Bill Thompson was the small, worried voice in the corner of Disney's 1950s features: the White Rabbit, Smee, several of the dogs in Lady and the Tramp. His job was the supporting business, and he made it funny, reliably.
Fi1m perspective
The White Rabbit hurries past the riverbank in a waistcoat, looking at his watch, and Alice follows him down the hole. Smee tries to shave Captain Hook and picks the wrong moment every time. Both are Bill Thompson, and both are the same idea: a small, worried, well-meaning man who is late for something or in the way of it, and who has no notion of how funny he is. That is the note he played for Disney through the 1950s, and it is a good note.
He came out of Chicago radio in the mid-1930s, on The Breakfast Club and Fibber McGee and Molly, where he did several comic characters a week, among them Wallace Wimple, a meek, mush-mouthed soul whose delivery he carried into cartoons. From 1943 he was Droopy for Tex Avery at MGM, on and off until 1958: the deadpan hound who says almost nothing and wins anyway. Disney took him on from the early 1950s, Hanna-Barbera used him too, and he kept working until 1971.
The Disney years are what most people will know. In Alice in Wonderland (1951) he is the Rabbit and the Dodo, in Peter Pan (1953) he is Smee, in Sleeping Beauty (1959) he is King Hubert. The reason the studio kept him was dialect: in Lady and the Tramp (1955) he voices five parts, Jock among them, each with its own regional voice, and you would not guess from the sofa that it was one man. Smee is the best of the ones we have reviewed. He is a soft, kindly idiot in a film whose real prize is Hans Conried's Hook, and we laughed at him every time he came at the Captain with the razor, because Thompson plays the eagerness straight and lets the animators supply the disaster. Our Sleeping Beauty review found the film cold and gave the evening to Eyvind Earle's backgrounds and Eleanor Audley's Maleficent; Hubert is in there and we did not single him out, which says something about the film and a little about the part.
There is no reservation about him worth the name. The nearest anyone gets is that some of the shorts left his name off the credits, which is the voice actor's lot rather than a failing. He worked twice each with Clyde Geronimi and Ward Kimball, and his last part was Uncle Waldo in The Aristocats (1970). If you want to hear what he could do in one sitting, put on Lady and the Tramp and count the voices; if you want to laugh, put on Peter Pan and wait for the razor.
Biography
Bill Thompson was an American radio personality and voice actor. Born William H. Thompson on 8 July 1913 in Terre Haute, Indiana, he began his career in Chicago radio in the 1930s and became a featured performer on the long-running series Fibber McGee and Molly, playing multiple characters including Wallace Wimple.
Thompson supplied voices for numerous animated films and shorts. For Walt Disney Productions his credits included the White Rabbit and Dodo in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Mr Smee and other pirates in Peter Pan (1953), Jock, Bull, the Policeman at the Zoo, Dachsie and Joe in Lady and the Tramp (1955), and King Hubert in Sleeping Beauty (1959). He was also the voice of Droopy in most MGM theatrical cartoons from 1943 to 1958. His final role was Uncle Waldo in The Aristocats (1970). Thompson died on 15 July 1971 in Culver City, California.
