Trivia: Was classmates in high school with Randy Hankins, who later became anchor Craig O'Neill.Worked at the Arkansas State University's campus radio station.Performed multiple duties (technical director, audio technician, cameraman, film processor and announcer) while working at Jonesboro's Raycom Media.Earned a minor in theater from the Arkansas State University.Served as writer, producer and performer in his comedy program Mid-Century Nonsense Festival Featuring Kumquat Theater.Moved to New York in 1977 to pursue a career in theater.

Trivia: While few filmgoers or TV fans have ever seen June Foray, a healthy majority of them are quite familiar with her work. June Foray was one of the leading voice artists of the golden age of animation, working with both the Warner Bros. animation department and the Disney studios, and later gained her greatest fame as the voice of Rocket J. Squirrel on the classic television cartoon series The Bullwinkle Show. Born in Springfield, MA, on September 18, 1917, Foray began her career as an actress at the age of 12 -- appropriately enough, by appearing in a radio drama at a local station in Springfield directed by her voice teacher. By the time Foray was 15, she was a regular at Springfield's WBZA, and two years later she was living in Los Angeles, hoping to break into the big time as an actress. At 19, Foray was both writing and starring in a radio series for children, as Miss Makebelieve, and soon became a frequent guest performer on a number of top-rated radio shows, working with the likes of Danny Thomas and Jimmy Durante. It was in the mid-'40s that Foray finally broke into the movies, but while she scored occasional onscreen roles (most notably as High Priestess Marku in the exotic drama Sabaka), she soon discovered there was a ready market for her vocal talents in Hollywood. Her first animation voice work was for Paramount's Speaking of Animals comedy shorts, in which animated mouths were superimposed on live-action footage of animals. The Speaking of Animals shorts spawned a series of records for children, recorded with a number of other noted voice actors, including Daws Butler and Stan Freeberg. The records made her a hot property with casting agents for cartoon voice work, and she found herself working for many of the biggest names in animation. For Chuck Jones at Warner Bros., Foray provided the voice of Granny in the Sylvester and Tweety cartoons, as well as the cackling Witch Hazel and dozens of other female characters. She recorded voices for several Tex Avery cartoons at MGM, as well as some Woody the Woodpecker shorts for Walter Lantz. And she made her debut at Disney as Lucifer the Cat in Cinderella. With the rise of television in the 1950s, a new market for cartoons appeared, and Foray's career kicked into high gear. She was cast as Rocky on The Bullwinkle Show, and also voiced a number of female characters on the series (most notably the villainous Natasha); she was also the voice of sweet-natured Nell Fenwick on the show's side series Dudley Do-Right. Foray stayed busy doing voice work on a number of other cartoon series as well, including Hoppity Hooper, Yogi the Bear, George of the Jungle, and the new Tom and Jerry shorts produced for TV in 1965. In addition, Foray did occasional work on The Flintstones, though she was passed over for the role of Betty Rubble after voicing her in the show's pilot. (Foray also appeared, uncredited, as the voice of Cindy Lou Who in Chuck Jones' classic animated version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas). In the 1980s and 1990s, at an age when most actresses would consider retirement, Foray was still one of Hollywood's busiest vocal talents, recording voices for everything from The Smurfs and Garfield to Duck Tales and The Simpsons. Foray also made a return to prestigious big-screen animation as the voice of Grandmother Fa in Mulan, and revisited her most famous role with vocal work in 2000's mixture of live-action and computer animation, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. In semi-retirement (though she still takes the occasional job that strikes her fancy), Foray is an active member of the International Animated Film Society, as well as the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Trivia: Curly headed, charismatic, and slightly campy Tom Jones with his trademark booming baritone is best known as a pop singer/nightclub act from the '60s on, but he has also appeared in a few films where he generally good-naturedly parodies himself. He was born Thomas Jones Woodward in Pontypridd, Wales. He became a singer at age 23, billing himself as Tommy Scott and singing with the Senators. He went solo the following year and had a brief record contract, returned to sing in Wales, and by the end of the year he changed his name to Tom Jones with the help of singer-turned-manager Gordon Mills who got him a contract with Decca. Jones had his first hit in 1965 with "It's Not Unusual." His flamboyance and knock-em-dead sex appeal helped make him a major star with four more hits that year. In 1969, he starred in his own television variety show This Is Tom Jones. It was alternately filmed in both London and Hollywood. After the show ended in 1971, he basically left recording in favor of a career as a Las Vegas nightclub singer. He began his sporadic film career in the early '70s. In the early '80s, Jones began recording again and touring. He continues to occasionally appear in feature films and on television.

Trivia: Made his voice acting debut in 1979 at the age of 8 in an episode of Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo.Played bass guitar in the rock band Boy Hits Car since their founding in 1993, but left in 2006.Has done brand endorsement work for Netflix, Nextel and Best Buy.Got the callback for Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters a year after his audition.Has voiced characters in cartoons, anime and animation, radio, commercials, films and video games.

Trivia: Perhaps most recognizable from television on the campy sci-fi The Lost Saucer series on The Krofft Supershow from the 1970s, Alice Playten did voicework on countless animated features, including the remake of Felix the Cat, Aladdin, and My Little Pony: The Movie. She played a recurring role, or voice, rather, in the animated Doug series as Beebee Bluff. Ironically enough, she was also the voice of the demon in Amityville II: The Possession. More known for her stage work than television or screen acting, Playten was nominated for a Tony Award for her role in Henry Sweet Henry. She won an Obie Award for her portrayal of Mick Jagger in the stage show National Lampoon's Lemmings in the early '70s, which also starred John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Christopher Guest. She won another Obie for her work as Maimie Eisenhower in First Ladies Suite. She was in the original Broadway cast of many a musical, including Oliver!, Henry Sweet Henry, and Promenade, and appeared on Broadway in W.C. and Seussical.

Trivia: Contemporary animation lost a visionary on August 18, 2005 -- at a point when Pixar continued to deeply reilluminate the possibilities of the animated form, via their perennial collaborations with Walt Disney Studios. The vision and artistry of Joe Ranft played a vital, essential role in this process.His name might not be a household one on par with Disney or Avery, but in his brief window of 45 years, Ranft made an indelible mark on American animation to rival the contributions of the greatest. Born in 1960, and raised in the blue-collar Southern California community of Whittier, Ranft acquired and honed a deftness with magic tricks from a young age. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in 1978, as a classmate of John Lasseter -- who would become one of his enduring collaborators and a lifelong friend -- and in 1980 joined the ranks of Walt Disney animation. Ranft's early drawings were purportedly crude, but he exuded such a versatility in style and subject -- and projected such warmth and good humor -- that it scarcely mattered. Moreover, Ranft found an even stronger niche in the sphere of narrative. He honed his storytelling craft to a magical level as time progressed. Ranft received his first official credits for screenwriter, screen story, and a key voice on the critically-acclaimed 1987 animated feature The Brave Little Toaster. Subsequent roles included screenwriting credits on Oliver and Company (1988), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1992), and The Lion King (1994), as well as storyboard supervisor on Tim Burton's 1993 film Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach in 1996. Ranft officially began at the Emeryville, California-based Pixar in 1992 and re-encountered Lasseter, who held the position of studio head. The co-alums set to work and storyboarded the first Toy Story sketch, with the green army men. Ranft became a co-writer on that feature (for which he earned an Oscar nomination), and subsequently co-wrote the smash hit A Bug's Life (1998) and worked as story editor on Toy Story 2 (1999). Lasseter fondly recalled Ranft's willingness to sit in on looping sessions for those two features, doing "test voices" for several of the characters as a formality; Ranft performed so beautifully, in fact, that the producers used his voice in the final cuts of the films; he performs as Heimlich in A Bug's Life and Wheezy the Penguin in Toy Story 2. He also worked as a story artist (and did supporting voices) on 2001's Monsters, Inc., perfored as Jacques the Shrimp on the 2003 Finding Nemo, and voiced tertiary characters in The Incredibles (2004). These were all warm-ups, however, for Ranft's broadest contributions to an animated picture, when he and Lasseter co-directed and co-wrote the Pixar feature Cars -- a film in which Ranft also performs as corvette Red, one of the main characters (who also illuminates the film's teasers, his toothy grin emerging from beneath a protective sheath). Cars would become one of summer 2006's top box office draws, but tragically, Ranft did not live to see it happen. On August 18, 2005, he and two friends, Elegba Earl and Eric Frierson, were traveling in a 2004 Honda Element north along the tortuous Highway 1, 130 feet above the rocky Southern California coastline. Earl, the driver, mismanaged a hairpin turn and the car spun off of the roadside cliff, crashing onto the banks of the Navarro River. Ranft and Earl were killed instantly. Lasseter later avowed that despite the irony of the manner in which Ranft died, he sees Cars as a testament to the talents (and permanent legacy) of one of his best friends and an animation pioneer. Lasseter and company dedicated the film to Ranft's memory.