In the "I didn't know he died" department, Don Messick, one of animation's most talented voice actors (of Scooby-Doo and Jonny Quest fame), passed away recently after a long, unspecified illness. I found this out only last week, while "lurking" on the Internet's rec.arts.animation newsgroup (in cybergeek-speak, "lurking" refers to when you read bulletin board posts, but don't participate in the discussions). Cartoon voiceover artists don't often get big obits in the press because they're so invisible and unknown, which is why I found out about Messick's death only on the Internet. (However, when Mel Blanc, the most famous voiceover actor of all time, died in 1989, he got a bunch of press, including a memorable tribute on National Public Radio.)
Messick's humble, amiable voice (he was often cast as dogs or kindly paternal figures) was a fixture of countless cartoon-loving viewers' childhoods, including mine; his voice popped up in more than half the cartoons I grew up on. Messick was a regular voice actor for the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon studio since 1957, when animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the creators of MGM's high-quality Tom & Jerry theatrical shorts, started producing low-budget animation for the small screen.
A Maryland native who spent his earlier showbiz years as a radio announcer and a ventriloquist, Messick created hundreds of voices for characters on Hanna-Barbera shows like Yogi Bear (he doubled as Boo-Boo, Yogi's partner in picnic basket-snatching, and Ranger Smith — Sheriff Buford T. Justice to Yogi's Burt Reynolds) and The Flintstones (he was Bamm-Bamm). But Messick will be remembered most for providing the scratchy voice of Scooby-Doo, Hanna-Barbera's cowardly, crime-solving canine. The campy Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? has become a twentysomething cult favorite in the '90s; ravers especially love it because they like to add a drug subtext to the show — why were Scooby and his best friend Shaggy always having the munchies? Last year, TV Guide did a two-page article about Scooby-Doo's newfound popularity among older viewers — and of course, they didn't acknowledge that the primary reason for its current cult following was the possible drug references.
Hanna-Barbera cartoons often had abysmal animation — I agree with many who blame Hanna-Barbera for sapping the art out of animation with its cookie-cutter animation techniques — but the performances of the voice actors were hardly awful. Performers like Daws Butler, Messick and Blanc — "The Man of 1,000 Voices" — made these low-quality cartoons watchable with their lively characterizations. One poster on the rec.arts.animation newsgroup said, "Messick could shift from one role to another so swiftly that directors often got confused and complained that the guy playing the dog was overlapping the guy playing the cat... only to then realize that Don was playing both parts."
In more recent years, Messick voiced Papa Smurf, Ratchet the ambulance on The Transformers and Hamton the neurotic pig on Tiny Toon Adventures. Last year, he suffered a series of strokes that kept him from working. When the Scooby-Doo characters made a guest appearance on an episode of Hanna-Barbera's new show, the very funny Johnny Bravo, Messick was too ill to reprise his Scooby role, so another voice actor substituted for him — and did a lousy, half-assed job. It was like Scooby on crack. Only Messick could do Scooby.
The press may not give a crap about cartoon voice actors or take them seriously, but I think highly of them. Messick helped elevate voice acting to an art form.