August 24 - Hal Smith

Image courtesy behindthevoiceactors.com

On this day, in 1916, Harold John Smith was born in Petosky, Michigan. Hal didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the Great Lakes State before his family travelled east and settled in the village of Massena, New York, about as far north as you can get in the Empire State before you become Canadian. After graduating from Massena High in 1936, Hal migrated a few hours south to Utica where he became a disk jockey for radio station WBIX. Over the next seven years, he played music and provided voices for all sorts of projects at the station, from promotional ads to filler bits between the scheduled programs. In 1943, he left the great state of New York to become part of the United States Army Special Services unit and travelled around Europe and the Pacific entertaining the troops for the rest of World War II. After the war, Hal moved again, this time to Hollywood. He took a number of uncredited roles in movies until the mid-Fifties, when both television and his career started to bloom.

Image copyright Hanna-Barbera

Hal began his run in television during all sorts of small roles on a variety of shows including Peter Gunn, Bonanza and Have Gun - Will Travel. It was the advent of cartoons on television and specifically the rise of the Hanna-Barbera studio that really gave him a boost though.  Starting in 1959 with the studio’s second series, The Huckleberry Hound Show, Hal became a staple voice talent for Hanna-Barbera. He voiced characters as diverse as narrators to Santa Clause to title characters like Yappee in dozens of series such as Quick Draw McGraw, The Flintstones, The Yogi Bear Show, Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey, The New 3 Stooges, Scooby-Doo Where Are You, Hong Kong Phooey, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, Trollkins, Richie Rich and The Smurfs.

Image courtesy adirondackalmanack.com

Unlike some voice actors over the years, Hal also had a fairly prolific amount of live action appearances as well. His most famous role, hands down, was as Otis Campbell, the town drunk, on The Andy Griffith Show. Otis not only figured into 32 episodes over the shows eight seasons, but Hal reprised the role for a 1986 reunion movie, Return to Mayberry, and appeared as Otis in the music video for Alan Jackson’s song Don’t Rock the Juke Box. But the town drunk wasn’t the only way Hal’s face popped up on folks television sets. He also had guest spots on The Addams Family, Get Smart, Hogan’s Heroes, Green Acres, The Mod Squad, The Brady Bunch, Hollywood Squares, The Dukes of Hazzard, Little House on the Prairie and Fantasy Island, to name a few. He was truly one of those actors everyone recognized but few people could have told you his name.

Image copyright Disney

Hal holds a special place in the annals of Disneyana, especially for fans of Winnie the Pooh. For starters, he was the original voice of Owl, portraying the long winded know-it-all from Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree in 1966 right on through The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh television series that ended in 1991. In 1981, for a new special called Winnie the Pooh Discovers the Seasons, Hal began doing double duty in all Pooh related ventures: he provided the voice of the tubby little cubby himself, when Sterling Holloway declined to continue on in the role. Over the next seven years, Hal would do both Owl and Pooh, right up to the debut of New Adventures, when Jim Cummings took over responsibility for the fluff headed bear. Not that Hal was working any less mind you. During the run of New Adventures, Hal was simultaneously doing voices for DuckTales (including Gyro Gearloose, Flintheart Glomgold and the adult versions of Huey, Dewey and Louie), Adventures of the Gummi Bears (Nogum), TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck and The Little Mermaid.

Image copyright Disney

Hal holds five other Disney credits outside of the realm of Pooh and television. He was one of the elephants marching with Colonel Hathi in The Jungle Book. He had a small live-action role as the Courthouse Guard in 1971’s The Million Dollar Duck. He brought the Auctioneer in The Small One to life. He played everyone’s favorite man-dog, Goofy, in Mickey’s Christmas Carol (and had been playing him since Pinto Colvig had passed away several years earlier). And his final project for the company came in 1991 when he provided the voice for Belle’s horse, Phillipe, in Beauty and the Beast.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

The secular world of entertainment wasn’t the only realm that held Hal’s interest. He readily lent his voice to several religious projects as well. Starting in 1959, he was the voice of Goliath and Davey’s father for the Lutheran produced series, Davey and Goliath, which ran for sixteen years. Later, in the Eighties, he did work for the Focus on the Family broadcast, performing in various scripts for their daily show until 1987 when he signed on as John Avery Whittaker, the lead character in FotF’s longest running serial ever, Adventures in Odyssey. It was because of his commitment to the show that helped convince the rest of Odyssey’s cast to come on board.

Life was pretty sweet for Hal right up until Louise, his wife of 56 years, passed away in 1992. Without his lifelong companion by his side, Hal’s own health deteriorated rapidly. He managed to continue recording episodes of Adventures in Odyssey for a little over a year more. Then, on January 28, 1994, the character actor who spent more than four decades doing what he did best suffered a fatal heart attack, supposedly in his favorite chair while listening to beloved radio dramas. It sounds exactly like how the 77 year old would have wanted to go.