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| Image courtesy of wikia.com |
On this day, in 1913, Jonathan Joseph Candido was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Considering Candy (as he was known) did literally hundreds
of voiceovers for pretty much every major studio in Hollywood and was partnered
with several stars over the years, it’s surprisingly hard to find even a few
nuggets of information about his life. Here’s what I could scrape together.
He was famous for his four octave speaking voice. Candy
would frequently start talking in a normal, mid-range voice and then suddenly
sound either like a mouse on helium or the lower notes of a tuba. It was this
quality that made him perfect for voice work. He spent a few years on the radio
program The Jimmy Durante Show. Every
week he would utter the phrase “I’m feeling mighty low.” Those four words
became so popular with audiences that Candy and Jimmy would record a song with
that title and they appeared in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (a sure sign you'd made it,
and we’re talking about the words here, not Candy and Jimmy).
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| Image copyright Decca Records |
Before his radio career, Candy had played bass (not guitar,
the actual big giant bass) and sung for Ted FioRito’s big band and even made an
appearance with them in a 1933 Soundie (think of it like an early version of a
music video) singing Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me. A couple of
years after that, he sang a duet with Fred Rogers in the film Roberta. Following his radio career, we
learn that Candy was funny as he started touring the country with the great straight
man, Bud Abbott, after Bud’s first partner, Lou Costello, passed away.
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| Image copyright Disney |
For Disney, Candy made a number of roles his own over the
course of a few decades. Several of
them were, like many of his roles, uncredited. He began with the Indian Chief
in Peter Pan in 1953. His last role
would be Fidget the Bat in 1986’s The
Great Mouse Detective. In between, Candy lent his voice to one of
Maleficent’s goons in Sleeping Beauty,
some trees in Babes in Toyland, the
crocodile Captain of the Guard in Robin
Hood, and Brutus and Nero, the crocodiles in The Rescuers. He can also be heard on a handful of Disney
attractions. On Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, listen to the devils; pay attention to
the goons throughout the Sleeping Beauty Castle walk-through; he’s the
graveyard executioner and a low pitched prisoner in the Haunted Mansion; he
reprises his role of Indian Chief for Peter Pan’s flight.
After a long career that covered performances in films as
diverse as The Wizard of Oz and Heavy Traffic, Candy passed away quietly
in his sleep at his home in Burbank, California on May 19, 1999. He was 85
years old.
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