Some actors have such a distinctive voice that it gets “borrowed” time and time again by other actors, particularly those doing voice-over work. I suspect Ed Wynn may hold the record here for the number of roles emulating his voice. (And in case you don’t know who Ed Wynn is, here’s footage of him recording the voice of the Mad Hatter in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.) Off the top of my head, there’s
Wally Gator from Wally Gator, voiced by Daws Butler
Fred from George of the Jungle, voiced by Paul Frees
Dr. Blinky from H. R. Pufnstuf and its feature film Pufnstuf, voiced by Walker Edmiston
Bravo Fox from Zoobilee Zoo, played by Gary Schwartz
Jollo from King’s Quest VI, voiced by Chuck McCann
King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph, voiced by Alan Tudyk
Are there any more Ed Wynn impersonations we can add to the list? Have any other actors been impersonated a similar (or even greater) number of times? Peter Lorre, Orson Welles, or Vincent Price, maybe?
(Note that I’m speaking here of bona fide acting roles, not brief impressions as part of a stand-up comedy act.)
There have, indeed, been many Peter Lorre imitators (Mel Blanc in the Bugs Buny cartoons, Robin Williams in Aladdin, off the top of my head), but I’m not sure Orson Welles or Vincent Price had so many. I think Jack Nicholson has gotten quite a few imitators in recent years (Robin Williams, again, in Aladdin. and every stage production of Little Shop of Horrors included an actor doing a Jack Nicholson voice, since he was in the original film (ironically, they didn’t do this for the filmed version of the musical. Many Nicholson complained). But there’s a ton of “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” imitations spoofing The Shining alone, in addition to other of his roles.
If I may digress a little, I am fascinated at how close the animation was to the footage of the actors. Was this common for Disney films and was it done for the whole films? I have never seen it before.
Disney had a practice of shooting footage of the actors going through the actions while saying their lines, which the animators used as a guide when they did the scene. Disney claimed that they didn’t use the practice of Rotoscoping (which was invented by their competitor, Fleischer Studios), but animators who worked there said that they did sometimes use it.
Mel Blanc’s impersonations definitely count for the purposes of my question, since when he did this he used Lorre’s voice for an entire character. But Robin Williams in Aladdin is just doing throwaway impressions for a single line at a time; the Genie doesn’t speak in Lorre’s or Nicholson’s voice consistently.
This is interesting but I’m not sure it really fits the spirit of the question. If an actor is using Jack Nicholson’s voice for the exact same character previous played by Jack Nicholson, then you can’t really say that the voice has been repurposed. By contrast, all the examples in my OP are characters that have nothing to do with Ed Wynn; the actor just happened to use his voice.
Actually, they don’t use the Nicholson voice for the character who played the masochistic patient at the dentist’s (the role Nicholson played in the Corman film), but for a completely different part.
This might be straying further from the OP, but another case that went so far as to be taken to court was when Helen Kane took the Fleischer studio to court because she claimed that Betty Boop stole her act.
Kane was the same babyish voice, forehead curls, and – most significantly – punctuated her songs with “boop-oop-a-doop”, as Betty Boop did. Boop, voiced by several women , but most famously by Mae Questel, was pretty clearly modeled on Kane, but they argued it wasn’t exclusively her in court.
Yeah, it’s not really hard to find isolated instances of one actor using another actor’s iconic voice for a completely new role, as was the case with Foghorn Leghorn and Betty Boop. What I’m really after in this thread is seeing if we can identify those actors who were imitated the most often. I don’t think Kenny Delmar and Helen Kane were impersonated for many more roles than the two just mentioned. (At any rate, not nearly as many as Ed Wynn and Jimmy Durante.)
Speaking of commonly borrowed female voices, though, Mae West’s must be up there, eh?
Art Carney as Ed Norton from The Honeymooners was said to be the inspiration for Yogi Bear
(Hanna Barbera did a lot of stealing from famous actors or role for their early cartoons)
For the Warner Brothers cartoon The Honeymousers, naturally, they had an Ed Norton character, voiced by Daws Butler. (Warners did two other “Honeymousers” cartoons, later)
Interestingly, when Hanna Barbera made The Flintstones, pretty obviously riffing on The Honeymooners, they got Mel Blanc instead of their usual Daws Butler to do the voice of Barney Rubble, the Ed Norton character. Blanc has stated many times that they wanted him to do an Art Carney imitation for the part, but he refused.
The answer to the OP is not an actor at all: it’s Chuck Yeager, WW2 ace, test pilot and the first man to break the speed of sound. His relaxed, West Virginia-tinged drawl has become the default “pilot voice”, imitated by countless movie and real-life pilots. Just imagine what a stereotypical male American pilot sounds like on the plane’s intercom - that’s Chuck
One more voice imitation in the Hanna-Barbera stable was Snagglepuss, who was inspired by Bert Lahr (who had played The Cowardly Lion in the 1939 Wizard of Oz)
Lahr also sued over use of his imitated voice, but not until they used Snagglepuss for a commercial for Kellogg’s cereal. Lahr said he didn’t want to give the impression that he was endorsing the product (and not even getting paid for it). So Daws Butler got a credit line in the commercial.
Butler re-used the voice " for two other Hanna-Barbera characters: Jonathan Wellington “Mudsy” Muddlemore from The Funky Phantom and Brutus the lion from The Roman Holidays ."
I don’t know of any other cartoons that used a Lahr-inspired voice, though.
Warner Brothers cartoons Beaky Buzzard was pretty clearly based on Edgar Bergen’s character Mortimer Snerd – both the look and the voice. He has the distinction of being voiced by several different voice actors – Kent Rogers, Stan Freberg, Mel Blanc, and more recently by Joe Alaskey, Rob Paulsen, Jeff Bennett, Jim Cummings and Michael Ruocco.
I’ve certainly heard the “Mortimer Snerd” voice done by others, but the only other one I can recall is Bill Cosby, who did it in his routine “Special Class” on the album Wonderfulness.
