16 Things We Learned About Nostalgic Cartoons In 2021 That Are Just Plain Smurfy

Actor and comedian Paul Winchell was a man of many talents; he was a ventriloquist and also an inventor, building and patenting a mechanical heart in 1963.

Winchell began voice acting for Hanna-Barbera during the late 1960s, notably appearing in Winnie-the-Pooh featurettes. As the voice of Tigger, Winchell won a Grammy for Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too in 1974. When The Smurfs first aired in 1981, he provided the voice for the antagonist, Gargamel.

While Winchell navigated acting and performing, he simultaneously invented and patented dozens of devices. His artificial heart design, which he donated to the University of Utah, was fundamental in developing the model that was used in 1982 for the first artificial heart transplant.

Chuck Jones directed many Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies episodes and was instrumental in shaping the characters’ personalities. Along the way, he created or co-created characters like Bugs Bunny, Pepe Le Pew, Marvin Martian, Wile E. Coyote, and Road Runner. Over numerous episodes, the adventures changed, but the rules of the wild cartoon universe remained consistent thanks to a clearly laid-out list.

Director Amos Posner posted the list from Jones’s autobiography, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (1999), to Twitter, saying: “Still obsessed with Chuck Jones’ coyote/roadrunner rules. Awesome to so clearly, concisely define your characters.”

In the Warner Bros. theatrical shorts, Mel Blanc voiced nearly all the major characters. He was Bugs Bunny, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig. When the original voice actor for Elmer Fudd, Arthur Q. Bryan, passed in 1959, Blanc stepped up to the plate.

He also voiced characters like Barney Rubble on The Flinstones, albeit from a hospital bed. In January 1961, Blanc fell into a coma for two weeks after a serious car incident and was in the hospital for 70 days. He continued his recovery at home in a hospital bed, but this didn’t stop him from working. The cast and crew of The Flintstones came to Blanc’s home, set up his microphone, and read their lines for him around his bed.

According to Blanc’s son, Noel, the prolific voice actor’s connection to one of his best-known characters, Bugs Bunny, was undeniable. When Blanc was in a coma, doctors searched for signs of life, speaking to him with no response. Eventually, after seeing Looney Tunes playing on the TV, they switched to another tactic.

“[The doctor] finally says, ‘Bugs, can you hear me?'” Noel recalled. To which Mel in character responded, “Yeah, what’s up, doc?”

Scooby-Doo was once the longest-running animated series on television. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? debuted on television in 1969, and new iterations of the show have continued to run for decades. In 2004, Scooby-Doo became the longest-running animated comedy, according to Guinness World Records.

Scooby-Doo no longer holds that title. Currently, the longest-running animated series in the Western world is The Simpsons, while Sazae-San from Japan ran continuously from 1969-2020.

Through the years and in the many new and reshaped Scooby shows and movies, Shaggy and Scooby have been the only characters present at every step. Frank Welker, one of the most prolific voice actors in the history of animation – with as many as 850 credits to his name – started voicing Fred on Scooby-Doo from the outset and has ever since. After the voice actor for the titular character (Don Messick) perished, Welker took on voicing Scooby, too.

Welker was 23 years old when he started voicing Fred Jones in 1969 and, although the show had some brief hiatuses from airing, has remained a constant as the man who drives the Mystery Machine. Welker takes joy in the fact that, over the decades, “Fred was the only one who had a license… As long as nobody took the van away from me, that gave me four-wheel power.”

When Welker auditioned for Scooby-Doo, however, he wasn’t trying for the role of Fred. Welker, rather, wanted to voice Shaggy – which ultimately went to Casey Kasem. Kasem actually auditioned for Fred but, when the voices were finally assigned, the two men had been swapped. Welker explained:

I really liked Shaggy, and tried to have fun with that, and I know Casey wanted to do Fred because he wasn’t really comfortable doing that kind of goofy Shaggy part. But then Joe [Barbera] [switched us], and Casey came up with that crazy, wonderful voice for Shaggy.

Joe said that Fred was the all-American hero type and that I should just do my own voice. I was like, “I never saw myself as the hero type, but OK!”… I’m kind of a comedian goofball, so it was a little bit hard being restricted, but I was just happy to be a part of the [group].

There’s a reason so many Hanna-Barbera characters have collars. From Yogi Bear to Fred Flintstone to Huckleberry Hound, the animated stars were drawn wearing collars because it cut down significantly on the number of drawings needed for each episode.

According to Joseph Barbera, putting a collar or necktie around a character helped cut costs, which was important when the creators shifted their focus from putting cartoons on the big screen to television during the late 1950s and ’60s.

With a collar, animators only had to worry about drawing a character’s head; the body could remain relatively static. This technique, called “limited animation,” developed “because there was no money, absolutely no money,” according to Barbera.

Frank Sinatra’s 1966 song “Strangers in the Night” closes with a somewhat bungled phrase, one that inspired the name of an equally klutzy dog. Sinatra riffs “scooby dooby doo,” which inspired the moniker for the lovable mystery-solving canine.

According to television executive Fred Silverman, who had an idea for a show about teenage mystery solvers, he heard the music while on a plane and it made him think of making their dog a key character:

[A]nd as we’re landing… Frank Sinatra comes on, and I hear him say, “scooby-dooby-doo.” That’s it, we’ll take the dog – we’ll call it Scooby-Doo.

Silverman made it happen and Scooby-Doo was born.

Alongside Scooby-Doo’s musical origins, the human characters on Scooby-Doo were based on characters from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a sitcom that aired from 1959-1963. Dwayne Hackman played the titular role, one of many teenage characters presenting stories about their lives from their own points of view – rather than those of adults.

Other characters included Maynard G. Krebs (played by Bob Denver), Thalia Menniger (played by Tuesday Weld), and Zelda Gilroy (played by Sheila James Kuehl). Together, Dobie, Maynard, Thalia, and Zelda were prototypes for Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma, respectively.

As Scooby-Doo went through different stages of development, the would-be names of the characters came to fruition – as did the name of the show itself. At first, Scooby-Doo was called Mysteries Five and W-Who’s S-S-Scared? but the latter was determined to be too frightening for a children’s show. In the end, they decided to name the show after the dog they’d worked into the mystery-solving group, Scooby-Doo.

When The Jetsons first aired in 1962, the lead character George was voiced by George O’Hanlon for the initial 24 episodes of the show. When it was canceled, he spent his time writing and picking up other acting roles.

When The Jetsons was revived during the 1980s, O’Hanlon was again tapped to voice George. By that time, he had suffered a stroke and “couldn’t read, he couldn’t memorize, he couldn’t concentrate very well.” The studio was willing to accommodate him and O’Hanlon received assistance recording his lines. According to Joseph Barbera:

[O’Hanlon] couldn’t see. So you had to read him the line, and he would then do it, and that was one line at a time.

The same system was used when O’Hanlon voiced George for The Jetsons movie in 1989. As he was finishing up a recording session, however, he showed signs of distress. He was taken to the hospital, where he passed soon after, the result of a second stroke.

When it was released in 1990, The Jetsons was dedicated to O’Hanlon and to voice artist Mel Blanc, who’d passed a few months earlier, as well. Both O’Hanlon and Blanc’s parts in The Jetsons were completed by voice actor Jeff Bergman.

Author David Feldman decided to get to the bottom of what Barney Rubble’s job actually was, going so far as to call Hanna-Barbera Productions to find out. He wasn’t alone in his inquiry; apparently, many people had asked this question over the years.

According to Feldman, representatives from the company told him they used to get calls from drunk fans who needed to know what Barney would put as his occupation on his tax forms. One security guard said the calls were so common, he simply responded:

I know why you’re calling; you want to know what Barney Rubble did for a living. He worked at the quarry. But why don’t you call back after opening hours?

That remains the company stance on Barney’s job to this day. While he worked at Mr. Slate’s quarry, there’s still no real clarity as to what he did there.

In another Rubble-related conundrum, Feldman also found out why Betty Rubble wasn’t included in Flintstone vitamins. From what he gathered, she simply wasn’t popular enough to warrant a chewable nutritional supplement all her own. This changed in 1995, when Bayer Corp. announced it was adding Betty to the fold. In doing so, the company decided to remove the car-shaped vitamin.

The signature baby voices on Rugrats are suffused with missing words, malapropisms, and other charming signifiers of the characters’ youth, all voiced by women. Elizabeth “E.G.” Daily provided the voice for Tommy Pickles, the main character, and put all her energy into making him come alive.

In an interview with The Guardian, Daily revealed that at one point she recorded Tommy’s voice while in labor:

The engineer was like, “Your contractions are coming really quickly now.” And I was like, “No, I’m fine.” Very soon after that, I had my daughter.

It’s not entirely clear if Daily was the first person to be in labor while voicing a role for any cartoon, but Rugrats does hold the distinction of another “first.” On June 28, 2001, a ceremony was held to award Rugrats with its star on Hollywood Boulevard, the first for a Nickelodeon cartoon.

Grunge icon Kurt Cobain could have written a song for The Ren & Stimpy Show, according to voice actor Billy West. West voiced both Stimpy and, after series creator John Kricfalusi was fired by Nickelodeon, Ren.

During a 2010 interview on the Nerdist podcast, West claimed Cobain came to the show’s studio and offered to write them a song:

One day, this scraggly kid comes in and said he wanted to write a song for Ren & Stimpy, and they said, “Yeah, that’s great,” and they threw it in the wastebasket. It was Kurt Cobain. I think John [Kricfalusi] was like, “Who does this guy think he is? Who do all these people think they are coming in here?”

According to Flavorwire, this might have been around 1992, just as Nirvana was breaking into the mainstream.

Ever since West told this story, Cobain fans have wondered what happened to this song – and if it might be one of the home recordings released on Montage of Heck in 2015. In 2021, West was asked on Twitter if he knew what happened to this alleged song. West replied, “I don’t think the song actually exists. As far as I know it had yet to be written and remained a proposal.”