J. Plus (please leave me real names, people) wrote to ask…
You mentioned once in an interview that when you were a kid, you loved to read the credits on the TV shows you liked. How do you feel about the credits on shows you've worked on? Was it a thrill to see your name on the screen?
It was more of a thrill for my parents…especially my father. He was never happier than when he could turn on the TV and see his son's name. If he'd had his way, any thirty-minute show I wrote would have consisted of five seconds of program and 29 minutes and 55 seconds of my name on screen.
And you know how people can know something but still not quite accept it? My father understood that when I got paid for a show was not when my name was on the screen…but somehow, when he saw my name on the screen, he thought, "Mark got paid this week." Even though I'd sometimes been paid months earlier.
Since it's the Christmas season, I'll tell you the screen credits I liked most on a show I wrote…and they didn't even involve my name. In 1982, I wrote a prime-time Yogi Bear holiday special for Hanna-Barbera. It was a last-minute assignment, there were huge fights and some yelling but it got on the air and every so often, I like to look at the voice credits. They were spread out over two cards and here's one of them…
Daws Butler deservedly received special billing, though they misspelled the name of Mr. Jinks and they omitted other iconic roles Daws played in the show such as Dixie the Mouse, Augie Doggie, Snooper, Blabber and Wally Gator. Daws was one of the key voices of my childhood. I loved any cartoon he was in, whether it was a Warner Brothers cartoon, a Jay Ward cartoon, a Walter Lantz cartoon or a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I loved him. He was a dear, sweet man who taught a wonderful class full of up-and-coming voice actors who also loved him dearly.
Daws had suffered a stroke and this show was his return to voice acting after many months of not doing what he did better than just about anybody. There are moments in some lives where you feel that you're connecting with an important part of your upbringing and this was a big one for me.
I was also connecting with names on this other card…
Georgi Irene was a child actor and a very good one. All the other names on this list were people who voiced cartoons of my childhood…and some of them, like Hal Smith and Allan Melvin, were also on live-action TV shows I watched when I was growing up. In 1982, this was kind of an All-Star Lineup of Voice Actors for me and in most cases here, they were playing the same characters. Mel Blanc, for example, was playing Barney Rubble.
I worked with most of them on other shows but, Ms. Irene aside, this could have been the voice cast on a cartoon I watched when I was ten. It was kind of the same way I felt when I wrote comic books that were drawn by the artists who drew comic books I read when I was seven or wrote lines for live-action shows that were spoken by actors who appeared in shows I watched when my age was in single digits.
If you don't get why this felt special to me, there may be no way I can explain it. It just did.
