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• Tuesday, January 13, 2009 01:36 PM

  Re: "stage left, pursued by flying plates"

  http://www.toonopedia.com/content/snaggle.htm

  Snagglepuss

  Original Medium:Television animation
  Produced by: Hanna-Barbera
  First Appeared: 1959

  He was a pink lion, quite friendly and civilized, but sometimes mistaken for a wild beast (a problem he shared with Loopy de Loop, a wolf). The person most often doing the mistaking was Major Minor, a big game hunter with a big motive — if he doesn't bag Snagglepuss, he's liable to be thrown out of The Adventure Club.

  Snagglepuss's voice was patterned after that of actor Bert Lahr (who is famous for playing another lion, the cowardly one in the 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz), and was provided by Daws Butler (an old hand at mimicking real actors for cartoon characters — his Peter Potamus sounded like Joe E. Brown, and his Wally Gator like Ed Wynn). Butler was so good at the Lahr imitation that when the character was used as a spokestoon for Kellogg Cereals, Lahr sued, and the commercials had to give Butler a credit line so nobody would think it was Lahr plugging the cereal.

  The character's best-remembered catch-phrase ("Heavens to Murgatroyd") was also from Lahr, who used it in Meet the People (1944), where he played a supporting role under stars Dick Powell and Lucille Ball. His other catch-phrase ("Exit, stage left") was from a common stage direction, not so specific a source.

  - - Don Markstein's toonopedia

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  p.s. . . . Exeunt? Mooser contains multitudes?

  —sysprog Read sysprog's other letters
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