tragic KENT ROGERS - Warner Bros. mimic (doing Gary Cooper, Bergen & Charlie McCarthy)

Here’s a rare glimpse of KENT ROGERS (1923-1944). The young man had a brilliant future in celebrity impressions and voice-overs. One of his best surviving achievements is voicing almost all the male stars in “Hollywood Steps Out,” a 1941 Tex Avery Warner Bros. cartoon. (It's been posted on YouTube by another uploader). He was a perfect Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Peter Lorre, Kay Kyser, Ned Sparks and Groucho Marx. He gave the bird to Warner Bros as “Beaky Buzzard” and “Henery Hawk” and also voiced Woody Woodpecker for some Walter Lantz cartoons. You’re watching Kent’s scene from “All American Co-Ed.” It’s a frothy farce that featured Johnny Downs in drag (invading an all-girls school). Johnny does a great job (not too campy) and the film’s got a variety of comic supporting players including Harry Langdon, Noah Beery Jr and Alan Hale Jr. Kent was inserted sort of the way Jay Lawrence (Larry Storch’s brother) was in “Stalag 17,” just for the sake of novelty. Rogers did a fair job of imitating the visual tics of Gary Cooper and once his baby-faced features matured, probably would have become an exceptional impressionist, more able to visually morph into a Karloff, Cagney or Edward G. Robinson (voices he did so well in that Warner Bros. cartoon, which was made the same year as this movie). He had the potential to be a fine addition to Mel Blanc at Warners, and to Paul Frees at Disney and Jay Ward. Kent didn’t reach the age of 21. Old enough to serve in World War Two, he was killed in a training flight accident in Florida.