Stang studies

Taking off from my brief appre­ci­ation of the late Arnold Stang back in December, my friend Joseph Failla con­siders the char­ac­ter act­or’s oth­er claims to immortality.

“It’s been a rough couple of weeks read­ing about the passing of some not­able film per­son­al­it­ies, and news of Arnold Stang’s depar­ture from the scene cer­tainly does­n’t make things any easi­er. While his appear­ances in a couple of very dif­fer­ent  Otto Preminger films  (THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM and SKIDOO) and Stanley Kramer’s monu­ment to slap­stick, IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, are abso­lutely note­worthy, it’s the sound of Arnold’s voice that will always stay with me. Growing up at a time when he was lend­ing his tal­ent to many anim­a­tion pro­duc­tions, I became as famil­i­ar with his New-York- accen­ted wise guy whin­ing as with his imme­di­ately recog­niz­able bespec­tacled, frail appearance. 

Ironically, the most mem­or­able anim­ated char­ac­ter he spoke for, TOP CAT, sounds much more like Phil Silvers than it does like him­self. Not neces­sar­ily a bad idea, as TC (to his friends), was modeled on the SGT. BILKO show and along with the par­ti­cip­a­tion of fel­low cast mem­bers Marvin Kaplan, Allen Jenkins and Maurice Gosfield, remains one of Hanna-Barbera’s fun­ni­er cre­ations. Where Arnold’s voice is unmis­tak­ably his own, is in his work dur­ing the ’40s and ’50s for Famous Studios as POPEYE’s extremely annoy­ing sidekick Shorty, and as a mouse with a mean streak in the genu­inely sad­ist­ic HERMAN AND KATNIP Noveltoons. 

Even though Shorty’s offens­ive­ness is barely tol­er­ated by most POPEYE fans, what’s so remark­able is see­ing Stang’s own like­ness in the char­ac­ter­’s con­cep­tion. How many voice artists are payed such a back­han­ded com­pli­ment? Meanwhile, Herman the mouse is a per­fectly mon­strous cre­ation and per­pet­rat­or of some of the most viol­ent antics seen in a comed­ic car­toon series. TOM AND JERRY have noth­ing on these guys (just think Lampoon’s KIT ‘N’ KABOODLE strip and you’ll know this was the inspir­a­tion). Although 1947’s NAUGHTY BUT MICE is brazenly funny, it’s unset­tling to hear Arnold’s Herman sing “Ding, Dong, Bell, Pussy’s in the well” after just hav­ing dis­patched a barn­yard cat in a par­tic­u­larly hein­ous way. Still, he man­ages to make nearly all of the mater­i­al seem pal­at­able, which is more than I sus­pect oth­er act­ors in the same pos­i­tion could muster.

Arnold con­tin­ued in some very unusu­al anim­ated pro­jects with roles that catered to his screen per­son­al­ity, such as Nurtle the Turtle from PINOCCHIO IN OUTER SPACE, a 1964 Belgium American pro­duc­tion whose poster not only gives him top billing, but sole act­ing cred­it. While the film seems to quote more from Astro Boy than the Collodi clas­sic, it also sets a much dark­er tone than most chil­dren’s films would be com­fort­able with. He’s Queasy the Parrot (a pir­ate’s sidekick) in Richard Williams’ under appre­ci­ated music­al RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY (1977), which con­tains more curi­ous char­ac­ters (dig that blue camel!) and strik­ing set pieces than you might ima­gine. The delight­ful clay­ma­tion fea­ture, I GO POGO (1980), remains dif­fi­cult to find. I sup­pose it goes without say­ing that Arnold makes for a great Churchy LaFemme (two turtle roles?) oppos­ite the likes of Jonathan Winters and Vincent Price. His latest con­tri­bu­tions were as recent as this past dec­ade (when he was well into his 80’s) for vari­ous assign­ments on the award win­ning, but undoubtedly strange COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG Cartoon Network series.

 So while he fash­ioned a num­ber of excep­tion­ally idio­syn­crat­ic char­ac­ters, Arnold Stang actu­ally became insep­ar­able from the anim­ated film land­scape, which already seems all the more ordin­ary without him.”