Hey, Christopher Geoffrey McPherson wants to know something…
Had an interesting dream last night that I won a contest with the prize being a guest-voice spot on The Simpsons. I'll glide past most of the details (including a ride in Dan Castellaneta's giant white pickup and that I woke up before we got into the studio) to ask you the following question: How long does a typical recording session last for an animated show? How much time elapses from when you arrive and high-five Paul Frees, June Foray and Stan Freberg to the moment when you flick off the lights and head out to the Musso and Frank Grill for lunch (or dinner or breakfast)?
Well, I only met Paul Frees over the phone so we didn't do any high-fiving but I did dine with both June and Stan at Musso & Frank, though not at the same time and not after a recording session. And that's not what you wanted to know, is it?
A cartoon recording session can take any length of time, especially if some actor is late or there's music to do. Generally speaking, if there's no singing and everyone's there, a half-hour cartoon should take 2-3 hours to record. That's allowing lots of time to rehearse and discuss and to do it in short chunks so the actors don't feel oppressed. I believe the current union rule is that for a scale session fee, you're allowed four hours before there must be overtime pay and they may still have the rule that says you get eight if it's the first episode of a series.
Once upon a time, you got eight hours all the time for that fee but almost no one was using eight. Four became the accepted max and most sessions finished in three. If you booked an actor to be there at 9 AM to record a half-hour cartoon, they would usually try to also get a booking to do another one at 1 PM or 2 PM. (Obviously, if you were booking and paying them to do two half-hour cartoons, that would change things. Occasionally, a very in-demand actor might do three or four cartoons in one workday, including perhaps an evening session.)
The problem with this was that there was one voice director who took all day to do a cartoon. I was never in one of his sessions but actors who were told me he just loved playing with them so much that he'd needlessly elongate the sessions, wasting a lot of time and doing every line at least ten times. It didn't lead to better work. He'd make an actor do a speech twenty times and then use the second take and folks ran out of energy before they ran out of script pages. I once was offered a voice directing job and the producer said, "Please accept because I don't want to have to hire him."
At some point in the late-seventies, the voice actors went on strike for better pay but also to shorten the official time of a session…from the eight hours in the contract to the four hours in reality. Some said that it was entirely because of this one director. And the contract was changed.
The time it takes can vary. Some actors take several tries and it's worth it because what you wind up with is very good. I did a show with Jonathan Harris, who many of you remember from the TV series, Lost in Space. His first take was good, his second was usually better, his third was even better…and he peaked at around the fourth or fifth.
There are also actors who are so quick and sharp, they nail it the first time. On Garfield and Friends, we could probably have used every "first" take that came out the mouth of Mr. Lorenzo Music. The rest of the cast was also so good that we often recorded a seven-minute cartoon in under fifteen minutes. One time, a guest star was in and out so swiftly, he thought he'd been fired and was being replaced.
And once when I was at Hanna-Barbera, I watched as Don Messick and Frank Welker did a seven-minute cartoon in one continuous take of about seven minutes with each of them doing five or six different characters. I doubt that in the history of animation, there has ever been an actor who could swap voices and be right on top of every cue better than Don Messick. He could sound like five different people having a conversation and even interrupting each other, all in real time.
The Simpsons, by the way, is a special case. They do that more like a live-action situation comedy with table reads and rehearsals, and most or all of the regular actors are paid on a different basis and aren't scurrying off to other sessions afterwards so a session can be much longer. But the Jay Ward cartoons with Paul Frees and June Foray were all recorded at a frantic pace in something approaching real time. You can do that when you have real professionals who are used to working together. And it's a joy to watch in person.
