We’re going to be spending this month in this column paying tribute to some of the great voice actors of the past. Which means we get to do a deep dive into the wild world of mid-century animation, because the person we’re talking about today was Ozma in Thanksgiving in the Land of Oz, which is a thing that absolutely exists, it seems. Yes, she’s also done a lot of things people have heard of, but there’s a reason I’ve already taught my son the phrase “cocaine is a hell of a drug” in regards to why things were the way they were during my ‘80s childhood. Because I have to admit that some of the bonkers stuff I remember from those days also does kind of imply that cocaine is a hell of a drug.

There is extremely little biographical information available online about Joan Gerber. There is an author named Merrill Joan Gerber, who is not the same person, and that’s about the only detail I can give you that is not copied from one website to another. Gerber appears on a lot of assorted wikis, because she did a lot of stuff, but no one seems to know much about her. She was born in Detroit in 1935. She was briefly married to a man named Frank Dowse who has no links and whom I’m not inclined to track down, and she had one daughter. She died in 2011.

And she did an extraordinary amount of voice work. Not all of it utterly lunatic. Mrs. Beakley from Duck Tales, for example. Alice Braithwaite Goodyshoes, one of the weird minor Sesame Street characters that make people say, “Oh, yeah!” when they see or hear them. Mrs. Zuckerberg in the ‘73 Charlotte’s Web movie. She did a series of audio shorts with Mel Blanc. One site I found claims she did an episode of Futurama, but it doesn’t give me any details beyond that other than a year of 1999, which is the year the show started running, so I don’t know.

Then, of course, there’s the stuff that’s lunatic but established lunatic. Like The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. Davey and Goliath—she did a lot of Christian stuff, though I don’t know if that’s because of her beliefs or because of a belief that she should be able to eat and sleep indoors. H. R. Pufnstuf. My beloved Square One TV. The Smurfs. A Flintstones Christmas Carol. Various Scooby Doo properties. That sort of thing.

Finally, we reach the sort of thing that you can’t quite believe is real. The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda. A lot of movie spin-off stuff—did you know there was a Dukes of Hazard cartoon? The weird ‘70s animal cartoons such as Blast-Off Buzzard and Undercover Elephant. A cartoon about Muhammad Ali from the same era. That show with the Partridge Family in space. Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp. I don’t know if we are missing something by no longer having that sort of show, but the names, at least, are often a delight.

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