Mr. Laurel or Mr. Hardy
In this item, I mentioned Jim MacGeorge as the cartoon voices of Beany and Captain Huffenpuff, but I’d be willing to bet that there are a lot of things you don’t know about Mr. MacGeorge.
He’s probably best known for his numerous appearances as Stan Laurel to Chuck McCann’s Oliver Hardy. Chuck likes to tell the story that it takes him over an hour to get into make-up to play the larger half of one of the best comedy teams of all time, while Jim looks so much like Stan in real life that all he has to do to get into character is sneeze. At this point, Jim sneezes, running his fingers through his hair to make it stand up, lowers his eyelids to half-mast and gives that familiar tight-lipped grin, and without saying a word, he becomes Mr. Laurel.
Okay, so you may have known Jim plays Stan Laurel in windshield wiper commercials and variety shows, but did you know that in the Laurel and Hardy cartoon series made by Hanna-Barbera in 1966 that Jim did the voice of Oliver Hardy, while Larry Harmon did Stan’s voice? Jim is a great voice impressionist, but most people have only ever heard him do Stan Laurel.
And here’s another little piece of trivia, Jim wrote all of the Super Chicken cartoons for Jay Ward’s 1967 George of the Jungle TV series. Yes, that’s right, not voiced, but wrote. Paul Frees was the voice of Fred and Bill Scott clucked for Henry Cabot Henhouse, III (aka Super Chicken). But Jim turned out to be as talented a writer as he was a performer.
His other lead role was as Crazy Claws in the 1981 Hanna-Barbera cartoon, The Kwicky Koala Show. Kwicky Koala was an old-style H-B show with three funny animal cartoons. It was also the last thing created by veteran director Tex Avery. Crazy Claws, pictured at right, was a bobcat that would go into a wild spin, shredding everything in his path. Jim gave him a Groucho Marx voice for his sarcastic remarks. One of his foils, Rawhide Clyde was voiced by writer Bob Ogle, who incidentally, gave me my first writing job in Hollywood. But that’s a story for another time.
Jim is still very active and does stand-up for conventions and business groups. He tells jokes and does impressions and you can even book him, if you’re looking for a great after-dinner speaker.
Hmm, this was just supposed to be a little tribute, but I think I might have just earned 10% of his next gig. What do you say, Jim? I think he might say, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it!”