A lot of people love Don Knotts. It would seem a cinch, therefore, that being hired to be part of the cast of his variety show would mean fame and oodles of cash. Not like doing a fairly straight voice in some new Saturday morning cartoon show a year earlier.
The Don Knotts Show was cancelled after 24 episodes in the 1970-71 season. The cartoon show? It may never die.
Its name is Scooby Doo, Where Are You! and the actor in question is Frank Welker.
We can first find him with the Santa Monica City College theatre arts department in January 1966, on stage in “A Phoenix Too Frequent.” There were other productions, too, including The Wizard of Oz (One wonders if he did a Bert Lahr impression. Or Snagglepuss, even).
He soon joined the throng of “fastest rising young comedians.” In July 1967, he worked for Disney. Not in cartoons, but on stage at Disneyland. He landed a gig at the Purple Onion in San Francisco the following month. The next year, he showed up on the daytime talk show Pat Boone in Hollywood. His next break came when he toured with the Righteous Brothers. A columnist named Barney Grazer reviewed their stop at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles in late May 1968:
The opening act posed the question: what’s a Frank Welker?
Take a standup comedian, remove his standard tux, suit him in mod threads, grow his hair longer, equip him with a rubbery face and soundbox and let him go to work mimicking a dog, bird, duck, John Wayne, Walter Brennan, LBJ, Mayor Yorty, Bobby Kennedy, the Queen Mary’s toot, and 15, yes 15 ducks singing “Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
That’s what a Frank Welker is, a new generation comedian adjusted to the times and its laughter.
John L. Scott of the Los Angeles Times of May 25 decided:
A young comedian, Frank Welker, opens proceedings with a series of pretty fair impersonations which climax with hilarious avante-garde mimicry featuring, believe it or not, 15 ducks singing “I Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Welker reveals a good comedy potential.
Then came a blurb in the Hollywood Citizen-News of May 27, 1969 that he and Casey Kasem, Nicole Jaffe, Don Messick and Stefanianna Christopherson had been signed to lend their voices to a half-hour animated series which needs no introduction.
The Great Dane continued to be a cash cow for Hanna-Barbera. But it was “only” a Saturday morning cartoon. So it was that Welker didn’t get a lot of recognition. However, the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle profiled his voice career in a full-page story in its Dec. 23, 1988. This may have been the first time he talked on the record about being hired for Scooby-Doo.
You may not recognize the face or know the name, but he has a household voice
Frank Welker sounds like a winner
By BRIAN McCOY
News Chronicle
Give Frank Welker's resume a quick read and you might think he's among that breed of marginally successful journeyman actors that Hollywood literature and lore so love to depict.
A three-sport letterman at his high school in Denver, the Agoura resident had never seen a play before coming to Southern California in 1965. He had a way with a joke, though, and some radio experience, so he was able to pay the bills as both a standup comic and comic actor.
Welker's career began to bloom as the decade waned. He parlayed his joke-telling into gigs opening for the Righteous Brothers and Brasil '66 and landed some face-in-the-crowd roles in a few far-from-distinguished films.
Television then beckoned, and in the early '70s Welker appeared on a number of shows, even made a few pilots. His best shot at the TV big time fell victim to the network ax, however, and Welker's face has appeared on the small screen irregularly over the past 15 years. Asked to construct a story around that framework, most novelists would cook up some neo-Gothic tale of Hollywood's seamy underside. Big-eared kid comes to LA. to earn his fortune but winds up playing the struggling actor, just another nameless face on countless cattle calls.
But that "Sunset Boulevard" scenario couldn't be further from the truth Frank Welker enjoys. He lives on a pricey, rambling estate that includes a pool and tennis courts. He counts Jonathon Winters and Howie Mandel among his friends. He can barely keep up with all the work he gets.
Very few people outside the entertainment business know Welker's face, of course, but everyone knows his voice. From commercials. From movies. From the dozens of Saturday morning cartoon characters he's spoken for over the past 18 years. Welker — the man behind such animated favorites as Slimer on "The Real Ghostbusters," baby Kermit and Skeeter on "Muppet Babies" and Hefty and Poet Smurf proves you don't need a high profile to flourish in Hollywood.
"Since I started in the business. I've never stopped working. I guess it's like medicine; once you're in medicine there are a million things you can specialize in. The key is they can't hold you down; you can do anything you want."
And during the March-to-September animation season, Welker's voices keep him running from sunrise to sunset.
"I'll probably do on the average three shows a day with commericals [sic] in between and sometimes a radio show. I may start at Rick Dees at seven in the morning, go in and do some voices for Han (Hanna-Barbera) and then go to a commercial session and do a chicken or something."
Voices are Welker's mainstay, but he's always kept a hand in his other interests and it's his comedy that's receiving the attention now thanks to his recently released album, "Almost Sold Out."
"I guess I enjoy doing it all and I find that I'm busiest now doing voices but ... I never let (comedy) get too far away because it brings good stuff."
Among the “good stuff” were appearances on "Laugh-ln" —Welker was set to become a series regular when the show was cancelled — and his first commercial.
"I was working a nightblub [sic] in Westwood and I do this dog-and-cat-fight routine in my act. And this guy...was doing a commerical for Friskies dog food and he said, 'Hey you do great dogs, come and do a voice-over.'
"I didn't know what a voice-over was, so I said sure and I went in did the voice of the tail of the dog."That was in 1970, Welker says, "and the way those things go, his girlfriend worked for ABC and she was casting 'Scooby Doo.' So I went in to read with Don Messick and Casey Kasem and a bunch of other people and read for the dog.
"I didn't get the dog but they called me back and said, 'Look, why don't you read for the part of Freddy.' So Casey got Shaggy, I got Freddy and Don Messick got the dog. That was my first cartoon show."
Welker's first film had come two years earlier, when he landed a small role in Elvis Presley's final feature. "The Trouble with Girls (And How To Get Into It)."
During the seven weeks he worked on the film, Welker got well acquainted with Presley, who would often ask him to do his dog-and-cat fight.
"He was so great and all the people traveling with him were so friendly on the set. And he was going into Vegas to start that cycle of his life and was real excited about it.
"Just the way happenstance goes, I never really touched base with him again. I was working with Ann-Margaret the night he died and I was standing where he played at the (Las Vegas) Hilton."
Welker's decision in the mid-'70s to put his on-camera career on hold was not a conscious one, he says, but it did give him more freedom.
"I found that in '74-'75, I started hooking up with the nightclub act and getting out of the on-camera stuff.
"That's so confining, when you're doing on-camera stuff. You're again at the mercy of basically the way you look, what look is in, whether you're going to get this part based on this or that.
"There are so many things involved. With standup, you can look any way and you can create your own material. With the other thing, you count on too many other people."
Welker says he loves what he does, though the anonymity his career provides is a "double-edged sword."
"I think there are times when I would like that kind of exposure, but on the other hand it's awfully nice when I watch what happens (to the famous faces) when they're tilting to eat."
And, he says, he doesn't need mass adoration for his ego either.
"I get a lot of nice ego builds from the people I work with. In fact, I work with Jonanthan Winters [sic] on 'The Smurfs' and when he turns to you and goes, 'Oooooh, good voice' that's like worth a year" of applause.
You could probably count the number of cartoons Frank Welker voiced before and after this story, but it would take up a lot of time. Happily, he is still working as of this writing. Considering his talent, that’s no mystery for some meddling kids and their dog.
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