- Born
- Died
- Birth nameVance DeBar Colvig
- Nickname
- 'Dean of Hollywood Voicemen'
- Height6′ 0½″ (1.84 m)
- Pinto Colvig was the quintessential clown whose own identity was always
hidden but whose innate warmhearted character always came through his
many talents. His humor tickled the funny bone and touched the heart.
Incredibly gifted in music, art and mime, he spoke to different
generations in different roles: as a child clown playing a squeaky
clarinet, as a full-fledged circus clown under the big top, as a
newspaper cartoonist, as a film animator, as a mimic and sound effects
wizard, and as the voice of dozens of well-known characters on film,
records, radio and television.
Vance DeBar Colvig was born in Jacksonville, Oregon, on September 11,
1892. His school friends nicknamed him after a spotted horse named
"Pinto" because of his freckled face - and just like his freckles, the
name stuck for his entire life.
Pinto's childhood home was filled with music and laughter, and he was a
clown from birth. As the youngest of seven children, he would do
anything to get attention. He learned to make people laugh by making
faces and playing pranks. He also spent hours mimicking the sounds
around him: a rusty gate, farm animals, sneezes, wind, cars, trains,
etc. He and his brother Don put on song-and-dance minstrel shows at
local functions. Along the way he picked up his instrument of choice,
the clarinet, and soon played well enough to join the town band.
It was the clarinet that got Pinto into show business when he was 12.
Visiting Portland's "Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition" with his
father William, he was magnetized by "The Crazy House" on the Midway
where a huckster attracted the crowd with a bass drum and shouts of
"Hubba Hubba!" Pinto told the man he could play "squeaky" clarinet and
ran back to the hotel to get his instrument. He was hired on the spot
and given some oversized old clothes and a derby and, for the first
time, white makeup and a clown face. The man told Pinto, "Now you look
like a real bozo" ("bozo" was a name given to hobo or tramp clowns in
those days). Pinto's act was to play a screechy clarinet while
distorting his face and crossing his eyes at the high notes. He later
recalled, "I never was able to get circuses and carnivals out of my
blood after that."
He went to school during the winter and worked in the circus and
vaudeville in the spring. While studying art at Oregon Agricultural
College (now Oregon State University) and playing with the college
band, he became known for his clever cartoons in student publications,
his funny "chalk talk" performances improvising a monologue while
quickly sketching cartoons, and his unconventional lifestyle. He never
took his class courses seriously and his college career ended abruptly
in the spring of 1913 when he accepted an offer to do his chalk talks
for the prestigious Pantages vaudeville circuit and wound up in
Seattle, Washington. There he joined a circus band and traveled
throughout the country struggling to make ends meet.
In 1914 he landed a job as a newspaper cartoonist at the "Nevada
Rockroller" in Reno, and later the "Carson City News" in Carson City.
By the spring of 1915 his cartooning was going well but the lure of the
circus was too strong. When the Al G. Barnes Circus came through Carson
City, Pinto dropped everything and joined the troupe, once again
clowning and playing his clarinet in the circus band.
In those days circuses closed down each winter and Pinto returned to
newspaper cartooning wherever he could find a job. While working on a
Portland newspaper between seasons in 1916, he met and married Margaret
Bourke Slavin, putting an end to his vagabond life as a circus
performer. With a family to support, Pinto and Margaret moved to San
Francisco, where he returned to the newspaper business writing and
drawing cartoons full-time at "The Bulletin" and later the "San
Francisco Chronicle". His cartoon series, "Life on the Radio Wave,"
which poked fun at the way the newly introduced radio was influencing
people's lives, was syndicated nationally by United Features Syndicate.
He greatly enjoyed cartooning and considered it another form of
clowning. "A cartoonist," he said, "is just a clown with a pencil."
While Pinto toiled daily to meet newspaper commitments, he began to
spend evenings experimenting with the animation of cartoons and
eventually set up his own studio, Pinto Cartoon Comedies Co., where he
created one of the first animated silent films in color called "Pinto's
Prizma Comedy Revue (1919)". In 1922, after realizing that San
Francisco was not the place to break into the movie business, he moved
his family to Hollywood. There he would be able to continue his
animation work and find a wealth of other things that he could do. He
was overjoyed one day to get an offer to join
Mack Sennett, the reigning king of movie
comedies, who had developed one of the most successful studios of the
day, the Keystone Film Co., home of the famous Keystone Kops,
Charles Chaplin and many others. Sennett
needed an experienced animator for his own films, but Pinto soon found
himself also writing and acting in comedies and dramas. In 1928 he
teamed up with his friend Walter Lantz to
create an early talking cartoon, "Bolivar, the Talking Ostrich (1928)",
but unlike Walt Disney's
Steamboat Willie (1928), it
failed to become a hit. Pinto and Lantz, who would later be the voice
of Woody Woodpecker, gave up and went to larger studios.
Disney, who was making "Mickey Mouse" and "Silly Symphony" cartoons,
signed Pinto to a contract in 1930. Pinto worked on stories, co-wrote
songs such as the lyrics to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" and was
the original voice of animated characters such as Goofy and Pluto,
Grumpy and Sleepy in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
and the Practical Pig in "Three Little Pigs." Disney cartoonists copied
many of Pinto's facial expressions while drawing animal characters for
the cartoons. He left Disney in 1937 following a fallout with Walt and
Disney proceeded to reuse his old voice tracks. Meanwhile, Pinto
freelanced voices and sound effects for Warner Bros. cartoons, sang for
some of the Munchkins during Dorothy's arrival scenes in MGM's
The Wizard of Oz (1939), and
also joined Max Fleischer Studios in Miami, where he did the voice of
Gabby in
Gulliver's Travels (1939) and
the blustering of Bluto in "Popeye the Sailor" cartoons. He returned to
Disney in 1941 and continued to freelance for them and on radio
programs for others. He was the original Maxwell automobile on
Jack Benny's show, the hiccuping horse for
Dennis Day, and a variety of voices
for "Amos 'n Andy." His live radio experience and contacts introduced
him to the recording industry. He did several albums before
encountering one of his best-known characters, Bozo the Clown.
It was 1946 when Capitol Records in Hollywood hired
Alan Livingston as a writer/producer.
His initial assignment was to create a children's record library, for
which he came up with the soon-to-be-legendary Bozo character. He wrote
and produced a popular series of storytelling record-album and
illustrative read-along book sets, beginning with the October 1946
release of "Bozo at the Circus." His record-reader concept, which
enabled children to read and follow a story in pictures while listening
to it, was the first of its kind. The Bozo image was a composite design
of Livingston's, derived from a variety of clown pictures and then
given to an artist to turn into comic-book-like illustrations.
Livingston then hired Pinto to portray the character. "Pinto came in,"
Livingston recalls, "and turned out to be a very jolly, likable fellow
with the kind of warm, folksy voice I wanted. He didn't talk down to
children." Not only did Livingston get a perfect Bozo voice in Pinto,
he also got most of the animals and odd creatures under the sea and in
outer space, all for the price of one. On some of the records, Pinto
provided as many as eight other voices. The series turned out to be a
smash hit for Capitol, selling over eight million albums in the late
1940s and early 1950s. The character also became a mascot for the
record company and was later nicknamed "Bozo the Capitol Clown." Pinto,
as Bozo, also starred in the very first Bozo television series,
Bozo's Circus (1951) on
KTTV-Channel 11 (CBS) in Los Angeles, made numerous guest appearances
on radio and personal appearance tours all over the country. He
especially enjoyed his visits to children's hospitals and orphanages,
according to Pinto, "doin' my silly stuff to make them laugh."
Pinto's Bozo days came to an end by 1956, when Livingston left Capitol and Larry Harmon acquired the rights to Bozo (excluding the record-readers) in 1957. In 1958 Jayark Films Corp. began distributing Bozo limited-animation
cartoons to television stations, along with the rights for each to hire
its own live Bozo host. Harmon produced and provided the voice of the
character in the cartoons. On January 5, 1959, Bozo returned to
television with a live half-hour weeknight show on
KTLA-Channel 5 in Los Angeles starring Pinto's son, Vance Colvig Jr. as the live Bozo host. Vance's portrayal and the KTLA show
lasted for six years, at which time Harmon bought out his partners and
continued to market the character through his Larry Harmon Pictures
Corporation.
If Pinto had any dark years, they were during World War II. Four of his
five sons were of eligible age and his wife felt the dread that
millions of mothers felt, which may have complicated an illness that
made her a semi-invalid for several years. Pinto took care of her until
her death in 1950.
Throughout his life Pinto was upbeat and cheerful, convinced that
laughter was the world's best medicine. "Sure, there have been kicks in
the pants and occasionally an empty gut," he once said, "but those are
the jolts what pushes a guy upward and onward!" His letters, though
touching on his philosophy, were never serious but always funny and
filled with odd typing effects, extraneous capitalization, underlining,
misspellings and strange made-up words. He also lavished his letters
and envelopes with outrageous cartoons and balloons filled with gags.
He kept regular correspondence with clown legends
Felix Adler,
Emmett Kelly,
Lou Jacobs and Otto Griebling, and visited
"clown alley" whenever a circus came to the Los Angeles area.
In 1963 Pinto received a letter from Oregon Senator Maurine Neuberger
thanking him for supporting her bill requiring warning labels on
cigarette packages. It was a controversial idea at a time when
nonsmoking areas were just a dream and America was blue with secondhand
smoke. With lungs ravaged by a lifetime of heavy smoking, Pinto did his
part to help others become aware of the problem. On October 3, 1967,
Vance Debar "Pinto" Colvig died of lung cancer at the age of 75 in
Woodland Hills, California.
Vance Jr. donated his and his father's memorabilia to the Southern
Oregon Historical Society in Pinto's hometown of Jacksonville in 1978.
Vance Jr. passed away in 1991.
In 1993, the Walt Disney Company honored Pinto Colvig as a "Disney
Legend." On May 28, 2004, he was inducted into the International Clown
Hall of Fame in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.- IMDb Mini Biography By: George Pappas
- SpousesPeggy Bernice Allaire(1952 - October 3, 1967) (his death)Margaret Bourke Slavin(1916 - 1950) (her death, 4 children)
- Children
- ParentsWilliam Mason ColvigAdelaide D. Birdseye
- RelativesLouis Colvig(Sibling)
- The voice of Goofy and Pluto
- His memorable laugh for Goofy (hyuk hyuk!)
- Survived by his widow, Peggy, and five sons.
- American comic actor, long with Disney where he was the voice of 'Goofy' and 'Pluto'. Began his performing career as a clown in vaudeville and later worked as a writer and cartoonist for the San Francisco Bulletin. In Hollywood from the 1920's, he started with Mack Sennett at Keystone as a gag writer, scenarist and cartoonist/animator in 1923.
- Father of Vance Colvig Jr..
- The original voice of "Bozo The Clown" for the first series of kids'
record-readers created by Alan W. Livingston for Capitol Records in
1946. In 1949, he was also first to portray "Bozo" on television via
KTTV (CBS) Channel 11 in Los Angeles. - Although he spent most of his time at Disney, Pinto did not work for him between 1937 and 1940 after having a falling out with Disney.
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