Casey Kasem

None of us picture him first. How could we? We grew up hearing him either on the radio or doing voice acting. Oh, he’d show up in person from time to time—usually playing himself—but either he was counting down the Top 40 or he was Shaggy. That’s how we knew Casey Kasem. One of the radio stations I listen to in the car still plays old episodes of the show, from what I can tell completely at random. (Oh, let’s have an episode from October of 1978, and next week maybe it’ll be January of 1991. Why not?) It was jarring the first time, but there’s a certain comfort to it, even when I don’t remember any of the songs he’s playing.

Kasem was born of Lebanese Druze ancestry in Detroit, Michigan. His parents wanted him to assimilate and wouldn’t let him speak Arabic. He seems to have been inspired by Make Believe Ballroom to become a disc jockey, though he himself said he wanted to be a baseball player when he was a kid. Either way, he got his start on radio in high school, and even when he was drafted and sent to Korea the year he turned twenty, the Armed Forces put him on the radio there. When he returned to the US, he returned to the radio there.

He dabbled in acting—he once lost a stage part to Ed Asner—but one suspects moving around to keep his day job as a DJ wasn’t beneficial to that. Eventually, though, he ended up in LA. By then, he had settled his on-air persona into one that gave you information about what you were listening to instead of just being wild. It was that persona that lingered. It’s how he ended up doing the countdown show that would be one of his lasting legacies.

Of course, the other was the voice acting. Oh, he’d done other acting; I haven’t seen The Amazing Two-Headed Transplant, but it seems about on par with a lot of the other movies he did in those days. More important, though, was his work for Hanna-Barbera among others. It’s Shaggy that we remember, but he was Robin on Super Friends and Alexander Cabot III on Josie and the Pussycats and so forth. He was on Transformers until they asked him to voice a character named Abdul, King of Carbombya. So that wasn’t great. He quit as Shaggy because they wanted him to voice a Burger King commercial and he was vegan, only returning when they let Shaggy be a vegetarian.

I really don’t want to talk about the end of his life. It’s depressing. It’s a horrible reminder to make sure you have your end-of-life directives planned well in advance, including talking about what you want done with your remains. Don’t let your family fight it out; ask for what you want. Early, before you’re likely to have the kind of condition that means you can no longer advocate for yourself. It’s not exactly reaching for the stars, but it’s awfully practical.