The show’s pun-enriched titles, grown-up allusions and gently satirical slants made it uniquely appealing to adults as well as the small fry, as it continues to be.įoray was also Ursula on another Ward-Scott series, “George of the Jungle,” and, not quite least among her roles, she is the voice of the Chatty Cathy doll and of Granny Goodwitch in a cereal commercial. Edward Everett Horton told the “Fractured Fairy Tales.” “Then my agent called and said, ‘Remember the demo you did about that squirrel? It’s a go, on ABC.’ ” So it was, with Scott, who was also the show’s gifted head writer, as the basso defuncto voice of Bullwinkle Moose and Bill Conrad as the narrator. “I didn’t hear anything for a year ,” Foray says. Then one day an amiable Harvard Law School graduate and entrepreneur named Jay Ward, who had broken into cartoon production with “Crusader Rabbit,” took her to lunch and invited her to be on a demo of what became “Rocky and His Friends,” with Paul Frees and Bill Scott as the other voices. shorts, and with Ross Bagdasarian on the first “Alvin the Chipmunk” series. She worked as well with Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng on something like 70 Warner Bros. She met both Stan Freberg and Daws Butler doing the shorts, and the shorts led to a series of Capitol records, in which those three were joined by Mel Blanc and Pinto Colvig, the original voice of Goofy. She edged into cartoons via a series of Paramount live-action shorts called “Speaking of Animals,” in which the mouths of the animals were animated as they said deucedly clever things. Hardly out of her teens, she was appearing on two or three radio programs daily, including “Lux Radio Theater,” the Danny Thomas and Phil Harris shows, the Sherlock Holmes series and Steve Allen’s earliest incarnations on local radio. Turner Publishing has now optioned them all and will initially have her record six audiocassettes of her stories. Not long ago, tidying her garage after the earthquake, which gave a severe shaking to Foray and her house in the San Fernando Valley, she found stacks of her “Lady Make Believe” scripts. At 19, she invented a program she called “Lady Make Believe” and for three years wrote children’s stories that were piped into Los Angeles classrooms by the Board of Education. She wrote playlets for the Office of Civilian Defense (and discovered years later that Ray Bradbury was too). When she was 17, her family moved to California and Foray precociously began writing for radio as well as appearing on it. She took acting lessons instead, was appearing on radio at 12 and joined the WBZA Players at 15. “I ran into Steven Spielberg at the nominees luncheon before the Oscars,” Foray says, “and before I could congratulate him on ‘Schindler’s List,’ he had to tell me his sons watch ‘Rocky’ every day and adore it.”įoray was 15 when she started in radio on WBZA in Springfield, Mass., the same station that a few years earlier had launched Norman Corwin on his significant career in the medium.Īs a child she had thought of being a dancer, because an idol, Eleanor Powell, had studied at McKernan’s dancing school in Springfield, but a siege of pneumonia derailed that idea, and a finger broken playing baseball in the back yard put a crimp in the piano lessons. Reportedly not included is an episode of “Fractured Fairy Tales” in which the Prince, thought to be bear some sly resemblance to Walt, elects not to kiss the Sleeping Princess but to build a theme park around her. It is still seen in syndication, and Disney, of all firms, has released a dozen cassette compilations of the shows. “Rocky and His Friends” was on ABC from 1959-61 and NBC from 1961-64, not long as series go, but it has had an extraordinary afterlife.
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