I was Google-ing around looking for lyrics to the songs from Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels, and I came across some voice credits at IMDB that said they were complete, but all they listed were the main characters, non of the minor ones.

Then I did some digging into the name Jack Mercer. Found a page that says he did ALL the voices in the old Felix the Cat 'toons. That says to me that then Jack was the voice of all three spies and probably King Bombo as well.

Can anyone out there help me out on this ?

Thanks.

Yes indeed, Jack Mercer did every single voice in the Joe Oriolo tv Felix the Cat series. I do a pretty good Master Cylinder and Professor myself!



It's been a while since I've seen Gulliver's Travels. I think it's about time to pull out that tape and watch it again. I know all of his voices so this time I'll have to write them all down.

Let's see if I can remember them. King Little, The Florist, Snoop the Spy, Teamster, Prince David, and the Lilliputian in the Red Night Shirt, and other incidentals.

I am also making a guess that Mercer voiced Felix in those Van Beuren shorts in the mid '30's. Fleischer and Van Beuren often shared personell. And gues who was also working at Van Beuren at the time, Joe Oriolo!

Van Beuren also had Winston Sharples.

Sorry, but that was not exactly the way it was. According to Jack Mercer's interview I have, he went to work for Fleischer's around 1932 or '33, as an opaquer and inker on POPEYE THE SAILOR. He never mentioned having worked at any other animation studio before, or after being hired at Fleischer. Once he was discovered for his voice talents, he was moved into the story department at Fleischer's, and continued on with Famous Studios, later Paramount Cartoon Studios as of 1958. He did some freelance work for Terrytoons in the early 1960s on television shows such as DEPUTY DAWG.

As far as "sharing" personnel goes, it was more so a matter of people leaving Van Beuren either voluntarily, or from being fired by Burt Gillette. Fleischer Studios hired many dismissed workers from Van Beuren when they closed in 1937 just at Fleischer was expanding. The supervisors at Fleischer's felt in many cases that the work of the Van Beuren people was not up their standards, and Fleischers could only offer lower level positions to people who had been ink and paint supervisors and animators at Van Beuren. The disgruntled sentiments of the Van Beuren employees, combined with other
management issues regarding the pressure for more POPEYE cartoons aggitated by Paramount resulted in the five month strike. This was the first such labor strike in the motion picture industry. This incident, combined with several others based on poor timing and bad business judgement brought about the demise of Fleischer Studios, with its relocation to Miami the following year. And as we know, Fleischer Studios becamse Famous Studios in mid 1942.

Well, if Mercer didn't speak for Felix in this Van Beuren shorts, who did? As for the Fleischers treatment of Van Beuren personell, Joe Oriolo and Win Sharples seem to have done all right there. There was a lot of top talent that worked at Van Beuren when it was forced to close toward the end of 1936, I find it surprising that the Fleischers wold give the cold shoulder to the likes of Bill Littlejohn, Joe Barbera, Jack Zander and Frank Tashlin but the point is academic. They all went to work elswhere. So the Fleischer's loss iwas someone else's gain.

I might be mistaken, but weren't Joe Barbera and Jack Zander at Terry at this point in time? That's where they
were when they departed for MGM to work on The Captain and the Kids.

When they left Van Beuren they went to Terry.

There are a number of ill-founded conclusions here. First, Jack Mercer did the Felix voice for the Joe Oriolo series in 1959. The voice used in the three Van Beuren Felix cartoons seems to be by a woman or midget like Walter Tetley. Although the voice sounds like Tetley's, I have no information to support that is was him. But I do know that it definately was not Jack Mercer;s voice, as anyone familiar with his vocal range should be able to recognize.

The "Fleischers" did not give the "cold" shoulder to the men you mentioned. Joe Barbera told me that he left Van Beuren because Burt Gillette's characters such as
Parrotville Parrots and Molly Moo Cow weren't very good characters, which they weren't. His work on Kiko the Kangaroo was not any more inspired, but he learned a lot, especially about unappealing characters with limited personalities.

Win Shaples was a freelance arranger/composer. He did things other than cartoon scores for Van Beuren and later Fleischer. So he was not technically an "employee."
Sharples came in at Fleischer's around the time of the closing of Van Beuren, and became part of the music department under Lou Fleischer's supervision.

It is not a fair and proven fact that Fleischer's or anyone else's loss was anyone else's gain since there are so many other factors and events that figure into each situation, the most being sustaining a job during the depression.

Here's what I found in Gulliver's that Mercer voiced:

King Little

Snoop the Spy (in his Professor's voice from Felix the Cat tv)

Head baker who brings in wedding cake

A few incidentals but they were only one word or were on screen very briefly to tell exactly who was speaking.

Interesting discussion, and lots of useufl background info. Verring off topic slightly, to the earlier point, King Bombo, according to most sources (as well as my own admittedly not always reliable ear), was played by Tedd Pierce, who had played various roles at Warner Bros., and went on to play C. Bagley Beetle in "Mr. Bug Goes to Town."

Though radio singer (a regular on "Showboat" at the time) Lanny Ross is credited as the singing voice of Prince David, as M. Pointer stated, his few speaking lines were Mercer's. I've oft debated whether or not to purchase the I YAM WHAT I YAM book on Mercer by Fred Grandinetti, rather guardedly promoted by Jerry Beck as essentially a scrapbook. Considering how long his animation career spanned, in various capacities, even a scrapbook-style book should prove interesting (I wish I could get my hands on the Mercer interview record included with Funnyworld #18, long ago).

And Sharples of course returned to the wonderful cat in 1958 with the aforementioned and much-maligned TV verison for Oriolo.

[quote=Steve Carras,Aug 5 2004, 12:27 PM] [/QUOTE]
And Sharples of course returned to the wonderful cat in 1958 with the aforementioned and much-maligned TV verison for Oriolo. [/quote]
Giving new meaning to "the circle of life."

[quote=Steve Carras,Aug 5 2004, 12:27 PM] [/QUOTE]
And Sharples of course returned to the wonderful cat in 1958 with the aforementioned and much-maligned TV verison for Oriolo. [/quote]
Giving new meaning to "the circle of life."

Make that the "circus of life"!