Babo and a Flashlight Battery

The Fleischer brothers began making sound Screen Songs in 1929, so it’s perhaps no surprise the first cartoon voice actors of note in New York City were singers. But you’ll never see the names “Billy Murray” or “Margie Hines” on a title card on any Fleischer cartoons. People who provided voices simply didn’t get their names on the screen in the 1930s and, for years, Mel Blanc on the West Coast was generally the only person who got credit until the ‘50s rolled around. Even then, the successors to the Fleischer studios only rarely (and likely contractually) gave voice credits; Frank Gallop’s name in There’s Good Boos To-Night (1948) is one.

Fans of cartoons actors are left baffled by the identity of many of the people who stepped up to the mike at animation studios on the East Coast. Several actors, however, did get a little bit of newspaper press and a few lived long enough to be interviewed by animation historians.

Here are a couple of newspaper pieces about three actors. I haven’t a clue whether Toby Deane worked in theatrical cartoons, but we know that Lionel Wilson worked at Terrytoons under Gene Deitch and provided all the voices for the imaginative Tom Terrific TV cartoons. This first story is from the Radio and TV column of the Syracuse Post-Standard of August 14, 1956. It reminds us a very flourishing commercial animation business was in New York. You can read more about Wilson in this post.

Cartoon Voices Have Interesting Persons Attached
By PEG SIMPSON
A tiny, hidden corner of the TV world is occupied by a group of actors who busy themselves out of nobodies. These thespians are the ones who give life to the pencil sketches which charm viewers of video’s animated cartoon commercials.
Two members of the cartoon-voice fraternity were seen last week in featured roles in the Lyric Circus production of “Girl Crazy.” Petite blond Toby Deans has the distinction of owning the voice of Dottie Doeskin, the M&M peanut, Mr. Kruger of beer fame, and the glow worm (or bubble boy) on the Babo can, among others.
Lionel Wilson, who played Toby's husband in the presentation, has done many Ivory Flakes characters along with Crisco, Viceroy cigarette, and other commercials.
Both Toby and Lionel pursue regular, successful careers in showbusiness in addition to having built up quite substantial careers in this end of the recording business. Each can handle the voices of either sex and any age.
“That's the strange part of this business,” Wilson laughed. “A mature woman may come up with the perfect little boy voice while a man oftimes handles a little girl voice better. In fact a girl frequently does an old man’s voice better than a male actor can. I've done them all and so has Toby.”
While the pair appear to get a big kick out of being the anonymous voices behind a cartoon, each has his own philosophy about, having a job which leaves him nameless.
Lionel likes the anonymity. He has two separate, distinct careers. On one hand, he records voices. On the other, he's an actor in TV, radio and stage. He keeps the careers apart deliberately that one job doesn't reflect upon the other.
Toby, however, has welded her jobs. Primarily a club singer, she uses her many voices and stories about them in her act. She feels the identification helps her establish contact with her audience—most of whom watch TV commercials at one time or another. She's had as much success with this idea as Lionel has had his philosophy.
Just keep an ear cocked during the next cartoon commercial you see--the voice you hear belong to a couple of former Lyric Circus stars.

Another one of Deitch’s favourites was Allen Swift. He was incredibly busy with commercial work but Deitch brought him in to provide voices at Terrytoons and then later on the Tom and Jerry cartoons he made for MGM. Since someone will mention it if I don’t, Swift was also one of the Total TeleVision stock company. We’ve written about Swift’s career in this post and again in this post. Here’s yet another newspaper article from one of the syndication services, dated April 6, 1959.

Man of Many Voices Finds TV Profitable
NEW YORK (WNS)—Allen Swift is the most listened-to man in television: you may not see him, but not an hour goes by in the whole broadcasting day that you don't hear his voice.
Swift, you see, is the man who does all those odd voices for the commercials. He may be a cigarette, a pencil, a duck, an electric shaver, a bottle cap or a ballplayer ... and each time one of his voices comes at you in a commercial, Swift can say with satisfaction:
“Well, I just made myself another $35.
CONSIDERING he has 400 commercials being used on radio and TV right now, this 35-year-old New Yorker has good cause for satisfaction.
Even though his face never appears on the screen, he ranks as one of TV’s highest paid performers. Which is nice going for a fellow who started his TV career as the voice of “Howdy Doody.”
“Actually I started at the age of 8,” Swift explained in his own natural baritone voice. “I went to the movies and saw Maurice Chevalier and Zasu Pitts in a triple feature or something, and when I came out I discovered I could do the Chevalier and Zasu voices.
“DID THEM well enough so that I got a lot of attention from the family—and I liked it. So I was a mimic from that time on.”
Swift, who's a happy-faced, blue-eyed fellow with thinning brown hair, is really more actor than mimic. He doesn't just imitate voices; he makes them up. “Say an advertising agency calls me in and says they want to do a talking pencil, I try to figure out how a pencil would sound if it could talk.
“And of course I try to make the voice entertaining.”
BECAUSE SWIFT is blessed with an extraordinary range— he can go from base to falsetto in two syllables—he's never had any of his voices identified as belonging to the same man.
“I really don’t think I’ve ever repeated a voice,” he says. “Because you never get the same character speaking.”
That means Swift is the owner of some thousand different voices. He’s done 2,000 commercials, the voices for “Terrytoon” cartoons, and five years of radio soap opera.
Sometimes Swift’s voice can be heard offering competing products. For instance, he’s been eight different brands of cigarettes and two different kinds of electric razor.
SWIFT HAS little trouble with such items. But sometimes the non-existent characters he has to speak for stump him.
“Have you ever tried being a flashlight battery that sees the light?” he asked. “The biggest problem is trying to be serious about the voice. There’s something very funny, even though it’s my living, about deciding whether a pencil with an eraser talks slower than a pencil with a metal case, But it makes all the difference to the people paying for the commercials.”

There are so many other names that lie in the weeds of obscurity. For every Jackson Beck and Mae Questel there are an Arthur Kay and Cecil Roy. And who was that raspy guy who turned up in Gene Rodemich’s Van Beuren cartoons? Maybe some day we’ll see some new research to answer the many questions about people who deserve to be better known by animation fans.