Daws Butler



Butler in 1976

Born: Charles Dawson Butler;November 16, 1916; Toledo, Ohio, U.S.
Died: May 18, 1988 (aged 71); Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place: Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City
Other names: Dawes Butler
Occupation: Voice actor

Charles Dawson Butler (November 16, 1916 – May 18, 1988), professionally known as Daws Butler, was an American voice actor. He worked mostly for the Hanna-Barbera animation production company, where he originated the voices of many familiar characters, including Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Auggie Doggie, Loopy De Loop, Wally Gator, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, Snooper and Blabber, Hokey Wolf, Elroy Jetson, Peter Potamus, The Funky Phantom and Hair Bear.

Early life and career

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In 1949, Butler landed a role in a televised puppet show created by former Warner Bros. Cartoons animation director Bob Clampett called Time for Beany. He was teamed with Stan Freberg, with whom he did all the puppets' voices: Butler voiced Beany Boy and Captain Huffenpuff, and Freberg voiced Cecil and Dishonest John. An entire stable of recurring characters were also seen. The show's writers were Charles Shows and Lloyd Turner, whose dependably funny dialog was still always at the mercy of Butler's and Freberg's ad libs. Time for Beany ran from 1949 to 1954, and won several Emmy Awards.

In 1952, Butler starred in the live-action short Nice Try, Virgil.

He briefly turned his attention to writing and voicing TV commercials. In the 1950s, Freberg asked him to help him write comedy skits for his Capitol Records albums. Their first collaboration, "St. George and the Dragonet" (based on Dragnet), was the first comedy record to sell over a million copies. Freberg was more of a satirist who did song parodies, but the bulk of his dialogue routines were co-written by and co-starred Butler.

Butler teamed again with Freberg and actress June Foray in a CBS radio series, The Stan Freberg Show, which ran from July to October 1957 as a summer replacement for Jack Benny's program. Freberg's box set, Tip of the Freberg (Rhino Entertainment, 1999), chronicles every aspect of Freberg's career except the cartoon voice-over work, and showcases his career with Butler. In Mr. Magoo, the UPA theatrical animated short series for Columbia Pictures, Butler played Magoo's nephew Waldo (also voiced by Jerry Hausner at various times)] In Freberg's "Green Chri$tma$" in 1958, a scathing indictment of the over-commercialization of the holiday, Butler soberly hoped instead that we'd remember "whose birthday we're celebrating".

Butler provided the voices of many nameless Walter Lantz Productions' characters for theatrical shorts later seen on the Woody Woodpecker program. His characters included the penguin Chilly Willy and his best friend Smedley, a Southern-speaking dog (the same voice used for Tex Avery's laid-back wolf character and for Hanna-Barbera's Huckleberry Hound).

In 1957, when MGM had closed their animation unit, producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera quickly formed their own company, and Butler and Don Messick were on hand to provide voices. The first, The Ruff and Reddy Show, with Butler voicing Reddy, set the formula for the rest of the series of cartoons that the two helmed until the mid-1960s. He played the title roles in The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Quick Draw McGraw Show, and The Yogi Bear Show, and portrayed a variety of other characters.

Characters

Some of the characters voiced by Butler from 1948 to 1978 included:

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Stan Freberg - St. George & The Dragonet, 1953 Capitol record.

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Capitol 2596. This is the theme sound intro music(minus the spoken word part on this record) for the "Dragnet" TV-crime show series on NBC from 1951 to 1959, and 1967 to 1970.

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