Val Bettin
Val Bettin is an actor, born 1923.
Every part Bettin played, he played in an English accent, which is a curious career choice for a man born in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 1923. It served him well. Before the film work he hosted The Storyteller, a children's programme on Chicago television in the late fifties, and that warm, unhurried, slightly fussy delivery is audible in everything that came later.
Two Disney jobs define the record. In 1986 he voiced Dr David Q. Dawson in The Great Mouse Detective, the doctor and steadying companion to a rodent Sherlock Holmes, and the performance is the emotional floor of the whole film: the detective is all nerves and ego, and Dawson is the reason you care what happens to him. Then he inherited the Sultan of Agrabah from Douglas Seale, playing him in the Aladdin television series and in both direct-to-video sequels, The Return of Jafar and Aladdin and the King of Thieves.
The rest is small and scattered: a period film director in Somewhere in Time, Sarks in Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series, Herbert Olsen in W.I.T.C.H., the Bishop in Shrek. He died in 2021. It is a modest filmography that happens to contain one genuinely great voice performance, which is more than most actors manage.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with Val Bettin
The Great Mouse Detective is the one, and it is not close. Dawson carries the film's decency while everything around him is scheming, and the warmth in the voice is doing work that the animation alone could not.
After that, the Aladdin material is the completist's route: Aladdin for the series run, then The Return of Jafar and Aladdin and the King of Thieves, neither of which is good, both of which show a careful actor taking a cheap sequel seriously.
Shrek is a single scene and a fun credit to spot. Somewhere in Time and W.I.T.C.H. round out a short filmography. Start and probably finish with the mice.