Geek Punditry #148: The Mount Rushmore of Halloween Cartoons

October 31, 2025 blakemp Geek Punditry broom-stick bunny, Bugs Bunny, Cartoons, Disney, Donald Duck, Garfield, Garfield's Halloween adventure, Halloween, it's the great pumpkin Charlie brown, June Foray, Looney Tunes, Peanuts, trick or treat, Witch Hazel

By the time this is posted it will be the afternoon of Oct. 31st, which of course is the day that all of us – people of all shapes, sizes, religions, creeds, and soda preferences – come together and celebrate that most important of occasions, the birthday of Vanilla Ice. For many of us, though, it’s also Halloween, and at this VERY moment (assuming you read this as soon as it’s posted) I am scrolling through the options on my Plex library trying to decide which cartoons to watch with my son to get us ready before it’s time to take him trick-or-treating. This is harder than you may think. You see, while there are plenty of creepy cartoons to choose from, on Halloween itself I like to limit myself to those cartoons that actually take place ON Halloween…and the number there is smaller than you may realize. Christmas, as I always say, is easy. There are a thousand Christmas specials and hundreds of thousands of Christmas episodes of various TV series. Halloween, though, for all its popularity, doesn’t have quite as many to choose from. In an odd way, I sort of blame that on the universality of the holiday. You can put on any ghost story or monster movie and get a Halloween feel, which means there’s less of an impetus to evoke the holiday itself.

But I wanna evoke, dammit. I wanna get my impetus out and evoke something. So as you put together the goodie bags for the trick-or-treaters, carve your turnips into Jack-O-Lanterns (or pumpkins, for you provincial types), and iron the wrinkles out of your Dracula cape, what are the best cartoons to put on in the background? I’ve looked at the list and picked my top four. There will probably not be any surprises on this list, but that’s not the point – in the pantheon of Halloween cartoons, these are the greatest, the most iconic, the most seasonal. In my humble opinion, of course, which is the only one that actually matters here, since this is my blog.

Here we are: the Mount Rushmore of Halloween Cartoons.

“The Great Pumpkin flies out of the Pumpkin Patch and brings us an OBSCENE amount of merchandise.”

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)

I told you up front there weren’t going to be any surprises, and it would be disingenuous of me to pretend otherwise. This was the third special based on Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip (following A Charlie Brown Christmas and the lesser-known Charlie Brown’s All-Stars) and is considered by many to be the best of them all. On the night it first aired, a whopping 60 years ago this week, it was watched by 49 percent of American homes that were watching television. That means that if you lined up everybody in America on Oct. 28, 1966 and asked them if they watched Charlie Brown the night before, nearly HALF of them would ask you who the hell you were and how you got the authority to make them all line up like that.

We all know the story, of course – on Halloween night, Charlie Brown and the gang are making their preparations to go trick-or-treating…all except for Linus, that is. The wisest of the characters in Schulz’s strip, Linus has somehow conjured up an entire mythology surrounding the Great Pumpkin, who chooses the “most sincere” pumpkin patch to rise out of on Halloween night and give presents to all the children who are there waiting for him. The special raises a number of theological questions, most glaringly that of how one measures the sincerity of a pumpkin patch, but that’s not the point. Little Linus, dauntless in his faith, heads out to the pumpkin patch with Charlie Brown’s sister Sally, spurred on by a crush on him that no doubt would have gotten her into serious trouble if these characters were ever allowed to grow up and go to college.

As Linus and Sally freeze in the pumpkin patch, the rest of the kids go trick-or-treating. The neighborhood adults all for some reason have rocks just to give to that round-headed Brown kid (you can tell it’s him because his ghost costume has too many holes), and Snoopy puts on his World War I Flying Ace outfit to have an imaginary dogfight.

The special is a classic for a reason. From a standpoint of loving the characters, this is one of the most perfect encapsulations of the Peanuts gang and who they are – Charlie Brown is down on his luck, Lucy yanks the football away from him, Snoopy’s imagination is in overdrive, and of course, Linus and Sally’s story showcases them better than any other. The animation is gorgeous and the music, by Vince Guaraldi, is nothing short of iconic. The version of “Linus and Lucy” – which most people just think of as the “Peanuts theme” – is perhaps the greatest version Guaraldi ever recorded, adding in a flute part that perfectly mirrors the main theme. And you genuinely care about the characters. After the special aired, the studio actually started getting packages of candy in the mail from viewers who were upset that all Charlie Brown got when he went trick-or-treating was a sack full of rocks. That means that if you lined up everyone in America on Oct. 28, 1966, and asked them if they felt bad for Charlie Brown, nearly half of them would ask you to stop lining them up, for God’s sake, what kind of bizarre godlike powers do you HAVE, anyway?

What’s more, this was the first Halloween special ever broadcast on television, and opened the floodgates for all the others. There had been a few holiday specials before, most notably the original Charlie Brown Christmas and assorted Rankin and Bass Christmas specials, but nobody had put forth that kind of effort on Halloween before. But not only did It’s the Great Pumpkin give birth to the Halloween special, it also put a spark under the concept of Halloween itself, a holiday that had gone into decline during the lean years of the Great Depression and World War II, and had only gotten a recent bump thanks to another cartoon that we’ll mention later on in this list. But once families had an annual dose of Charlie Brown to look forward to, Halloween began to take off again. Not only is this a great special, but in a real way, it may have saved Halloween itself. And it’s also — fun fact — the film I have logged most often on Letterboxd since joining the platform back in 2014 — a whopping 18 times. Well, probably 19, by the time you read this.

“I TOLD you not to eat lasagna after 11 p.m.”

Garfield’s Halloween Adventure (1985)

Nineteen years after Charlie Brown taught us to love trick-or-treating again, Jim Davis’s Garfield told kids across America that it was okay to be scared. This special originally aired on Oct. 30, 1985, and I remember many years growing up when it was paired with the Charlie Brown special, making for a delicious hour of cartoon goodness every October. On the morning of Halloween, Garfield is woken up by Binky the Clown, the world’s most obnoxious kids’ show host (until Blippi, anyway) telling him that this is the night when he can go out to the streets and load up on candy. The prospect of free food is all it takes to get Garfield to put forth a little effort, and he decides that if he ropes Odie into going along with him he can get TWICE as much candy. The two of them put pirate costumes and head out into the night, loading up on sweets. The classic Garfield greed kicks in, though, when he decides to take a boat across the river to hit even more houses, only to get stuck on an island featuring a rundown old mansion. Inside that house is a very old man with a very, very scary story.

People mock Garfield today. The comic strip, they say, is stale and unfunny. Jim Davis perfectly formulated the comic to be as inoffensive as possible, appealing to the widest number of people, and as such sacrificed any edge that it may have had. These people are right, and I’m certain Jim Davis weeps profusely over his choices, wiping his tears with the plethora of million-dollar bills he has lying around as he stares out the window of his private jet, eating Waygu steaks off gold plates and drinking 190-year-old wine out of diamond-encrusted goblets. In the earlier days of the strip, though, there WAS still an edge, and that was especially true of the animated specials. They put Garfield’s legendary cynicism front and center, with no posturing about goodwill or making things fun for everybody, no waxing nostalgic over Halloweens past. No, this is a hero who is in it for one thing and one thing only: candy. He makes no apologies for this, and we love him for it.

But over the 24 minutes of this cartoon, that classic Garfield hunger is forced to take a back seat when we get to the mansion and we enter one of the most legitimately creepy scenes I’ve ever seen in a kids’ show. The old man weaves a story of a band of pirates who buried a treasure on that very island 100 years prior, with the promise to return that very night. Garfield and Odie are suitably disturbed and try to leave, only to find HOLY CRAP THIS CARTOON ABOUT A CAT THAT EATS LASAGNA IS FULL OF GHOSTS! And we aren’t talking about Casper and his buddies, friends, these ghosts are creepy, chilling, spectral apparitions that makes you long for the days when network television was actually willing to put images into a children’s animated special that would potentially give them nightmares the way that God intended. These nautical spooks look like the Pirates of the Caribbean ghouls, only creepier, because one of them looks like he’s going to eat Odie.

In addition to the surprisingly effective story and phenomenal animation, the special is full of fantastic music as well. Composed by Ed Bogas and Desiree Goyette, we get three classic songs – two sung by Lou Rawls and one by Garfield’s voice actor Lorenzo Music – that are absolute bangers that deserve to be on your Halloween playlist, except for the fact that for some insane reason none of them appear to be on Spotify or, for that matter, anywhere else except for this special…which for some reason also doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere. This is why you can’t abandon physical media, friends.

“This is an intervention, Don. We’re here to talk to you about your anger management problem.”

Trick or Treat (1952)

I mentioned before that It’s the Great Pumpkin helped bring back the custom of trick-or-treating after it kind of faded during the 30s and 40s. It didn’t do it alone, though. The tradition had gotten a bump several years before, and without the 1952 Disney short Trick or Treat, it’s conceivable that the practice may have died off entirely before Charlie Brown managed to take it off of life support in 1966.

On Halloween night, Donald Duck’s nephews are trick-or-treating when their uncle decides to prank them, putting firecrackers in their bags instead of candy, dumping a bucket of water on them, and then sending them away laughing. Donald was kind of an asshole in these old cartoons, if you didn’t know. Anyway, the whole thing is observed by a witch named Hazel – voiced by the immortal June Foray – who decides to help the boys get a little payback. When Donald tries pranking Hazel, not realizing she’s a REAL witch, she whips up a magic potion that allows her to control Donald’s legs, and then the fun REALLY begins.

This is Disney at its peak, with some of its best animation (courtesy of director Jack Hannah), and an amazing title song by Paul J. Smith that warns the listener you need to be generous on Halloween night or face the consequences. I don’t know that Michael Dougherty was inspired by this cartoon when he made his 2007 Halloween anthology movie Trick ‘r Treat – a film with slashers and werewolves and vengeful revenants which is most certainly NOT for kids – but they share the same thesis, so I choose to believe the connection was deliberate.

Technically, he’s still having a better Halloween than Laurie Strode.

Broom-Stick Bunny (1956)

Just four years later, June Foray would voice Witch Hazel again…but not for Disney. This time it was Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones who would recruit her for the Bugs Bunny Halloween short Broom-Stick Bunny. This is perhaps not as well known as the other three cartoons on this Mount Rushmore. In fact, it’s not even my favorite creepy short from the Looney Tunes catalogue. It is, however, the greatest Looney Tunes cartoon that is specifically about Halloween, rather than just co-starring Gossamer or a vampire or something, so it cuts to the head of the line.

In this one, Witch Hazel is conjuring up a potion when she gets a visit from Bugs Bunny, wearing a witch costume, as he’s trick-or-treating. Hazel mistakes him for a fellow witch and is disturbed when her magic mirror suggests that he (or at least, his mask) is uglier than she is, so she invites him in with a plan to hit him with a beauty potion to protect her own reputation. The cartoon devolves into one of those wild, madcap Bugs Bunny chase scenes as Hazel goes after him with a meat cleaver, because back in the 50s you COULD have a cartoon character go after somebody with a meat cleaver without being worried about “offending” somebody. The cartoon ends with Hazel accidentally drinking the beauty potion and – in a joke that there’s no chance in hell a modern kid would get – transforms into a gorgeous redhead that is actually a caricature of June Foray herself.

This was the first time Foray did a voice for Chuck Jones, who supposedly thought it would be hilarious to cast Disney’s Witch Hazel to play his OWN Witch Hazel. Foray went along with the gag, although she differentiated the two by using a British accent for the Disney witch and an American accent for the Looney Tunes version. More importantly, this short struck up a collaboration between the two – Jones began using Foray more and more often and became a regular not only in his work, but also at Warner Bros. animation until her death in 2017.

As always, friends, recommendations are welcome. What are some cartoons set on Halloween that you would place on your own Rushmore?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He regrets to this day that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? didn’t take the chance to have June Foray do a Witch-Off between the two Hazels.

Geek Punditry #95: A Not-So-Scary Punditry

October 25, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Bob's Burgers, Bugs Bunny, Chuck Jones, Disney, Donald Duck, Halloween, Halloween Baking Championship, June Foray, Looney Tunes

“You know Blake,” some of you may be saying, “Just because it’s October doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING you write about has to be scary. Some of us don’t necessarily NEED to immerse ourselves in serial killers and cosmic horror and Stephen King 24/7.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“I…I am?” you reply.

“Yeah, you are. I guess just because it’s October doesn’t mean EVERYTHING has to be scary.”

“Oh. Oookay. Well…GOOD!”

“So this week,” I say, “I’ll talk about some stuff that isn’t scary at all.”

“Thank you.”

“Still gonna write about Halloween, though.”

“Damn it.”

We all know how much I love the creepy content during Spooky Season, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things about Halloween that I love just as much – things that wouldn’t scare anybody but, at the same time, still contribute to the ghoulishly gleeful fun of this month. So if you’re NOT the kind of person who wants to be freaked out for Halloween but you still want to take part in the celebration, I’m going to give you guys a few recommendations for totally safe, family-friendly Halloween entertainment that will hopefully take you through to next month.

When I’m not watching somebody getting disemboweled in October, you know what’s the next best thing? Baking. I’ve been a fan for YEARS of the Food Network’s “Baking Championship” shows, and Halloween is the prime time. There are a whopping 14 seasons of Halloween Baking Championship available, and they’re all worth watching. In case you need someone to spell it out for you, it’s a pretty standard reality competition show. Each season a new group of contestants are gathered together and made to compete in a series of baking challenges, each episode one contestant is eliminated, and in the end, a victor is crowned. There are a wide variety of challenges as well – sometimes they have to make a certain type of dessert, sometimes they have to decorate their concoction based on a specific theme, sometimes there’s a specific ingredient they have to use. This is all well and good, but as I can’t actually eat any of the things that they’re making at home, I generally tune in to see what these creations look like. I’m in awe of some of these cakes and pies and cobblers that come out looking like monsters, skeletons, witch’s cauldrons, spellbooks, and any other sort of thing you can imagine.

Now, this isn’t one of those shows where they’re necessarily attempting to IMITATE real things (you’re thinking of Is It Cake?, where the goal is to make a cake that can trick someone into thinking it’s something else, like a shoe). This is purely about the artistry and creativity of the decorating and how good the food actually tastes. I don’t talk about it much, but I actually quite enjoy baking. It’s a fun, soothing, and edible hobby, and I think I can do a decent job making things that taste pretty good. However, absolutely NOTHING I have ever or will ever make in my entire life will look as amazing as the stuff we see on this show. Even the LOSERS turn out confections that put anything I could ever create to shame, and somehow I enjoy watching that.

If you think that sign is gonna stop me from eating your house, Mr. Snake, you are sadly mistaken.

I also like these shows way more than “traditional” reality competitions like Survivor or Big Brother because — unlike those other shows — you don’t have the pettiness, the nastiness, or the backstabbing that have made them world-famous. In fact, it’s not at all unusual to see the contestants on these shows HELP each other if they can. It’s not QUITE as cozy as The Great British Baking Show, but there’s still a vibe of camaraderie that makes this show far more entertaining than one where they’re voting each other off.

It’s not the only show that has this pedigree as well. There are two other Food Network shows with similar formats that I also enjoy. Outrageous Pumpkins is structurally the same, except instead of baking it’s about carving and building elaborate displays out of pumpkins. Then there’s Halloween Wars, which combines the two: on this show there are teams of food artists (typically a baker, a pumpkin carver, and someone skilled in making things out of sugar) working together to create remarkably elaborate dioramas that look like they could have spilled out of a haunted house.

Maybe that’s not your thing, though. You want something with a story, a plot. I’ve got just the thing, guys, and it’s called Bob’s Burgers. This has been one of my favorite cartoon series for years. At its core, it’s an animated sitcom about the owner of a struggling hamburger joint and his lunatic family, including his wife Linda and their three kids. The thing about this show, though, is that no matter how strange, bizarre, or absolutely ludicrous that week’s misadventure may get, there is a warm and loving core. Bob and Linda Belcher love each other and love their children completely and without reservation. That doesn’t mean they never get mad or have conflict, because real love doesn’t work that way, but at the end of the day they deeply care about one another, and that’s really refreshing in an era where so many TV comedies are about families who can’t even be in the same room together without being jerks.

Bob gives you a Halloween episode with FULL bars of chocolate.

The Belchers are in their FIFTEENTH season, and they’ve actually done more for holiday episodes than almost any other show I’ve ever seen. Over a dozen of their fifteen seasons have included Halloween episodes. Not only that, but they almost always have a Thanksgiving episode AND a Christmas episode each year. Plus, while not exactly an annual occurrence like the others, there have been several Valentine’s Day episodes as well. The people behind this show LOVE their holidays. If you’ve got the Hulu streaming service, there’s a spot in their “Huluween” library where you can actually access every Halloween episode of Bob’s Burgers right now. Just try to ignore the fact that 13 Halloweens have gone by and Louise Belcher is still eight years old. It’s a cartoon, you know how this works.

Last year, I spent an entire column writing about some of the great Halloween specials and how much I want new ones. I’m not going to go through all of them again (go ahead and read last year’s column), but let’s remember how many awesome non-scary Halloween specials actually exist. Beyond the classics like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, there are lesser-known but still worthy movies and specials like Rankin and Bass’s Mad Monster Party, Halloween is Grinch Night, or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

But what about the SHORTS, guys?

I’m still waiting for a scientific explanation for how Louie kept that pumpkin on his head.

I have often felt like a man out of time in many respects, and none more so than my craving for theatrical animated shorts. There was a time, a halcyon era before I was born, when buying a movie ticket would include not just the feature film, but at least one short film. It’s the place where the Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and the Disney pantheon all came from, and the fact that not even Pixar is still consistently giving us theatrical cartoon shorts makes me a sad, sad panda. But back in the day, these studios gave us some magnificent Halloween shorts that are still fun to watch today. Let’s talk about two of my favorites, both of which star the same phenomenal voice actor, the immortal June Foray.

In 1952, Jack Hannah gave us Disney’s Trick or Treat, which is in the running for my favorite Donald Duck cartoon of all time. I know you’ve seen this one: Donald pranks his nephews while they’re trick-or-treating by dumping water on their heads, because Donald is just that kind of a jerk sometimes. This transgression is witnessed by Witch Hazel – voiced by Foray – and she decides to give Donald his comeuppance. She comes after Donald with the help of the boys, some singing ghosts, and a magic spray that gives her control over his legs.

The same thing happened to me when I tried the “Wednesday Whopper” at Burger King.

It’s a funny cartoon with gorgeous animation and, along with it, a song that should by God be a national Halloween anthem. I’m not even joking – if a kid came up to my house singing the “Trick or Treat” song from this cartoon I would just dump all of my candy into their bag and close the door, because they just won Halloween. Plus there’s June Foray as Witch Hazel, the only person in the history of American cinema who even comes close to Mel Blanc as a voice master. Some people have even called her the “female Mel Blanc,” while others find it more appropriate to refer to Blanc as “the male June Foray.” I’m not going to argue with either one of them.

But it didn’t end there. Four years later, in 1956, director Chuck Jones asked Foray to reprise her role as Witch Hazel – not in a Disney short, but for the Looney Tunes. You see, Jones noticed that “witch hazel” is the name of an actual plant and, therefore, Disney could not trademark the name, making it free for him to use as well. Armed with the law on his side, he recruited Foray into his acting troupe for the cartoon Broom-Stick Bunny.

Marvel likes to act like they invented things, but June Foray has been doing Multiversal Variants since the 1950s.

In this one, Bugs Bunny is wearing a witch costume for his trick-or-treating and winds up in the mansion of, once again, Witch Hazel, who thinks he IS a fellow witch and invites him in. It’s a great cartoon and knowing that Jones deliberately cast Foray to voice the character in an attempt to “remake” the Disney version makes it even funnier. Foray, for her part, did attempt to differentiate the two witches, using an American accent for the Warner Bros version instead of the British accent she gave the Disney witch, but it’s hard to watch the two cartoons back-to-back without picturing them as the same character. Foray would reprise the Witch Hazel role several times and ultimately became a frequent collaborator of Chuck Jones. The voice of Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas may have been totally different if Jones didn’t want to poke at the Disney machine just a little bit.

Actual photograph of Disney’s reaction upon learning of the Chuck Jones cartoon (1956, colorized).

If you want to join in on the fun of Halloween but you don’t want to be scared, there are still plenty of options out there for you. Round up the kids, watch some of these classic cartoons, try to recreate some of the eerie edibles from the Food Network shows, and just have fun with it. Halloween should be fun, and if your idea of fun doesn’t involve having your blood chilled, there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve just got to find what unlocks your inner ghoul with lighter fare.

QUICK NOTE: If you’re the type of person who actually reads the title of these columns (hi!) then you may notice that this issue the 95th installment of Geek Punditry. Coming up on the two-year anniversary and, perhaps more important, the nice, round 100th column. I’m the kind of nerd who likes nice, round numbers, and I want to do something special for the big 1-0-0…trouble is, I don’t know WHAT to do. So if you have a suggestion for something you think I should write about or something I’ve discussed in the past you’d like me to go back to, here’s your chance to let me know I’m open for suggestions! You can drop them in the comments here, on whatever social media you followed to get to this post, or email me at info@blakempetit.com!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s still not sure what he’s going to dress up as for Halloween this year. He was considering a Stephen King costume, but he hasn’t been able to find a Maine travel guide.

A sound byte for June

July 27, 2017July 27, 2017 blakemp Geek Punditry Animation, Disney, June Foray, Looney Tunes

It’s been a rough summer for genre fans. Adam West — the first Batman for so many — passed away. We lost George Romero, who made zombies what they are today. Two women who helped make Marvel Comics what it is — Joan Lee and Flo Steinberg — died within weeks of one another. Then last night, as I was going to bed, word broke of the one that — to me — is the harshest blow of all. June Foray died at the age of 99.

Most of you, I think, probably recognized the name as soon as you read it. If you don’t recognize June Foray’s name, though, you certainly know her voice. Or at least one of them, because she had so many.

You may know the voice she used as Rocky the Flying Squirrel in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, or the one she used as Moose and Squirrel’s arch-nemesis, Natasha. If you’re a child of the 80s, you may be more familiar with her as Jokey Smurf. Looney Tunes fans know she spent decades as the kindly old Granny who tolerated Sylvester and Tweety, and may also recognize her as Witch Hazel, who occasionally tormented Bugs Bunny. Drastically different from her turn as Witch Hazel, of course, was her turn as Hazel the Witch, who once tormented Donald Duck on a memorable Halloween. And while we’re on the subject of ducks, Ducktales fans may not remember that she voiced Scrooge’s secretary Mrs. Weatherby, but how could they forget that she was also the nefarious Ma Beagle, or the deliciously evil Magica DeSpell?

And we’ve only scratched the surface here. Her IMDB credits — all 308 of them — cover a span of 71 years and include Disney films stretching from Cinderella to Mulan, TV cartoons including Garfield and Friends, The Simpsons, The Real Ghostbusters, Mr. Magoo, Dudley Do-Right, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, and even work on live-action television including Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, and The Twilight Zone. The characters she voiced are countless: Martha Wilson, Betsy Ross, Grammi Gummi, May Parker, Mother Nature, Mrs. Santa Claus, Pogo Possum, Red Riding Hood, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and, of course, Barbara Streisand.

Like many voice actors, when you know that June Foray is the person behind the character, you can hear the similarities between her voices. They are, after all, the children of the same throat. But at the same time, listen to Rocky and listen to Magica. The acting prowess of this woman was remarkable, and it saddens me somewhat that, compared to the other performers who have recently died, reaction to her passing seems somewhat subdued. Not to cast aspersions on any of the others, but I saw so many people talking about how Adam West was a part of their childhood, and now they’re blinking at the name of the woman who was literally the voice of it.

witch hazels — (Left) Witch Hazel, (Right) Hazel the Witch. Totally different.

I think part of the reason is that June Foray, for most of her career, was what you’d call a utility player. She was always there and always great, but she was rarely the star. While Mel Blanc was Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and a trillion others, Foray was the Granny who popped in and out of the cartoon or the Witch that Bugs had to outsmart. She wasn’t the main Smurf or the main Ghostbuster. She wasn’t the Grinch, she was Cindy Lou Who. She was Dudley Do-Right’s girlfriend. And except for Rocky her few leading turns — such as Dorothy Gale in the animated series Off to See the Wizard — are in projects that are largely forgotten.

None of this can in any way diminish her talent.

Chuck Jones (who directed so many of those cartoons in which she starred) once corrected someone who described her inadequately as “the female Mel Blanc.” Jones replied, “Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.”

The animation community, of course, already knows the scale of the giant who has fallen. The rest of the world should know it too. While there will never be a voice like hers again, we fortunately have enough of her work already to last the rest of our lives. Pop some classic cartoons on today, and listen for a while to the voice that made them whole.