This year, I had the odd experience of a pretty okay Father’s Day being bittersweet due to the death of one of my voice-over heroes, the immortal Casey Kasem. For many people my age, it’s a toss-up as to whether Casey’s golden pipes are more recognizable from his years of hosting America’s Top 40 or from his turn as Norville “Shaggy” Rogers in the first few iterations of Scooby Doo. Oddly for me, just the night before I got the news, Stephen and I watched ‘Ghostbusters’, which features a Kasem voice-over cameo, and the night before that I took in a couple of episodes of classic Transformers, and within the last week, I was delighted to hear him voicing Shaggy’s FATHER on the latest version of the endless Scooby Doo cartoon Möbius strip. Indeed, it seems as though NOT hearing that voice is actually harder for me than hearing it, and I’m saddened to realize that his era has ended, which leads us to today’s memorial query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) still associates that voice with Mark, the leader of the G-Force team from ‘Battle Of The Planets’, a formative viewing experience for me, asking: What’s your favorite memory of the late Casey Kasem?
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When I realized that Robin was Shaggy was the guy on my mom’s car radio.
Since I grew up with him as the voice of Shaggy in several incarnations of Scooby-Doo (which in itself is a pretty fond group of memories), I found a great deal of amusement that when he wasn’t voicing Shaggy in “Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated”, he did lend his voice to Shaggy’s father.
http://scoobydoo.wikia.com/wiki/Colton_Rogers
And I also loved his cameo in “Ghostbusters”.
Watching some iteration of Super Friends, and after a large meal Robin says, “Holy carbohydrates, Batman!” That cracked us all up something fierce. :)
Hearing him do the Top 40 on the way to and from church every Sunday as a kid.
Casey was such a fixture of my youth — ages 5 to 18 and beyond — that it’s hard to pick one moment. Given my Robin obsession, however, I’ll settle on the moment I realized that the cool guy who told me music stories was also the voice of my favorite TV hero.