When Webb arrived in Hollywood, he was using the name Dave Weber. He did celebrity impersonations on the Burns & Allen anniversary show along with doing voice work for a Screen Gems cartoon called Sing Time, where he impersonated Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Eddie Cantor, Andy Devine and others.[2] He started working for Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s and his first cartoon was The Coo-Coo Nut Grove. He also voiced Egghead in Daffy Duck & Egghead, Elmer Fudd in Cinderella Meets Fella (1938) and in Believe It or Else (1939). And Webb also did voices for the 1939 Merrie Melodies short A Day at the Zoo.
Webb, for a brief time, voiced the Disney character Goofy after Pinto Colvig had a falling out with Walt Disney and left the studio.[3]
In 1941, after Mel Blanc signed a contract with Leon Schlesinger in which he exclusively did voice work for Warner Bros., Webb became the first person to succeed Blanc as the voice of Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz Productions. He only partially voiced the character in Pantry Panic, which also contained a few spoken lines Blanc had recorded prior to leaving the Lantz studio, before Webb enlisted in the army and was succeeded by Kent Rogers (sources claiming that Ben Hardaway was the first person to succeed Blanc as Woody's voice are incorrect, as Hardaway would not voice the character until The Barber of Seville in 1944).[4]
Webb enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, worked his way up to staff sergeant, and ended up entertaining troops in North Africa. Dwight D. Eisenhower was sufficiently impressed by his technique to deem him as 'Comedy Commando', a tag which stuck around for several years after World War II had ended. Webb later returned to radio, became the voice of Sad Sack, hosted the quiz show "Guess Who", and then had a minor career on local television sometime after 1951.[2][unreliable source?]
