Under the Radar: Charles Fleischer

 

Born on this day in 1950, Charles Fleischer has been a stand-up comedian for going on half a century. Though the work has been steady, with many, many movie and television appearances, to date Fleischer has not become a household name. His own name, anyway. A character he lent his voice to...

...was on quite a few lips in the summer of '88.

Fleischer discusses that role as well the rest of his career in this 2015 interview:

 

We'll get a look at Fleischer's scientific side in a bit, but first let's take in a movie:

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg, 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes place in an alternative 1947 in which the animated characters of the era live in Toontown, a cartoon neighborhood in an otherwise live-action Los Angeles, and commute to Hollywood, where they're employed on shorts and feature films not inked on celluloid but shot on sets just the same as movies with flesh-and-blood actors. If by that description alone it sounds like an extradimensions-intensive science-fiction drama, The Twilight Zone by way of CalArts, let me assure you that it's nothing more, and almost defiantly nothing less, than a symphony of silliness, a multiverse as merry as a melody and as light as Dumbo's feather, the high-concept plot gleefully undermined throughout the flick by the toonful loons punny dialogue (such as when Jessica Rabbit says, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way.") Watch:

God knows what negotiations took place between two legendary animation studios to make it happen, but for me personally one of the joys of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is watching Walt Disney and Warner Brothers cartoon characters cross paths, along with a few outliers like Woody Woodpecker (Walter Lantz) and Betty Boop (Max Fleischer, no relation to Charles.) SPOILER ALERT: The following clip comes at the very end of the movie (though it's not like you're watching Agatha Christie):

Yes, Tinkerbell upstages Porky, but what do you expect? It's a Disney production.

 

Finally, Fleischer in the flesh doing what he does best. On the YouTube site I snagged this from, someone in the comment section accuses Fleischer of "trying to sound like Robin Williams". Since the two men started doing stand-up at roughly the same time, and Fleischer's first TV appearance (in 1974, though this clip is from about 1980) predates Williams by three years, it just may have been the other way around. Watch:

He's even more animated when he's not animated!