Earlier today, I wrote here about how cartoon voice actors are too often not treated with the same respect as on-camera actors. As it turns out, my friend Paul Harris was discussing the same topic today on his popular radio show in St. Louis on station KMOX. His guest was vocal thespian Billy West, who's best known as about a third of the cast of Futurama. When it comes to not being treated right, Billy has some examples from his own career that would be funny if they weren't so maddening.
Aw, heck. They're funny anyway. You can hear Paul's interview with the brilliant Mr. West on this page. It runs about 16 minutes and if you enjoy it, browse Paul's site and you'll find plenty of other interviews you'll enjoy.
Michael Kinsley asks a couple of good questions about how some people (like, say, George W. Bush) who say they care about protecting the rights of the unborn don't have a big problem with human beings being killed after they're born.
I know some people reading this don't like Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. I do, most of the time. Judging from the latest ratings, an increasing number in the 18-49 demographic category do, too.
Anyway, this is not about politics. Every day, he does a segment called "Oddball" that includes weird or interesting news footage. In today's, he had tape of newly-born baby pandas. There is nothing cuter on this planet than newly-born baby pandas. Nothing! You know how cute baby kittens are? Especially baby kittens swatting at a fly or a string? Well, newly-born baby pandas make baby kittens swatting at flies look like a cluster of unsightly pimples oozing pus. That's how cute newly-born baby pandas are. They're cuter than you are, certainly. They're even cuter than me and I'm pretty darn cute.
Here's a link which will probably only work for a day or three...but right now, it takes you to the MSNBC website and loads the video of today's "Oddball" segment. You can stop watching after the newly-born baby pandas. Nothing can top them, anyway.
And let me know if you find any other online footage of the newly-born baby pandas. You can never see enough of newly-born baby pandas.
In the above photo, the guy in the middle is Red Skelton. Very funny man. The lady at left is character actress Mary Wickes, who was also pretty funny. But let's focus our attention on the man at the right.
That's Lennie Weinrib...also a very funny man. Lennie, whose obit I sadly had to post here last June 28, was an on-camera actor (The Dick Van Dyke Show, Magic Mongo). He was a cartoon voice actor (Inch-High Private Eye, Flintstone Kids). He was the voice of hundreds of commercials and many a Sid and Marty Krofft series. He was the writer and voice of H.R. Pufnstuf, for instance. He was also a good friend to many of us.
A whole mess of Lennie's friends here in Los Angeles will gather to remember him and celebrate his talented existence on Thursday evening, October 26. One of his daughters, Linda, is throwing the event and I think I'm the Master of Ceremonies. There will be stories and video clips and wonderful anecdotes and food and glorious memories. If you knew Lennie, drop me an e-mail and I'll send you the details of how to be there. It's just our way of spending a little more time with a great talent and a great friend.
Stephen Colbert is currently accepting "atonement phone calls" from Jews who wish to apologize to him for...well, anything at all. If you're really Jewish, you can think of something.
I'm actually only half-Jewish so I called up and didn't leave a message. Still, I enjoyed hearing his announcement and you might, as well. The number is (888) OOPS-JEW. If you have no Jewish blood in you at all, you can give it a try and see if it works. I don't see how they would know.
If you do call, stay tuned past the annoying announcement where the lady informs you that they have the right to use your call on the air. Colbert gets the punch line just before the beep.
Here's a brief interview with Peter Cullen, a fine voiceover performer. Peter played Venger on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show (which'll be out on DVD in December, they're now saying) but his big animation role was Optimus Prime on The Transformers. Wise people now doing the live-action movie of that property have seen fit to engage him again...because it just won't be Optimus Prime if it doesn't sound like Cullen.
There's an unfortunate tendency in the movie business to think of voice actors as not real stars. If Mel Blanc were still around and they were making a big Bugs Bunny feature — especially if it was live-action and therefore a bit removed from the old context — there'd be some studio exec who'd say, "Hey, can we get Mel Gibson to do the rabbit's voice? Or one of those Wayans Brothers?" What they don't realize is that the character is the star and the voice actor is an integral part of the character. They also don't realize that voice actors are stars, too. In fact, they're big stars...huge stars.
Stars in Hollywood are judged by how their movies gross. If you're in a movie that takes in $600 million, you're a bigger star than someone who was in a movie that took in a measly $300 million. If you're in a number of movies that take in a lot of money, you're a bigger star that someone who's in a lesser number of movies with lesser receipts. Stars are hired and they command top salaries because of their past grosses.
Now...suppose you fed into a computer the cast lists of all the movies and cross-indexed that with the grosses. Wouldn't it be interesting to see who was in the cast list of movies that had collectively grossed the most money? Can you guess where I'm going with this?
Here are the box office grosses going back a couple of decades for my pal — and maybe the best voiceover actor ever — Frank Welker. If you go by this, he was the number one grossing actor of the nineties, ahead of Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Williams or Bruce Willis...and I'll bet the total for Frank is, if anything, low. He was in a lot of movies for which he did not receive credit. (Okay, so some of his standing is due to sheer volume. When you only work one or two days on a movie, you can be in a lot of them. But it's still an interesting way of looking at the situation.)
And it's also kind of neat to note that Stan Lee is, at the moment, #20 on the Box Office List for this decade, ahead of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.
There are hundreds of weird homemade videos on the Internet that use Barbie dolls to act out bizarre perversions. Over on the official Barbie website, there's one that may just be odder than any of them. It's an ad for the new Barbie "Tanner Dog." I'm a little fuzzy on just what comes in the box when you buy one of these things but basically, it's Barbie's dog and you feed it plastic food...and then at some point (Immediately? A half hour later?) the toy dog takes a dump and you have Barbie clean it up with the Barbie Pooper Scooper, which I hope isn't sold separately.
Yes, yes. I know this sounds like one of those lame parody commercials they used to use to bridge sketches on Saturday Night Live but it's legit. Linking directly to the video on Mattel's site is a little tricky but here goes: This link may, depending on your browser, play it for you. If it doesn't, go to either this page or this page and look for a picture of Barbie and her dog to click on. It's a very short spot but it's everything I say it is.
I'm also a little fuzzy on the marketing idea at work here. I guess I'm trying to imagine the meeting when someone said, "Hey, you know what little girls all dream of doing?" Or maybe it has something to do with thinking that parents will buy the toy dog (and pooper scooper) to teach their daughters about being responsible when they someday get and walk real dogs. In which case they're going to then discover that the process is a bit messier than they thought...and not quite as odor-free.
And since it's doubtlessly on your mind, I'll ask: Is the plastic thing that comes out of the dog's rear the same piece of plastic that went in through the mouth? If so, doesn't that suggest the concept that you feed your dog crap? Or that crap is food? There are enough little girls around who are going to wind up anorexic without us planting that association in their fertile, young minds.
This is very disturbing. Very disturbing, indeed.
To get your mind off it, I offer the following embedded video of Liza Minnelli singing "New York, New York" on a 1982 TV special. Note that unlike the famous Sinatra version, she actually gets the words right. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with the video. Liza is actually slightly out of sync in real life. And then the next two days in this space, I'll be featuring what I think are two of the five (or so) most brilliant moments in the history of TV comedy. See if you can guess what they are.
September 29, 2006
