Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a pretty fair knack for spotting voices. When, as a kiddo, I figured out from a book or magazine article I’d read that Mel Blanc did all of the Looney Tunes voices, I started hearing him elsewhere…usually anytime an old sitcom had a parrot, or sometimes in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, or even in movies like “Strange Brew”. (Incidentally, Mel Blanc did NOT do all the Looney Tunes voices…Elmer Fudd was voiced by Arthur Q. Bryan, several characters were voiced by the tremendous Stan Freberg and female voices were done first by Bea Benederet and later June Foray. There was an even wider variety of non-Blanc voices used in the 30’s and 40’s.)
Years of cartoon-watching left me able to identify all of the above along with other titans like Paul Frees, Daws Butler, Don Messick, John Stephenson and more. Eventually the voice-spotting habit expanded beyond cartoons to movie and TV promo voices, announcers, disc jockeys…anybody who got paid to use their voice.
To this day I love hearing a voice and being able to ID it. It’s just about the most useless parlor trick on planet Earth but, hey, I’m a radio geek. I love this stuff!
Which brings me to an episode of “The Flintstones” I had on this morning. It was rolling along when all of a sudden, I heard an extremely familiar but alien voice coming from a TV commercial pitchman character. Familiar, because I knew I’d heard it countless times over the years. Alien, because it was not one of the usual Hanna-Barbera voice guys. (The earlier episodes of “The Flintstones” have some surprising voice actors popping up, guys like Frank Nelson and Herb Vigran.) As much as I knew the voice was familiar, I needed some help. IMDB to the rescue! The part of the commercial pitchman in this episode of “The Flinstones” was voiced by…Bern Bennett!
Bern Bennett announced on TV for a hundred years. Okay, maybe not that long. But come on!
The 1950’s…
The 60’s…
The 70’s…
The 80’s…
The 90’s and beyond…
Bern Bennett got a rare moment of on-camera notoriety in 1990 when he was a central figure on an episode of “To Tell The Truth”, a series on which he was the original announcer back in the 50’s! (I figured out which one is really him…but it took a while!)