Larry Storch
Larry Storch is an actor, born 1923.
Storch built a career out of other people's voices. He came up as an impressionist, working New York rooms as a teenager and moving into nightclubs and radio after wartime service in the Navy, and by the standard account of his break he was called in to substitute on a radio variety show for an ailing Frank Morgan, then did an impression of Morgan that went over better than the substitution itself. The voice stayed the instrument for the next sixty years.
Television made him. He was nominated for an Emmy in 1967 for the bumbling Corporal Randolph Agarn on F Troop, and the nomination is fair: Agarn is a performance of constant twitching improvisation, a man mid-scheme in every scene and never quite in control of the sentence he has started. The same energy went straight into sixties film comedy, in small hot parts: Texas Jack in The Great Race, Cpl. Gavoni in Captain Newman, M.D., the motorcycle cop in Sex and the Single Girl, Floyd in 40 Pounds of Trouble.
The second career was voice work and it outlasted the first. He voiced the Joker in The Adventures of Batman and again in The New Scooby-Doo Movies, took parts in Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Jack Frost, The Flight of Dragons and Garfield and Friends, and kept turning up on camera in whatever was shooting: Airport 1975, S.O.B., Without Warning, A Fine Mess, the 1994 spoof The Silence of the Hams. He died in 2022.
Movies (14)
- Sex and the Single Girl (1964)
- The Great Race (1965)
- Airport 1975 (1974)
- S.O.B. (1981)
- The Flight of Dragons (1982)
- The Silence of the Hams (1994)
- Without Warning (1980)
- The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951)
- Jack Frost (1979)
- A Fine Mess (1986)
- Sweet Sixteen (1983)
- 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962)
- Musical Comedy Tonight II (1981)
- Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)
TV (24)
- Frontline (1983)
- Mannix (1967)
- Garfield and Friends (1988)
- Love, American Style (1969)
- The Name of the Game (1968)
- The Persuaders! (1971)
- The Flying Nun (1967)
- The Doris Day Show (1968)
- F Troop (1965)
- The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972)
- Your Show of Shows (1950)
- Out of This World (1987)
- Temperatures Rising (1972)
- The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (1969)
- The Phil Silvers Show (1955)
- The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (1979)
- The Mothers-in-Law (1967)
- Grizzly Adams (1977)
- Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1969)
- Phyllis (1975)
- Hennesey (1959)
- My World and Welcome to It (1969)
- The Adventures of Batman (1968)
- He & She (1967)
Where to start with Larry Storch
F Troop is the reason to be here, and one episode is enough to see the whole act: Agarn is all exposed nerve, three seconds from an idea he has not finished thinking. After that the pleasure is in the range. The Great Race hands him a broad comic turn inside a very expensive film; Captain Newman, M.D. drops him into a war drama and asks him to be funny in it, which is the harder assignment.
For the voice work, The Adventures of Batman and The New Scooby-Doo Movies both cast him as the Joker, and the second is the stranger listen. The Flight of Dragons and Jack Frost are the animated ones, and both are better than their reputations. Airport 1975 and S.O.B. show what the seventies did with him: two scenes, played hard, gone.