wanted
By DICK FLEMING
Of The Times Staff
Next weekend Don Messick will visit Salisbury where he is to be welcomed as a “local boy who made good.”
The 48-year-old freelance voice performer who has participated in countless cartoon and commercial productions, will be guest of honor for the area Chamber of Commerce annual banquet Saturday at the Wicomico Youth and Civic Center.
A native of Buffalo, N. Y., Mr. Messick lived in Jesterville near here during his teenage years and got his first taste of performing in school productions and on a local live radio broadcast.
Mr. Messick set out from Salisbury for Baltimore where he studied drama and made appearances in various radio and treatre presentations. He also carried his ventriloquist act to local variety productions and vaudeville on the road to Hollywood.
He arrived there in 1950, and in 1957 became a freelance performer. Among his more well-known performances have been vocal work in Yogi Bear (“Boo Boo”, “Ranger Smith”), Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (“Scooby”), The Jetsons (“Astro” the family dog) and The Flintstones (“Bamm Bamm”).
Mr. Messick is a bonafide celebrity and will be welcomed here as such. In addition to being the Chamber’s guest, he will be presented with a certificate of honorary citizenship of Salisbury, and Mayor Elmer F. Ruark has proclaimed, Saturday, April 12, “Don Messick Day” in the city.
But perhaps the most fitting tribute to Mr. Messick is the fend memories of him held by the persons with whom he was acquainted before setting out on the road to stardom. He is the "ambitious little boy who knew what he wanted to do.”
AS A youth, Mr. Messick apparently led a dual rose as entertainer and serious-minded young man, and kept the two people separate. Most of his old acquaintances remember him as a "quiet, shy boy." It was when he assumed the character of "the voice" that he became outgoing and noticeable.
That point is illustrated by Mrs. Nellie Collins, who grew up down the road from the Messick family.
“I knew who he was and we knew his family,” she recalled. “But I can’t remember a lot about what he was like back then.”
“He was a couple of years below me in school and the older ones never paid that much attention to the younger children.”
She did remember, however, the sight of the young boy and his everpresent dummy. A budding ventriloquist already, he was seldom seen without it, most recall.
But he was considered by his friends as one of the group and even when he was performing on WBOC radio with his own show at age 14, he wasn't really thought of by them as a celebrity.
Mrs. Collins explained, "We didn't really have the luxury in those days of sitting around and listening to the radio. We lived on a farm and there was a lot of work to be done. Once that was finished, then maybe we could hear the radio.”
Most of his schoolmates at the old Nanticoke High School were treated to at least one of Mr. Messick’s early performances, however. The school assembled in the auditorium on one occasion to watch his one-man show.
ONE OF Mr. Messick's acquaintances from Nanticoke High who remembers him well is Sheldon Dawson, now Wicomico County assistant superintendent of schools. Mr. Dawson served as English teacher and critic for the young ventriloquist.
Mr. Dawson remembered the boy as being "shy and reserved, studious, a good writer.” And outgoing when he picked up his dummy under his arm. He hadn’t changed much on his last visit to Salisbury, Mr. Dawson said.
“He was still his same old self, very reserved, until it was time to entertain the kids with some of his voices.”
Mr Messick was serious about school work, the former teacher said, but he did on occasion manage to work his act into the classroom routine, sometimes helping to make a point in an English class through the use of the dummy.
Often, those persons with an inclination toward entertainment crave the attention of friends and companions, and in school, such people are apt to assume a role such as the "class clown." Not so, however, with Mr. Messick, Mr. Dawson said. Mr. Messick’s normal speaking voice, Mr. Dawson recalled, was not particularly distinctive except perhaps for his diction. He said though that by being acquainted with the man as well as "the voice," he can hear traces of young Don Messick in the characters for which he vocalizes.
When Mr. Messick began performing a weekly program on WBOC radio in the early 1940s, he wrote his own scripts and worked by himself. He often tried out his skits on Mr. Dawson for a preview reaction to the material.
MR. MESSICK got his start on the radio show in a talent search and impressed the staff of the station. Among them, now general manager Sam Carey took an interest in the young man. Mrs. Carey drove to Jesterville every Sunday to pick the boy up at his home and carry him to the station.
According to Mr. Carey, the station put out a call on the air for local talent to come in and be auditioned.
"He came in," Mr. Carey recalled, "and at that point he had the dummy under his arm and his routines memorized.
“He came in self assured and went right at it, giving us a five or six minute skit," Mr. Carey said. "He had everybody there captured.”
Either the young man approached the 'station or vice versa, Mr. Carey isn't sure which, and Don Messick had his own 15 minute radio show every Sunday afternoon.
Jack Ward, vice president of operations, recalled that Mr. Messick “worked by himself, did everything himself.
“He would come in and practice the script for an hour or so and rehearse the voices. He knew what he was looking for.”
A 1941 yearbook from the old Nanticoke school recognizes the young man as vice president and historian for the sophomore class.
Ironically, he wrote in the class history in that yearbook:
"While we are one of the smallest classes we have made ourselves known with, for instance, more than the average participation in extra-curricular activities.
“Finally, with a group more or less compact in size, ideas and ideals, we look forward to continued and increasing success.”
For at least one member of the Class of ’43, the prophecy has come true.

Don passed away in Monterey, California on October 25, 1997. We’ve linked to a fine remembrance of Don on Mark Evanier’s web site before but let’s do it again. Click here. Even if you’ve seen it before, read it again. It’s a touching tribute to a fine actor.

Here’s the final part of the biography on Don Messick from “The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who’s Who of Cartoon Voice Actors” by Tim Lawson and Alisa Persons. You can find large chunks of the book on the web without much trouble and read about some of your other favourite veteran cartoon actors. If you see a copy in your local bookstore, get it.

The story ignores Messick’s work on Spunky and Tadpole, just as well perhaps, but it doesn’t mention a venture involving Messick, Bob Clampett and others around the time the Hanna-Barbera studio was getting off the ground. It was reported in an edition of Boxoffice magazine at the time but I didn’t make a note of when and can’t find the reference now.

At a time when desperation forced him to resort to selling his blood, Messick’s fortune turned for the better. While he was in New York, actress Joan Gardiner recommended him to her employer, legendary animator Bob Clampett. “She told him that she knew this guy who could do voices, was a ventriloquist, and who could do puppets. Well, I had never done hand puppets before, but they [the producers] paid my way back to Hollywood, and so for six years I was under contract to Bob Clampett. He had developed Beany and Cecil and was developing other shows, including Buffalo Billy. It was a half-hour Sunday afternoon live children's puppet show, adventures in the Wild West-type of thing starring Buffalo Billy and his aunt, Ima Hag. So, for six months I practiced in his garage while he tried one contact and then another to get this show on the air. It finally did go on the air in 1949 or 1950 in New York. . . . Again, I was back in New York!”
Thirteen weeks later that show had ended, as well as, apparently, his association with its producer. “Bob Clampett dropped me, but I think he sort of kicked himself for having dropped my contract.” Messick went back to the other coast for yet another puppet show; after which, Clampett promptly rehired him to work for the next five years. Besides acting, this stint with Clampett also included the duties of writer and production coordinator on the new live children’s adventure puppet productions. Included were the revamped Adventures of Buffalo Billy, The Willy the Wolf Show, and Thunderbolt the Wondercolt, in which he also had a chance to do some on-camera acting.
Messick’s cartoon career finally began when friend Daws Butler put in a good word for him. “It’s due to Daws that I got my first cartoon job. It was back in the ‘50s, and Tex Avery was looking for a voice. Daws recommended me to Tex while he was at MGM doing the Droopy the Dog theatrical cartoons. The actor who regularly did the voice of Droopy was not available for some reason or other and they needed to get this cartoon completed, so I wound up doing the voice of Droopy on two of the cartoons. Daws was certainly generous with sharing his professional contacts with me as well as just being a great, good friend. I certainly owe Daws, if not for my start in show business, then for the opportunity to grab onto the next rung of the ladder.”
His success solidified in 1957 when William Hanna and Joe Barbera decided that Messick and Butler should have the honor of breaking new ground with them. “Daws and I were the first voice men with the first series that Bill and Joe did on their own when they left MGM; that was, of course, Ruff and Reddy. I was the voice of Ruff, Professor Gizmo, and the narrator.”
The series became a hit. From then on Messick was offered part after part at the studio and eventually came to see Hanna-Barbera as a second home. “My association with Hanna-Barbera has been over twenty-seven years long. I’ve worked with them on something every year since they formed their own company.” In that time, he enjoyed the Hanna-Barbera approach of recording as an ensemble cast, a practice he was familiar with from the old radio programs. He stated that his ambition was always not to just do funny voices for a paycheck, but to approach it as a serious actor. During the course of his series, he took pride in letting his characters evolve and, subsequently, refining them along with his craft.
“Well, I think there is always something of me, of Don Messick, involved inside the character that I do because, basically, I am not an impersonator. That’s the way a lot of people who do voices develop them, and that’s usually what the producers want. They say, ‘We want such and such a type.’ So, it’s pretty much an acting job for me. The development of a character comes from inside my imagination and expresses itself outwardly, hoping that it conforms pretty much to what the producers had in mind and adding a little bit more to it. Daws was always complimentary about my work in saying that a lot of the other people who do similar things to what I do lack the warmth in the character that I seem to project.”
Messick was especially fond of some of his most popular characters. “Boo Boo Bear was kind of special and one of my favorites because he was such a simple naïve little guy, and in a sense Yogi Bear’s conscience, because he would always strive to steer him away from his incorrigible acts of stealing ‘pic-i-nic’ baskets. There’s something warm and friendly and nice about Boo Boo. Then there’s Muttley. He was always complaining about Dick Dastardly. One of my favorite shows was Dastardly and Muttley and Their Flying Machines.”
If pressed for an all-time favorite, Messick picked the most famous of Hanna-Barbera creations—Scooby-Doo. Messick helped create the character and performed the voice for the first twenty-two years that Scooby-Doo shows were in production. When asked about the cartoon canine’s enduring popularity, Messick was thoughtful: “I think kids identify with the human characters on Scooby-Doo, and bringing with that humanism into Scooby himself makes them further identify with the dog. I mean, everybody loves dogs. And, I think we all project our own personalities onto our pets. Scooby with his vulnerability is a lot like us. We are not all the bravest people in the world.
We all have our own hang-ups, and Scooby’s hang right out there up front! He’s cowardly; yet he always seems to come out on top in spite of himself.”
Finding the voice for Scrappy-Doo, Scooby’s nephew, became a little more complicated than expected. “When Scrappy was first introduced, they auditioned several people, and they offered it to another actor, but they finally ended up using me. I think we were doing sixteen episodes that season. ‘Long about the fourteenth, Joe Barbera and the ABC producer decided they didn’t like my Scrappy, so they had Lenny Weinrib (of H. R. Puffenstuff fame) do it. And he had to re-do everything that I’d already recorded, which meant that he had to ‘loop’ them, which is longer and more complicated. Well, it went on the air that way with Lennie Weinrib’s kind of Jerry Lewis mean little kid voice. Then the network decided they didn’t like that. ‘We prefer Don Messick.’ So I didn’t redo them, but I started with the next season’s shows.” Of course, being network executives, first they had to reaudition Messick to make sure that he was really what they wanted.
He also found work on Jonny Quest, the second actor to portray Dr. Benton Quest, opposite Tim Matheson as Jonny and Mike Road as Race Bannon. “They started out with John Stephenson, who did six of twenty-six [shows]. They decided to change the voice, have a different actor do it because they found a conflict between John’s voice and the voice of Mike Road. So they got me to do it. I also did Atom Ant for the last six or eight episodes [after Howard Morris].”
One of the highlights of Messick’s career was his time spent as Bamm-Bamm, Arnold, the paper boy, and various other characters on The Flintstones, a show he concisely describes as “one big pun well done.” Among the talent he had the honor of working with was one of his childhood idols, Alan Reed, who voiced Fred Flintstone. “I remember Alan Reed when I was a child, listening to the Fred Allen show. He did various characters on many, many radio shows. . . . He seemed to genuinely enjoy the character things I did. He and Mel [Blanc] would be sitting back and I’d glance up, out of the corner of my eye, when I was doing something. They’d be looking at each other and kind of nodding affirmatively, which made me feel good because they were ahead of me and I looked up to them.”
Certainly, judging by the continual interest in characters like Scooby- Doo, Astro, and Boo Boo Bear, Messick’s peers are not the only admirers of his work. Hanna-Barbera was especially grateful that for all that Messick struggled through at the beginning of his career, he never felt like giving up on showbiz. “I have felt that maybe I should get a steady job as a staff announcer at a radio station. But usually when such an opportunity would present itself, something else would come up to pull me away from going that route.”
Sadly, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Don Messick passed away on October 24, 1997, at the age of seventy-one, of a stroke. While Messick had respected Joe Barbera as a “perfectionist” and a “tough” director to work for at times, Barbera may have given Messick the most flattering tribute when summing up his work and that of his former partner, Daws Butler. “Daws and Don Messick—it was like a goldmine with those two guys. Between them, they could do almost every voice you could think of.”
Messick was grateful for his professional success, but he also recognized greater and lasting value to society in his life’s work in animation. “We need escapism. I think the world takes itself too seriously. There are so many serious things to think about and deal with. It’s nice to have a release, a departure, something that gets us away from the worries of the day, to help us not take ourselves too seriously and deflate our egos, if at all possible. I think that cartoons poke fun at our pomposity and our stuffiness, and so it helps us place a different perspective on some of our real-life situations. If it does nothing else but make us laugh, that in itself is therapeutic, healthy, and good.”

You can read an earlier post about Don’s life and career HERE.

Comparisons involving cartoon voice actors invariably start with Mel Blanc. Mel was the greatest, and that isn’t being said because of some nostalgic whimsy based on his ubiquitous presence on TV during childhood. His comic acting range was amazing.

Don Messick reminds me very much of the Mel Blanc of network radio, with one difference. Mel starred on his own show which, frankly, was a waste of a top cast. But he really shone as an A-list, regular supporting player for Jack Benny, Judy Canova, Al Pearce, Al Jolson, Burns and Allen and so on. Don was the more-than-capable support of Daws Butler in the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and continued showing his versatility time and time again through the 1960s when Daws was relegated, mainly, to voicing his old characters in commercials and on records. The difference between Don and the radio Mel Blanc was Don played a starring character that became an all-time monster success (Scooby-Doo).

If you troll the internet, you can find parts of a great book published in 2004 called “The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who’s Who of Cartoon Voice Actors” by Tim Lawson and Alisa Persons. I don’t know whether it’s in print any more, but anyone interested in the life stories of some of cartoon-dom’s famous voices should get it. There’s a chapter on-line about Don Messick (and, with a little guessing of words, you can fill in the missing paragraphs). We’ve presented a post on Don M’s life-story before, but here’s something from Tim and Alisa revealing his pre-animation career.

Ventriloquist, soldier, “Scooby-Doo” — Don Messick’s long climb up the career ladder culminated in the voice of the world’s most famous animated dog. Although it’s been over thirty-five years since it was originally produced, Scooby-Doo is more popular than ever, airing twenty-three times a week in the United States and broadcast in forty-five other countries, and with two live-action feature adaptations. Messick, who became a cartoon icon doing characters like The Jetsons dog Astro, Boo Boo and Ranger Smith on Yogi Bear, Pixie of Pixie & Dixie, Dr. Quest on Jonny Quest, and Papa Smurf on The Smurfs, is considered almost as much a cornerstone of Hanna-Barbera as its famous founders.
In the 1930s, the twelve-year-old “country hick kid back in Maryland” discovered that his first love was radio, which he listened to during the summertime for seventeen or eighteen hours per day. Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen were his favorites, so, naturally, he couldn’t resist the ad in Popular Science whose copy screamed, “Boys, throw your voice!” “When my voice changed, I discovered its flexibility, so it seemed to me that the most logical thing was to learn ventriloquism. I still remember the ad, which showed a picture of a man with a trunk on his back and a voice coming out of the trunk and a kid off on the side snickering because he’s throwing his voice into the trunk. I knew I had to try it.” After spending a quarter on the ventriloquism kit, Messick found that he couldn’t make the mouthpiece work, but the instruction book was instrumental in developing his ventriloquist act. “I was a rather shy, introverted kind of kid, smaller than most for my age, and was picked on and teased a lot by my peers, so it was a surprise when all of a sudden I turned to doing my own radio show when I was fifteen.”
“I had appeared on a [radio] talent show in Salisbury and I won first prize on that broadcast. And that led to my being called upon by the station, which acted as a talent agency. When an organization like the Lions or the Elks would be seeking entertainment, they would call the radio station, which had a roster of singers and various kinds of comedic talents. So, I started appearing and making five dollars here and seven dollars there all around the area, and that led to my first weekly radio program-a fifteen-minute thing on Monday nights on WBOC in Salisbury. I played the harmonica. I did about two harmonica duets with an organ and interspersed that with dialogue that I wrote for my characters.”
Over the two-year period that Messick did the program, he gradually dropped the harmonica and went to strictly writing and performing a one-man situation comedy show. For those wondering what style his comedy was in those days, the answer is an emphatic “CORNY! I bought a lot of joke books and thumbed through them, and depending on the little situation that I was writing, I would incorporate some of those. I also studied books on radio and production, so I was self-taught in that respect.” Messick also gained valuable experience by learning from his mistakes.
Coming into WBOC early one evening with his ventriloquist dummy Kentworth DeForrest, Messick wanted to practice his routine that was to air at 7:30 that night. “I was sitting at the piano, and I was just playing MMM bump bump. . . MMM bump bump, and Kentworth was singing ‘Shortnin’ Bread.’ There was a network newscast, by Fulton Lewis Jr., that was being fed out of Washington, D.C., on the Mutual Radio Network. This was before the pre-taped commercial days, so they had to break away from Washington for a local commercial. There was a woman announcer, which in those days was rare, but, because all the male announcers had been drafted, they were down to using women. So, she was waiting at the broadcast desk for the red light to come on and the engineer to give her the cue to read a commercial for the Wyconico Garage. I was sitting there banging on the piano, when all of a sudden I had this strange feeling come over me. I looked across at the control booth and the engineer was staring back at me with a strange look on his face, and the lady announcer had her head down on the desk in front of the microphone, doubled over in hysterics. I realized what the listeners at home must have heard was Fulton Lewis Jr. saying, ‘And now, here’s your announcer.; Then the next thing they heard was a high-pitched voice singing, ‘Three little children lying in bed, one of them sick and the other most dead.’ The lady announcer tried to gain control of herself and she choked her way through the commercial. I was terribly embarrassed. I thought I would certainly be thrown out of the place bodily, but that didn’t happen. I don’t think we ever did get back to Fulton Lewis Jr. for his goodnight from Washington.”
After high school, Messick put the mortification of the experience behind him and moved to Baltimore to study acting. “I think I had pretty good timing right from the time I started performing, because of listening to the radio [performances of] Jack Benny and Jim Jorden, Fibber McGee and Molly, people like that. You can’t listen to hours and hours of that sort of thing without some of it rubbing off. But I entered a small dramatic school, no longer in existence, run by one man. He had been a Broadway actor and a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. His name was William Ramsey Streett. We were known as the ‘Streett Players.’ Going to that school further developed my timing and delivery and helped me get rid of my down-home Eastern Shore accent.”
“One of the productions I starred in was Night Must Fall, which is a murder mystery. I played the lead—Danny, a psychopathic, homicidal maniac. That was one of my favorites. I also appeared in Arsenic and Old Lace, in which I played Dr. Einstein with a Peter Lorre-type voice. At the time I didn’t know a movie was going to be made, and Peter Lorre was going to be doing the part of Dr. Einstein in the movie! We did George Washington Slept Here and The Man Who Came to Dinner. I preferred playing character roles.”
Unfortunately, World War II disrupted many plans, among them, Messick’s burgeoning acting career. “I was drafted in January of 1945. I was put into basic training in a special division of the infantry, the message center. When I had written that I did radio work, they, in their infinite wisdom, assumed that it was technical radio. So they figured I could learn Morse code and operate the ‘Tick-Tick’ thing. Well, needless to say, I wasn’t very good at that, but it was better than being a basic rifleman trainee.”
If the army did nothing else for Messick, it brought him to the West Coast. “They put me on a troop train again and shipped me to California—Fort Ord. That’s the first time I saw California. I was then eighteen years old, and I fell in love with it. By then I was with Special Services, which was the entertainment branch of the infantry, and I took my ventriloquist dummy that I had renamed ‘Woody’ DeForrest with me. My mother had made him a uniform and we started entertaining almost right from day one. Woody got me out of a lot of dirty detail while in the service.”
It was during one of these shows that Messick was faced with a performer’s worst nightmare. Inexplicably, his entire audience suddenly stood up and walked out leaving a bewildered Messick staring at an empty hall. “In the middle of the act, I started hearing a shuffling of chairs and the guys started getting up. I finished my act as hastily as I could and dashed offstage into the wings. I asked the MC what was happening and he says, ‘Well, can't you smell it?’ I had a serious sinus problem at that time so I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Skunk.’ The ventilation ducts were open to the outside and a skunk had crawled into the shaft and let loose. The stench was filling the entire auditorium in the middle of my act.”
After about a year and a half in the military, Messick received his discharge in 1946 and decided to take his chances in Hollywood. “I got into a thing that was sponsored by the radio actors’ union, which was then known as AFRA, the American Federation of Radio Artists, not AFTRA [changed in 1952 to include television actors]. It was a workshop kind of thing which met a couple of times a week, and we recorded half-hour radio dramas. The man who headed up the workshop was named Robert Light, who was the head of the Southern California Broadcasters Association. Robert Light was friendly with Paula Stone, a well-known actress at the time. She and her husband were connected with the workshop and developed a fifteen-minute radio show for RCA Victor called The Raggedy Ann Show, based on the dolls. I was Raggedy Andy. That was my first continuing radio series, and it ran for thirty-nine weeks.”
When the show was ended by a musician’s strike, there seemed to be no work in Los Angeles to be found. “I went on the road for a while in the Midwest, playing theaters and doing my ventriloquist act. I then dumped myself in New York, where I had a few starving months, and made the rounds of producers’ offices. I performed over the weekends either up in the Catskills or over in New Jersey in second-rate supper clubs.”

Read part two HERE.

Animator Mike Kazaleh has given up a rare piece of personal property for Jerry Beck to post over at Cartoon Brew. It’s a promotional record featuring H-B regular voice artists Daws Butler, Don Messick and Doug Young, along with the First Lady of Cartoon Voice Actors, June Foray.

Even the label’s cool. The caricatures were done by T. Hee, noted for his work at UPA and, before that, Disney, but who also spent time in the mid ‘30s at Warner Bros.

I can do no better than to link to the disc on Jerry’s site. Click here.

Well, yes, I can. Let me link to the background behind this. The disc is a sequel to another disc for ad-agency-ears-only called ‘All That Jazz—Blooper’s Soap.’ It’s a satire of how interfering clients, agencies and the people afraid losing their business can completely screw up even the simplest commercial. Anyone who was worked in commercial copywriting or production probably must have experienced that kind of thing at least once.

The script to the original disc can be found by clicking here.

Thanks Mike and Jerry for a chance to hear these fine cartoon voices in a recording likely few people reading have heard before.

Oh, sure, Avatar is the biggest movie of all time, and that hand-drawn stuff is only for boomers who need walkers to get to the liver pills in the medicine cabinet and Gen Xers desperately injecting botox to vainly pass for someone under 25, right?

I don’t think so.

And neither do the good people of Riverdale, New York, judging by an ad in last Thursday’s local paper, The Press. Here’s the relevant portion:

...the next meeting of the Alana Llama Film Club for Kids will take place on Sunday, Jan. 31, at 10:30 a.m. The Y will present a compilation of cartoons from the 1960s, including episodes of The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Porky Pig, Top Cat, Quick Draw McGraw and others. There will also be free popcorn and a small gift for all children in attendance. Tickets cost $7 per person and they can be purchased at the door on the day of the event.

What a great idea: getting kids together to watch cartoons.

Sounds like they’re showing one of those ‘Saturday Morning’ DVDs that was put out last year. Regardless, it shows that after all these years, young people want to see funny cartoons, no matter how they’re drawn or how old they are. And I’ll bet my liver pills they’ll laugh as much at George Jetson kicking Uniblab out of the Skypad apartment with the cool interiors as I did when I was their age. At least they’ll see it in colour.

One would think that they would be showing Archie cartoons in Riverdale, but the local environs are obviously filled with smart children with good taste. Thus they’re denied asking themselves “Why are they so cheap that they keep reusing the same ugly animation of Hot Dog dancing every week?”

And it isn’t dewey-eyed nostalgia talking when I categorically yowp for the record that these were funny cartoons, even though everyone knows the animation itself on The Flintstones could never compare to what the same artists had created only a few years earlier at Disney and MGM. Witness yet another syndicated column, this one dated June 6, 1960. Whether this is the same Barney Glazer who was a movie screenwriter, I don’t know.

Glazed Bits:
Do You Know TV Stars?
By BARNEY GLAZER
So you think you can name all the major television shows.
Try naming the program that includes the following characters.
The hero, a lanky horse, disguised himself as a steer. With Snuffles, the bloodhound, in tow and Baba Looey, a Mexican burro, at their side, they tracked the Phantom Rustler.
The steer, who wasn't a steer, you see, “mooed” when he ran smack into a hot clue, but the rustler nabbed him and thinking he was a real steer, which he wasn't, he branded him (ouch!).
There was Augie Doggie who had a cold in the nose. Since he couldn’t smell, Augie Doggie made friends with a little skunk which is why this episode was titled “Skunk You Very Much.”
Snooper and Blabber, an intrepid cat and mouse private eye team, were assigned to track down a pair of ghosts named Harum and Scarum. The job didn't come off well when Snooper and Blabber finally admitted to each other they were scared of ghosts.
If you haven’t guessed by this time what the heck we’re talking about, we'll let all you uninformed gentry in on our little secret. It’s a television show, quite popular with our younger generation, and it’s called “Quick Draw McGraw,” who is a lanky horse and perhaps the most remarkable Western hero of our times.
Not only is Quick Draw McGraw the fastest draw among man or beast but in the guise
of “El Kabong,” which he assumes on numerous occasions, he is also the masked righter (Wheel) of oppression.
The name “El Kabong” is derived from the guitar he uses to smite villains over the head with the resulting reverberating sound of “kabong!”
Starring voice of this junior-grade show is Daws Butler who is kept as busy as a mongoose at a cobra rally doing voices for this program, for “Huckleberry Hound,” and hundreds of radio and animated tv commercials.
Associate voices are those of Don Messick and Doug Young. Heard in many of the supporting voice characterizations, Messick remembers how he reversed the old parental advice when he was a kid by being the child who was heard and not seen.
In this show, Messick has performed everything from a lion to a mosquito or a Martian to a kangaroo, but among his favorites he lists a humming bird named “Humboldt,” a heroic French flea named “Toot Sweet,” and a garrulous little gopher who remains anonymous.
Doug Young unveiled his talent by impersonating a station manager. The next day, while applying for his unemployment check, Doug commented: “That guy had no sense of humor.”
“Quick Draw McGraw” and his cronies have been riding roughshod over tv ratings since last Fall. The creative talents of Producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera began with the famous Tom and Jerry movie cartoons, continued with tv’s Ruff and Reddy, then traipsed to “Huckleberry Hound” and now “Quick Draw McGraw.”
It’s an open secret that millions of unashamed adults, as well as their bewildering offspring, seat themselves in front of their tv sets come “Quick Draw McGraw” time.
The delightful program is an irresistible web and there is nothing quite so wonderful as being caught in it.

And, if they don’t know it already, kids in Riverdale, New York are going to find out for themselves, 50 years later.

Daws Butler and Don Messick were the backbone of the body of voice artists in the first Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Actually, the first year that H-B Enterprises was in operation, they were the whole body, handling all the characters in Ruff and Reddy, though Lucille Bliss has revealed she was up for the role of Ruff and got screwed out of it.

When The Huckleberry Hound Show debuted in 1958, Daws and Don provided just about all the voices. Comedian Red Coffey was brought in to do his duck voice in a few. June Foray makes on appearance in a Yogi Bear cartoon. Ginny Tyler, who worked for Disney on children’s records, provides an annoyed housewife camper’s voice in a couple of other Yogis (at least it sounds like her). And a French accent is being faked in the Pixie and Dixie cartoon ‘The Mark of the Mouse’ by someone whose identity has escaped experts like Mark Evanier and Earl Kress.

The reasons for such a small stable would seem obvious. Theatricals didn’t employ more than a few actors in a short. And Daws and Don were terrific. Joe Barbera put it this way: “...it was like a gold mine with those two guys. Between them, they could do almost every voice you could think of.” Who needs anyone else, right?

Well, apparently there was another reason. One that Barbera outlined in a story to the United Press International wire service; this ran in a newspaper dated July 13, 1959.

Want To Crash Hollywood?
Use Your Head—And Voice
By DOUGLAS DILTZ
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—A tip to those who want to crash Hollywood: The art of voice characterization offers a much better chance in the movie capital these days than the body beautiful.
Some of the most prosperous and highly-rated actors have hit the jackpot through their vocal impersonations. Most of these specialists, with the notable exception of Jim Backus (“Mr. Magoo,” etc.) live in a delightful world of almost complete anonymity, yet earn salaries that dwarf those of many glamorized personalities.
Artists like Daws Butler, Don Messick, June Foray and Patty Chapman [sic] can name their terms—the demand for their services is so acute.
According to Joseph Barbera, of the TV cartoon-producing company of Hanna and Barbera, there is a dearth of voice actors in Hollywood. The reason for the demand stems from a new surge in television cartoon production, not only in TV cartoon shows, but also for cartoon commercials.
For such TV cartoon shows as “Ruff and Ready” [sic] and “Huckleberry Hound,” there are more than 110 speaking characters. The voice specialist sounds off as many as 10 to 15 different characters for these cartoons.
Hanna and Barbera says it is always on the lookout for potential stars who have a repertoire of voices completely unlike anyone else’s. And, it won’t make any difference if you’re not pretty.

A dearth of voice actors? Like the hundreds, many of whom were amazingly versatile, who populated network radio only a few years before this news story was written? Call me Yowp the Sceptic, but it seems unlikely there was a “dearth of voice actors” in 1959. I say it ain’t so, Joe. Especially since Hanna-Barbera soon hired top radio character actors Alan Reed, Bill Thompson, Bea Benaderet, Janet Waldo and Penny Singleton. Oh, and some fellow named Blanc. Can’t remember the first name.

One thing is clear—the studio added artists as it added cartoons and voice artists were no exception, dearth or not. When The Quick Draw McGraw Show aired in 1959, several new actors came on board. Some lasted longer than others.

• Peter Leeds, best known for narration and foil duties with Stan Freberg, narrated ‘Scat, Scout, Scat’ and vanished for good.
• Los Angeles children’s TV star Vance Colvig appeared on ‘Bad Guys Disguise’ and disappeared until the following year when Barbera needed someone to say “Ain’t that cute” about a duck. Neither displayed much vocal flexiblity, surprising given Colvig’s pedigree.
• Elliot Field, a disc jockey who had arrived in Los Angeles from a radio station in Texas, was the original voice of Blabber Mouse before Butler took the role after four cartoons. He later came back to do guest voices on ‘The Flintstones’ before his radio career took him to Detroit.

Barbera lucked out with several other actors.

• Hal Smith, pre-Otis Campbell (the town drunk on Andy Griffith), lent his voice to a bunch of incidental characters for both the Quick Draw and Huckleberry Hound shows, then stayed with Hanna-Barbera through the ‘60s. Warners used him as Elmer Fudd after Arthur Q. Bryan died and he seems willing to accept work on the lamest of cartoons (like Filmation’s ‘Rod Rocket’ and Ken Snyder’s ‘Funny Company’ educationals).
• Julie Bennett, who also worked briefly for Warner Bros. and Jay Ward, made a couple of appearances as Sagebrush Sal on Quick Draw before claiming the role of Cindy Bear a year later.
• Jean Vander Pyl, the radio voice of Margaret Anderson on ‘Father Knows Best’, got most of the female roles, with some accents that would become familiar to viewers of Hanna-Barbera through the ‘60s.

But the only new regular voice actor on the Quick Draw show was a radio announcer and actor named Doug Young, who managed an amazing feat—he mimicked Jimmy Durante, keeping Durante’s humour but not overpowering you with the impression. You could watch Doggie Daddy and think of him as Doggie Daddy, not someone doing Durante. He added relaxed warmth to the voice and the role.

The surprising thing that you may not realise is when you watch the earliest cartoons on The Quick Draw McGraw Show, Don Messick is nowhere to be found. Why? That’s a mystery. Certainly no one at Hanna-Barbera could have been dissatisfied with him. It could be Don was busy with—CRINGE ALERT—the egregious ‘Bucky and Pepito’. Or maybe Barbara wanted to go with a bit of a different sound; certainly he did with the background music on the Quick Draw series. Whatever the reason, things seems to have changed about mid-season as Don’s familiar narration and incidental voices returned to add to his body of work as he and Daws Butler played off each other to delight cartoon lovers.

Good thing, too. After all, a body does need a backbone.

Yowp note: If you’ve never heard of Pattee Chapman in the wire story she, among other things, worked with Stan Freberg on the radio show ‘That’s Rich.’ Isn’t there always a Freberg connection?