June Foray, the voice of “The Bullwinkle Show’s” Rocky the Flying Squirrel and his nemesis Natasha Fatale of Boris and Natasha fame, died Thursday. She was 99.
Foray was the voice behind Looney Tunes’ Witch Hazel, Nell from “Dudley Do-Right,” Granny in the “Tweety and Sylvester” cartoons and Cindy Lou Who in Chuck Jones’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” among many others.
Hokey smoke!
I was really hoping she’d make it to her 100th birthday. Only two months shy. She lived a very long and productive life, working until the end. Chuck Jones once said of her, and Mel Blanc, “June Foray isn’t the female Mel Blanc. Mel is the male June Foray.”
June Foray and Bill Scott, together again.
D’oh! I meant, of course, “June Foray isn’t the female Mel Blanc. Mel is the male June Foray.” :smack:
I remember her from old Stan Freberg albums I had. Impressive career.
Damn!
well, you knew it was coming sometime.
On the Huffington Post they illustrated her obit with an incredibly awful image of Rocket J. Squirrel that didn’t look at all like him.
But Rocky isn’t the way to remember her – she did voices for everbody’s cartoons, starting in the 1940s. She worked for Warner Brothers (Witch Hazel and Granny, most notably, but she was their “go-to” female voice for everything), MGM, Hanna-Barbera, Disney (among other things, she was Grandma Fa in the Mulan movie and its spinoffs) as well as working for Jay Ward as the voice of Rocky, and Nell, and a great many others (and on his virtually forgotten “Fractured Flickers”).She voiced characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. She was the voice of Talky Tina on that episode of The Twilight Zone
iMDB credits her with 308 roles, but that has to be short of the total - she was uncredited in many cartoons.
She did narration and off-screen voices, too. I think she appeared a couple of times as an actual human being on-camera, but I can’t vouch for it – I haven’t seen those. Most of even live-action stuff was of off-screen characters. June Foray , even more that Mel Blanc and Paul Frees , really was her voice.
She was still doing voices three years ago. She’ll be missed
iMDB also doesn’t take account of her radio work, which was considerable. She started out playing roles on local radio in Massachusetts when she was only 12 years old. Once she graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles, she worked in radio with people like Orson Welles, Lionel Barrymore, Fanny Brice, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, and Lucille Ball. She really was an institution in the voice acting business. She was even the voice of the Chatty Cathy doll.
I was always vaguely, though pleasantly, surprised whenever I was reminded that she was still living. I guess I can’t really say this is unexpected news, but it’s sad nonetheless.
Here’s a nice tribute from her friend, writer and voice director Mark Evanier (which is where I got the information about her radio work).
Do you mean the .gif? I’ve seen Rocky looking like that in 1960’s animation. The studio, Gamma Productions, which was based in Mexico, was not known for its quality or consistency. According to Bill Scott,
The voice of my childhood. Glad she had such a long run.
No – not the gif in their article, but the one on their homepage directing you there. (Here – good for today only – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ This might work better – https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5979c3cd1a00008381dc0c9b.jpeg?cache=xxz0doxezw&ops=336_189,quality_75 )
I’m aware of Gamma productions’ very liberal limits on reproducibility and acceptability. The image Huffington Post used sits far outside even those limits – it barely looks like Rocky at all
I remember as a kid watching the Pat Boone vehicle The Perils of Pauline (1967). There’s a scene with some Arabian prince (a kid). When the kid spoke, I thought to myself, “That sounds just like Rocky the Squirrel.” Many years later I found it was.
Coincidentally, when I saw the movie some years ago and that scene came on, the prince’s father spoke (some kind of sultan), and as soon as he spoke I recognized the voice. “That’s Yukon Cornelius!” (Only that was his actual voice, not dubbed.)
Since it’s in B&W, I’m guessing it’s a very early design sketch of the character.
I read somewhere that Scott and Co. were originally forced to go with Gamma in order to keep costs down, but they stuck with them because the crappy animation was so much funnier.
Raskolnikov! Another star taken from us. 
RIP, June! May you find happiness on that great New Greenpernt in the sky!
Anybody get that lonely point?
“I’m Talky Tina…and I don’t like you very much”.
RIP, June…and Rocky, Natasha, Talky Tina, Cindi Lou Who, Witch Hazel, Betty Rubble, Jokey Smurf, Grandma Gummi, Nell Fenwick, owner of Tweety Bird-Granny, Magica de Spell… A true legend in voice acting.
She was also Peter Parker’s Aunt May, in SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS. Like, you’d hear Hans Conried hamming it up as a super-villain – and, in the same episode, you’d hear June Foray doing her iconic ‘quavering voice of a sixtysomething’ schtick; or you’d hear her interacting with an unmistakeable Alan Young. And so on.
“Oh my! Nothing like this has happened to me since the day the boys came home from Gettysburg!”
I went straight to the article from the link in the OP, so I didn’t see that. You’re right, even a MAD Magazine sketch would have looked better, no disrespect meant to MAD, which had some fine artists.
Goodbye June. Thanks for some of the best memories of my childhood.
I only noticed that in the credits the last time I saw the episode a few years ago. Very cool.
As pointed out above, Foray also provided the voice of the real-life toy Chatty Cathy, which almost certainly inspired Talky Tina, so it all fits together.
