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.

October 8 - Art Babbitt

On this day, in 1907, animator Arthur Harold Babitsky was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Known in life as Art Babbitt, his family moved to Sioux City, Iowa when he was in kindergarten. His father had injured his back, causing the family to struggle financially. Art decided he would become a psychiatrist to help alleviate that struggle, so after high school, he moved to New York to be a pre-med student at Columbia University. He didn't realize how much money that would take. To earn some, Art transformed into a freelance commercial artist, drawing advertising cartoons for companies like Sylvania. Inspired by the Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance, he got a job with the Terrytoons studio in New Rochelle doing animation. He never did become a psychiatrist.

In the early 1930s, Art moved west to try to get a job with the Disney Studio. He managed to snag one along with a fellow Terrytoon animator, Bill Tytla. Starting as an assistant animator, Art's talent was immediately noticed and he was promoted to animator. His first major work was bringing to life the drunken bumpkin mouse in the 1936 short The Country Cousin. Cousin would go on to win the Academy Award for best animated short.

The next project Art did at the studio, required all hands on deck. For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he was part of the team that worked on the Evil Queen, a role that fellow animators acknowledged was probably the trickiest one in the film. Incidentally, the movie also brought Art his first wife, Marjorie Belcher. She was a dance model for the animators to reference. Following Snow White, Art became a directing animator. For Pinocchio, he led a team of 22 in the creation of Gepetto. Art reportedly felt that some of the best work he ever did, and the studio ever did for that matter, was on Pinocchio. His work in Fantasia can be seen in the characters of Zeus, Vulcan and the dancing mushrooms. When Dumbo came along, Art was again a directing animator on the character of Mr. Stork, who looks a bit like his voice actor, Sterling Holloway, thanks to him.

During this period of work on features, Art didn't forget about the shorts. His biggest contribution of all to the Disney family can be summed up in one word: Goofy. Art saw something in the decidedly minor character of Dippy Dawg that no one else did. He gave him a distinctive walk and developed his personality. Art once described Goofy this way: "He was someone who never really knew how stupid he was. He thought long and carefully before he did anything. And then he did it wrong." Art's work on Goofy's character paid off. Goofy had a long string of immensely popular shorts where he taught viewers how to do everything from skiing to driving a car. And his popularity continues to this day. He's had his own movie, his own television series and endures as one of the most beloved characters in Disney history. Love Goofy? Thank Art.

Unfortunately, in 1941, Art's relationship with the Disney Studio didn't just sour, it went full-on rotten. By that time, every animation studio in Hollywood had been unionized, except one. Even though he was one of Disney's highest paid animators, Art sympathized with the lower earning employees. Not only was he one of the few lead people to support unionization, he went a step further and became a leader in the fight. Walt fired Art and 15 other union leaders in May of that year basically for what he viewed as personal betrayal. The next day, 200 employees began a strike that would last for five weeks. Art spent that time rallying the troops and leading the picketing, at one point almost coming to blows with Walt. The studio finally gave in to union demands but the damage was done. Walt never forgave the strikers (in fact he named a bunch of them as communists when he testified before the McCarthy Hearings) and the familial attitude around the place was gone.

Walt was forced to rehire Art following the settlement but immediately looked for grounds to fire him again. The two men would go back and forth several times, Walt firing Art, Art suing the studio, if Art won, Walt would be forced to rehire him and on to the next round. Eventually Art left Disney for good and, along with other strike victims, joined a newly formed studio, United Productions of America. UPA was kind of the anti-Disney studio. While Disney was going for ultra-realism in animation, UPA was all about stylized minimalism. Art was involved in a mess of UPA's award winning shorts. One of the highlights of his time there was an Academy Award nominated short titled Rooty Toot-Toot. Art was also involved in creating the early Mr. Magoo shorts.

Later in the fifties, Art co-owned a firm named Quartet Films, which mainly created television commercials. He would win a Cleo Award for a spot he did for Parkay Margarine. Later he became part of Hanna-Barbera. In the early seventies, Art began teamed up with Richard Williams, a Canadian animator, to give a series of lectures to young (and sometimes old) animators about the craft. It's said that the notes from those lectures constitute the most circulated, most copied, most revered unpublished bible on animation out there.

Art would continue working pretty much right up to his death. His final project was a film with his lecture partner called The Thief and the Cobbler. The movie was independently financed at first and was in production for nearly three decades. Warner Brothers finally agreed to finish and distribute it, but that fell apart when the production went over budget. Cobbler was finished by a bond company and released in Australia. Ironically, two years later, after Art had passed away, Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney, would acquire it, edit the daylights out of it and release it in the US. Art's work had come full circle.

The story goes that in 1991, when Fantasia was released on video, Roy E Disney sent Art a note thanking him for all his contributions to the Disney Company. Supposedly Art was touched by Roy's kindness and released 50 years of animosity toward Roy's father and uncle. People close to Art say that since he was dying at that point, it's possible but considering how vehement his anger towards the Disney brothers stayed well in the late seventies, it's not all that probable. On March 4, 1992, Art passed away from kidney failure, most likely still harboring some justifiable resentment towards the Walt Disney Company. Nevertheless, his former co-workers Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas spoke at his funeral and he was made an official Disney Legend in 2007.

Also on this day, in American history: Great Chicago Fire