Character from The Alvin Show
Fictional character
Clyde Crashcup is a fictional character from the early 1960s animated television series The Alvin Show. He is a scientist in a white coat who tends to "invent" things that had already been invented; his experiments invariably fail.[1] He usually invented by penciling the concept in air, with the picture becoming the actual object. The character has also appeared in comics and other Alvin and the Chipmunks works after The Alvin Show.
Creation
Clyde Crashcup was created by Ross Bagdasarian. He is voiced by Shepard Menken impersonating Richard Haydn.
Fictional character biography
Crashcup is a scientist in a white coat whose experiments invariably failed. His was the only voice heard in many of the episodes because the other main character in the series was his assistant Leonardo, who only whispered into Clyde's ear.[a]
Clyde Crashcup was primarily an inventor rather than a researcher, although he tended to "invent" things that had already been invented. However, in one episode, he built a functioning time machine. He typically would invent something by taking a pencil out of his lab coat's pocket and drawing a picture in midair of his conception: the picture would then become the actual object.
With the release of This Is Your Life Clyde CrashCup it shows him for the first time of wearing black pants and black bowtie and a grey shirt.
Clyde's catchphrase was to break down the name of his invention into its metonymic elements to explain his thought process. For example, when asked to justify the invention of the telephone, he would say "That's 'tele-' for tele and '-phone' for phone: telephone."
In the show He didn't fail most of the time but in the comics he did it was because the inventions were becoming harder and harder.
In one episode, though, Clyde invented a wife, voiced by June Foray. Clyde had one of the four segments, and the Chipmunks starred in the other three (two of which were musical segments). In the episode "Crashcup Invents the Birthday Party", Foray provided the (all too audible) voice for the mother of Crashcup's inaudible assistant, Leonardo.
When The Alvin Show ended in 1962 There was a new show called The Jetsons.But if you look carefully You'll see that George has a hair sticking out of his head and that is just like Clyde but he has all of his hair sticking up.
