History: Funny animals on the radio

Amid Amidi at the Cartoon Brew presents a true rarity: a 1947 unsold half-hour recording for a children’s radio show, “Sally in Hollywoodland”. Recorded on June 3, 1947, the pilot is about a little girl who falls asleep and dreams herself into an adventure with Walter Lantz’s famous Hollywood animal cartoon characters.

This episode stars Woody Woodpecker (voice of Theodore Von Eltz), Andy Panda (Sarah Brenner), Oswald Rabbit (June Foray), Wilbur Wolf (Billy Bletcher, who was the Big Bad Wolf in Disney’s 1933 Silly Symphony), and Wally Walrus (Herb Lytton). Amidi says that the recording was discovered by Randy Riddle, and that notes show that if the pilot had sold, Sally would have continued to have adventures with the Lantz characters, not other studios’.

The Cartoon Brew article includes a publicity picture of Lantz at the drawing board surrounding by some of his characters (presumably a generic publicity picture since the group includes Chilly Willy and Buzz Buzzard, but not Wilbur Wolf), and the complete half-hour audio recording.

This is a rare opportunity to hear a half-hour’s worth of “the Big Bad Wolf” (and Bletcher performed many other deep, gravel-voiced cartoon voices over the decades, such as sometimes Disney’s Black Pete), and June Foray before she created any of her famous roles like Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Tweety & Sylvester’s Granny.