It’s interesting where we know people from. Scatman Crothers had a long and varied career. He was a singer and songwriter. He was a radio personality. He had, let’s be real here, one of the most ’70s acting careers ever. He was one of the singers in a group called The Ramparts that did a song called “The Death of Emmett Till,” surely something more people should know about. (Both the song and the actual death.) And yet how many people basically know him for being senselessly killed by Jack Nicholson in the entry of the Overlook Hotel? Or, probably weirder, for voicing a singing cat or a member of the Harlem Globetrotters?

Like Mark Twain, Crothers was born when Halley’s Comet made an approach to Earth, in 1910, and died when it appeared again, in 1986. Unlike Mark Twain, he was a self-taught musician who took the stage name Scatman (his given name was Benjamin) when he was a radio personality in Dayton, Ohio. He wrote a number of songs, made a number of records. He went on USO tours with Bob Hope and performed in a wide number of places, including the Apollo. His musical career itself was impressive enough to be worth remembering.

Then, in 1953, he was cast in the minor Sirk film Meet Me at the Fair—so minor that I’ve never seen it and essentially its entire Wikipedia page is a plot summary, a list of five people who were in it, and the fact that Leonard Maltin considers it a pleasant musical. (He also appears to have been in a 1951 movie called Yes Sir, Mr. Bones, about nostalgia for minstrel acts that looks exactly like what you’d think that would look like.) Many of his movies appear to have been similarly forgettable, but they did propel him into considerably more noteworthy casting.

Apparently, he considered the making of The Shining to be incredibly boring because of Kubrick’s tendency toward multiple, excessively so, takes. Since his character isn’t in much of the film, this means that, when he was onscreen, he had to either do the same thing over and over again or else wait while other people did. But, he said, he took the job, so he did the job. Even if that means his character was going to die needlessly even though he survives the book. (This is one of the things I’m still annoyed about regarding that movie.) I can’t help wondering if it’s one of the reasons he ended up doing so much voicework—at least then you’re always doing something.

As it happens, I mostly remember him in live action from The Journey of Natty Gann, where he plays an elderly junk dealer that Natty has befriended. Named Sherman, actually, which was his real middle name. It’s probably the first thing I saw him in. He may be well known for the four movies he made with Jack Nicholson, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but I’ll always remember him for his work with Disney. Others may remember him as Jazz from The Transformers. His career was so varied that there’s something in it for everyone.

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