Over at The Onion, Billy West talks about cartoon voice work — an area at which he excels. Billy complains, and rightly so, that a lot of producers would rather pay zillions of dollars to a "celebrity" voice who'll give a mediocre performance than to hire a reasonably-priced specialist who might not have the reputation but has a lot more talent. He's absolutely right. And the maddening thing about that is that many of those producers will tell you, off the record, "Yeah, the no-name voice actor would have done a much better job but the celebrity adds a note of importance to the project."
Billy notes one of the unethical practices in this area. Some less-than-scrupulous producers will bring in a guy like him or Maurice LaMarche or Rob Paulsen — any good voice actor — to audition. And then they won't hire them but they'll take that audition tape, play it for the star they do hire and say, "Try to read the copy like this guy did." This is a slight variation on a scam that a couple of studios were working years ago, when having voice tracks recorded in Canada was even more financially advantageous than it is now. They'd audition for a new TV show in Hollywood, calling actors back again and again, just as if they intended to hire some of them to work on the series. And then, once they'd selected the proper voices from all those created by the L.A.-based actors, they would not hire those people. Instead, they'd take the audition tapes up to a studio in Vancouver or Toronto, bring in Canadian actors and say, "We need you to match these voices." What a lovely practice.