Here's what I did on my 65th birthday. I hosted a program out at the TV Academy on the art/science of new people doing voices of classic characters.
This is a video of the whole thing minus a couple of videos that were shown and which have been edited out for, I assume, copyright purposes. There was a great opening montage you won't see and about halfway through, there was a script reading of an episode of the TV series, Wabbit. The reading is in the video below but then we ran the cartoon and that ain't in the video below. The reading made more sense when you could see how all those strange noises and shrieks the actors did fit into the finished film.
Also, I should mention: I am identified as the Writer/Producer/Director of The Garfield Show. This kind of shorthand occurs so often throughout the business that we rarely correct it…but just for the record, I am a Writer on the show, the Supervising Producer and the Voice Director. There are other writers and other producers, and the guy who gets and deserves the Director credit is a brilliant gent named Philippe Vidal. He actually directs the animation and assembles the finished episodes. I just hire and direct the voice actors for the English language version.
As you'll see, we had a great panel and we only began to talk about this topic, which could be discussed for many, many hours. Here's about 75 minutes on it…
