Commercial Voices

There’s still one area where people who are heard on television don’t get credit on the air—commercials.

I’ve watched an awful lot of spots over the years where I recognise an announcer’s voice (I guess they’re called voice-over artists now) but can’t name them.

Others are easier to identify. They may have appeared in cartoons (eg. June Foray) or elsewhere (egs. Art Gilmore, Joe Sirola) where their names have been mentioned. Or they are celebrities like Bob and Ray for Piel’s (I don’t know who plays the Piel’s announcer to the right).

Steven Scheuer of King Features’ “TV Key” service wrote a couple of stories in the late ‘50s about commercial voice-over people. The first one got screen credit in a Walter Lantz cartoon and later on Chuck Jones’ 1961 Warner Bros. short Nelly’s Folly (There’s an irony that the narrator, radio actor Ed Prentiss, gets no credit).

This piece appeared in papers around Sept. 5, 1958.

GLORIA CAN IMITATE ANYTHING
By STEVEN SCHEUER
The name Gloria Wood doesn't mean anything to you. If you heard her voice, that wouldn't register, either, but the chances are you’ve heard it more often than, say, Steve Allen’s.
When you hear "Duz, Duz, Duz!" that's Gloria. Minnie Mouse is Gloria’s voice and so is Tinker Bell fluttering around that jar of peanut butter. She's the Indian boy who says, "Santa Fe, All the Way,” and the female voice on every beer commercial you can name.
Besides plugging all makes of beer, Gloria is a big cigarette jingle girl. That penguin saying, “Smoke Kools, Smoke Kools,” is little five foot tall Gloria.
Gloria is in a good racket. She gets residuals (that means more money) after her commercials arc repeated a certain number of times. She does an average of one commercial a day and claims to have recorded 1,600 commercials on radio and TV over the past three years. The repetition of the jingles gives her the dubious distinction of possessing the most heard voice in the world—in addition to perpetual income.
“I blame it all on my four octave voice range,'' said Gloria in Hollywood, now the center of the jingle business. "When the ad agencies discovered I could imitate practically anything, the jobs started pouring in. Thank goodness.”
Gloria said that up until 1951, the jingle business wasn’t very big and she came in at the right time. A Medford, Mass., girl, Gloria sang with her sister Donna Wood and her Don Juans in Horace Heidi's band. Then she moved along with bands of Clyde Lucas, Hal McIntyre and Kay Kyser, where she was the voice of "Woody Woodpecker." That record, according to Gloria, sold 4,000,000.
Gloria moved over to Bing Crosby’s radio show to be the voice of "Rudolph, the Rod Nosed Reindeer.'' Her next big thrill was cutting a record called, “Hey, Bellboy,” and all she uttered were those two words. As Gloria says, "I usually don't sing words."
She's itching to do ballads with lyrics, like other singers. One of her boosters has been Frankie Laine, who keeps encouraging Gloria, saying “someday!” Frankie talked to his head man, Mitch Miller, the A & R man for Columbia records, and Mitch now has Gloria in an album. There may even be a medley of some of her hit commercials on record soon.
About her four octave voice. After "Hey, Bellboy!” Gloria was tabbed as the "American Yma Sumac.” Gloria can go to E flat above high C in a clear voice. "You have to have a clear voice to do commercials," said Gloria seriously. "Elvis couldn't make the grade. His voice isn’t clear enough.”

Gloria’s publicist was pretty busy around this time. Around the same time as this story, Erskine Johnson of the Newspaper Enterprise Association gave her a couple of paragraphs in his column, including the fact she sang for Marilyn Monroe; Vernon Scott of the United Press mentioned her latest album for Columbia, “Wood for the Fire,” a torchy blues collection; while James Bacon of the Associated Press pointed out she was making $250,000 a year. Wood, according to her Los Angeles Times obituary, made 7,000 commercials before her death on March 4, 1995.

About a year later, Scheuer spoke with another person who made the rounds of commercial studios. You won’t recognise his name from Warner Bros. or Walter Lantz or Walt Disney. A Variety story from April 1, 1959 mentioned he had recorded an English language soundtrack to an Russian animated version of Snow White. I can’t help but wonder if the trade paper meant The Snow Queen, where you can hear Paul Frees, Dick Beals and one June Foray. He also provided a voice in this animated PSA starring Bob and Ray. And he was a carrot. I presume it was a commercial voice-over.

Announcing Boon For Boone
By STEVEN SCHEUER
Announcer Mike Baker, regular announcer on the Pat Boone show, isn't sure of exactly how many different commercials he did last year. One thing he is sure of, he worked for a lot of organizations. He had 44 W-2 forms to include on his income tax return.
Though he'd been an announcer on radio and TV for a long time, Mike didn't come into prominence in the field until a couple of years ago when he impersonated Edward R. Murrow's voice on a radio soft-drink commercial. It was a thoroughly successful impersonation—CBS lodged a complaint. A lot of national publicity followed and Mike was on his way.
There was only one drawback," Mike told me. "I was embarked on a career as an announcer, but after the Murrow impersonation, most of the calls I got were requests to imitate other people's voices. I'm still getting calls and I'm trying desperately to make people forget that part of my talent. I'm not interested in trading on another person's voice. If the sponsor thinks so much of the person he's trying to hire me to imitate, why doesn't he hire the original? I don't mind doing character voices, but I’m through with impersonations.
Mike's been busy doing character voices—he supplied voices for some 25 cartoons during the past year—and is quite proud of the fact that among his creations is the voice of a carrot. "It's crisp," he explained.
Mike bemoans the fact that both radio and television have fallen into a pattern of conformity. "When radio stopped diversifying," he commented, "it became an immense bore. Every station gives you the same top forty records around the clock and you hear the same sketchy news bulletins a dozen times a day. There's no individuality and sooner or later it has to bore the public. The funny thing is that the one place where you do find individuality is in commercials. A lot more time, effort and even money is put into commercials than into many shows. And in some cases the commercials are more entertaining than the shows.”
In regard to his own contributions to a commercial, Mike is confident of his versatility.
“I do hard sell, medium sell and soft sell,” he said "Different products require different techniques.
The best automobile commercials are medium to soft sell, but other products require a hard sell. A good rule of thumb is: ‘The faster you want to move a product, the harder the sell.’”

There’s an old saying about the certainty of two things in the world—death and taxes. So long as broadcasters need to make a profit, you can add commercials to the list. And until A-I fully takes over, there will need to be people to voice them.

It's Greek, All Right

The term “It’s Greek to me,” I gather, means “I can’t understand it.”

How appropriate it was that one of Gene Deitch’s Tom and Jerry cartoons was It’s Greek to Me-Ow. Does anyone understand what is going on in these Deitch cartoons?

In one scene, I was hoping for perspective animation like in the 1930s when a character goes running or flying “past the camera.” It starts out that way, but then Deitch cuts to a medium shot. And one that doesn’t even try to match the previous frame.



He just loves those jagged impact drawings (even the Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerrys had them). They’re all over the place in this short.



Deitch also like doing what James-Call-Me-Shamus Culhane did better 15-plus years earlier for Walter Lantz. He has impact footage where there are camera shakes, and goes back and forth from frame-to-frame between extreme close-ups and a medium shot. Culhane’s versions seem funnier to me; I don’t know why; the timing's pretty much the same.



Fans of Tod Dockstader’s “boing” sound effect (which I first heard in the Deitch Popeyes as a kid) will enjoy this cartoon. I don’t know anyone else who would. Deitch had a good perspective on humour but I can’t picture him laughing at this. If you want to keep yourself amused with this cartoon, consider the words “It’s Greek to Me-Ow” fit the opening bars of Scott Bradley’s Tom and Jerry theme. Think up your own funny lyrics for the rest of it, instead of watching this cartoon.

Something I find amusing may have been unintentional, but I’d like to think it was deliberate. A theatre manager in San Francisco booked it with a Melina Mercouri movie. “Hey, we got this Greek chick in this movie about Greece. Let’s have a Greek cartoon, too.”

We Was Framed

Tex Avery’s characters knew they were in a cartoon. A great example is the “Technicolor Ends Here” gag in Lucky Ducky (MGM, 1948)

Here’s another example from his days with Leon Schlesinger. In Picador Porky, our hero is chased by an angry bull—around the frame of the cartoon.



Avery pulls out a few other favourite routines, starting with the opening title card bespeaking of a peaceful village. You know in the next shot, all hell will break loose. And it does.

The cartoon was released in February 1937.

The Porky 101 DVD version has a soundtrack that doesn’t fit the end-title animation.

Don't Touch Her Silverware

Judy Carne had been on Love On a Rooftop. Larry Hovis was on Hogan’s Heroes. Ruth Buzzi had shown up on That Girl. But there were other people who appeared every week on Laugh-In that came from who-knows-where.

Take Lily Tomlin as an example. I didn’t know she had come from a restaurant. Well, actually, that’s not the whole story. She did that to make pay bills as she worked on her act and her career before George Schlatter hired her as a replacement for the third season.

One of her pre-Laugh In champions in the press was columnist Earl Wilson. Yeah, when you hear his name, you think of vaudeville and Broadway, of Jack Benny and Georgie Jessel. But he watched the new talent coming up, too. He wrote about Tomlin twice in 1968 (likely saving some comments for a second column), the year before she joined Rowan and Martin.

This story is from April 30, 1968.

NEW YORK — Lily Tomlin, the tall attractive daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Guy Tomlin, 215 N. Sunnyside, South Bend, has a marvelous sense of humor. She’s one of the stars in a satiric revue, “Photo Finish,” at the Upstairs at the Downstairs, where she wrote two of the funniest sketches in the show.
Lily started out two years ago as a comedienne at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village. She loves the Village and lives nearby, in the Lower East Side, also known as the East Village.
“I had two fish which died because it gets cold at night,” she said. “The landlord shuts the heat off after 11 p.m. But it’s a beautiful apartment. It’s a fourth floor walkup, has five rooms, and even has a window."
STAR DASH
SHE WAS born and raised in Detroit before her parents moved to South Bend and she to New York.
“Dad used to take me and my brother Richard to the race track all the time,” she recalled.
“He’d send Richard and me to place the bets. We’d go to the window and just stand there with the money in our hands. The horse would never come in, so Dad never missed the money, which we just kept.”
It was a sense of humor only they, as children, appreciated. . .for they were afraid of telling their father about it. Today Lily's making that humor work for her. She was recently interviewed by Johnny Carson’s staff and may soon appear on his show as a refreshingly new talent.
In one of her sketches at the night club, she sits on a high stool, dressed in a shawl and granny glasses. As she flicks the ashes of her cigar into the plastic rose on the lapel of her fur mini-coat, she sighs the end of a song she wrote about computer dates:
And we’ll both have found something
We’ve waited an awfully long time for—
A relationship
That’s tender, loving and very gentle . . .
And then I’ll hurt him.

A cigar appears in another anecdote in Wilson’s column around October 1st.

NEW YORK — Not many waitresses get interviewed, but then Lily Tomlin was not just a waitress—she was "waitress of the month” at Howard Johnson’s at Broadway and 49th.
“There was really only one other waitress there but she worked another shift,” Lily Tomlin said. "I would get at the mike and say, ‘Attention diners! Your waitress of the week, Lily Tomlin, is about to make an appearance on the floor. Let’s give her a hand!’ Then I’d walk out and nod and take a lot of bows.
"IT WAS FUN BUT THEN one day something snapped.
"I would get my silver all cleaned and put aside for the lunch rush. I was very jealous of all my cleaned silver. One day the cook was very busy and wasn't buttering and I had to butter. People were snapping their fingers for service. The waiters started raiding my silver. I ran out of silver! You run out of silver in a lunch rush! I went berserk, I flipped.
"I rapped on the counter and I shouted, 'All right this is the last time anybody takes my silver! I’m not serving another thing!’
“And the waitress of the week quit right there in the middle of the lunch rush! I’ve heard that more mental breakdowns occur in the restaurant business than anywhere else, and I believe it.”
LILY, WHO’S IN HER mid-twenties and comes from Detroit where she went to Wayne University, uses some of these experiences as a basis for her comedy act at the Playboy Club.
One character she portrays is a girl whose boy friend took her to dinner at the Automat. “When I got back with my mince pie, my date was gone and the table had been moved. I said to myself ‘That just goes to show that something was wrong somewhere’ but I didn’t let it bother me; I just went right on smoking my cigar.”

In between the two columns, a feature story about her and her show appeared in Robert Wahls’ column in the Daily News of June 16th:

ONE OF THE brightest new faces of 1968 apparently eluded the tireless Leonard Sillman— that of an associate comedienne in "Photo Finish," the revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs. This is a pre-Hair satire in which the comic, Lily Tomlin, satirizes not the right people but the up-tight people. That is, the non-flower folks.
Between professional engagements, Miss Tomlin, a rangy brunette, was twice annointed Miss Waitress of the Week while serving at Howard Johnson's at 49th St. and Broadway. The lunch crowd was grist for her up-tight observations. Today her star up-tight is Laverne, who carries the power of positive thinking to a paranoid state.
"Laverne is like this: the whole world is wrong, and she is right. And she's convinced, because, after all, hasn't she this bright blue light flaming in her eyes?" Miss Tomlin explained. "She has, and let the buyer beware."
Confined Stork
In repose at the Grenadier the other night, Lily sat like a confined stork over whom someone has draped a hobin's-egg [sic] blue mini dress with a square neck. Her hair could be a wavy stretch wig of black. It isn't. It is her own.
Repose is probably the wrong word, for Lily, compulsively so, is always on. When she tells you she was born in Detroit after her momma and poppa drove north from western Kentucky to pick up a new Dodge, you wait for the punch line.
"Poppa's family was a tenant farmer family on the Ford place. Momma was Lillie Mae Ford. She spells it with an 'ie' and not a 'y' like me."
Miss Tomlin waited for me to write that down.
"They went to Detroit also because there was too much kin in Kentucky and all the way into Tennessee."
All her kin folk and the Southern heritage probably help Lily when she satirizes Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson in conversation with George Hamilton's mother. Describing the Great Society, Lily says: "It's just me an' Lyndon an' 5,000 head of nasty cattle. George didn't understand Lynda Bird.
"I know I get some of my characters from the kinfolks. There's Lud and Pad and Odie Mae and Ermadee. They seem to fit into my characters. You know, I write most of my own material. I suppose it's all based on what I heard about us, the first families of western Kentucky.
"You see, I didn't see much of the southern family, except when they were passing through or we were visiting. We lived in Detroit in the old neighborhood, 12th St. and Claremont. . .near Buddy's Barbecue, and I was daddy's girl and sang "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me,’ That's when I was taking ballet and tap."
Miss Tomlin came to Manhattan just over two years ago to study mime and pantomime in order to refine her natural gesticulations. She spent a week at the Cafe Au Go Go synchronizing her movements and her monologue.
"I got an agent out of the exposure. But after he signed me, he turned into a travel agent, cruising the Caribbean. Then I wrote some more skits and tried them at the Improvisation. I got another agent, Ashley-Famous, which sounds real good.
Carol Her Carol
"With them I've turned down a 20th Century contract, then I signed for a new Gary Moore variety, which died. I wasn't sorry. They kept forgetting and calling me Carol for their ex, Carol Burnett. Then William Dozier put me under contract to follow Batman with Wonderwoman. The fad passed. I never did Wonderwoman, and I'd have been so good."
Lily has a flat in the East Village, which she refers to broadly as the Lower East Side. Miss Tomlin shares her floor with her brother, Richard, who has attached a tricycle to the kitchen ceiling as a pop art decoration. This sends them both.
"And I have a tremendous collection of old gowns, antiques really, which I bought for from 85 cents to $3 around St. Mark's Place and on Third Ave. Some I even picked up in Los Angeles when I was waiting to play Wonderwoman."
As her experience broadened, Lily found that she could do 50 minutes as a stand-up comedienne. While standing up, she does a barefoot tap dance. But she positively does not ride the tricyle on the kitchen ceiling in the East Village.
"That's one trip I've never been on," Lily explained. "When I travel, I always stop at Howard Johnson's."

Laugh-In was satiric enough for some of Tomlin’s characters to fit in for a few years until she went on to, perhaps, bigger things. I suspect, for many years, she’s been able to afford her own silverware.

Grade A, Too

A cow gets smacked by the Betty Boop Limited in the 1932 cartoon of the same name.

It happened twice. We went through the first time in this post. It happens to close the cartoon (in reused drawings).



The cow flips over. The cow doesn’t come down in pieces like in a butcher shop (with an accompanying “Kosher For Passover” sign. But we get the same type of gag as the cow flips over.

>

I like the incongruity of the cow wearing rubber work boots.

Willard Bowsky and Tom Bonfiglio are the credited animators.

The soundtrack includes the Fleischers’ favourite train song, Beyond the Blue Horizon. Here’s a version for you fans of Hammond organs.

Foxy Adolf

Bob Clampett’s Looney Tunes short Eatin’ on the Cuff isn’t just about a moth, a bee, a black widow spider and a pianist sing-speaking their story in rhyme. The year is 1942, and there’s a war on. You know what that means.

Clampett and writer Warren Foster toss in only one reference to the war, and it’s not the usual heavy-handed kind you’ll find in other Warners cartoons in the era with plugs to buy bonds or “V for Victory.”

The moth devours a suit, a dress and then chows down on a fox wrap. But it turns out the fox fur is hiding the head of the head Nazi.



And, for extra humiliation, the moth buzzes off Adolf's moustache. Ja, sehr gut!



Virgil Ross received the rotating animation credit on this cartoon, the last time his name appeared in connection with the Clampett unit.

Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: How About Me?

When Bill Frawley wasn’t drinking, going to the fights or ball game, or grousing on the set of I Love Lucy, he was adding to his income starring in industrial films.

We talked about one for Jam Handy in this post and another in this post. But reader Jason Merrick has discovered another Frawley short which, of course, we have to pass along to you.

How About Me? was made by the Calvin Company out of Kansas City. Some of its films leaned toward satire. This one is a little more straight-forward, with a one-gag comic opening/closing, and a good portion of the rest of it showing Mr. Smith (Frawley) at a desk either in close or medium shot.

The plot’s straight-forward, too. Mr. Smith manages a complaint department. During a lunch break, he complains to a service station operator (ie., the camera) about ways they should be doing business that would add to their profits.

Business Screen Magazine existed to review films like this, but How About Me? slipped past them. It is mentioned in a list of “recent films” by Calvin in its February 1957 issue. “Recent” goes back into 1956 so this short was made in either of those two years. The only credit (other than to Calvin) says “Presented through the courtesy of Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation Automotive Products Div.” Frawley receives no screen credit, nor do the other actors.

The background music at the start is furnished from the Capitol Hi-Q Library. The opening theme is L-1147 Animation Movement. At 3:30 is L-1158 Animation Comedy, both by Spencer Moore. At 3:48, you fans of Yogi Bear will surely recognise C-3 Domestic Children by Bill Loose and John Seely. The later cues sound as if they’re from an earlier, English library.

Spot the ’54 Ford at 4:01 near the pumps that sell (chuckle) $2 worth of gas.

Weighing Every Gesture For Charity

One of the many jokes on the Jack Benny show involved his mediocre violin playing. But like almost everything about his radio and TV character, it was a canard.

In interviews in later years, he was alternately proud of his playing and regretful that he gave it up for comedy. Regardless, he used the violin, along with his huge popularity, for concerts to raise money for symphony orchestras, musicians’ pension funds and venues falling into expensive disrepair.

But how well did he play?

The concertmaster of one California symphony weighed in. This story was published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel of August 29, 1971.

Jack’s wife generally didn’t travel with him to benefits (shopping in London and Paris was a different thing). You can get the idea from this story why she didn’t.

Maestro George Barati Talks About His Friend Jack Benny
"Anyone who has worked with Jack Benny as I have, learns how much serious effort goes into being funny." George Barti, new music director of the Santa Cruz County Symphony, was reminiscing about his long friendship with the famous comedian.
The two got together recently at San Francisco Airport where Benny, en route from Las Vegas to a command performance in Sacramento, joined his friend for publicity photos for their joint appearance with the Santa Cruz orchestra September 18 a[t] De Anza College, Cupertino.
Quipps Barti, "Jack stepped off the plane in the early morning looking, if not 39, fresh and not a day over 50 instead of his calendar age of 77."
Their friendship began over 11 years ago when they first performed together in Honolulu and has been active ever since.
"People always ask me, ‘How well does Jack Benny really play the violin?’” says Barti. "I always answer that playing violin may well be one of the most meaningful things in Mr. Benny's life. He was, after all, a violinist to begin with. I'm convinced he could have made a go of it. It is almost unbelievable that a man in his 60s could take up a stringed instrument again. But with his typical determination and will power, he now practices every day. As a result he now has a good tone, fair technique, and excellent bow arm, and, possibly most important, he phrases well. He takes it completely seriously—and therein lies the basis of his being so funny: he tries but does not QUITE succeed. It's true that he couldn't play so badly if he didn't play so well."

The comedian's renown as one of the greatest of our time is no accident, according to Barti. "He is a meticulous artist who prepares, plans, weighs every work, every gesture."
Having performed with him and watched many of his performances over the years, Barti says that is is [sic] when Benny appears most relaxed and spontaneous that he is in reality most studied.
"That inimitable perfect 'timing' of Benny's which is his hallmark is, like inspiration, 10 percent instinct and 90 per cent practice and perfectionism. At the same time he can improvise like an angel. Of course he has script writers and in Hollywood where relationships wither fast, Jack's have lasted throughout his career, testimony to the respect and affection accorded the man. But he has natural wit as well. We were with him one evening when he was spotted in the audience by a colleague on stage. Completely out of the blue he was pulled on the stage where the stream of wry, in-context spontaneous [sic] remarks had us all aching with laughter."
Barati says he had an experience with Benny's ad lib ability himself. They had rehearsed down to the last lift of the eyebrow two, three, and four times. And then again. "First the two of us, then with key orchestra members since we are all part of the hilariously funny act he does in these famous 'serious' concerts. Patiently he re-explained to them what he'd already told me. Over and over, until by concert time everything was down pat.
"Came the concert, Benny walked on stage, as planned with the elegant dignity of a true virtuoso. But then unplanned he walked past his spot as soloist straight up to me, looking into my eyes with that famous haughty blue-eyed stare . . . and I almost broke up the show with uncontrollable laughter."
Barati says that Benny cherishes his outrageously funny act with symphony orchestras and the life among concert musicians that goes with it. With infinite relish he mentions as friends Heifitz, Stern, Piatigorsky and the many symphony conductors for whose orchestras he has raised over five million dollars. Benny speaks with true awe of what he considers his most precious experience—playing with Casals.
Benny is not, when off stage, a funny man, notes Barati. "He is too busy observing everything as possible material. It is the unerring eye for the human situation, mainly in which he mocks himself, that has made him timeless. There is no generation gap because he identifies, not with persons of one age or another, but with human beings."
He also is the first to appreciate humor in others, says the maestro of the Santa Cruz County Symphony. "When he and Isaac Stern and other artists organized a huge performance to save Carnegie Hall (and save it they did) I sent Jack a long telegram at that performance. It was a mock critique somewhat as follows: ‘Jack, I'm glad that after years of assaulting the stage with your out-of-tune fiddling, you're now trying to SAVE one with it. However, I'm afraid YOUR fiddling might bring Carnegie down instead. Please TRY and play in tune.’
"Benny, who loves a joke on himself, read the telegram from the Carnegie Hall stage that night. The next day every gossip columnist in the country carried the text verbatim."
Mary Livingstone, Jack's famous partner and wife, goes along with his concert career with less enthusiasm than he. At "21" following the Carnegie Hall concert she looked around at the famous concert performers seated at her table and said wistfully, "Sometimes I long for the old days when we went out with Jackie Gleason!"
Barati says of Benny, "You not only learn a great deal when you work with a genius like Jack but also much is revealed in his friendships. Socially Jack is humble, unassuming and still retains a remarkably childlike appreciation of life. Our girls adore him because he is affectionate and interested. Everything he does reflects the generosity which is symbolized by the donation of his time and talent to projects such as ours the concert on September 18 to benefit Montalvo Center for the Arts and the Santa Cruz County Symphony."

1,800 packed the Flint Center at De Anza College on September 18, 1971. “Delights audiences as usual,” read the headline in the Sentinel the following Monday. The paper didn’t reveal how much the concert took in, but some people paid $500 for a show and dinner with Jack. As he put it to reporters the night before the concert, “I like good music and I like symphony orchestras and I hate to see ‘em go to pieces...Rich people get sick of being asked for $100 for so many causes so I believe in asking them for $500 to break the monotony.”

By that point, his various shows had raised $5,000,000. And he was still performing just months before his death.

Boop, Bluebell and Barbra

It sounds like something in a late-‘50s Paramount cartoon—Olive Oyl as the entertainment director of a seaside resort in New Jersey. The cartoon almost writes itself, right down the last “doouuung!” of Popeye swallowing spinach as a Win Sharples cue is dragged out for the umpteenth time.

But the scenario is true. In a manner of speaking.

In between voicing cartoons and making the rounds of radio and TV shows in New York, the voice of Olive found work at a resort.

The year was 1952 and Mae Questel had been around show biz for two decades. And, as we learn from the Asbury Park Press of July 13, 1952, she seemed busier than ever. Unfortunately for her, not only was radio dying, a lot of television production would migrate from New York to the West Coast with the long-waited installation of the coaxial cable. Questel had inherited radio roles along the way. Betty Garde was the original Hortense on the Morgan show (opposite Arnold Stang) and Shirley Booth was the first of more than a half-dozen Miss Duffys. But both roles were done now, so an entertainment side gig came in handy.

She’s Heard But Not Seen on TV Screen
The Original Betty Boop Is Girl of Many Voices In Films, TV
By Jean Smits
Do you listen to the radio? watch television? go to the movies? Then the chances are you've heard the voice of Mae Questel, director of activities at the Hollywood Hotel, Long Branch. But you've probably never seen her. "I'm heard but never seen," says Miss Questel—just the reverse of the old adage. Miss Questel is the "voice" of Paramount Studio cartoon characters: Little Lulu, Oliveoil [sic], Little Audrey, Casper and the Friendly Ghost [sic], and Betty Boop. She also does TV commercials for Duz, Fab, Ivory Snow (she's the voice of the snow man[)], Colgate's Dental Cream, Clark's candy bar, Scotch tape. "Whenever they want something odd, unusual, or weird, they call on me."
Radio listeners have [heard] Miss Questel as Miss Duffy on "Duffy's Tavern" and "Hortense" of Hortense and Gerard on the Henry Morgan Show. She's also played on the "True Story," "Mr. and Mrs. North," "Perry Mason," and "The Goldbergs" shows.
There's one exception to the heard-but-never-seen rule. Miss Questel recently made a series of television movies with Melvyn Douglas. These are currently on view as the "Hollywood Off-Beat" mystery program every Thursday at 8 P.M. on Channel 7.
Making a movie cartoon is "a piecemeal job," Miss Questel confesses. All the work is done in the Paramount studios in New York City. "In fact," laughs Miss Questel, "the only time I've ever been to Hollywood is this summer"—referring to her job at the West End resort hotel. A cartoon gets under way when a rough draft of a script has been prepared. Miss Questel's job is tops on the agenda, for the pictures aren't drawn until the voices have been recorded. Last of all come sound effects and music. Paramount employs 250 cartoonists, Miss Questel affirms. Yet the output is only about three cartoon shorts a month. That is because each of the thousands of shots in a cartoon must be drawn as a separate picture. Complicated as this business is, it used to be even tougher, Miss Questel will tell you. When the animated cartoon business began, it was customary to draw the picture first, dub the voices in after wards. This meant the actors had to keep an eagle eye on a "beater" to synchronize their words with the movements of the cartoon characters’ lips.
Miss Questel likes her behind-the-scenes acting a lot better than what is called "legitimate dramatic work. She confesses that she was in a Broadway play once. It was called "Doctor Social" and lasted exactly one week at the Booth theater.
She likes to tell about the movies she made with crooner Rudy Vallee. That was before "Betty Boop's" time. Miss Questel played a character called "Betty Coed."
Miss Questel herself was the model for Betty Boop, she reports. The cartoon character mimics her own gestures; "Betty's" fare is a caricature of Miss Questel's.
After the summer season at the Hollywood—where she serves as entertainer, mistress of ceremonies in the Hollywood Shell Room, and manager of guest relations—she will head back to New York City and Paramount studios.
She is also planning an “Appearance”—purely vocal, as usual—on a new television show in the fall. It's called "Baby Talk." Miss Questel and Madelyn Pierce have already made television movies for the new show, Miss Questel reports.
TV movies are the coming thing, she feels. It's easier, more convenient for the actors. "Fluffs"— missed cues, or forgotten lines—can be done over again, so that the program the viewer finally sees is a smoother, more finished job.

Jump ahead 25 years and Questel had been cast as a character in the lucrative world of TV commercials for Scott Towels. She found film work, too (later with Woody Allen), though theatrical cartoons were a thing of the past (she was hired to reprise Betty Boop in Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988).

Here’s a syndicated feature story from August 25, 1978. The animation research in this story, for 1978, is very good.

In her stage show, and in one cartoon, Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame (1934), Questel's Betty impersonated Paramount star Maurice Chevalier. Was Chevalier really a womaniser? Questel can tell you about that.

Still a Bopper
The Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl Continues
By PATRICIA SIMMONS
Washington Star
WASHINGTON — Betty Boop, the mini-skirted cartoon cutie of the ‘30s, that unforgettable girl with the garter, is alive and well.
Her real name is Mae Questel and there’s still a Betty Boop sparkle in the voice. That she’s amply curved and slightly graying these days doesn’t appear to bother Questel a boop-a-doop spitcurl’s worth.
As Aunt Bluebell, the television commercial lady who hawks paper towels, Questel gets a kick out of being recognized by her paper towel fans. "They wave at me. Even in the middle of traffic they want to know ‘Is it really heavier?’”
Questel hands it right back, with a wave and a smile. “Weigh it for yourself, honey!” calls movie and stage comedienne Questel, who even in her vaudeville days never needed a microphone to bounce her voice around New York’s Palace theater.
The many lives of Mae—besides animated queen La Boop and saucy Aunt Bluebell--include a decade of ad-libbing for Popeye’s waterspout-skinny girlfriend Olive Oyl.
"Olive Oyl reminded me of actress Zasu Pitts, so I gave her the same whining, high pitched tones,” recalls Questel. She slows down the interview to throw in a few nostalgically familiar Olive-Oyl sighs.
Her’s was also the overvoice for Max Fleischer’s Sweet Pea., the baby in “Popeye,” and Betty Boop’s cuddly dog Pudgie. It was the Boop-boop-a-doop era of the ‘30s and for most of the world it was depression time. But Questel admits that for her everything was raining dollars.
On the original RCA Victor Betty Boop label Questel was pouting to the music of “Don’t Take My Boop-a-Doop Away.” Mountains of Betty Boop fan mail poured into Paramount and Boopmania moved into the marketplace. There were Betty Boop bathing suits, cigarette cases, Betty Boop pajamas, which retailed at $1 a pair, Betty Boop pocketbooks, nail polish and jewelry. Even a five-cent Betty Boop candy bar.
Artist Grim Natwick had no idea what he was starting when he drew the first Betty Boop cartoon, taking the spit curls from popular singer Helen Kane, who was then working for Paramount. At first Natwick came up with a pair of shapely human legs for his bouncy little dog. It was only later when the dog’s long ears evolved into a pair of fetching earrings that little girl Boop was born.
The year 1932 marked one of her first big hits, "Minnie the Moocher,” in which La Boop cavorted as a princess. Several women had a go at the over-voice in the beginning, but brunette, five-foot-two Questel—“I never walked, I bounced,”— was quickly chosen by Max Fleischer as the permanent ‘Boop Queen.’ She stayed with it until the series ended in 1939.
Come 1934 and Betty Boop was hauled into court as newspaper reporters and the nation awaited the verdict. A suit brought by singer Helen Kane asked $250,000 from Max Fleischer, the Fleischer Studios and Paramount Pictures and charged that the Boop had claimed to marquee fame by stealing Kane’s vocal style.
Fleischer trotted Questel and the four girls, who first did the Boop cartoons, into court. Newspapers ate up the testimony that “boop, boop, a-doop” actually began as "ba-da in-de-do,” then slipped into “do-do-de-o-do” before finally blossoming into “boop, boop, a-doop.” Fleischer and Betty Boop won the case.
When Hayes office censors in the ‘30s decided that Betty Boop’s single black garter was suggesting more than it should, Paramount removed it, only to be deluged with fan mail reading “Put back Betty’s garter!” The Hayes office knuckled under to public pressure. Meanwhile Decca sold two million records featuring Questel’s Betty Boop voice doing Shirley Temple’s hit, “On the Good Ship Lolly Pop” and on the back a recitation called “I’ve Got A Pain in My Sawdust.” Questel also knocked out 70 records for Decca plus "a bunch of ‘Olive Oyl’ ones” for Columbia. And in 1934 a syndicated Betty Boop comic strip bowed.
Questel soon found her personality splitting in every direction. Little Audrey . . . the Wicked Witch in the Land of Oz . . . ‘No. 7’ orphan boy in radio’s “Green Hornet” . . . even the Dragon Lady on “Terry and the Pirates.” “I also did all the voices on CBS’s Saturday morning show, “’Winky Dink,’ like Dusty Dan and Mike McBean,” she adds. But none ever kicked up quite the same stir as La Boop.
Questel remembers that in 1933 “Popeye” made his first guest appearance in a Betty Boop cartoon entitled “Popeye the Sailor” and captured the imagination of the entire country by squeezing a ship’s mast into clothespins.
It wasn’t long before the combined popularity of Olive Oyl and Betty Boop was adding up to $500 a week for Questel. “That was a lot of money in the ‘30s,” she recalls, “and I didn’t have taxes to pay.” She signed a yearly contract with Fleischer “so it didn’t matter” how many, or how few, cartoons she turned out.
Questel pocketed a lump sum of $75,000 for “the later Popeye ones, those that are now being shown on television." There were “big dfferences” in making the early Boops and Popeyes, she explains.
“When we first started there was a bouncing ball right there on the side of the cartoon and we’d follow the ball with our words or lyrics. It took a week to make one cartoon and we had to rehearse for three days.”
By the time the final ones were turned out, she says the voice-over was done first and “animation was added to fit.” That way she could do as many as 10 cartoons in one day. She also turned out a full-length feature film with Nancy Carol and Richard Arlen plus a handful of one-reelers with Rudy Valley—Remember ‘Betty Coed Goes to College?’” she laughs.
Among Questel’s collection of Betty Boop memories there’s one she will never forget—the day Maurice Chevalier visited Paramount. He wanted to meet her and see a Boop cartoon. She and the famed Frenchman, plus a handful of Paramount brass, were ushered into the screening room and she was given the place of honor next to Chevalier. “Sitting in the dark I suddenly felt his arm around my neck. I was 20 years old at the time and I was too frozen to say a word."
When the lights went on Chevalier said: “That was delightful. I would like to take you out to dinner.”He was appearing in a show at the time and wanted her to see it.
“I told him I would be delighted to go to dinner,” Questel says, but added “he didn’t need to pick me up because my husband would do that.” Questel and her husband enjoyed Chevalier’s show. The dinner never came off.
A few years ago Questel appeared on Johnny Carson’s show to plug the movie “Funny Girl,”—in which she played Mrs. Strakosh—and brought down the house when Carson, who was intrigued that she did animals in early cartoons, asked her, “OK—how would you do a rhinoceros?” “Male or female?” Questel smiled sweetly.
Probably the only compliment that ever came close to going to Questel’s head was from Director William Wyler on the “Funny Girl” set. However, the very next day, she recalls, “he had me do a scene over 18 times. Finally, I went to him and said ‘Mr. Wyler, what am I doing that’s wrong?’ He looked at me and said ‘nothing. When I get exactly what I want, then I will print it.’ I watched Barbara Streisand do a take 33 times for Wyler without a murmur,” she says.
The only thing that bothers Questel about commercials are the mothers who ask her how to get their babies into it. You don’t do things like that, she says. "A baby should not have to work under those lights. I always tell them not to do it.”
Cartoons, movies, commercials and all vaudeville—“they’re all easy compared with doing soaps,” says Questel who played the lady who lived in the big house in NBC’s “Somerset” starring Molly Picon. “There’s nothing harder than doing a soap . . . there's no ad-libbing on a soap opera. And you tackle many more pages of script a day than in a movie."
Who else but ‘Betty Boop’ would get excited about discovering a brand new kind of show business at age 60 or more? At a recent Nostalgia Convention in Tucson, Ariz., she shared star billing with former “Tarzans”—Johnny Weismueller and Buster Crabbe—and met an old rival for the first time. "I couldn’t believe it—there he was, the man who did the voice for Donald Duck! After all those years, we finally met. And I just loved him."

Questel managed to ring in the new year in 1998. And that was about it. She died four days later at age 89.

Bagpipe Bosko

Bosko plays some kind of instrument that doesn’t look like a flute, but sounds like one, in Bosko the Sheep-Herder (1933).

In fact, it still sounds like a flute when he turns it into something else.

Bosko risks being stung by grabbing a beehive and branches from a dead tree, combining them, and turning them into bagpipes. The buzzing bees make the sound of the drone.



Carl Stalling would likely have put “The Campbells Are Coming” in the background of this gag but Frank Marsales settles for a Scottish-sounding tune I can’t identify (it may be a Marsales composition). The main tune heard in a good portion of the cartoon is, apparently, Harrison Aldrich’s “The Straw Ride,” which I have not heard before. It’s the only Warners cartoon where it is heard.

One scene got the Tex Avery treatment more than two decades later. Bosko’s sheep line up and move forward en masse devouring all the grass. Avery had Droopy’s sheep do the same thing (though he added a pile of gags) in Drag-a-long Droopy, released in 1954. Comparisons:



Ham Hamilton and Max Maxwell are the credited animators. Hugh Harman directed.