Arnold Stang

I’ve been fretting lately about the idea that no one reads most of my articles. Well, my fault for doing as many damn obscure people as I do even though that’s also the point, right? I keep looking down my schedule for people anyone recognizes, and the next person I’m sure people will know on sight, and maybe even by name, is in four weeks. There are some coming up this year, including my traditional How Have I Not Done This Person Yet? for Halloween, but this column is the least likely of anything I write for people to know who I’m talking about before they read, and it kind of makes me spiral.

You don’t know the name Arnold Stang. I feel confident in saying this. You might know the face, especially if you’re a fan of older comedy. You almost certainly know the voice. My actual children know the voice, because the last credit on his IMDb page is the over two dozen episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog he did. (He was, among others, the Precious, Wonderful, Adorable, Lovable Duckling and the Evil Eggplants.) That said, he’s much better known to any older readers as the voice of Top Cat.

Still not ringing any bells? How about Churchy LaFemme in a Pogo movie from 1980? Shorty from the ‘40s Popeye cartoons? Herman from the Herman and Katnip shorts? Catfish in the Misterjaw and Catfish shorts? He was Sparrow in The Man with the Golden Arm; Rumpelstilskin in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. Ray in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Ah Chong in the “there’s no way it’s racist” episode “The Ah Chong Story” of Wagon Train. And, uh, yeah, we’re kind of running dry, here. Two episodes of my beloved Emergency!, even, and the original voice of the bee mascot of Honey-Nut Cheerios.

He apparently preferred radio to TV, in part one assumes on the grounds of his self-description as looking like “a frightened chipmunk who’s been out in the rain too long.” This is not wrong. He was, as the Coens would later describe an actor whose name you actually know, kinda funny-lookin’. He did a lot of radio, when radio was a thing a lot of people did. One assumes it’s the same impulse that got him into voice acting. And apparently the producers of Top Cat said they paid for Arnold Strang, not Phil Silvers, so he stopped doing a Phil Silvers impersonation.

Weirdly, IMDb sent me down a rabbit hole with what I’m quite certain is a mistake. It lists his children as Deborah and David Stang, and that may be true, but it definitely isn’t the David Stang to whom they link. That’s the brother of a murdered nun named Dorothy Stang, who moved to the Brazilian rain forest and helped defend the rights of the people there. She seems to have been killed for it, but I’d have to watch the documentary to know for sure. But what I do know is that she’s not the daughter of Arnold Stang.