Ron Glasgow writes…
I've noticed that on a lot of animated pictures coming out these days which feature well-known actors doing the voice work, that the voices of the characters in those films are often quite different from the actors' natural speaking voices that we hear them use on talk shows and in live action films. Guys like Mel Blanc did all kinds of different voices for radio and animation as a matter of course, and some actors today can do a range of voices and accents when they're making recordings for audiobooks, etc. I get the distinct impression though that many actors' voices have been electronically/digitally altered after being recorded for use in animated films, the way that some producers or audio engineers use Auto-Tune to make recordings of singers sound a little better.
Does that happen during the production of The Garfield Show, and are you aware of it happening in other animated productions? Maybe that has always been the case and I just wasn't aware of it. I did figure out Ross Bagdasarian's trick with Alvin and the Chipmunks when I was a kid by playing around with the speed of those records when I listened to them.
Voices in theatrical animation are often tweaked and futzed and sped and pitched a half-dozen different ways. Modern technology makes it so simple, it's almost irresistible. Obviously, it's done to actors playing giant robots and space aliens but it's also done to folks playing normal human beings or aardvarks.
Altering voices is not a new thing. A lot of Mel Blanc's voices in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons were sped, as was Woody Woodpecker's most of the time and others at still other studios. With Mel, they had this problem: They'd speed his Daffy Duck lines up X% but then when Mel made personal appearances or did his characters on live radio shows, he'd try to imitate the sped voices…and then when he went into the studio to record Daffy, he'd do him higher and faster and the engineers would find that X% was too much and they'd have to modify the numbers. Some of the engineers were not very good at this and when certain of Mel's voices didn't sound right, that was often the reason.
There's less tech-tampering with voices in TV animation but there's some. Often, it's so subtle that the actors themselves don't realize their voices have been modified ever-so-slightly.
Quick story: When they did the Fantastic Four cartoon show for Saturday morning in 1978, my friend Frank Welker supplied the voice of a silly little robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. Frank is one of those vocal magicians who can sound like anybody or anything. He speaks for Transformers and fuzzy bunnies and makes the sounds of squeaky door hinges or cocker spaniels. For H.E.R.B.I.E., he did a voice that sounded artificially-enhanced but wasn't…and then after he left, the engineers would trick it up a little more. No one had told that to Frank.
After the first four or five recording sessions, the director told Frank to re-read a certain line a little slower. He said, "We need it clearer because we're filtering you to make you sound a little more robotic." Frank said, "Really? Could I hear what that sounds like?"
They played him a sample of how H.E.R.B.I.E. would sound in the finished shows, which of course were not finished yet. Frank immediately began imitating that sound, giving them the filtered voice without the filter. That's why the guy works all the time.
On The Garfield Show — for which Frank, by the way, had the title role — we did some fiddling when we needed a voice that sounded like a robot or a computer. On the earlier series, Garfield and Friends, we had some recurring characters called the Buddy Bears who would sing and talk with sped-up voices…
Because people keep asking me about this: The speaking voices of the Buddy Bears were done by Thom Huge (who played Jon on that series), Gregg Berger (who played Odie on both series) and whatever other male happened to be in the room at the time. I did a few lines once as one of them. The late and lovely Lorenzo Music played Garfield then and we tried speeding his voice to play one of the Buddy Bears but found Lorenzo sounded like Lorenzo, no matter how much we sped him.
That was for the voices of the Buddy Bears when they spoke. When they sang, Thom Huge did all three voices. And yes, I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music…and if you watched that clip, I apologize that you'll have that tune running around in your head for the next eight days.
Don't worry. It goes away.
The only other times I recall us adjusting voices on either series were because I would sometimes hire veteran, older voice actors. The pitch and timing might be A bit on the low side but they still had the acting chops. I did one session once where three of my seven cast members were in wheelchairs.
One was the late Marvin Kaplan, who was then in his mid-eighties. Our ace engineer Andy Morris would push a few buttons and turn a few dials and, like a miracle, Marvin would sound exactly as he did in the sixties when he was the voice of Choo Choo on Top Cat. We did a little of that with a few other actors, as well — Stan Freberg and Jack Riley, to name two. I wish more studios would try that instead of saying, "He's too old. Let's replace him with a younger guy!"
