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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read his obituary here.

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

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

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

Today we can enjoy DVDs or on-line streams of our favourite old cartoons (or bootlegs in some cases). A generation ago, baby boomers ooh-ed and aww-ed about the latest home entertainment technology of the day—video cassettes. Yes, people could actually see some of their favourite cartoons without having to wait for them to appear on TV.

Who better to give free plugs for these wondrous new products than the people who appeared on the cartoons?

Mel Blanc and Jean Vander Pyl were the only main cast members of The Flintstones who were alive when episodes of the ‘60s show first started appearing on home video. Blanc had a whole new career at the time as a raconteur, showing up on talk shows to gab about the old days of the Jack Benny radio show and throw in samples of the voices of his characters (mainly the Maxwell, an English horse and Warner Bros. cartoon stars) that everyone instantly recognised. Vander Pyl seems to have been less in demand. Of the four main actors, her career was arguably the one with the lowest profile. She wasn’t known for much more than being Wilma Flintstone.

Still, we’ve stumbled across this story dated August 27, 1987. In the few interviews I’ve read, she strikes me as a modest, open person, and I’m glad to see she got more recognition in her later years (especially when the live-action Flintstones movie came out). The columnist asks the right (if obvious) questions—“What about the Honeymooners connection?” “Are the old cartoons better than the new ones?” “Are you surprised with the show’s success?”

The many voices of the Flintstone family the work of one
By Mike Cidoni
Gannett News Service
Jean Vander Pyl is never alone, even when she’s by herself.
Forget Sybil. Vander Pyl is a REAL mistress of multiple personalities. Each of hers collects a paycheck.
And there’s another check on the way, as Vander Pyl — the voices of Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone as well as eight occasional characters on “The Jetsons” — picks up her profits from the videocassette “The Flintstones: The First Episodes” (Worldvision, $29.95). The tape (arriving Aug. 29) features the animated series’ first four shows, which aired on ABC in the fall of 1990. When Vander Pyl picks up the phone, you half expect a blast from that past, you expect to hear Wilma; perhaps Pebbles and Bamm Bamm cooing in the background; maybe a few of Fred’s brontosaurus burgers broiling on the grill.
What yon get is a voice that’s husky, warm, matronly.
You get a feeling that Vander Pyl loves creating the voices of Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone. She loves to review the show’s original episodes. She has a gay old time whenever she returns to Bedrock.
Yon also get a little perplexed and a lot bedazzled.
Give Vander Pyl a cue. Any cue. And out comes a quiver. Then a nasally quake.
“Fred!”
One word reveals it all. It’s Wilma, alright.
“And you’ll never believe it," says the 67-year-old Vander Pyl. “That’s all I need to say and I get surrounded by people. I’m more popular now than I was 20 years ago. It’s still a big deal.”
And it still gives the San Clemente-based Vander Pyl a bounty of work. She says her character is featured in a new series of ads, including one for MasterCard of England.
While she’s grateful for the recent Flintstone gigs, Vander Pyl agrees that they don’t make ’em — or write ’em — like they used to.
“Amen,” she says. “The writing, that parody, that wit. It was really ahead of its time. The originals — from 1960-66 — that we did ... Everybody says they’re the best. I have met so many people, kids 35 and 40, who grew up with the originals.”
Those first “Flintstone” shows, which make up the longest-running animated series in prime-time history, are now in syndication. They’ve also inspired a string of spin-offs including the Saturday-morning series “Pebbles and Bamm Bamm” and ABC’s current “The Flintstones Kids.”
Hanna-Barbera also is in pre-production with its big-budget live-action “Flintstones” feature starring Jim Belushi as the hard-headed Fred.
Vander Pyl hopes the new projects will recapture the spirit and success of the earliest episodes.
“(Producers) Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna were such pioneers,” she explains. “They had seen that something like 90 percent of ‘Huckleberry Hound’s audience was over the age of 19. So they decided to try an experiment an animated series strictly for adults that would air in prime time.”
The late Alan Reed gave a voice to Fred. Mel (“Bugs Bunny”) Blanc played neighbor Barney Rabble. Vander Pyl originally auditioned for the role of Barney’s wife, Betty. But she lost the part to the late Bea Benaderet (who simultaneously played Kate, the mother, on CBS’ “Petticoat Junction.”)
“Almost all of us came from radio,” Vander Pyl says. “And in radio days, if you couldn’t do two or three characters in one show, you didn’t work. Who’s gonna pay for three actors if you can get just one to do three parts?"
Impressed with Vander Pyl’s versatility, Barbera cast her as Wilma.
“He showed us some drawings and told us ‘This show was kind of inspired by “The Honeymooners’.” So, at first, Vander Pyl based Wilma on Jackie Gleason’s “Honeymooners” wife, Audrey Meadows.
“You know what I mean,” Vander Pyl explains. Then she breaks into flat, through-the-nose Meadows impersonation. “Oh, Raaalph!”
She says Barbera’s direct command to clone “The Honeymooners” separates “The Flintstones: The First Episodes” from the rest in the series.
"When we first started the show, we were all striving — more or less — for that ... I have to come out and say it. We were copying THEM,” she says, laughing. “But it only lasted for about three or four shows because we quickly eased into our characters. Now, I think Wilma’s more like me. A caricature version. People that know me well can spot me in Wilma. I get awfully angry at men sometimes.”
Oddly enough, in its debut season (1960-61), “The Flintstones” scored a higher Nielsen ranking than its original inspiration. It also had a longer run (the original “Honeymooners” ran just a season, “The Flintstones” ran for six).
“And nobody really expected it to go that long. It was just something they were going to try out,” she says.

Vander Pyl may have won the audition for Wilma, but it wasn’t her first role at Hanna-Barbera. When the studio expanded in 1959 to add the half-hour Quick Draw McGraw Show, Joe Barbera went out to look for new voices. One was Vander Pyl, whose first role was Mrs. J. Evil Scientist on a Snooper and Blabber cartoon.

Vander Pyl and the Flintstones’ cast received an unexpected honour in the series’ second season. This is likely a news release from studio PR flack Arnie Carr and appeared in the Binghamton Press of January 6, 1962.

Flintstones Are Invited To Film Festival

A new honor has just been bestowed on the ABC-TV television program, The Flintstones, in the form of an invitation to enter the Monte Carlo TV Film Festival being held this month.
The invitation specifically requested that the Flintstone episode, "Alvin Brickrock Presents," represent the Flintstones show in the comedy category.
"Alvin Brickrock Presents" has to do with a neighbor of the Flintstones and the Bubbles, Alvin Brickrock, whose strange activities with spades, shovels, and coffin-like boxes leads Flintstone and Rubble to suspect that Alvin has done away with his wife — whose absence from the Brickrock home is not satisfactorily explained.
To qualify for the Monte Carlo Festival, the "Brickrock" script had to be translated into French and dubbed with French subtitles. Elliot Field, well-known Hollywood "voice," stars as Alvin Brickrock. Wilma and Fred Flintstone are played by Jean Vander Pyl and Alan Reed, Betty and Barney Rubble by Bea Benaderet and Mel Blanc.

Someone else hired at Hanna-Barbera in 1959 appeared in the cartoon mentioned above. It was Color Radio KFWB disc jockey Elliot Field. Elliot was hired as the voice of Blabber Mouse and appeared in the first four Snooper and Blabber cartoons (and provided incidental voices). However, he explained to me once he ended up in hospital for surgery and when he was fit again, Daws Butler had taken over the role. As you can see, he came back to the studio, but any further cartoon work was cut short by a radio career move to Detroit.

Elliot sent a note several days ago to let me know he’s still out there. He’s the last of the pre-1960 Hanna-Barbera voice actors kicking around (Jimmy Weldon wasn’t hired to be Yakky Doodle until late 1960). We wish Elliot good health and hope to hear from him again. His book about his time in ‘60s rock-jock radio, commercials and animation is still available.

I mentioned a number of weeks ago that the original voice of Blabber Mouse, Elliot Field, had written his autobiography. Here’s a little note about getting his book on-line (I make no money from this ad). It doesn’t deal a lot with his career at Hanna-Barbera, which was cut short in 1959 by a stay in hospital (he returned later to work on a couple of Flintstones episodes before moving to Detroit). It talks mainly about that era of radio when creative local disc jockeys took over from the Golden Age network shows.

Elliot can be heard as Blab in the cartoons “Puss ‘n’ Booty,” “Switch Witch” (he’s also the witch), “Real Gone Ghosts” and “Desperate Diamond Dimwits.” He also surfaces in the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon “Scary Prairie” (as both the narrator and the bad guy).

L.A. radio pioneer DJ reveals the genesis of Top 40 radio.
In 1958, Elliot Field was earning an unprecedented 31.8 share for his afternoon drive slot on LA’s #1 station. Field, one of the original seven Swingin’ Gentlemen of KFWB, Los Angeles, was there for the introduction of “Color Radio,” working along side other pioneers like Gordon McLendon and Chuck Blore. He has just released his autobiography titled, “Last of the Seven Swingin’ Gentlemen” available in paperback and as a Kindle book on Amazon.
Field also enjoyed a career as an actor and voiceover artist, creating memorable cartoon characters on Hanna-Barbara’s “Quick Draw McGraw” and “The Flintstones,” most famously as the voice of Alvin Brickrock, a spoof on Hitchcock.
An early victim of polio, Elliot has spent his life in leg braces, remaining active (and vertical) through it all. His stories, told in his straightforward voice, with touches of humor, are honest and inspiring. Elliot gives real meaning to the concept of the “last man standing.”
Published by Palm Springs Publishing.
Sold by Amazon Digital Services
AISN: BOOKMIIMZK

Everyone interested in this blog, I trust, recognises who this is.



Yes, it’s Blabber Mouse, specifically from his first appearance in “Puss N’ Booty” (1959). But perhaps you don’t know who this is.



It is the voice of Blabber Mouse. And, no, it’s not Daws Butler.

This is a photo of Elliot Field, who was a disc jockey at KFWB radio in Los Angeles from 1958 to 1963. Elliot lent his voice to Blabber and other characters in the first four Snooper and Blabber cartoons (including “Puss N’ Booty”) and can be heard in the first Quick Draw McGraw cartoon as the narrator and Grumbleweed.

Joe Barbera was looking for new voices when the Hanna-Barbera studio was about to launch its second half hour show in syndication for Kellogg’s, the great Quick Draw McGraw Show. Perhaps it was because Don Messick was working on the wretched “Spunky and Tadpole” cartoons and the studio needed new people. Whatever the reason, Mr. Field, Hal Smith, Peter Leeds and Vance Colvig appeared on the Quick Draw show early in the season. Smith stayed, the rest disappeared. Colvig returned a couple of years later to play Chopper in the Yakky Doodle cartoons. Elliot returned as well to lend his voice on “The Flintstones,” most famously as Alvin Brickrock, a parody of Alfred Hitchcock. He had done the same spoofing voice of Hitchcock on his radio show.

Elliot went into radio in the Golden Days of the 1940s, first on CBS as a teenaged performer in Boston, then as a disc jockey in the hyper days of Top 40 radio, and finally in management. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, he decided to look for outside work (today, that means lucrative commercial voice-overs) and acquired as his agent Miles Auer, who also represented Daws Butler, Don Messick and a pile of cartoon people. Unfortunately, because of the sorry state of the Hanna-Barbera library, almost all of Elliot’s screen credits for the studio were stripped from the films years ago and replaced with gang credits without his name.

Elliot is now 87 years old and, to the great fortune of everyone, has written his autobiography. The only thing wrong with it is it’s all too brief. It features succinct, crystal-clear memories of his youth, when he contracted polio, his career as a rock jock in the pre-Beatles era and his time in cartoons. It’s available for a teeny price on Amazon.com. Check it out here.

I make no money from this plug and mention it solely because I have a soft spot for cartoon voice actors and veteran radio people. One thing Elliot doesn’t mention is why he only appeared on five cartoons in the Quick Draw show. We’ll give you the answer. He had an operation in 1959 and was subsequently unavailable. I suspect at that point Joe Barbera handed the role of Blab to Daws, much like Red Coffey was apparently too busy touring to continuing voicing an insufferable duck when it was given its own show and the great Jimmy Weldon was hired. Timing is about as important as talent in landing work.

There are so few of the pre-1960 Hanna-Barbera cartoon voices around—Doug Young was still living in the Seattle area last I heard—so it’s great to see Elliot put his memories on paper. I hope the e-book is a success.

Here’s today’s trivia question: What does this….



….Have to do with this?



A hint—the photo at the top is of the man who immortalised the phrase “Ah, there’s good news tonight!” We’ll get to the answer in a second.

But first…

We’re getting word about books that have been, are about to be, or may be, published that involve Hanna-Barbera. You might want to know about this one from Leslie Stern, whose step-father was H-B designer Iwao Takamoto.



Iwao himself wrote a book not too many years before he died and it’s a nice remembrance of his time at H-B. Of course, there’s the sad side about what happened during World War Two, as his and other innocent Japanese families were removed from their homes in California and moved to camps.

Tim Hollis, who somehow manages to churn out book after book, has another one. The cover you see to your right is pretty self-explanatory. Hanna-Barbera’s deal with Kellogg’s that put Huckleberry Hound on the air in 1958 logically seems to have had a pitch clause as a lot of the syndicated H-B characters started hawking cereals. Later, of course, Post picked up the Flintstones as spoke-cartoons in ads that were, to be honest, more fun than those Flintstones sequel shows.

You should find the book through on-line sources.

If you want to see my all-time favourite H-B cereal commercial, watch below. I think someone told me Ed Love animated this. Daws Butler does a great job as Mr. Jinks. And how can anyone hate meeces singing “Yeah, yeah, yeah”?



And now the answer to our question above. Here’s the connection.



Elliot Field, as you may be able to see in the fuzzy caption, provided voices on the Quick Draw McGraw Show. He was the original voice of Blabber Mouse (four cartoons) and played Grumbleweed and a variety of other roles in the first Quick Draw cartoon. At the time, Elliot was the afternoon drive host on KFWB radio in Los Angeles. He had arrived after a brief but successful career on stations in San Antonio and Dallas. But, before that, in Walter Winchell’s column of June 18, 1956, is the squib.

Elliot Field, long with Gabe Heatter, will be a news specialist for a Boston station.

Elliot wrote me to explain that he was Heatter’s show and recording producer on the Mutual Broadcasting System from 1952-56.

But Elliot’s career goes back to the Golden Days of Radio. Last week, he celebrated the 70th anniversary of his first job in radio. His first job was on “Youth on Parade,” a sustaining (no sponsor) programme fed to 83 CBS stations from WEEI Boston. A chap named Dolphe Martin created the half-hour Saturday morning show in 1941, which featured young people singing, an orchestra, adventure sketches, doing impressions, and so on, just like any variety show. The show went network the following year after 44 broadcasts.

You may be wondering how Elliot was hired at Hanna-Barbera, which was looking for new talent (and not familiar voices from network radio) when Quick Draw went on the air. And why he left before coming back to work on a few episodes of “The Flintstones.” I’m curious, too. Elliot says he’s putting everything together in a memoir. It’s be interesting to read when he gets done. When it’s published there will, indeed, be good news tonight.

Thanks to likely-no-longer-existing credits, there are still a few mysteries about who lent their voices to some of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Mark Evanier and the late Earl Kress thought they solved one awhile ago. It’s evident that Daws Butler is not voicing Blabber Mouse in the first four Snooper and Blabber cartoons put into production. They came to the conclusion the actor was Jerry Hausner, a long-time professional baby-cryer on radio and one of the members of the voice stable at UPA. We documented it here.

Some time after the post, author Tim Hollis sent me a note and a DVD. He knew Jerry Hausner quite well and said, to his ear, it wasn’t Hausner at all. Furthermore, his DVD interview included Hausner talking about his unpleasant experience at Hanna-Barbera and didn’t mention anything about Blabber or any cartoons from the 1950s.

So, I put all this aside and didn’t think anything of it until the other day when I was doing some research and put on the season five Flintstones episode Super Stone. And then I heard a voice that sounded awfully familiar.

Compare the narrator in the first part of this to the newscaster in the second part. Doesn’t it sound like the same guy?



The newscaster is Elliot Field. The narrator is from the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon Scary Prairie. The same narrator is heard intoning at the start of the Snooper and Blabber cartoon Desperate Diamond Dimwits which features the non-Daws version of Blabber.

Hanna-Barbera was, well, cheap. Rarely did they hire more than two voice actors for a short in the ‘50s unless they needed a woman or a specialty voice. So would they hire Daws Butler, Elliot Field and Jerry Hausner for a Snooper cartoon? You’d think not. So is the early Blab really the voice of Elliot Field and not Hausner?

Let’s compare again. Here’s the early Blabber compared with two Elliot Field clips from Flintstone and the Lion. The sound quality is different and so is the acting, but the clip of Blab is the longest I could find to make a comparison.





What about Hausner? Let’s try again. Here’s the early Blab with Hausner from the UPA cartoon Pete Hothead (1954).



You can see how Field and Hausner could act in the same general vocal range, which makes discerning one from another fairly tough.

I’ve had better luck at unravelling who Elliot Field was. Better make that “is” because Elliot is still with us and enjoying life in Cathedral City, California.

Field was a disc jockey, making his career in that period when the Golden Days of Network Radio really were days. All the old night-time shows were gone and networks retreated into the daytime hours, mostly running soap operas or news. It was the start of the glorious and all-too brief period for creative rock and roll jocks, who combined character voices and comic routines with the latest hits, punctuated by easily remembered jingles. We picked up young Elliot Field’s career in May 1957. He had made himself a name in San Antonio in a short period of time after arriving from Manhattan and had just been transferred by the station’s owner—the one-of-a-kind Gordon McLendon—to a station in Houston. The following January 6th, he arrived in Los Angeles and debuted at KFWB, replacing Bill Ballance in the afternoon drive slot. He was one of the legendary “Good Guys”, a concept ripped off by stations all over North America. Field and the guys did the unusual in 1961—they went on strike. Even if you never lived anywhere near L.A., you’ll know the name of one of the other striking announcers. A chap named Gary Owens.


Field left Los Angeles for WJR Detroit in 1964 and we next find him seven years later as the general manager of a station in Palm Springs. Field settled into the community. He was elected to City Council and was mayor pro-tem for three terms starting in 1981. He set up an ad agency bearing his name which exists to this day.

His acting career? Field made his dramatic debut in the anthology series Accused in April 1959. That’s all I’ve been able to find about his turn as an actor, other than several internet sites which say he appeared on three Flintstones episodes. We’ve mentioned two; in the other he provided the Hitchcock-like voice of Alvin Brickrock in the show’s first season (for which the original titles are apparently lost).

But is that Elliot Field in those early Quick Draw and Snooper cartoons in 1959? And as the voice of Blabber? It would seem the answer to at least one of those questions is “yes.” Elliot, if you’re out there, drop me a note. At least one old cartoon dog (and ex disc jockey) would like to know if it’s you. And a bunch of readers, too, I’ll bet. Be a “Good Guy” one more time.

A Yowp post-script: since this note went up, Elliot has e-mailed me. We haven’t discussed many specifics but he has acknowledged his work on five cartoons on the Quick Draw McGraw show.