I would say that voicework of the mid-twentieth century was supported by three main people. There were a lot of others working then, of course, but remove any one of those three, and the landscape of cartoons looks radically different. Most people think of Mel Blanc, who’s great and who we’ll get to. If they’re trying to be different or genuinely considering the underappreciated contributions of women, you’ll hear about June Foray. But arguably the most undiscussed of the three, and the one who I believe did the most voicework “in the wild,” as it were—not just cartoons but narration for serious movies and dubbing of other actors—is Paul Frees, whose work is heard unnoticed by untold numbers of people a day, and that’s just visitors to Disney theme parks.
Paul Frees was also the youngest of the three; he was born in 1920. He served in World War II, which interrupted his early radio career. He returned home after being wounded in action and went back to work. He continued in radio, but he also started working in film and movies, eventually providing voices for nine different animation studios. He appears in a few works in person, but it seems to have mostly been in-jokes, like his occasional casting in minor roles in Disney movies.
IMDb doesn’t list commercials, so there is probably no definitive list of things he’s done, and of course many of his appearances are “additional voices.” But a list of Frees characters would be very long indeed. He narrated a wide array of movies, of course, from The Manchurian Candidate to Doc Savage: Man of Bronze to Where the Boys Are. He was to my mind the definitive narrator of Disney cartoons, including the Spirit of Adventure in “Donald in Mathmagic Land” and the guy explaining family planning in yesterday’s short “Family Planning.”
But he also voiced Ludwig Von Drake himself. Boris Badenov. Ignatz Mouse. The Thing. Santa Claus. Both Noah and God; both George Harrison and John Lennon. (What, you thought the Beatles recorded their own voices for those cartoons? I’m just glad he didn’t voice any of the Jackson Five.) Inspector Fenwick, the Ghost Host, and the Pillsbury Doughboy. He wrote The Beatniks. Dubbed Toshiro Mifune in Midway and Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall. And was part of the falsetto voice of “Josephine” in Some Like It Hot. He was even on Lux Radio Theater.
The list is long. I suspect I care more about Paul Frees than a lot of people do because of my Disney fixation—you can’t love Disney and not appreciate what Paul Frees contributed. But you don’t have to love Disney to do that. You can like kaiju movies, or Jay Ward or Rankin/Bass, or George Pal. He had a four-octave range and did some of the most iconic voicework of the twentieth century. He may have recorded “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” but he’s also prove that it’s not a hundred percent true. He died shortly before I turned ten and I’ve been listening to him tell tales all my life; I told you we’d get back to someone whose work I knew sooner or later!
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