Cartoon Heroes

Ok, I wasn’t going to blog this, but the more I looked into it, the more there were cool coincidences, so I decided to go ahead.

Dr. Girlfriend

Nowadays, I love Adult Swim: the brilliance that is Family Guy and the cool, self-possession of Dr. Girlfriend. I’ve LOL’d to Squidbillies, and been edified by Persepolis.

I have always loved cartoons… I drew weird cartoons myself as a kid and adult. I devoured Saturday morning cartoons in the 80′s, which was a time when Saturday morning was still an EVENT for kids. In the 80′s, before internet and YouTube and all that stuff, Saturday was my ONLY “day off” of the week, since the week days were filled by school and Sunday was devoted entirely, day and night, to Jesus (shudder). I would wake up on a Saturday morning and throw off my Mickey Mouse sheets in excitement, knowing that the television was waiting for me in the living room with a full slate of programming made just for me! I’d get a glass Coca Cola bottle out of the refrigerator, pop off the metal cap, and plant it in front of the tube ready for hours of excitement.

So, this current Odyssey began with my enduring love for Miss Switch. It was a throwaway cartoon from the 80′s about some kids who found out their schoolteacher was actually a WITCH! OMG! Yes, I was a Goth-obsessive even way back then when I was a kid. Witches, wizards, monsters, magic… I was into it! At the time, I looked more like the nerdy narrator of the cartoon, but I wanted to be Miss Switch, damn it! Ha ha, I guess I sorta ended up as “Miss Switch” after all, though. Anyway, I thought that nobody remembered this cartoon, and until YouTube came along, and the internet made every tiny bit of errata available, I may have been. Side note: It appears that she teaches at “Pepperdine”, LOL!

So once things developed enough that all this information was available online, I searched around for the voice of Miss Switch. “Hmm, Janet Waldo… Ok.” I looked up more info… OMFG, Janet was also the voice of the cartoon version of Morticia Addams! AND OMDFG she was also the voice of Judy Jetson! THE Judy Jetson! Side note: Much later in life, when I was a showgirl at the Connection, I worked with an experienced and famous drag queen showgirl with the stage name of “Judy Jetson”. She was hilarious, and maybe some day I’ll tell you some of the… erm, unique installations she had in her dressing room, and the story of the tainted lip gloss. Maybe.

Janet Waldo

*Snort! Snort!*

So that had me looking around more, where I saw that she had done an “additional voice” on The Smurfs as Hogatha! When we were kids, my sister Ginger did a dead-on Hogatha impression (complete with the trademark “snort snort”) that always had us rolling on the floor, laughing (in the 80′s there was no abbreviation for that yet).

Paul Winchell, aka Gargamel!

So Hogatha was very attracted to Gargamel (on the Smurfs). Gargamel was played by Paul Winchell. He is the father of super-cool April Winchell, the online hoarder of rare, cool and unusual mp3s! I love her site, there are always tons of songs from weird, strange sources that you will find nowhere else. But, aside from April and the voice of Gargamel, you know what else Paul produced?!? The first artificial heart! He was also the voice of Tigger and Crackle, from the Rice Crispies commercials! OMFG!

It’s so weird… this little group of people, reaching into so many corners of my child psyche… playing so many characters…