June Foray -- The Queen Of Cartoons

by Michelle Klein-Häss

It's very hard not to use superlatives when writing about June Foray. Long considered the best (and certainly the most visible) voice actress working in animation, she is now acclaimed as the finest living animation voice artist, period. And she is certainly the most recognizable. Just as one would marvel at the many, many voices created by Mel Blanc, and could hear in each characterization his own distinct vocal signature, Ms. Foray's personality shines through in every character she has helped bring to life. From her work at Disney, Warner Bros., Lantz and MGM during the 1950s, to Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Natasha Fatale, to her most recent work, her characters all seem to have a special sparkle, a liveliness that none of her peers can touch.

She lives in a comfortable but modest home in a suburb of Los Angeles with a veritable museum of animation memorabilia and a very friendly canine companion. As well as remaining active in voice-over work, Ms. Foray is also on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the folks who give out the Oscar each year) and on the advisory board of the Cartoon Network alongside such luminaries as Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Friz Freleng and John Kricfalusi. And as one of the founders of the Hollywood chapter of ASIFA, Ms. Foray has been very active in promoting the present state of the art and the future possibilities of animation.

Ms. Foray began her long career at the young age of 12, as a radio actress at a local radio station in her birthplace (and Animato! home base) Springfield, Massachusetts. "My dramatic teacher had a radio show, and so I went on it. By the time I was 15 I joined the WBZA Players in Springfield on a regular basis. Acting has been an important part of my life certainly since my school years...I managed to have a part in just about every school play that was put on. I have to hand it to Mrs. Larson...she really taught me a lot about being a professional."

By age 17, Ms. Foray was living in Los Angeles, the west coast hub of the major radio networks as well as the home of the American film and recording industry. She began writing and performing in radio, eventually writing and performing her own children's show, Lady Makebelieve at age 19. The Northridge Earthquake uncovered a long- forgotten boxful of Lady Makebelieve scripts, and the ever resourceful Ms. Foray decided to make the best of the discovery.

"I'm going to record six cassettes featuring some of the old Lady Makebelieve stories for Turner Publishing over the next three years, and they have options on the stories for other media: books, TV, film, animation, the whole spectrum....The character of Lady Makebelieve narrated the stories, and did all the parts in the stories as well. I wrote all the stories myself. I remember it was really well received when I did it for radio originally...the LA City School District actually replayed the transcriptions in school. The stories were innocent, charming fantasies...I think that's needed in times like these. Yes, older children should know about subjects like crime and AIDS and sexuality, but I think that younger children need some magic back in their lives...they need to have an escape."

Ms. Foray spent her early adulthood working on radio programs like the Lux Theatre, the Danny Thomas show, the Jimmy Durante show and many others, during a time when radio was as ubiquitous in people's lives as TV is now. Then, in the late '40s, she began working in film, both in live action as a voice replacement artist and in the field she loves best: animation voice acting. Her first work in animation was in the strange hybrid live action/animation shorts by Jerry Fairbanks for Paramount, Speaking of Animals. Then in 1950, she began work at Disney. Her first work there was doing feline vocal effects as Lucifer the Cat in Cinderella.

"I met Stan Freberg and Daws Butler on Speaking of Animals. Then, around that time Stan, Daws, Mel Blanc and myself got signed to Capitol Records to do children's records. Remember, this was before Warner Bros. and Disney had their own record labels, so there was no problem having us record for Capitol...I also cut records for RCA as well. The producers at Warner Bros. and Disney heard my work on these records, and they hired me based on that."

From then on, Ms. Foray worked constantly in animation, helping to create such memorable characters as Witch Hazel, and turning previously nondescript characters like Granny in the Tweety and Sylvester series of cartoons into something more fleshed out and alive. Because of this, she became one of Chuck Jones' favorite voice actors, and continues to work with him to this day. She worked at MGM with Tex Avery on two cartoons, most memorably as the female announcer on "Cars Of Tomorrow." She also voiced characters for Walter Lantz, and not only vocally portrayed the Indian Princess and one of the Mermaids in Disney's Peter Pan but also served as the live-action model for the Mermaid that was used as a reference for the animators. All through this period of work, however, she felt a little slighted because even though her voice was heard, she got no on-screen credit for her work.

"It did rankle a little bit. Mel Blanc was the only one who was getting the onscreen credit, and that was because Warners didn't really pay him what he deserved and he managed to get the credit as a compromise to keep him from walking out on them. Stan Freberg was not happy about this, and neither was Daws Butler. At least now all of us who did voices on Warners cartoons are getting credit when they air on TV. But I'd like to see the credits added to the shorts on video and when they are shown theatrically."

But all that anonymity changed when she began work in 1958 on Rocky and His Friends, where she not only created the voices she is most famous for, Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Natasha Fatale, but was also the voice of most of the female characters in those cartoons. The show was wildly successful, at times controversial in its day, and still has an enduring audience on both cable and broadcast TV.

The track recording sessions for those cartoons were very different from how the major animation studios did it in that rather than having isolated voice actors performing their voices line by line, the track was laid down live, with all the actors in one studio playing off each other.

"[Rocky and His Friends] was great all around...the writing, the stories, the satire, the conception, the acting, the direction... it was very intelligent, very sophisticated. We offended sports stars, congressmen...but all the time it was gentle, friendly satire. Nothing cruel. I look at my time there and I can say, with a fair amount of certainty, that this was the zenith, this was the high- water mark of my career. The Warners cartoons were great, too, but the techniques they used for recording voices didn't allow for the interplay between the actors. The rapid delivery was just incredible. It couldn't have been done line by line."

Around 1960, Hanna-Barbera was working on another addition to the animated family show derby that included at that point Bob Clampett's Beany & Cecil (as part of the Mattel Toys-sponsored Matty's Funday Funnies) and The Bugs Bunny Show, both of which were airing in prime time on the ABC TV network. They made a pilot, The Flagstones, which led to the series, retitled The Flintstones due to conflicts with the comic strip Hi & Lois. On this pilot, which recently resurfaced thanks to the diligence of researchers working for Turner, it is Foray, not Bea Benaderet, who is voicing the dishy Mrs. Betty Rubble. Why did Ms. Foray not continue in this role?

"I have no idea. That really disappointed me...I don't think that Hanna-Barbera had anything to do with the decision...as far as I can figure it was a decision from the network brass. When I went in to do the voice, I asked them 'What kind of a voice do you want? Do you want a nagging voice, a sweet voice?' and they replied 'Just do your normal voice.' That's what I did...it was just me. Then, to my shock, they held auditions later for the voice, and they didn't invite me. I can look back at it now without any sort of resentment, but back then I was really mad."

Even after the demise of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which continued in production until the mid-1960s, Ms. Foray continued to be in demand as a voice actress, lending her vocal talents to not only cartoons, but doing dialogue replacement and looping as well. And in the 1990s, she still is quite active in these areas. She recently recorded tracks for a new Don Bluth movie currently in production, The Pebble and the Penguin. (She did the voice of the Queen of the Fairies in Bluth's most recent release, Thumbelina.) She is Granny Goodwitch in a continuing series of spots for Post Golden Crisp cereal. And she continues to be a regular vocal performer on Film Roman's Garfield series.

How does she come up with a voice for a given character? Sometimes she reaches back into her previous work and does a variation of one of her classic characters. And sometimes the process is one of pure serendipity.

"Sometimes you have to think off the top of your head when you go in to work on a given project. For example, I was working at Hanna-Barbera, on staff as a voice actor, and I went in to work on The Smurfs. I assumed they wanted me to do the voice of Smurfette...after all, she was the only female amongst the Smurfs. I instead ended up doing the voice of Jokey Smurf. This was 1980, something like that. Before I went in to record, I looked at all the model sheets for the characters, The director, Gordon Hunt, told me 'hey, why don't you try some of the other characters and see what you can do with them.' I simply didn't know any of the others...I was in to read for Smurfette. So I read cold on the others. My background in radio helped me a lot on that. I saw Jokey Smurf, with his 'Hyuk Hyuk Hyuk' dialogue balloon next to him, and improvised a funny laugh. It all fit together. So it turned out that I did Jokey on the show.

"But by that time, going in and reading for a part was something I didn't do much of anymore. And now I don't do that at all. They ask me occasionally to voice test for a job, but I won't anymore. Perhaps I've not gotten as many jobs as I could have, but I've gotten to a point where I would rather do less jobs and not have the stress. I did so many auditions when I was younger. I am still working, I am financially secure...why not let other, newer talents get a chance? When they ask for me to do a voice, they want me...they specifically want a 'June Foray voice.' The producers know the kind of characters I have done in the past, and they also know I can go in and come up with something unusual."

When she is not in the vocal booth, Ms. Foray is active with ASIFA-Hollywood, and is also sort of an ambassador of goodwill for the Hollywood animation community, making public appearances like one she recently did at the Hollywood Bowl as a part of Bugs Bunny On Broadway II. And as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors, she has been passionately involved in promoting awareness of animation in the Academy, and also helped to keep a live-action short subject category in the Academy Awards.

"The reason why the Academy wanted to get rid of live-action shorts was that they thought that there was no audience for them. But then they realized that there were new venues where live-action shorts were being shown...untraditional venues like Imax, Showscan, the new movie rides from Iwerks Entertainment. And the technical propensities of these new short films are nothing short of tremendous!....I didn't do it alone though...my colleagues on the board and also directors like Spielberg, Lucas and Scorcese who started their careers doing shorts helped to convince the Academy that the category should remain."

Her activism in the movie industry is also matched by her activism in political, animal-related and environmental causes. She even managed to get herself on the Nixon Enemies List in 1973 because she helped to organize a national meat boycott.

The price of meat in '73 was incredibly high...disproportionately high. A friend of mine called me and told me that some women back east were organizing a boycott, and why don't we help? So I called up Michael Jackson (the LA-based radio talk show host, not the self-proclaimed "King of Pop") and told him what we were going to do. Jackson is pretty omnipotent in LA media even now, and through him we got national media attention, and then things snowballed. We set the boycott for the first week of April, beginning April Fools Day. Hubert Humphrey called me to Washington to testify before Congress. The movement was so successful, even before the boycott day, that the meat producers had to ship cattle down to Argentina to sell them...and that's like shipping coals to Newcastle, you know? My husband and I got calls that would end at about two in the morning and start up again at five. About a week before the boycott, I got a call from Charles Osgood telling me that Nixon was putting a ceiling on meat prices, and asked if the boycott was still on. I said yes, because the ceiling was too high, and furthermore we were not just out to get the price of meat lowered, we were there to make a point. This embarrassed Nixon so much he put me on the enemies list, and as a result my taxes were audited for ten years after that!"

If Tex Avery was the King of Cartoons, as Joe Adamson described him in the title of his book, then Foray definately deserves the title of Queen of Cartoons. And her reign is likely to continue for a long time to come.

(This article originally appeared in Animato! Magazine#30, Fall 1994.)

Page last updated 1/15/1998

Michelle Klein-Häss
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