Cary Grant: Best Cartoon Voice Ever?

With apologies to industry legends like Mel Blanc and Daws Butler, I am beginning to think the best cartoon voice of all time belongs to Cary Grant. I believe this despite Grant, to my knowledge, never having done a voice for a cartoon.

It's why Cary Granite is one of the best-loved supporting characters in the history of "The Flintstones," it's why Fancy was never blown off the screen by Choo-Choo and Benny the Ball in "Top Cat," and it's why I sat transfixed watching old "Dick Tracy" cartoons with my father around Christmastime.

"Dick Tracy" is a fun show but not what I'd call a classic. But each time a certain character came on the screen, a police officer/dog who led "The Retouchables" in an ongoing fight against crime, I couldn't look away. He fascinated me, and it was at least 97.32% because of his ersatz Cary Grant accent. Sure, on some intellectual level, I realized that I was watching a series of drawings and that the voice was not actually coming from that dog. But on my unintellectual level, I was like, "Whoa, that is one debonair dog!"

I put on a disc of Harveytoons a while back, and suddenly in the middle of one, a character named The Cat appeared, a feline that happened to talk like Grant. The voice didn't fool me, nor did it likely fool anyone else then or since, into thinking it actually WAS Cary Grant, but that mattered not. Just the act of "doing Cary Grant" gave The Cat credibility. It made the cartoon more compelling right away.

Oh, how I wish the great man himself had actually voiced some cartoons. It might be too much to expect a full-fledged series like "The New Adventures of Cary Grant" on 1970s Saturday morning TV, but he could have done some guest work on "Wait Till Your Father gets Home," for example. Or put him on "The Jetsons," saying--you guessed it--"Judy, Judy, Judy" to the awestruck Jetson teenager.

We missed out on a lot, but we still have the enduring legacy of the Cary Grant voice in cartoons, even if it was never done by Cary Grant.