His Yogi Bear Voice Leaves Lasting Imprint

I always thought that Mickey Mouse succeeded on the strength of his good looks rather than that squeaky, unisexual voice. If mice could talk, I suppose they might sound like Mickey does, but for me the voice has always lacked the kind of character that would match those haunting eyes, which closely resemble lemon meringue pies with a slice removed.

Walt Disney may have seen the problem himself (he was Mickey’s original voice). Donald Duck quickly became a rounder, more popular and a far more versatile character than Mickey because that wise-quacking voice went so perfectly with the boisterous nonsense the duck got into. Mickey retained his primacy as the Founding Mouse and the corporate symbol, but Donald did the business.

Ever since the cartoons learned to talk like all the other movies, it’s been obvious that the voices could make the difference between amusement and brilliance. If a character is funny to watch, it’s twice as funny if the voice matches perfectly (even if it’s only the Road Runner going “Beep beep”).

Bugs Bunny would just be a rabbit with an overbite if Mel Blanc had not given him that cheeky, saliva-rich and imitable voice (imitable once Mel had created it). Mr. Magoo was the more majestically myopic and serenely, good-heartedly incompetent, because the voice that Jim Backus gave him, chesty and faintly pompous, was exactly right.

Daws Butler, who died last week at the age of 71, had made his own enduring contributions to the grand gallery of cartoon characters. Yogi Bear is Yogi Bear because Butler made him sound the only way Yogi could possibly sound--cheerful and chipper, with a voice that seemed to echo hollowly, as from the void where his smarts should have been.

As the obituaries noted, Butler was also Quick Draw McGraw and Huckleberry Hound, along with a platoon of lesser characters which rolled off the Hanna-Barbera assembly line, including one of the better hucksters of cereal, Cap’n Crunch.

Butler’s special gift was for a variety of Southern and vaguely Southwestern voices, crackery and folksy. Like Ernest Hemingway, he was from Oak Park, Ill., but he collected voices the way people collect match folders.

He made you realize, in fact, that the geniuses of voice-over are actors first and last, and very gifted actors too. It is no surprise that in later years Butler taught acting, with emphasis on the amazing range of accents, from New England nasal to Midwest flat to down-home drawl, that all qualify as American.

There is a peculiar and I suspect frustrating kind of anonymity that goes with giving speech to cartoon characters--”I don’t recognize the face but the voices are familiar.” But Butler had been so good for so long that he had acquired an identity and a following in his own right.

Like many a comedian, Butler discovered early that making people laugh was a good cover for shyness and insecurity, and the first thing you knew, it had become a career.

Nothing careerwise is ever quite as easy as it looks to the distant observer. But Butler’s luck was that he brought his talent to Los Angeles at a time when early television, which had an endless appetite for anything that moved, was discovering it had a particular appetite for animation.

Those years, the ‘50s and ‘60s, were the golden years of television animation and principally centered in Los Angeles, taking up where the major film studios had abandoned hope. These were animation’s equivalent of live television, before the Saturday morning formulas took over. Jay Ward and Bill Scott, for whom Butler worked on “Fractured Fairy Tales” and “Aesop and Son,” were proving there was an audience for witty and sophisticated animation too.

Blanc, who will be 80 next Monday, remains the Dean of Men among the voices of cartoons, as June Foray (the wickedly sultry Natasha as well as Rocky from “Rocky and His Friends”) can fairly be called the Dean of Women. Daws Butler was their peer and colleague and, like them, he increased the funny population of the world unforgettably.