I've written a number of articles about great cartoon voice actors like Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, June Foray and Don Messick. Often, e-mails ask where the heck is the in-depth article about the late, great Paul Frees? Surely, he ranks with the others. And he sure does. Trouble is, apart from one brief phone call, I never met Paul Frees. Never had the honor. And while I could rattle off a list of roles and parrot some third-hand anecdotes, I don't know enough to craft the kind of article he deserves. He was an amazing performer, much admired by his co-stars and incessantly coveted by casting directors.
Some others did more famous characters…though Frees's Boris Badenov is one of the great performances ever in animation. (I especially love when Boris would adopt, say, an Irish accent…thereby requiring Frees to do a Russian guy talking with a brogue. June Foray says these things never threw him, not even for a second. The only other comparable feat I can recall was the WB cartoon — I think it was Rabbit Seasoning — in which Mel B. had to do Bugs imitating Daffy, then do Daffy imitating Bugs.)
During his career, Frees occasionally had his agent assemble a demo tape of his work. Every voice actor has one — some have several — and their creation is an art unto itself. The Paul Frees demos are duped and circulated throughout the voice biz and widely considered the best ever. Most of them run 6-7 minutes and one of the top voice agents once said to me, "I am torn on the subject of handing copies of these out to people. On the one hand, I want them to see how wonderful a voice demo can be. On the other hand, Paul Frees was maybe the only human being ever in the field who could sustain a 7-minute demo tape. And I mean that. Mel Blanc in his prime probably couldn't have kept you listening for seven minutes. If one of my clients today brought in a 7-minute demo, I'd kick him out into the street."
So I suppose you're eager to hear one of these legendary demo tapes, right? Well, here's a link to a site that has one you can hear on-line via RealPlayer. I have a couple of other tapes and I'll post them here if there's enough interest.