Pinto Colvig is a hero of mine since I did VO work, including for cartoons. He was also the original voice for Goofy and did the dog sounds for Pluto in Disney cartoons along with Grumpy and Sleepy in Snow White. On top of that, he was also the original voice of Bluto in the Popeye cartoons and dubbed one of the voices for the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
Mel Blanc deservedly gets a lot of credit, but I actually find him less interesting than some of his contemporaries like Colvig. Blanc sounds like he has a lot of range, but if you really listen he doesn’t have as much as you would think. You can almost always tell a character voiced by Mel Blanc because they all have that Mel Blanc characteristic.
Pinto Colvig on the other hand? No similarity between Goofy and Bluto. You would have no idea they were done by the same guy.
(Admittedly, it does help that I can impersonate his characters better than I can Blanc’s.)
Daws Butler is the third in what I would consider the golden age trio of cartoon VO with Blanc and Colvig. Daws did half the famous Hanna-Barbera character voices, from Fred Flintstone to Huckleberry Hound. Daws also published a book called Scenes for Actors and Voices which was sort of a bible for me when I was getting into VO. It’s just a bunch of scenes he came up with that would help you develop character voices and I did at least one or two daily for years.
I still would have owned the ball in the buckets Grand Prize Game. If only I lived in Chicago and given the chance.
Yep, every kid that missed out on the brand new crisp one hundred dollar bill was a scrub and it should’ve been mine.
One hundred dollar bill? It was a fifty dollar bill when I was a kid! Damn inflation.
(Also, that was not Pinto Colvig’s Bozo. The original WGN Bozo was Bob Bell. He was replaced by Joey D’Auria in the mid-80s.)
Yeah, that was in the 80s.
Shout-out to his spiritual successor, Homey D. Clown.
Homey don’t play dat.
“Let’s get something straight, kids. Homey may be a clown, but he don’t make a fool out of himself.”
Can somebody smarter than me explain why he’s a “Jr” if he has a different name than his father? Can you be a jr if you’re named after a grandfather or an uncle?
