Billy Bletcher

Billy Bletcher
Background information
Born	William Bletcher September 24, 1894 Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Died	January 5, 1979 (aged 84) Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Actor, comedian, voice artist
Years active	1914 - 1971
Spouse	Arlyn Roberts

Billy Bletcher was an American actor, comedian, and voice artist, perhaps best known as the original voice of Spike the Bulldog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Career

Bletcher ap­peared on-screen in films and later tele­vi­sion from the 1910s to the 1970s, in­clud­ing ap­pear­ances in sev­eral Our Gang and The Three Stooges come­dies.

He was most ac­tive as a voice actor. His voice was a deep, strong and boom­ing bari­tone. Bletcher pro­vided the voices of var­i­ous char­ac­ters for Walt Dis­ney An­i­ma­tion Stu­dios (Black Pete, Short Ghost and the Big Bad Wolf in Three Lit­tle Pigs and its spin-offs). He au­di­tioned to play one of the dwarfs in Dis­ney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). How­ever, Walt Dis­ney dis­ap­proved for fear that peo­ple would rec­og­nize Bletcher from the stu­dio's Mickey Mouse and Don­ald Duck short subjects.

His boom­ing voice can also be heard as "Don Del Oro" the Yacqi In­dian god in the 1939 Re­pub­lic se­r­ial, Zorro's Fight­ing Le­gion. He also pro­vided voice work for Ub Iw­erks as the Pin­cush­ion man in the 1935 an­i­mated short Bal­loon Land, as well as Owl Jol­son's dis­ci­pli­nar­ian vi­o­lin­ist fa­ther in the 1936 Warner Bros. short sub­ject based on the song I Love to Singa and the men­ac­ing spi­der in Bingo Cros­byana.

In 1939, Billy Bletcher and Pinto Colvig were hired to per­form ADR work for the Munchkins in The Wiz­ard of Oz. In MGM films, he voiced Spike the Bull­dog and on some oc­ca­sions even Tom and Jerry, in Tom and Jerry, and in Warner Bros. many char­ac­ters, most no­tably the Papa Bear of Chuck Jones' The Three Bears. He por­trayed the vil­lain­ous wolf in Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Rab­bit (1944).

Bletcher did voice act­ing for the 1944 Pri­vate Snafu World War II train­ing film "Gas", where Bletcher plays the vil­lain­ous Gas Cloud. Bletcher also played The Cap­tain in Cap­tain and the Kids with MGM car­toons.

In 1950, he played sev­eral char­ac­ters on The Lone Ranger radio pro­gram as well as ap­pear­ing in episode 27 of the TV se­ries.

In 1971, Bletcher played one of his final roles, Pappy Yokum in a tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tion of Lil Abner. In 1978, he was orig­i­nally hired to voice the Weed on The Plas­tic Man Com­edy/Ad­ven­ture Show, but had to drop out due to illness.

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The article or pieces of the original article was at Billy Bletcher. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Warner Bros. Entertainment Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.