Don LaFontaine
There’s not a particular role that general audiences knew him for, but all Don LaFontaine needed were the three words that became his trademark: “In a world.” Although he began working tech jobs, like editing, and also some creative gigs like writing, his true calling was doing voice overs for trailers and other ads, a number of which he wrote himself. By some estimates, over the course of his career, he did hundreds of thousands of these, sometimes as many as 25 in a day.
His personal favorite was when he did the trailer for The Elephant Man, which was kind of a shame because it was 28 years before the end of his career. If that sounds at all like something trivial, bear in mind that at the time of his passing in 2008, he had an estimated net worth of roughly eighty million. He’d also connected with audiences enough that his catchphrase was used as the title for the 2013 hit indie movie In a World.
John DiMaggio
Modern cartoon fans know may know John DiMaggio best from Adventure Time as Jake the Dog, a transforming companion to the protagonist, Finn, who’s in his late twenties in “magical dog years.” His bits of down-to-earth philosophy, like “Sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something,” have certainly become widespread online. Others are likely to know him from the long running (as in, seven seasons with four movies) science fiction cartoon Futurama as the breakout character Bender, the lovable, emotionally vulnerable, drunken robot. More than a few may know him from the DC movie Batman: Under the Red Hood, where he did a very creepy rendition of the Joker. If we have any gamers in the audience, he was also Marcus Fenix through the Gears of War series.
Such is John DiMaggio’s commitment to his career that he wasn’t content with just starring in a number of popular cartoons. He also cowrote, coproduced, and narrated a 2013 documentary on voice acting called I Know that Voice, which includes interviews with numerous performers featured in this article. Anyone with any interest in the subject matter can’t afford to miss it.
See Also:
Jim Cummings
How’s this for range: a guy who can voice both Winnie the Pooh and Goofy’s gruff nemesis/best friend Pete in numerous Disney cartoons. Although he was a supporting character in pretty much every Disney cartoon from the late ’80s through the ’90s, such as playing the tough mouse Monterey Jack on Rescue Rangers or the goofy wolf villain Don Karnage, he also got to play the titular character in several original cartoons. He was the bumbling but reliable Darkwing Duck, and the cat half of the rather nightmarish, but fun, CatDog by Nickelodeon.
For decades he was pretty much inescapable on televised cartoons, but eventually he found his way into theatrical animated films, sometimes in surprising ways. It’s probably not so surprising, after you’ve heard his gravely villainous voice, that he played several characters in Aladdin who were obsessed with cutting the hands off of thieves. But did you know that in The Lion King, he didn’t just play the insane hyena Ed, but got to sing a duet with Jeremy Irons? Okay, no, what happened was that Irons blew out his voice during the epic villain song “Be Prepared” and Cummings had to step in and finish it for him. It’s a real testament to his skills as an impersonator that barely anyone noticed in the movie’s original run.
Mel Blanc
As “The Man with a Thousand Voices,” Mel Blanc is the best known, most influential, and most respected of all voice actors. It was pretty much because of him that we know today who voice actors are for cartoons, instead of that being a secret (since studios like Warner Bros tried to suppress the names of voice actors in the hope of keeping their cartoons more believable). Since he was the original voice for Looney Toons characters ranging from Bugs Bunny to Tweety Bird to Elmer Fudd, he was able to get a screen credit. Of course, he wasn’t all that benevolent: he was the only one who got a credit, and made sure of that.
In the ’60s, he was the original performer for numerous famous characters for Hanna-Barbera, such as Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Cosmo Spacely on The Jetsons. These characters were so important to him that there’s a famous story saying that, after a horrible car wreck in 1961 left him in a semi-comatose state, the doctors were only able to get a response from him after a few weeks by addressing him as Bugs Bunny, prompting him to respond (while semi-conscious), “Myeeeeh. What’s up, Doc?”
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