Appreciation: Famed voice actress Janet Waldo provided the sound of sweetness, spiked with attitude

Janet Waldo, who was the voice of Judy Jetson on “The Jetsons” and the voice of Josie in “Josie and the Pussycats,” and of Penelope Pitstop in “The Perils of Penelope Pitstop,” and before that the voice of Corliss Archer on radio’s “Meet Corliss Archer,” died Sunday at age 96. That is a lot of people to lose at once.

Voice artists are professional chameleons, creating new sounds for new characters; range is what the work requires. But Waldo’s career, which began in film, took off in radio and migrated to television, was largely conducted in her natural voice – the flute-like music of excited youth, a sound she could summon all her working life, well into her 70s.

Its hallmarks are clarity, a sweetness lightly spiked with attitude, an innocence that shades into impudence. She played smart girls, and sillier ones, but they were united by the authority of their enthusiasm.

Discovered in Washington state, reportedly by Bing Crosby, Waldo was signed to Paramount Pictures, and from 1938 played big roles in a few small movies and small roles in not much bigger movies. Alongside her more prominent parts, she appeared credited variously as hatcheck girl, cigarette girl, receptionist and telephone operator.

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Radio made her a star. In 1943 she created the title role in “Meet Corliss Archer,” about a teenage girl, and which ran for more years than anyone is actually a teenager. (She worked on other series at the same time.) In 1949 and 1950, as she closed in on 30, she played a collegiate newlywed, opposite Jimmy Lydon (the movies’ Henry Aldrich) in the series “Young Love.” (Hear a 1975 interview about those days with Waldo and her “Corliss Archer” costar Sam Edwards here, and a radio conversation from 2012 here.)

That was radio’s gift to actors (and animation’s as well): Disembodied, you are only as old as you sound. Waldo was over 40 when “The Jetsons” came along in 1962. At 67, she played Alice in a cartoon version of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

But she was youthful in her person as well – over 30 when she played a teenage devotee of Ricky Ricardo in “The Young Fans,” a 1952 episode of “I Love Lucy”; that same year, for the new TV version of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” she re-created her radio role as teenage neighbor and advice dispenser Emmy Lou. (Video also shows her to have been, in real life, an unusually spritely nonagenarian; here she is, bright-eyed and clear of voice, on a panel at Comic-Con in 2010.)

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She played older roles too – Granny Sweet on “The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show,” Hogatha in “The Smurfs,” among dozens of passing parts and “additional voices.”

But it was the teenager within her that led Hanna-Barbera to hire her for “The Jetsons.” Older viewers – and “The Jetsons” was a prime-time family show, not a kids’ show – would have heard the Corliss Archer inside her Judy Jetson, and the Janet Waldo in them both.

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