Elsewhere on this website, I have a couple of articles about how one goes about trying for a career in Cartoon Voicework. The pieces are not too encouraging but I think they are accurate.
As you'll see if you look at them, I pretty clearly ask people not to write me to ask that I help them in additional ways. Nonetheless, two or three times a week, I receive an e-mail from some total stranger who informs me (a) that everyone tells them they do great funny voices, (b) that their dream in life has been to do them professionally and (c) that they're hoping I can help them achieve this goal. I rarely answer these messages but I always wonder: Did this person see my request to not send me this kind of mail? If they did, did they think, "Oh, he'll make an exception for me"? If they didn't, why didn't they?
I always get the impression that the individual desperately wants to get into cartoon voicing but they found one of my pages and couldn't be bothered to spend five more minutes reading all of them. You get this a lot on the 'net when you have a site like this. I receive loads of trivia/research type questions that could be answered in ten seconds on Google but, I guess, the person couldn't be bothered to go there.
Anyway, an odd thing has happened with these "Can you help me get a job voicing cartoons?" messages. Lately, at least one a week comes from someone in another country…and I don't mean Mexico or Canada. Today, I got one from The Ukraine. Last week, there was one from an aspiring Mel Blanc in Portugal. I've received a couple from Australia.
If these folks lived here in Hollywood, there isn't much I could do for them, apart from bestowing the same advice I've posted here. But Portugal? Australia? The Ukraine? Exactly what are they expecting? I sure don't know any agents or casting sessions in their necks of the world. I'm certainly not going to suggest they scurry to Southern California so I can open doors for them, which I can't do even for local friends. What kind of response did they think was possible?
I wrote to a couple to ask and only received one reply, which was along the lines of, "Uh, I just thought you might be able to help me." Yeah, but help you in what way? They not only apparently want me to help them get their dream job, they want me to figure out how this can happen when they're in The Ukraine.
It finally dawned on me, dimwit that I am at times, that I'm dealing here with a smaller, more personalized form of Spam. Elsewhere at this moment, someone is sending out 500,000 e-mails — many of them addressed to moi — offering to enlarge or reduce portions of one's body or bank account. The abiding philosophy is, "Hey, it doesn't cost anything to send and there's maybe a 1% chance I'll get lucky." The vocal wanna-bes are operating on much the same principle.
It's a principle that existed before the Internet and which you may recall from your high school days. Remember the guy whose approach to women was to baldly proposition everyone he met who was even vaguely a potential date? The one in my school was named Rick, and Rick believed that the way to a lady's heart (or certain other body parts that interested him more) was to ask every one of them to have sex with him. No small talk. No getting to know the other person first. He would just ask if they were interested in sex, and he often did it in a manner so crude, he'd have alienated a nymphomaniac.
He offended women. He made them uncomfortable. I know of a few who slapped him, verbally or literally, but it didn't cause him to reconsider his approach. He'd explain to those of us who told him to knock it off, "Hey, if one in a hundred says yes, it'll be worth it." But I didn't see that he even scored that often — I didn't see that he scored at all — and I was sure he drove away a few females who might otherwise have found him interesting.
I never found out what happened to Rick after we graduated but I have two hunches. The more likely of them is that he's sitting somewhere at a computer, sending out millions of e-mails, asking strangers if they want to borrow money or buy generic medicine. The other is that he's living in The Ukraine and wants to do cartoon voices.