Magoo in the Comics, December 1964, Part 2

Here’s the last part of our series of Mr. Magoo daily cartoons from December 1964. It might seem odd that Magoo isn’t celebrating Christmas, considering he starred in the first Christmas cartoon TV special. But it may be, if I can wildly speculate, that the comics were reasonably new and there was no indication they would be in papers in time for the holidays.

Once again, Charlie appears.

You can click on each week’s worth of comics to enlarge it.

Draw!

Mike Maltese used it in “Hare Trigger.” The western bad guy orders Bugs Bunny to draw a gun, so he draws a picture of a gun. Maltese re-worked the gag in the Woody Woodpecker cartoon “Square Shootin’ Square” about ten years later. The drawing of the gun fires. The western bad guy then gets out a pencil and draws a gun. Yeah, you know how it’s going to end.



Some of Maltese’s other gags in this cartoon (eg. the Calamity Jane phone routine) will remind you of stuff he wrote for Bugs and Yosemite Sam.

Herman Cohen, Gil Turner and Bob Bentley, all former Warner Bros. animators, got screen credit on this one.

Magoo in the Comics, December 1964

You can’t exactly say Mr. Magoo fell on hard times by 1964. Yes, his Oscar-winning days were long gone, but he was still a valuable property for his stripped-down studio, UPA. Made-for-TV Magoo cartoons were being syndicated and in 1964, he appeared in prime time on NBC in “The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo.” Network news releases trumpeted that he was now “a Mr. Magoo who sees well enough to be an expert swordsman,” but today the world still thinks of him as a comedic half-blind guy who mistakes something for something else.

That’s how he was treated in a Magoo daily comic strip which debuted that year. I’ve found nice scans of comics starting Monday, December 7, 1964, so I’m going to post them in two parts.

Don’t expect any “expert swordsman” in these comics. They hew to the tediousness of the syndicated cartoons. I believe I’ve related how I used to “boooo” loudly at my TV set at the end of those cartoons for taking away valuable cartoon-watching time by giving me unentertaining slop. The comics also feature Charlie the houseboy, who I believe was an invention for the TV cartoons and didn’t appear in the theatricals. I’ll ask the same question I asked myself over 50 years ago: would anyone from China really say “Magloo” and “Bloss”?

Click on them to enlarge. Part two with the remainder of December 1964 will be tomorrow.

The cartoons are unsigned so I don’t know if UPA staffers were responsible for the story, design or inking. Click on each week of six comics to enlarge the set. Late note: the artist is revealed in the comment section. You might have seen his work in Warners cartoons.

A Strange Mixture of a Man

A feature article in 1958 about Jack Benny by his wife almost says as much about her as it does about him.

Mary Livingstone seems utterly baffled that “material goods don’t mean a thing to him,” that he wasn’t a clothes-horse or liked gossip. For material goods most decidedly did mean something to her, including clothes—preferably better and more expensive than what was owned by her friend Gracie Allen. She may not have loved show business but she certainly enjoyed the comforts its top echelon could buy. And the fact Benny needed the hired help to turn on a heat switch for him gives you an idea of the insane amount of wealth he had.

It’s a little odd to read how Mary believed she was a better wife by not being on the show. In the ‘50s, being a wife usually meant doing the cooking and cleaning and raising the kids. Mary didn’t do either of the first two and her daughter was married and out of the house by the time she quit television. By all accounts, she spent the bulk of her time playing cards or shopping.

Don’t expect Mary to gossip here. She outlines her husband’s harmless quirks. Perhaps some of them were revealed for the first time in this story. One thing you may take away from it is that while Mary was a great admirer of style, style without substance is nothing. It’s clear from Mary’s tale that Jack Benny had substance, and that’s why he was loved around the world. And, by all accounts, they had a loving relationship. Good for Mary and Jack!

This article appeared in The American Weekly, one of many weekend newspaper magazine supplements. It was published October 19, 1958.

My life with JACK BENNY
Here’s the hilarious lowdown on the private life of TV’s “fiddling tightwad”
By MARY LIVINGSTONE
AS TOLD TO LIZA WILSON
THIS is MY LAST magazine article as Mary Livingstone. From now on I’ll just be Mary Benny, because after a quarter of a century in radio and television, I’ve had it.
This June I made two TV films with Jack for showing this fall. As usual, before I faced the camera I was a nervous wreck, and a holy terror to live with. Suddenly I said, “This is it. I’m retiring.”

Jack gave me an argument, of course. Jack wants his Mary Benny and his Mary Livingstone, too. In our 31 years of marriage it’s the only thing we have actually fought about. But my mind’s made up. I make a better wife and a more relaxed one when I’m not on the show.
I never intended getting into the act in the first place. It was back in 1932, some months after Jack made his now famous first appearance on the air and said, “Hello, folks, this is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause while everyone says, ‘Who cares.’” One day they needed a girl to do a bit on the show and Jack asked me to try it. I was scared, blew my first line and giggled. That giggle did it. I was trapped. The mail started pouring in requesting “more of that girl who giggled” and the writers gave birth to Mary Livingstone as sort of a running gag.
I’d been madly in love with Jack since I was 12 years old and living with my family in Vancouver. My older sister invited Zeppo Marx to dinner one night and Jack came along to get a good home-cooked dinner. He was playing a local vaudeville house, and he was my first contact with show-business. Jack was suave and polite, but definitely not interested in children who carried on like a road company Gloria Swanson. He broke my heart when I heard him whisper to Zeppo, “Get me out of here.”
The next time I met Jack was several years later when my family had moved to Los Angeles and I was working at the May Company. Jack was appearing at the Orpheum and I went backstage with my sister. Even to Jack, who is not the most discerning person in the world, it was quite evident that I was no longer a child.
It was an exciting courtship, with me playing hard to get, but not too hard, and when he proposed I said “yes” real fast before he could change his mind. We were married in Waukegan, January 14, 1927. Two seconds after the ceremony I fainted dead away.
Ours has been a full, rich, good marriage and life with Jack has never been dull for one moment. He has the enthusiasms of a wide-eyed kid at Disneyland. If he has a chocolate ice-cream soda, it is the greatest chocolate ice-cream soda in the world. And off I have to go with him to get one, though I want a chocolate ice-cream soda like a hole in the head.
George Burns likes to tell about the afternoon he and Jack were sitting around our pool. Suddenly Jack jumped out of his chair and whispered excitedly, “George, come up to my room. I have something sensational to show you.” George thought it would be nothing less than the latest nuclear test. Jack threw open the door of his dressing room closet and pointed to a pair of shoes. “Isn’t that the greatest shine you ever saw?” he said.
George, and all Jack’s pals, just had to go to the shoeshine boy at CBS to get their shines. George Jessel has a whole slew of stories on Jack, but one of his favorites concerns the time he ran into Jack lunching at Romanoff’s. “George,” exclaimed Jack, “have you been to Hillcrest lately?” Jessel admitted that he hadn’t. “Well, you must go,” insisted Jack, “—and take a shower. Those towels Georgie, they’re the greatest towels ever.”
Jack's enthusiasms are not passing fancies. During Truman's administration Jack went to Washington to M.C. an important dinner. Mr. Truman told him he was dynamite, and Jack was as pleased as a teen-ager with a souped-up car. “Let’s celebrate with some ham and eggs,” he said to his publicity man. They finally found an open-all-night diner, and Jack proclaimed the ham and eggs the greatest.
Now really, what can be so different about ham and eggs whether you get them at the Waldorf or at Sloppy Joes? A few years later, he was in Washington again at the request of President Eisenhower. He was hardly off the plane before he said, “Let's find that diner for some more of those sensational ham and eggs.” Jack has great enthusiasm for talent.
If there’s an act playing the Mocambo, or one of the Hollywood night clubs, he can’t wait to see it. And if it’s a good act, he sees it again and again and phones all his friends to tell them about it. Jack has “made” almost as many acts as Winchell, and that's a good many.
He is a very strange mixture of a man. Material things don’t mean a thing to him. He is just as happy in the broom closet of a hotel as he is in the royal suite. He has never made a fuss about a table in a restaurant or night club, even when they seat him with the trombones or the potted plants. If he had his way, which he hasn’t, he’d drive a car until it fell apart. During a heat wave last summer, I heard strains of his violin coming from one of those cardboard, sun-baked dressing rooms on the studio lot. “Jack,” I said, “it’s 110 in here. Why aren’t you in one of the air-conditioned dressing rooms?” Well, it seems other members of the company had the air-conditioned dressing rooms, which was certainly all right with Jack. He may be the star of his show, but he never throws his weight around. I am sure he must have 20 pairs of gray flannel slacks, and heaven only knows how many cashmere sweaters, but at home he wears the same ones over and over. He gets attached to his clothes, and once wore the same robe until his elbows popped out. Gracie Allen literally tore it off him, and presented him with a new one.
I buy his ties for him dozens at a time, and all alike. Jack is a soup and coffee spiller. Sometimes he has to change his tie three times in the course of an evening.
But when Jack steps before a camera, or an audience, he is so handsomely groomed and expensively tailored that I fairly burst with wifely pride. Last year he was named one of the best-dressed men of the year. And when he played the Palladium in London his clothes were reviewed right along with his act.
Around the house Jack has all brashness of a mouse with an inferiority complex. He never makes any demands of the servants, and naturally they overwhelm him with service. They adore him. He is not a finicky eater. Everything is the greatest. Most of our servants have been with us 18 years.

Jack lives in a dream world of his own, and has never been able to cope with the mechanical age. He doesn’t even know how to turn on the heat. One day he was working with his writers in the den. They commented it was cold, and asked Jack to turn on the heat.
“Sorry, I can’t, fellows,” said Jack. “The butler is off today.”
One of the writers gave him an incredulous look, went out in the hall and pushed a button.
“Oh, oh,” said Jack. “Is that all you do?” He’d had visions of having to go down to the basement, shovel coal, and stoke the furnace.
At night, before we go to bed, I go around the house turning out the lights. One night I went to bed early with a headache. Around midnight I heard Jack tiptoeing in my room “Doll,” he whispered, “I turned out the lights in the playroom, but how do you get them out in the rest of the house?”
Jack isn’t the most observant person. He'd never make a detective. Light years ago I had workmen take down the chandelier in the dining room. For eight years he has been eating his dinner by candlelight. But just the other night he looked at the ceiling and said, “Why, Doll, you removed the chandelier!”
Jack is the happiest man in the world when he gets up in the morning. He is so happy I could kill him. For me, mornings are for the birds. The few times I have tangled with Jack before noon I have considered a divorce. He simply exudes happiness. He is an early riser, usually up by six o’clock.
If he is going on an automobile trip he makes it five.
Recently I heard him say to his writers, “Well, boys, let’s knock it off until six-thirty tomorrow.” “Jack,” said one of them, “you are the only one in Hollywood I would have to say this to do you mean a. m. or p. m ?”
His breakfast consists of fruit juice, toast and coffee, year in and year out. After breakfast he goes to his office and works on his shows. He usually lunches at Romanoff’s or Hillcrest, his golf club, they are mostly business. After lunch—and by that time I have come to life again—I meet him for several hours of golf. Jack gets in at least nine holes every day. He likes to have me play with him, in fact he insists upon it. This is unlike most Hollywood husbands who say there are three things they must do without their wives—testify, die and putt.
After that we go home and Jack practices on his violin—he is very serious about his violin as I am sure everyone knows by now—or we stop by our daughter Joanie’s house to play with our grandchildren, Michael, three, and Maria, one. Jack is a doting, indulgent grandfather, and buys them such impractical gifts as boxing gloves and gold-plated junior golf clubs.
On nights that we do not go out to dinner with our friends we have a tray in Jack’s bedroom. We look at television, or we read or talk. Mostly we talk. Jack likes to discuss his shows with me, and ask my advice about the minutest details. And this I like, just as long as I don’t have to be in them.
Now don't let me give you the idea that Jack is namby-pamby. He has his definite dislikes, even though he doesn’t shout them from the roof tops, or the newspaper columns. Among his dislikes are people who are not punctual, and “method” actors who mutter. Jack thinks that all performers should speak up clearly and enunciate every syllable. He also dislikes gossip, in any shape or form, I regret to say, though I admire him for it.
When we were first married and Jack was appearing in big lavish musical shows on Broadway, I used all my womanly wiles to extract tasty tidbits from him about the glamourous beauties he appeared with nightly. I might as well have tried to get money out of Fort Knox. They were all “nice girls,” according to Jack, “and good to their mothers.” He’s about as dishy as the Sphinx!
Jack is very loyal to his friends, never sacrifices them for the sake of a wisecrack, and they evidently are very loyal to him.
A well-known magazine writer, who has written about all the greats, spent six weeks in Hollywood trying to get a controversial story on Jack. Finally he gave up, and announced, “I couldn’t find a person who had a bad word to say about the guy.”
Jack may be casual around his home, but on his show he is a driving perfectionist. He knows what he wants and he isn’t stopping until he gets it. Although he has been on radio since 1932, and on TV since 1950, he is still trying to improve his shows. But in his own home he’s the best audience in the world. He loves to sit and watch the other comedians perform.
He loves to plan trips, too. I know of only two actors, Bob Hope and Bill Holden, who like to travel more than does. He wants to travel to the faraway backwoods places (me — I like London, Paris and Rome) and see everything and buy everything (mostly junk, in my opinion). Every time he has lunch with Bill, I know I am going to have another two-hour whirl around the world, via the batch of maps Jack always keeps at his bedside.
Near the night table, too, is the inevitable tray of pills. Jack collects pills. Every time any one tells him about a new one he rushes out and buys it. The assorted colors in little bottles fascinate him, I guess. He’s so fascinated that he forgets to take them.
Jack also collects TV sets and scales. We have them all over the house. Golf tees are his pet extravagance. He never uses the same one twice, and keeps hundreds of them in his dressing room back by the two Emmys he won at the Emmy Awards last spring.
I am very proud of my husband.
Others come and go in this business, but he stays right there on top, year in and year out. Jack explains it, when he is asked, “I guess it’s because I don’t try to be sensational. I just try not to be lousy.”
But I like better William Saroyan’s explanation: “Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being shoved by a touch of genius—and knew it, and knew you’d know it, too, in a moment. Style. If you’ve got it, you don’t need much else. If you haven’t got it well, I hate to do it, but I’ve got to borrow from Barrie—if you haven’t got style, it doesn’t matter what you’ve got.”
Style. That’s my Jack.

Martha Sigall

This is a picture from 1941 of the mixed doubles bowling team at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio that released films through Warner Bros. The young lady on the bottom row, second from the left, was in the studio’s ink and paint department. Her name was Martha Goldman. She later married and became Martha Sigall.

Word is that Martha has passed away after a stroke several days ago. She was born on April 17, 1917 in Rochester, New York.

Her first day at the Schlesinger studio was July 13, 1936. She started at $12.75 a week. Her career stretched through the Golden Age of theatrical animation into the television era. More importantly, for those who love those old cartoons, Martha had a wealth of stories she wrote in her autobiography Living Life Inside the Lines (2005). In it, she dispelled the myth that Schlesinger was a clueless, classless boob. She revealed that he was a genuinely nice man with a sense of humour. She talked about many of the people she worked with, some of whom, like assistant animator Harold Soldinger (top left corner of the photo), no stories had ever been written.

Martha worked with, and knew, many of the greats of the industry: Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Frank Tashlin, Mike Maltese, Irv Spence and, well, the list is a very long one.

By all accounts, she was a dear person and will be truly missed by those in the animation industry and her many friends.

Thanks, Martha.

How to Move a Bleep

Hanna-Barbera wasn’t the only TV cartoon studio around in the late ‘50s but its product may have been slicker than the others. Sam Singer was churning out “Pow Wow the Indian Boy,” Beverly Hills Productions came out with “Spunky and Tadpole” while Shull Bonsall manoeuvred Jay Ward and Alex Anderson out of their own property and created new episodes of “Crusader Rabbit” through his company, TV Spots (and distributed by his Regis Films).

And then there was Colonel Bleep.

Outer space was big in 1957, and a TV film commercial producer in Florida decided to take advantage of it. Soundac Productions created “Colonel Bleep,” starring an alien in a space helmet, a puppet cowboy named Squeak and a caveman called Scratch. By mid-1957, it was ready for syndication by Richard Ullman of Buffalo (Weekly Variety, June 19, 1957). Future research is needed to discover when it first aired, but it debuted on WGR in Buffalo on September 23rd. It was still running on WNBC in New York as late as 1971 (on Saturday mornings, to no surprise), but the series’ heyday was in the late ‘50s.

The cartoons certainly had their own graphic style which many people appreciate today. The animation? Well, let’s be kind and say the characters jerked from pose to pose, though they seem to have been stationary a lot of the time. On occasion, characters moved through a kind of smear animation with brush lines. Here’s a good example from one of the cartoons. These are consecutive drawings.

Ken Harris of Lower Slobovia

College-age Ralph Phillips is told in the U.S. Army short “Drafty, Isn’t It?” (1957) that all his buddies in the army won’t “look like a bunch of Lower Slobovians.” And there’s a shot of them. The cartoon was made by the Chuck Jones unit at Warners. Whether they’re caricatures of the Warners cartoon staff, I don’t know, but usually when there’s a gangly guy with a long nose and buck teeth, it’s Ken Harris. And there’s one of those here. (Abe Levitow and Dick Thompson got the other animation credits. Levitow was tall and dark).



There’s a neat hidden reference in a picture on Phillips’ bedroom wall. Note the signatures on the cast. One is “Linda.” Can it be a reference to anyone but Chuck Jones’ daughter, Linda?



You’ll also see the names “Joe” and “Bill” on the cast. I know what you’re thinking. Well, the cartoon has a 1957 copyright date so it’s likely it was made either around the time Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had been fired by MGM or had set up their new studio. My guess is it’s a coincidence but I’d like to think of it as a little tribute.

But Mademoiselle Zuzu...

Alas. Poor Oswald doesn’t have the money to see Mademoiselle Zuzu’s performance in “Bright Lights,” a 1927 Disney cartoon.



He rests his hand on her poster, dejected. Unfortunately, his hand is on Mlle. Zuzu’s butt. The poster-Zuzu comes to life, gets embarrassed and changes positions.



Patrick Malone’s Disneyshorts.org credits the animation on this to Hugh Harman and Ham Hamilton.

Oswald Finally Celebrates Christmas Again

It looks like it’ll be a happy holiday for Oswald and his friends in the 1927 cartoon “Empty Socks,” produced by Walt Disney. The drawing has (not surprisingly) a Harman-Ising feel to it, doesn’t it?



Wait a minute, you Disneyphiles and silent cartoon lovers are saying. Isn’t that cartoon missing? Apparently not. News reports say it has been tracked down to an archives in Norway, all but a portion in the middle of the short.

Now if only the world could get a look at it.

My thanks to Morten Eng for letting me know about this discovery.

Paul Kligman, Actor, Author and Reindeer

Go ahead. Call me a humbug. But I have never warmed to any of the Rankin-Bass stop motion shows, including the grand-daddy of them all, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” But I sure like the voice cast.

Every once in a while, I hear grumblings about “cheaper Canadian voice talent,” as if it’s somehow inferior to the hundreds of people in Southern California on the audition circuit for cartoon roles. Well, “humbug” I say to that. The huge legions of fans of “Rudolph” sure don’t complain about the actors as they cozy up to their TVs every December to enjoy Romeo Muller’s tale of the bullied outcasts who become admired in the end. The fans don’t complain because the actors come up with an enjoyable performance.

In every major Canadian city, there’s a little group of people that seems to get 90 per cent of the voice work; commercials, voiceovers and so on. And Toronto of the 1960s was no different. Many of the same actors in “Rudolph” lent their voices to other animated series, such as “Spider-Man” and “Tales of the Wizard of Oz.” It’d be tough to pick a favourite from that group. Carl Banas was wonderfully versatile and, according to people I know who worked with him on radio, a very funny and unassuming man. Bernard Cowan had a nice matter-of-fact, straight narrative delivery (his character voices sounded like Bernard Cowan trying to do character voices). But the guy I like best is Paul Kligman.

Kligman brought life to those cheesy-looking Spider-Man cartoons as the perpetually-annoyed J. Jonah Jameson. Like just about any voice artist in Toronto then, Kligman had acted in dramatic radio on the CBC. He spent some years in Vancouver before he realised the thing many actors in Vancouver eventually realise: jobs are limited so you have to go to a bigger city. So off he went to Toronto.

Here’s a story from the Ottawa Citizen of November 7, 1953. As you might expect, it dwells mainly with the all-important Theatre.

“Varied” Is The Word For Actor Paul Kligman
“Variety” is the first adjective you think of for the talent of Winnipeg-born actor Paul Kligman, whose name appears so often in the cast lists for CBC radio and television productions from Toronto: but when you consider the comic and serious stage roles he has carried in Vancouver and Toronto, as well as all the villains, buffoons, strange-accents imports and plain ordinary Canadians he has portrayed on the air, you begin to get a picture that borders on versatility.
Kligman, now 30, the father of two small children and (since March), the owner of a new house in the Wilson Heights northern suburb of Toronto, has been in show business for 17 years—on a full-time basis only since he moved to Toronto from the West in 1949.
Before that he led a double life over a period of many years, earning a living primarily as a salesman (shoes, groceries, clothing, furs, in turn) and supplementing this with a less dependable revenue from radio and stage work.
Produced Dramas

At the University of Manitoba (which he attended for two years—1941-42) he acted in or directed such plays as The Man Who Came to Dinner and Waiting For Lefty. Then he produced drama and variety shows for the RCAF. First from Winnipeg, then from Vancouver, he was heard in many CBC drama productions during and after the war and in Vancouver he put in six (summer) seasons with the Theater under the Stars, cast usually in “heavy comic” roles (he stands five-foot-eleven and weighs 240 pounds).
For the 1952 season he returned to Vancouver from Toronto to do The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, Senator Billboard Rawkins in Finian’s Rainbow, Frosch in Die Fledermaus and the Burgomaster in the Red Mill—just a sample of the musical comedy experience which stands to his credit.
On the CBC, particularly when he was in Vancouver, he has appeared often as the villain in melodramas. During and after the war he was much in demand, because of his facility with German and other “dialects”, for “filthy Nazi” parts. There have been many other similar roles like that one for him in CBC plays, and most recently, on TV, he portrayed the villainous type in The Duke in Darkness.
As for dialects, he can talk natural understandable English through many foreign-language filters and this is one of the abilities that often make him the obvious choice for a special role, otherwise difficult for the producer to fill.
He is “fluent” in English as it might be spoken by men whose native tongue is Russian, Italian, German, Yiddish or French. (His own ancestors were Russian Jews). For the CBC Wednesday Night production of Jacobovsky and the Colonel he carried the leading part with a convincing suggestion of Polish-Jewish origins; he was Papa Bonaparte in The Golden Boy on Ford Theater and on the stage in Vancouver—and who doesn’t recall the odd characters who used to stumble into the Wayne and Shuster Show when least expected?
Interested In The Theater
His interest in the stage is not confined to the musical-comedy field. A member of the founding board of the Jupiter Theater in Toronto, he played in two of that group’s productions—Aristophanes in Socrates and Slick in Crime Passionel. He was Jack in Wayne and Shuster’s Mother Goose production which was seen at His Majesty’s in Montreal and the Grand Theater in London in 1951, and heard later on CBC Wednesday Night.
One of the things he likes about radio and TV (and he says he’s never been happier in his life than during the last few years of concentrated effort in those fields) is that “no two jobs are alike.” And a glance at his recent record of recent activity serves to explain this. He is Mayor McTaggart in Jake and The Kid, Stanford Van Crump in Public Eye series of take-offs on the Dragnet-type program; gets frequent “straight” Canadian roles on Stage 54, Ford Theater, CBC Wednesday Night and Cross Section; and he appeared with his singing sister (Libby Morris) in the light comedy series Libby with Paul. On TV, he was Josh Smith, the Mariposa hotel proprietor in the Sunshine Sketches, and amateur geologist Gideon Spillet in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. One of his forthcoming radio appearances will be in Esse Ljunghs production of George Orwells 1984 for CBC Wednesday Night on November 18.
Off the set and away from the studio, Kligman gardens with relish and works at his collection of Jewish folk lore of all kinds. A hobby he hopes eventually to have more time for is the making of copper pictures. But nearly all his time is devoted to his acting work. “There’s no room for fooling around in this business,” he says. It has to be worked at, talked about all the time—just like any other profession.”
Having by this time acquired considerable experience in TV as well as radio, he is in a position to compare the two media from the play’s point of view. Work in TV has had the effect of “completely relaxing me in radio.” After the tremendous concentration of effort the player must put into a single TV performance, radio looks easy he says, and there is a great danger of the quality of a player’s radio work suffering if he does not deliberately “pull up his socks,” and remind himself that although he can read his lines from a script (instead of having to memorize them) there is still the other side of the coin—the fact that he must project his voice and role entirely with his voice and that he is deprived utterly of visual contact with the audience.
After noting Kligman’s flair for dialects and character roles, and his excellent sense of timing which fits him so well for comedy parts, it may come as a surprise that one of his strongest points is what producers call a fine natural voice with a distinctive intonation—the sort of voice that will fit happily and modestly into a documentary rather than a dramatic setting, and stand in clear contrast to other voices. Strangely enough, this quality is none too easy to find—so Kligman scores again, this time with what would appear to be the commonest of commodities—an ordinary Canadian voice.

The story is incorrect about Kligman’s birth. He was born in Romania and came to Canada with his parents in 1923 when he was nine months old. When he was about eight, his father opened a grocery store across from Winnipeg’s Leland Theatre. Perhaps that piqued his interest in acting. Kligman later wrote a fictional account of his dad in the book It All Ends Up In a Shopping Bag.

The story shows Kligman had an early connection with Wayne and Shuster. He was part of their stock company (along with announcer Bernard Cowan, the long-time voice of “Front Page Challenge”) on numerous specials on Canadian TV into the 1970s.

Kligman died in Toronto on August 25, 1985. Like many voice actors, his work lives on. And so long as there are TV Christmas specials, you’ll be able to hear Kligman every December.