Tuesday, November 4

"Heavens to Murgatroyd."

"Exit, Stage Right/Left," said Snagglepuss on election night, even.

Butler's voice characterization is reminiscent of the more soft-spoken aspect of Bert Lahr's broad-ranging characterizations, specifically the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz. (Coincidentally, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera headed the MGM cartoon studio on the Tom and Jerry anthology before opening Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1957).
Snagglepuss has three signature catchphrases. His most famous is his perpetual exclamation, "Heavens to Murgatroyd!" - a line first uttered by Bert Lahr in the 1944 film Meet the People. ...
When the character of Snagglepuss was used for a series of Kellogg's cereal television commercials in the 1960s, Lahr filed a lawsuit, claiming that the similarity of the Snagglepuss voice to his own might cause viewers to falsely conclude that Lahr was endorsing the product.
As part of the settlement, the disclaimer "Snagglepuss voice by Daws Butler" was required to appear on each commercial, thus making Butler one of the few voice artists to receive a screen credit in a TV commercial.
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ADDED:  Oh, the places we go...
John Henry Lahr (born July 12, 1941) is a British-based American theater critic, and the son of actor Bert Lahr. Since 1992, he has been the senior drama critic at The New Yorker magazine.
...
In 1994, Lahr published a profile in The New Yorker detailing the vagaries of Lady Maria St. Just, an executor of playwright Tennessee Williams's estate. The profile helped liberate Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, from a four-year legal stranglehold.

While working on a planned second volume in 2000, Leverich died and named Lahr as his favored successor. Lahr agreed to complete the second volume, which will follow Williams from 1945 to his death in 1983.  In October 2007, Lahr said that he was taking a half-year sabbatical from writing New Yorker profiles to work on the biography, and stated, "I'll probably finish it when I'm in my seventies."

The book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh was published on 22 September 2014, when Lahr was 73.