Flags should fly at half-mast in every alley in America, in tribute to Arnold Stang – a personal favorite actor who left us at age 91.Among his many roles, in both live action and animation voicing, was that of TOP CAT, the popular 1961 Hanna-Barbera prime time animated series.
Other animation voicing roles of note were Herman (of Herman and Katnip), Shorty the obnoxiously hyper little sailor friend of Popeye, and the Honey Nut Cheeiros Bee!I don’t know what Arnold Stang’s last appearance might be, but he did a DVD extra feature for the TOP CAT the Complete Series DVD set of late 2004. Interested parties can enjoy a ten-minute interview with him there.
I’d almost like to go outside and clang two trash can lids together (the method Top Cat used to summon his gang) in memorial to Mr. Stang… but with today’s plastic lids, it just wouldn’t be the same!
2 comments:
Joe,
I'll personally always cherish Arnold's performance (with Leo de Lyon, I believe) as hapless proprietor of the gas station trashed by Jonathan Winters in IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD.
Strange, isn't it, that Stang and the much, much younger Brittany "Luann" Murphy died at just about the same time.
Chris
Chris, it was Marvin Kaplan,not DeLyon, though they both worked on TC. I always found that cast veyr interesting and a tremendous expierence for Joe Barbera in experimenting with more characters and voices without the "Scooby/Smurf" effect of needlessly adding more as later shows would have.DeLyon was one of the only ones, along with John Stephenson to play more than one reucrring Top Cat character. Leo was Brain and Spook, John as Fancy Fancy and the frequent villian, a French cat named Pierre.
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