Looking for any evidence of the existence of my friend and former partner in my animation company circa 1964, animator Jim Carmichael, who came from Disney and Gamma studios, and with whom I worked on a test soundtrack for the very first Bullwinkle pilot film
— I recorded my version of the Bullwinkle voice on my old mono Ampex Signet 1000, with a very used Telefunken mike; June Foray did Rocky; as I recall, it was Jim Carmichael who suggested Bill Scott for the actual Bullwinkle voice.
The voice actors at Gamma included my friend Paul Frees, who tried a Bullwinkle voice, but ended up doing Boris Badenov and a few others including Inspector Fenwick in the Dudley Do-Right segments for Jay Ward. The animators were all friends of mine from Otis Art Institute … Jim did the voice of one of the crows in Disney’s breakthrough animation film, Dumbo; he mentioned it, but it didn’t strike me as overly important, because to me, he was an animator and an animation director, and a helluva good one.
Jim Carmichael did the complete blue-lines for several Saturday morning shows we produced for Max Oseran, formerly with SamArt Enterprises, a short-lived production company that went belly-up when Sammy Davis Jr. withdrew from the operation and went to New York to do Golden Boy, is how I remember it; maybe someone else has a better memory of what happened there, but that’s the gist of it.
Neither a trace nor a vestige remains of those works created from 1959 through 1971; I had some 16mm prints of our earliest Bullwinkle stuff, which at that time centered around Rocky, not Bullwinkle. I had nothing to do with the earlier stuff except that first audio recording made, as I recall, in 1959, the same year I recorded the Shearing concerts with the same pro tape machine & microphone.
As I remember it, Paul Frees tried the Bullwinkle voice, too, but Jay Ward didn’t like it.
Paul was the voice of John Lennon and George Harrison in the 1965 Beatles cartoon series, and is a Disney Legend; he also worked extensively for Rankin/Bass, notably as Santa in Frosty the Snowman.
Jim and Max dropped totally out of sight sometime around 1968. I often wondered what happened to them, how they ended up their lives and what they left as a legacy. Perhaps a reader knows and would be willing to share??? Here’s the thread I managed to pick up: