Born A Century Ago Today: Larry D. Mann: The Guy Who Played YUKON CORNELIUS

Wahoooooooooooo!!!

We begin this post with a reference to Yukon Cornelius from the Rankin-Bass holiday special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1969) not just because it’s Christmas season, but because December 18 happens to be the date of birth of LarryD. Mann (1922-2014), the man who voiced him. As an immediate digression — did you get the joke of that character’s name when you were a kid? If you were like me, you never thought much about it, other than that his name “Yukon” had a connection to the Alaskan Gold Rush, which I happened to know a little about thanks to Charlie Chaplin. But years later, after much greater exposure to the “Great North” genre and writers like Jack London, Rex Beach, and Robert W. Service, the full weight of the joke dawned on me. There’s Yukon Jack and Yukon Jake and Yukon Pete and Yukon Bill and Yukon…Cornelius. It’s just a very mild humorous twist, which both parodies the expectation, and indicates that the character is not quite the rough and tough frontier hero he seems. He’s a misfit like Rudolph and Herbie the aspiring dentist-elf, and we know that because his entire job is to excavate gold but all he ever finds is “nothin'”.

Mann had started out on radio in his native Toronto, leading to work in children’s television. On Howdy Doody (1954-59) he played Captain Scuttlebutt and Flub-a-dub. His voice could also be heard on the early Rankin-Bass effort Tales of the Wizard of Oz (1961), The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1961), Return to Oz (1964), and later The Pink Panther,Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, The Groovie Goolies, etc.

Mann was more than a voice however. One glance at a picture of him may cause you to realize that you’ve seen him in bit parts in countless movies and TV shows. Here’s what the man behind the voice looked like:

The best known films in which he appeared (ranked by estimated Q Rating) included The Sting(1973), In the Heat ofthe Night (1967), There Was a Crooked Man (1970), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), The Singing Nun (1966), Robin and the 7 Hoods (1946), Harlow (1965), Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), et al.

Most of all though he was a frequent television guest star, appearing on such programs as Bewitched,Hogan’s Heroes, Get Smart,The Green Hornet, My Favorite Martian, Honey West, Green Acres,Love American Style , Gunsmoke,Baretta,Columbo etc. He frequently appeared on The Magical World of Disney, and was also in the Disney film Charley and the Angel (1973) with Fred MacMurray. From 1983 through 1985 he had a recurring role as a judge on Hill Street Blues.

His son, Danny Mann carried on the family business and has over 150 credits as a voice-over artist including credits in such well known films as Disney’s Pocahontas (1995), Babe (1995), Babe: Pig in the City (1998), Up (2009), etc, etc.

Mann’s older brother Paul Mann (1913-1985) was a distinguished stage actor and teacher, who founded Paul Mann’s Actors Workshop, where Lloyd Richards and the Group Theatre’s Morris Carnovsky also taught. He was in the original productions of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy and After the Fall(both in 1964, and in Elia Kazan’s movie America, America (1963) as well as the 1971 screen version of Fiddler on the Roof.

For more on show business history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,