May 2 - Lorenzo Music

Image courtesy discogs.com

On this day, in 1937, Gerald David Music was born in Brooklyn, New York. The son of a shipbuilder, Gerald’s family moved to be near the shipyards in Duluth, Minnesota when he was six. After graduating from Central High School, he began attending the University of Minnesota at Duluth where he met his future wife, Henrietta. The couple formed a successful comedy duo called Gerald and His Hen and toured together for eight years, getting married at some point in between laughs. During the same time period, Gerald became interested in the spiritual movement known as Subud and as a result of his involvement, changed his first name to Lorenzo.

In 1968, Lorenzo was hired as a writer and performer on the politically charged variety show, The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour. In a highly controversial move, that show was abruptly cancelled in 1969, but Lorenzo's experience on it got him a gig writing for The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. Two years later, his career exploded when he co-created The Bob Newhart Show, which would run for six seasons. He and his wife also wrote the theme song for Bob. He continued to write for Mary and, more importantly, a spin-off of Mary, Rhoda. One of the main characters on Rhoda was to be the doorman to her building, Carlton, who would be heard but never seen. When the producers heard Lorenzo's voice one day, they offered the him the part and his voice over career began. Carlton became such a popular character that he got a single, Who Is It?, that became a regional hit in 1975 and his own animated special, Carlton the Doorman, in 1980, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. In 1976, Lorenzo and Henrietta were given their own variety show, but since pretty much everyone was being given their own variety show at that time, the craze for them imploded and the show didn't last long.

Image courtesy christmastvhistory.com

The next phase of Lorenzo's career didn't start until 1982. The most popular comic strip of the early Eighties was Garfield. Jim Davis, the creative force behind the fat. lazy cat, was capitalizing on that popularity by moving his character into television animation, but needed to find just the right voice. Dozens of people were auditioned, including Disney Legend Sterling Holloway, but none fit the bill, until Lorenzo. At the end of his first audition, he was immediately offered the role. Here Comes Garfield debuted on October 25, 1982, earned two Emmy nominations and started a twelve year association between the lovable yet cantankerous cat and Lorenzo. Over twelve specials (including A Garfield Christmas Special, one of my all time favorites) and 121 episodes of the animated series Garfield and Friends (which ran from 1988-94), Lorenzo became a voice over legend. And it's really no surprise that Bill Murray has done the voice of Garfield in more recent projects. Bill and Lorenzo have such similar voices, that Lorenzo portrayed Peter Venkman, a character originated by Bill, in the first two seasons of the animated series The Real Ghostbusters.

Image copyright Disney

Lorenzo solidly joined the Disney family three times during his cartoon decade. In 1985, he began a six season run on Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, mainly as Tummi Gummi, but doing additional characters as needed. In 1990, he became Sgt. Dunder for two seasons of TaleSpin and he voiced several minor characters on Darkwing Duck.

 In the mid Nineties, as the shows he worked on ended their runs, Lorenzo retired from all cartoon work. He continued to do some voice over work for various commercials, most notably OreIda Potatoes and Twinkies, and provided Garfield's voice for a few video games, but that was it. In one of the more touching anecdotes of his life,  he volunteered regularly for a suicide hotline. He recalled that callers would frequently be reciting their reasons for taking their own lives and suddenly stop, say you really sound like that cat on television, begin talking about that and kind of forget why they called. In other words, Lorenzo was able to talk people out of killing themselves without really saying in particular (although I'm sure it helped if he started talking about lasagna). 

In late 2000, Lorenzo was diagnosed with a double whammy of lung and bone cancers. After months of fighting against the diseases, he passed away on August 4, 2001 in Los Angeles, California. His wife of over 50 years scattered his ashes in his beloved Pacific Ocean. He was only 64.

October 18 - The Jungle Book

On this date, in 1967, Walt Disney Pictures 19th animated feature, The Jungle Book, was released in theaters. Based on Rudyard Kipling's book of the same name, The Jungle Book is also the last animated film from Disney that Walt had a hand in producing as he died several months before it opened. It was also the first animated film in a while that Walt actually paid attention to.

For 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone, Bill Peet, a long time animator and story man for Disney, had been allowed to develop the script pretty much on his own. Dalmatians had been a success for Bill and the company, Stone decidedly less so. When his initial script for Jungle Book was closely aligned with the dark tone of the book, Walt told Bill to lighten it up. Bill for some reason refused and subsequently left the company. Walt then took an active interest in developing the story and characters and the improvement of this film over Stone shows it.

In a break with his casting practices of late, Walt decided to hire more well known stars to voice some of the characters in his version of Jungle Book. Comedian and jazz singer Phil Harris was brought in for the role of Baloo, his first of three major Disney characters. Phil would confound the script team by ad libbing most of his lines because, as he put it, the written ones "didn't feel natural." Fellow jazz artist Louis Prima became King Louie. Sebastian Cabot, who also narrated the Winnie the Pooh shorts, was tapped for Bagheera. Also included in the cast were Disney stalwarts like Sterling Holloway, J. Pat O'Malley and Verna Felton, in her last film role. Walt had wanted to cast the four members of The Beatles as the vultures and have them sing the song "We're Your Friend", but when John Lennon refused, the vultures simply became Beatle-esque.

The Jungle Book cost the studio four million dollars to make but was released to critical acclaim and financial success, reaping box office receipts of over 378 million worldwide to date. Several current animators, including Brad Bird and Glen Keane, will tell you that Jungle Book was their inspiration to get into animation in the first place. The movie has spawned an animated sequel, two different live action versions, the Disney Afternoon series Talespin and the animated series Jungle Cubs.

Also on this day, in American history: Candy Cummings