Hearing the Last of Janet Waldo, aka Judy Jetson (R.I.P.)

The last time I spoke to Janet Waldo on the telephone, she sounded like a sixteen-year-old girl. This seemed remarkable, because she must have been in her 80s at the time. Waldo, who passed recently at the ripe old age of 96, was an actress best known for her youthful voice. Her voice is what earned her the breakthrough role of Corliss Archer, a perky teenager who was the title character in an amiable radio comedy I faintly remember from my childhood.

Janet played her share of live-action roles in movies and on television. She’s remembered, for one thing, for appearing on I Love Lucy as a teenaged fan enamored of Ricky Ricardo. (She was 28 at the time.) But she truly made her mark as a voice actress, especially for Hanna-Barbera Productions. It’s hard to believe now how many households tuned in each week to watch The Flintstones, a Hanna-Barbera animated sitcom set in a tongue-in-cheek version of the Pleistocene. The Flintstones, on which Waldo played a battle-axe mother-in-law, was so popular with audiences of all ages that it spawned a similar series with a futuristic slant. This was The Jetsons, and Waldo’s portrayal of rock ‘n’ rolling daughter Judy Jetson was to be her most iconic voice role.

Janet specialized in voicing effervescent young women like race-driver Penelope Pitstop and the lead singer in Josie and the Pussycats. But as a thoroughgoing professional she could handle any voice, from that of a small child to an elderly crone. For an animated TV series based on The Addams Family, she took on six different voices, including those of Morticia and Granny. As she insisted to me when I interviewed her for an article in Performing Arts magazine, “I don’t do voices; I do people.” Still, like most voice actors she was an excellent mimic, one who could respond with ease to a director’s request for a sultry Mae West voice, or  a sweet Billie Burke, or a sexy-tough Barbra Streisand. For Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law, she reached back into movie history and came up with “an exaggerated Marjorie Main.”

I first met Janet when I was working for Roger Corman at New World Pictures. Roger, who had just begun distributing prestigious European art films like Ingmar Bergman’s Cries in Whispers, picked up a charming French-language animated feature set on a faraway planet. The original title was Planète Sauvage, but we re-named it (with a nod to several American sci-fi classics) Fantastic Planet. In order to screen our movie in the heartland, we dubbed it into English. Since I was involved in both casting and the dubbing process, I was lucky to work with voice actors from the golden days of radio. Janet was one of them, and from the start I found her delightful.

While we worked on Fantastic Planet, Ralph Bakshi was heating up Hollywood with R-rated animated features like Fritz the Cat. Of course Roger Corman wanted a piece of that action. Someone came forth with an outrageous cartoon project called Cheap: we all knew Roger would respond in Pavlovian fashion to said title. After much dithering, Cheap became a raunchy piece of animation called Dirty Duck. Sweet, wholesome Janet Waldo was hired to do some of the voices. She told me she had a ball. But she was too embarrassed to put her own name in the credits.

Janet had a long happy marriage to Robert E. Lee, who with writing partner Jerome Lawrence created Broadway and Hollywood favorites like Auntie Mame and Inherit the Wind. He died in 1994, so I guess she’s rejoined him now.  

(Chris) Rocking the Voice Actors’ World

One of the most talked-about parts of this year’s Oscar broadcast has been Chris Rock’s comic riff on supplying voices for animated characters. Said Rock, “I love animation because in the world of animation, you can be anything you wanna be. If you’re a fat woman, you can play a skinny princess. If you’re a short, wimpy guy, you can play a tall gladiator. If you’re a white man, you can play an Arabian prince. And if you’re a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.” Obviously, Rock was making a social point – and a good one. But he went on to declare that “voice-acting is the easiest job in the world,” a simple matter of walking into the booth, saying a few lines, and collecting a million dollars. Nice work if you can get it, and a well-known performer like Rock (or Eddie Murphy or Mike Myers or Antonio Banderas or Tom Hanks) certainly enjoys million-dollar paydays that don’t even require him to learn his lines or wear makeup

But Rock’s put-down of voice-acting didn’t sit well with those workaday folks who earn their living supplying voices for commercials, games, and cartoons. On the Voice Acting Alliance site, many pointed out the obvious: that when you’re Chris Rock, you’re hired to sound like Chris Rock. Voice-acting specialists, though, need to be credible in a wide range of roles, covering many moods, age groups, and character types. When a producer is looking to save money, you may end up having a conversation with yourself, even if the scene involves (let’s say) an old lady chiding a little girl. Or perhaps you’ll be asked to play three young boys, each requiring a distinctive sound.

I have special affection for voice actors because long ago, in that era when Roger Corman took time out from T&A to distribute art-house flicks, New World Pictures acquired an animated feature from France. Known as Planète Sauvage (or Fantastic Planet), it was a lush depiction of a faraway world where humans were kept as pets by giant blue creatures, some of them benign. For the benefit of the American drive-in crowd, Roger wanted the characters to speak English. So we translated the script, tailoring the new lines to fit as closely as possible the mouth-positions of the characters, and then looked for a handful of actors who could play all the roles while also meeting the technical demands of a hurry-up looping session. We were lucky indeed to cast veterans of the Golden Age of Radio, including deep-voiced Olan Soulé, who liked calling himself the world’s oldest Batman. Another treasure was cuddly Hal Smith, who’d graduated from playing the live-action part of Otis, the town drunk, on The Andy Griffith Show to re-creating famous character voices for Disney animation.

Then there was Janet Waldo, who began her acting career as a giddy teenager, Corliss Archer, on a popular radio show that debuted in the 1940s. Janet’s first brush with animation came when she played daughter Judy Jetson for Hanna-Barbera’s futuristic sitcom, The Jetsons. Though she continued to star in youthful roles on such cartoon series as The Adventures of Penelope Pitstop and Josie and the Pussycats, she proved equally adept at supplying the voices of crotchety grannies, tough dames, and children of both sexes.

Today, Janet Waldo is enjoying her seventh decade in show business. We’ve just chatted on the phone, and her voice sounds as youthful as ever. So maybe Chris Rock was right: voice acting is easy. Or maybe it’s the challenges involved that have kept Janet Waldo young at heart.