The Top 20 Voice Actors: Don Messick

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This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Don Messick
Don Messick

Most Famous Role: Scooby Doo.

Other Notable Roles: Boo Boo Bear, Ranger Smith, Papa Smurf, Astro and many supporting players on The Jetsons, Bamm-Bamm (baby version) and many supporting players on The Flintstones, Muttley, Mumbly, Dr. Benton Quest on Jonny Quest, Hamton J. Pig on Tiny Toon Adventures and dozens of others.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Not much. Messick started out as a ventriloquist and puppeteer and quickly found himself in so much demand for voiceover work that he did only that for the rest of his life. The one real exception was his on-camera role as a cartoon voice actor in the short-lived 1984 situation comedy, The Duck Factory.

Why He's On This List: Messick was the consummate professional and the guy who could do anything, including playing six roles in the same scene and doing it so well you'd never know all those voices were coming out of the same guy. He could even overlap himself. No one on this list or others to come could ever switch between voices so quickly and expertly. And no one who ever hired him ever regretted their selection.

Fun Fact: Messick believed in not doing imitations. Once in a while, Joe Barbera pressed him into mimicking a celebrity but he didn't like it and almost never based a voice on someone recognizable — an amazing fact given how many different voices he was called upon to invent throughout his career. He also usually refused to replicate another voice actor, especially if that actor was available to be hired for the job in question. He adopted this policy after an unpleasant incident. He'd agreed to imitate a Howie Morris character when Howie wasn't available to record a part in a Hanna-Barbera record based on a prime-time animated special of Alice in Wonderland. Howie didn't blame Don but was furious with Barbera, leading to a fight which led to Howie not working again for H-B for a few decades. Under pressure, Messick agreed to take over as Atom Ant and a few of Howie's other roles but turned down later requests to "do" others' characters. One exception was taking over as Scrappy Doo after Lennie Weinrib but in that case, Messick wasn't imitating Lennie.

Shows That Keep Running and Running and Running…

It's been a long time since I've discussed the list of longest-running shows on Broadway. That's because it's been a long time since it changed but it just did. This is the list of the top thirteen as of last night. The ones in bold are still running.

  1. The Phantom of the Opera – 11,506 performances
  2. Chicago (1996 Revival) – 7830 performances
  3. Cats – 7485 performances
  4. The Lion King – 7412 performances
  5. Les Misérables – 6680 performances
  6. A Chorus Line – 6137 performances
  7. Oh! Calcutta! (1976 Revival) – 5959 performances
  8. Mamma Mia! – 5,773 performances
  9. Beauty and the Beast – 5461 performances
  10. Rent – 5123 performances
  11. Wicked – 4957 performances
  12. Jersey Boys – 4093 performances
  13. Miss Saigon – 4092 performances

As you can see, Jersey Boys just passed Miss Saigon to take over twelfth place and it won't be long before Wicked passes Rent and The Lion King passes Cats. Since there's no expectation that any of the currently-running shows listed above will be closing soon, when Lion King takes third, the all-time top three longest-running shows will all be shows that are currently-running.

The amazing thing of course is the continuing streak of The Phantom of the Opera. It opened in January of 1988 and last week was still filling 90% of its seats. Chicago and the Lion King were playing to fuller houses than that so it's not impossible that someday when Phantom closes, one of them could still be running.

So let's say Phantom finally closes and Chicago doesn't. How much longer would Chicago have to run in order to capture the top slot? You can do the math on this, figuring eight performances a week. I did it once and I think it's something like nine years. My guess is that none of us will live to see that day.

Today's Video Link

My pal Steve Stoliar did something that many of us envy…something none of us will ever be able to do. He was Groucho Marx's secretary for the last few years of that great comedian's life. You may have heard of the controversial woman, Erin Fleming, who more or less ran Groucho's life at the time. "Controversial" is, in this case, a nice way of putting it.

Steve was right there in the middle of it all, amassing a stockpile of anecdotes, observations, Groucho quotes, tales of meeting Groucho's friends, stories of the oft-unstable Ms. Fleming, etc. A few years ago, he crammed as many of them as he could into a book I've recommended here before…a book I was even recommending before Steve Stoliar became my pal, Steve Stoliar. It's called Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House and if you haven't read it, you should. By an amazing coincidence, I happen to have an Amazon link right here.

It is, as they say, soon to be a major motion picture. Even as I type that, I find myself wondering why no book or play is ever soon to be a minor motion picture. But any film made from Steve's book will be major so we don't need to ponder that now.

In the meantime, Steve goes about giving talks about his great experience and he even has some amazing, available-nowhere-else films to accompany his presentation. Wanna go see him? Well, if there's some facility in your area that books guest lecturers, get them to watch this promotional video and then book Steve…

The Lost Film of Jack Larson

This amuses me more than it probably should. We were talking here earlier about photos being misidentified on the web. This happens a lot and it happens nowhere more than over on eBay.

Yesterday morn, I went net-surfing to find a decent photo of Jack Larson to post with his obit. Once in a while, I locate what I seek over on eBay so I went there, searched for "Jack Larson" and this is one of the listings I found…

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That's right. It's Jerry Thomas and Jack Larson in the 1965 movie, How to Murder Your Wife. Those of you who thought that film starred Terry-Thomas and Jack Lemmon…well, you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.

How did this confusion occur? Well, like a lot of photos that turn up on eBay these days, this picture is being sold because a newspaper decided to digitize (or maybe just dump) its photo archives and sell the originals. Here is what was written on the back of this photo…

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If you didn't know better, you might think that said "Jerry Thomas" and "Jack Larson." I doubt that was a scanning error…probably a human one made by someone too young to at least recognize Jack Lemmon. Mr. Lemmon was a pretty big star in his day.

My friend Steve Stoliar, who'll be featured in the next Video Link I post, is driven mad by some of the eBay identifications of who's Groucho Marx and who isn't. It's not just that sellers think someone dressed as Groucho is Groucho. Sometimes, they think Eli Wallach not dressed up like Groucho is Groucho or that George Jessel, looking just like George Jessel is Groucho or that Laurel and Hardy are the Marx Brothers.

Actually, anyone with a mustache and prominent eyebrows is likely to be identified as Groucho because a pic of Groucho will sell better than a photo labelled as "Unknown man with mustache and prominent eyebrows." I especially liked the seller a few years ago who posted a photo he said was Groucho Marx without his mustache. Apparently, many folks wrote in to inform him it was actually Bud Abbott without his mustache.

The seller changed the listing to read that it was "Bud Abbott disguised as Groucho Marx." No one bought it so he relisted it as "Groucho Marx disguised as Bud Abbott" — and he got twenty bucks for it. If you're interested in the photo of Jerry Thomas and Jack Larson, it's been marked down to $27.00. Hey, it's the only known photo of Jerry and Jack together.

Cruz Control

Stephen Colbert had Ted Cruz on last night and the result was a perfect example of why I don't like politicians on talk shows that are focused on entertainment and short segments. Colbert strikes me as better informed than almost anyone who's had that kind of gig and, yes, he did ask a few questions of substance. But anyone who's seeking public office should be asked more than a few questions of substance…and by a questioner whose goal isn't to have the segment end with everyone happy and the guest willing to come back.

These things always seem to me like an unhealthy bargain. The Colbert show undoubtedly got some tune-in last night because of Cruz. Those who love Cruz watched to support him and to hope that he'd slap that Liberal star around. Those who loathe Cruz watched to hope Colbert would nail Cruz with the question that would end the guy's candidacy. Given the limitations of time and format, neither of those things were likely to happen.

What mainly happened is that Cruz got to show the world his human side and to seem like a reasonable guy with a sense of humor. That may or may not be who he is. He got to say he doesn't consider his political opponents "diabolical" without Colbert citing many past statements where Cruz tried to whip up support by insisting just that. He got to make some assertions about the glories of the economy under Reagan and the wrongness of how Gay Marriage was legalized in this country without Colbert having the time (or seriousness of intent) to challenge what he said.

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This kind of thing almost always seems wrong to me, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican or Bernie Sanders. Once in a while, it can be interesting. The conversation Colbert had with Joe Biden recently was fascinating…but Biden wasn't running for anything — at least at that moment — and I doubt he made one factual assertion his opponents would dispute. But the conversation Colbert had with Sanders was close to an infomercial and even though I generally side with "The Bern" on most issues, I thought it was a misappropriation of airtime and talk show resources.

Tonight, Colbert has Donald Trump on. That might turn out to be one of the exceptions because it may well be more of an entertainment segment than a political one. But I still wish talk shows would stop doing this.

Rejection, Part 2

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This is the second in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here.


One important point in dealing with the latter is that you need to have realistic expectations. I don't know how often this has happened: A writer friend has called me for comfort and reassurance when his new book (or show or whatever) got a withering review. I ask him about the overall reception and learn that he's gotten twelve notices — eleven in the good-to-rave category, one that likened his work to the flinging of feces. He's so destroyed by #12 that he's forgotten #1-11.

The problem there is that he's set himself up for defoliation. It's like buying one lottery ticket and then being crushed when it turns out you didn't win. Unanimous approval happens about as often as me or you winning the $45,000,000 grand prize.

Mickey Mantle didn't step up to the plate expecting his every swing to clear the left field fence so he was not crushed when he struck out. His lifetime batting average was around .300 and that's just fine. Imagine a player feeling like an abject failure because he didn't do a lot better than that.

Someone once observed that the difference between an American playwright and a British playwright was as follows: In England, a great playwright is someone who now and then writes a great play. In America, a great playwright is someone whose last play was great. The latter approach can make for a lot of grief and anguish and it can even make a writer afraid to take chances and to not play it safe.

Even if you play it as safe as humanly possible as a writer, you will have failures. They are unavoidable — some may not even be your fault — and I've had friends do incredible damage to themselves by not accepting that as a reality. What you should hope is to have successes of sufficient quantity and magnitude that you can stay in the game. As long as you can stay in the game, you have a chance to hit a home run next time at bat.

Also, remember that it is (usually) not you they don't like but the product. As readers of this blog know, I hate cole slaw. If you are a fine chef and you make me cole slaw, I'm not going to like it. If you write certain kinds of stories, I'm not going to like them either.

I think writers get crushed a lot by rejections that are in the same category as trying to make me love your cole slaw. It's like entering a contest you can't win. I ain't gonna shine on Dancing with the Stars or in the Short Track Speed Skating event at the next Winter Olympics. Entering something like that is just begging for failure and rejection.

There are writing assignments that are like that because of your limitations but there are also those where you simply can't succeed, no matter what you do. I shall favor you with but two examples, both cases of motion picture producers I've encountered in my career. I'll call them Frick and Frack.

Mr. Frick, I met in the late seventies. He had co-produced one movie for Paramount and now had an office on the lot from which, I was told, he hoped to develop screenplays for production. A mutual friend steered me to him and we hit it off well. He was a nice guy and he laughed in all the right places — always a good sign. He gave me some broad parameters of the kinds of ideas he was looking for and invited me to go off and come up with some, then come back and pitch them to him.

It seemed like a great opportunity. The guy was indeed a producer. He had an office at Paramount. He liked me. How could that not be worth my time to pursue?

SPOILER ALERT: The guy had no ability to get a movie made or even to pay for any writing. I'll tell you why in a moment.

Cluelessly thinking all I had to do was come back to him with the right idea, I spent a week or two of pondering. Once I thought I had three good ones, I went back and clicked into performance mode. One by one, my ideas were shot down. The first one was all wrong for these reasons. The second would never work for those reasons. The third was just plain a bad idea.

I didn't think any of them were terrible but he thought they all were…so that was it for those three ideas. But he still liked me and he encouraged me and he said, "Well, maybe now you have a better idea of what I'm looking for." That seemed possible so I went home, came up with three more and returned to his office, resulting in three more strike-outs. In fact, he seemed to like these three less than the first three…and he hadn't liked the first three at all.

He urged me to try, try again and he did it so nicely and sincerely that I almost did. What stopped me is that, via that most powerful of show business forces — dumb luck — I happened to meet another writer who'd been playing the same game with Mr. Frick. The writer had given up after four pitch sessions, asked around and learned what he thought was the reason for all the turndowns…

Mr. Frick was not a producer. Though he had that office on the Paramount lot, the studio had zero interest in him producing anything for them and he knew it.

He had not really even been a producer on that one film with his name on it. A friend then in power had set him up with the job, he'd botched it and another producer had to be brought in. They shared co-producer credit but the other guy had done all the work. Mr. Frick had then reverted to his previous job, which was as a consultant on matters of foreign distribution. That's why he had that office at Paramount and though it was in the building with real producers, he was no longer one of them. I might as well have been pitching to one of the janitors.

Frick had not accepted his fate so he continued to try and be a kind of "pretend" producer, taking meetings like mine when he wasn't doing his consulting work. The writer who tipped me off had a theory: "He thinks that if he hangs in there for a while, taking meetings and acting like an in-house producer who produces movies, eventually there will be some new Paramount execs who will think he is one."

That put him in this position: If he'd said to me, "Hey, that's a great idea," he would then have had to do something with it. He'd have to have Paramount draw up a contract and pay me money…and Paramount wasn't about to do that for anything he told them he wanted to do. His enthusiasm for an idea carried zero weight with the current guys in charge. So he had to hate all ideas pitched to him while he bided his time and hoped somehow that would change.

My friend's theory made way too much sense to me so I gave up on Mr. Frick. He passed away about twelve years later and if the Internet Movie Database is to believed — and sometimes, it is — he never produced anything else again in his career.

I'd thought my ideas were being rejected because they were rotten. They may have been — I pitched a few of them elsewhere and didn't get any takers — but that wasn't why he turned them down. The whole thing was akin to one of those unwinnable carnival games where you take home the Big Prize if you can knock down all three milk bottles by throwing a baseball at them — and one of the milk bottles is weighted-down so even a hurricane couldn't topple it.

I have come to believe this happens a lot with writers: They're playing a game that cannot be won. Either they're trying to sell the right thing to the wrong guy or the wrong thing to the right guy…or, once in a while, even the wrong thing to the wrong guy. And then they think they bombed because someone thought their scripts or pitches stunk.

In the next one of these, I'll tell you about Mr. Frack — who did produce movies, many of them. And I'll tell why you'd have had just as much chance of selling him your screenplay as you would have of selling it to Mr. Frick.

Recommended Reading

William Saletan explains why all this talk about Pope Francis being a Liberal, modern pope is a lot of wishful delusion on some folks' part. Mr. Saletan thinks people are reading way too much into statements and encyclicals that are (mostly) Vatican Business As Usual.

Jay Scott Pike, R.I.P.

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Jay Scott Pike died September 13 after a brief illness. He was 91 and since the mid-forties, he had been a painter and a comic book artist specializing in beautiful women. Between 1949 and 1973 (both dates approximate), he drew around a thousand comic book stories. Probably around 800 of those were assigned to him because they needed an artist who could draw good-looking ladies.

Pike's earliest comic book work appears to have been for Hillman Comics in 1949. He did westerns and romance for them, then worked for Atlas (now Marvel) for most of the fifties on war, horror, westerns and romance comics — romance, especially. He was also their go-to guy for female versions of Tarzan. He drew Jann of the Jungle and Lorna the Jungle Girl. He eventually found his way to DC Comics where he spent most of the sixties drawing (mostly) romance comics.

One interesting exception was a 1968 issue of Showcase featuring a Pike creation, Dolphin. It was a unique, haunting combination of a super-hero comic and a romance title and while DC then did not allow the project to go beyond the one issue, the book — which Pike wrote and drew — made a lasting impression. Later writers could not resist reviving the character and fans of that one issue often commissioned Pike to do paintings of the lovely Dolphin. The photo above shows the artist with one of them.

When he wasn't doing comics, Pike did paintings for men's magazines and advertising — usually, though not exclusively glamour girl stuff. He was real, real good at everything he did but especially at drawing and painting pretty women. His work will doubtlessly be exhibited and reprinted as long as folks want to see pretty women. I figure that's going to be a long, long time.

Foolin' 'em

Teller (of "Penn & ___") discusses the working premise of their show, Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I like the show for a number of reasons, one being that an important thing people have to keep in mind when they see magic is that it's always a trick. No one can read minds. No one can levitate. A good magician reminds you that just because you can't figure out how it's done, the explanation is not unearthly powers.

Recommended Reading

Gary Jacobstreats us to a preview of a speech from President Trump. Thanks to Steve Stoliar for telling me about this. Steve will be mentioned several more times on this blog in the next 24 hours.

Recommended Reading

A pretty good interview with Bill Clinton. Even those who didn't like him in the White House may enjoy seeing what he says in the interviewee chair.

Recommended Reading

Harry Enten (who's on Nate Silver's team) gives us scenarios for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and even Joe Biden should he decide he wants the Democratic nomination. I don't know how I feel about any of these people getting it. I keep thinking that there are events ahead that will change the whole race so much in both parties that we'll look back and realize what a waste it was to look at polls in September of 2015.

Jack Larson, R.I.P.

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Jack Larson, who would surely have preferred to be identified as "Playwright Jack Larson" than "The guy who played Jimmy Olsen" has died. Mr. Larson, who often fibbed about his age, would probably also have liked it if all the obits (like this one) were not revealing he was 87.

He actually had a pretty impressive career writing plays and opera librettos but of course, his role as "Young Olsen" on the George Reeves Superman show was a hard thing to escape. The series was done on a pauper's budget but worked I thought, largely because of the acting abilities of the leads. And no one did more to make it a classic than Jack Larson.

I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions when he'd agreed, probably after much prodding, to make an appearance in connection with that role. He always seemed like it was a burden in his life, one he occasionally had to make peace with. He was very fond of Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane…and Noel, who loved the attention (and fees) she got for her past work on the series, occasionally dragged him to some event.

Both, of course, experienced the yin and yang of their casting in that classic series. The good was that it made them famous and that despite the rotten pay and killer hours, it was in many ways a great experience. The bad was the rotten pay, the fact that their contracts kept them from pursuing other opportunities at the time, and that when it was over, there seemed to be no acting work for either.

That led Larson into writing plays. As a guy who was such a good actor, he must have often wondered where that career would have gone if he'd said no to The Adventures of Superman.

One time, I went in to do an on-camera interview for one volume of those shows on DVD. Larson and Neill were scheduled after me and on my way out, I ran into them in the lobby. Noel, who I'd interviewed not long before at a convention, introduced me to Jack, though I'd met him before. Ginning up some small talk, I said to both of them, "They'll treat you wonderfully in there. The makeup lady is a special joy."

Larson blanched and said, "Makeup? Do I have to have makeup?" I said, "No, I had to have makeup. I don't look like I belong on camera unless they do the same job on me they used to do on Lon Chaney."

He said, "I just don't like makeup. I don't like being on camera at all these days."

I said, "Well then, you made the right career transition. But you were awfully good on camera when you did like it. You know, it's not the fabulous scripts and lavish production values that made those shows so popular that fifty years later, people want to buy DVDs of them."

He smiled and said, "It was George."

I said, "George and those two people who played reporters." I was serious about that. He grinned and I'd like to think he accepted the compliment. Because he really was terrific on that show. So was Noel. And George.

Today's Video Link

From 1967: Groucho Marx introduces Dick Cavett on The Kraft Music Hall. This was the stand-up routine that brought Cavett to a fair amount of prominence. The following year, he got his first talk show on ABC…