Butler was born on November 16, 1916, in
Toledo, Ohio, the only child of Charles Allen Butler (1890–1972) and Ruth Butler (1899–1960). The family later moved from Ohio to
Oak Park, Illinois, where Butler became interested in impersonating people. In 1935, Butler began performing as an
impressionist, entering multiple amateur contests and winning most of them—not with the intention of showing his talent, but as a personal challenge to overcome his shyness. He subsequently won professional engagements at vaudeville theaters. His first voice work for an animated character was in the animated short
Short Snorts on Sports (1948), produced by
Screen Gems. At the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio,
Tex Avery hired Butler to provide the voice of a British wolf on
Little Rural Riding Hood (1949) and also to narrate several of his cartoons. In 1949, Butler landed a role in a televised puppet show created by former
Warner Bros. Cartoons animation director
Bob Clampett called
Time for Beany. He was teamed with
Stan Freberg, with whom he did all the puppets' voices: Butler voiced Beany Boy and Captain Huffenpuff, and Freberg voiced Cecil and Dishonest John. An entire stable of recurring characters were also seen. The show's writers were Charles Shows and Lloyd Turner, whose dependably funny dialog was still always at the mercy of Butler's and Freberg's
ad libs.
Time for Beany ran from 1949 to 1954, and won several
Emmy Awards. In 1952, Butler starred in the live-action short
Nice Try, Virgil. He briefly turned his attention to writing and voicing TV commercials. In the 1950s, Freberg asked him to help him write comedy skits for his
Capitol Records albums. Their first collaboration, "
St. George and the Dragonet" (based on
Dragnet), was the first comedy record to sell over a million copies. Freberg was more of a satirist who did song parodies, but the bulk of his dialogue routines were co-written by and co-starred Butler. Butler teamed again with Freberg and actress
June Foray in a CBS radio series,
The Stan Freberg Show, which ran from July to October 1957 as a summer replacement for Jack Benny's program. Freberg's box set,
Tip of the Freberg (
Rhino Entertainment, 1999), chronicles every aspect of Freberg's career except the cartoon voice-over work, and showcases his career with Butler. In
Mr. Magoo, the
UPA theatrical animated short series for
Columbia Pictures, Butler played Magoo's nephew Waldo (also voiced by
Jerry Hausner at various times). In Freberg's "
Green Chri$tma$" in 1958, a scathing indictment of the over-commercialization of the holiday, Butler soberly hoped instead that we'd remember "
whose birthday we're celebrating". Butler provided the voices of many nameless
Walter Lantz Productions' characters for theatrical shorts later seen on the
Woody Woodpecker program. His characters included the penguin
Chilly Willy and his best friend Smedley, a Southern-accented dog (the same voice used for Tex Avery's laid-back wolf character and for
Hanna-Barbera's
Huckleberry Hound). In 1957, when MGM had closed their animation unit, producers
William Hanna and
Joseph Barbera quickly formed
their own company, and Butler and Don Messick were on hand to provide voices. The first,
The Ruff and Reddy Show, with Butler voicing Reddy, set the formula for the rest of the series of cartoons that the two helmed until the mid-1960s. He played the title roles in
The Huckleberry Hound Show,
The Quick Draw McGraw Show, and
The Yogi Bear Show, and portrayed a variety of other characters. ==Characters==