9 Famous Voices Behind the Cartoons You Grew Up With

If you grew up on Looney Tunes, you grew up on Mel Blanc. He was the original voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn and so many more that Warner Bros. essentially built a whole cartoon universe on one man’s throat. They called him “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration—by his own studio’s reckoning he supplied the voice for the overwhelming majority of its cartoon stars.

Here’s a detail that always gets people: Blanc was reportedly allergic to carrots, which made Bugs’s signature munch a small ordeal to record. And when a near-fatal car crash left him in a coma in 1961, doctors are said to have finally gotten a response by addressing him not as Mel, but as Bugs Bunny. That’s how deep the voices ran.

For decades, if a cartoon needed a woman’s voice—sweet, wicked, or anywhere in between—the call went to June Foray. She was Rocky the Flying Squirrel and the deliciously villainous Natasha Fatale on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, often voicing half the cast of a given scene. She was also Granny in the Warner Bros. Tweety and Sylvester shorts, and Cindy Lou Who in the 1966 Grinch special.

Foray worked from childhood radio in Massachusetts all the way to her late nineties, and she was a founder of the organization that would eventually push the Academy to create an Oscar category for animated feature. Chuck Jones reportedly liked to say that June Foray wasn’t the female Mel Blanc—Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.

That booming, bottomless bass telling you a bowl of Frosted Flakes was “grrreat”? That was Thurl Ravenscroft, and he voiced Tony the Tiger in Kellogg’s commercials for more than half a century. Once you know the voice, you hear it everywhere—it had a warmth under all that growl.

But his most beloved recording is one most people credit to the wrong man. Ravenscroft sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” in the 1966 animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His name was left off the credits, so for years audiences assumed the song came from narrator Boris Karloff. Next December, listen closely—that’s the tiger.

Some voices just sound like comfort, and Sterling Holloway’s high, soft, slightly raspy tenor was one of them. He was the original voice of Winnie the Pooh, and he said Pooh was his favorite of everything he ever did. If you read those stories aloud to your own kids with a particular gentle lilt, there’s a good chance you were doing a quiet impression of him without realizing it.

Holloway’s run at Disney stretched nearly forty years. He was the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, Kaa the hypnotizing snake in The Jungle Book, and the stork who delivers Dumbo. In 1991 Disney named him a Legend—the very first person honored specifically for voice work.

When Hanna-Barbera turned cartoons into a television industry, Daws Butler was one of the two voices doing most of the heavy lifting. He originated Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Snagglepuss, among dozens of others—that drawl, that sly pause before a punchline, those were his.

Butler was also a teacher, and a generous one. He trained a whole generation of voice actors in his home, including Nancy Cartwright, who went on to become Bart Simpson. So the next time you hear “Ay, caramba,” there’s a thread running straight back to a man who taught his craft the way a good mechanic teaches an apprentice.

Daws Butler’s most frequent partner was Don Messick, and together they anchored Hanna-Barbera’s whole stable. Messick usually played the loyal sidekick to Butler’s lead—Boo Boo to Yogi, Ranger Smith, Astro the dog on The Jetsons, Papa Smurf. His specialty was the amiable foil, the voice standing just behind the star.

His biggest role came in 1969, when he became Scooby-Doo and stayed for nearly thirty years. Every nervous “ruh-roh,” every happy “Scooby-Dooby-Doo” was Messick, a ventriloquist by training who found his real stage inside a Great Dane who was afraid of ghosts.

Paul Winchell was the bounce in Tigger. Disney hired him in 1968 for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and that spring-loaded “T-T-F-N, ta-ta for now” stayed his for the next three decades. Before Hollywood, he was a star ventriloquist with dummies named Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff.

And here’s the part that sounds made up: Winchell patented an early artificial heart in 1963, a device that served as a prototype for the mechanical hearts that came later. The man who gave Tigger his hop also helped point the way toward keeping real ones beating.

You almost certainly know Jim Backus’s face—he was Thurston Howell III, the stranded millionaire on Gilligan’s Island. But years before that, his harrumphing, patrician bluster had already made him the voice of Mr. Magoo, the cheerfully nearsighted old gentleman who bumbled through cartoons certain that everything was exactly where it should be.

Backus did a little of everything—radio, Broadway, movies, television. He even played James Dean’s father in Rebel Without a Cause. But it’s Magoo’s squint and that unmistakable upper-crust grumble that stuck.

You spent Sunday mornings with Casey Kasem counting down the hits on American Top 40—he launched that countdown in 1970 and became one of the most recognizable voices in American radio. What a lot of people never connected is that the same man was Shaggy Rogers, Scooby-Doo’s perpetually hungry, perpetually spooked best friend.

Kasem voiced Shaggy on and off from 1969 for decades, and he put his own values into the part. A committed vegetarian and later a vegan, he famously walked away from the role rather than record a fast-food commercial that had Shaggy ordering a burger. The producers eventually came around.