A follower of this site who shall remain nameless wrote to ask me to explain about the voice credits at the end of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I've covered some of this before but here's a more detailed explanation…and the first thing you should know is that they were not complete and sometimes not accurate. For instance, here are the only end title voice credits that ever appeared on Quick Draw McGraw…
Three names: Daws Butler, Don Messick and Doug Young. Daws was in every cartoon on that show. In the Quick Draw McGraw cartoons, he voiced Quick Draw and Baba Looey. In the cartoons of Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Daws was Augie and Doug Young was Daddy. In the Snooper and Blabber cartoons, Daws was always Snooper and usually Blabber. A gent named Elliot Field was Blabber in the first four Snooper-Blabber cartoons, then Daws took over the part.
But there were other actors on that show besides Mr. Field. While they did the occasional cartoon in which Daws did all the voices, they usually had two actors in them. The other guy in the Quick Draw cartoons was often Don Messick but it was sometimes Doug Young, sometimes Hal Smith, sometimes Vance Colvig, sometimes Peter Leeds, etc. There were very few roles for females but there were some and they were done by Jean Vander Pyl or Julie Bennett. Messick was usually the second voice in Snooper & Blabber cartoons.
And when the little duck turned up in an Augie Doggie cartoon, that was a gent named Red Coffee. As far as I know, Mr. Coffee never got a screen credit on any Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
Years ago, my great (and sadly, late) buddy Earl Kress made all our study over the years of H-B cartoons pay…not for us but for the estates of some of the voice actors we admired. We helped the studio identify a lot of actors in shows where the records were missing or incomplete. We helped those families collect some residual cash for streaming and DVD releases.
Now, most of what follows applies to the shows that the studio produced for syndication or Saturday morning time slots. When they got into network prime-time with shows like The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat, they made more of an effort to make the end credits complete and accurate…though as we shall see in a subsequent post that didn't help.
And the second thing you should know — or maybe this is the third; I'm not counting — is that even when the errors and omissions rankled the folks who voiced or even just plain worked on the cartoons, the applicable unions didn't care a lot. This changed to some extent in the eighties. What follows is about the shows produced before the change.
So let's say we're the studio and we have a network order to produce and deliver thirteen episodes of a new show…and the year will be filled by running each episode four times. Because of the timing of how the networks made such an order and when they needed to put shows on the air, it is likely that Show #1 will air before the last few orders of the show are completed.
Some of the people who work on the show will work on every episode. Some will not. But when the time comes to prepare to deliver Show #1, we make up an end title for which we try to list all the major artists and crew members who have worked on that show up to that moment. And we're going to make up one end title sequence which can run on each week's show because it's easier and cheaper than making up credits that are specific to each individual episode.
So we list the main people in the various art departments that worked on the show. Those specific people might not have all worked on the show — or worked on it much — but we can't keep track of who drew what. A layout artist mainly assigned to one show might have helped out for an afternoon or two on another show. So we just kinda approximate who the artists and editors and supervisors were that season.
And then when it comes to the voices, we have the voice department make up a list of all the folks who were paid to do voice work on that show as of that moment.
We might be making this list up to put on Show #1 because it has to air next week. We haven't done the last show or two of three yet but it's time to make up the end credits so we put on all the names to date. Here is the card with the voice credits that aired on every episode of the first season of Dynomutt, which consisted of sixteen episodes that aired weekly beginning on September 11, 1976…
Okay now: First thing we note is that there's no indication of who did what voices or who did regular characters and who did one-time minor characters. Once in a while, an actor's agent might negotiate a special credit for the client…usually when the actor wanted more money but agreed to accept a special credit instead of more money. A special credit costs the studio nothing. More money costs them more money.
No one made such a deal on this series so there's nothing there to tell you who played which characters and who was in every episode. There were four recurring characters: Frank Welker was the voice of Dynomutt, Gary Owens supplied the voice of The Blue Falcon, Ron Feinberg was the Narrator and Larry McCormick gave voice to The Mayor. All four of those men were probably in every episode and all four could then have doubled or tripled performing other minor, one-time roles. Welker — one of the most versatile actors ever in the voice biz — undoubtedly did.
The roles that appear once or infrequently — Cop #1, Man #3, the villain in the episode, etc. — are usually referred to as Incidentals. All of the other folks on this list did incidental roles in the episodes that had been recorded as of the time the end titles were made up. Or at least, that's what Hanna-Barbera's records said. They were not always accurate…and of course, they only covered the shows that had been recorded as of the date the end credits were made up. If that was before Show #12 and Show #13 were recorded, then an actor who only appeared in one or both of those episodes would not receive screen credit.
And as I mentioned, mistakes were made all the time. I'll write about those in some follow-up posts soon.
