The Disney fan sites are erupting with the news that voice actress Kaitlyn Robrock has been designated to henceforth speak and sing for Minnie Mouse. She assumes this task/honor from the lovely Russi Taylor, who passed away a year ago this week.
Some of you may recall Kaitlyn from Cartoon Voices Panel 2, which we did online not long ago. She was quite delightful on it, displaying the versatility and talent that landed her this role. It's kind of a big deal because the Disney organization, unlike other companies that own immortal characters, tends to pick one person to voice a character for a long, long time. Once in a while, they seem to have two gents taking turns as Mickey or Donald but, for example, Bill Farmer has been the voice of Goofy and Pluto since 1987. (Bill is on Cartoon Voices Panel 5, which is part of ComicCon at Home and debuts online at this link on Saturday at 4 PM San Diego time.)
By contrast, Warner Animation likes to shake it up. The guy supplying the voice of Bugs Bunny this week is just the guy supplying the voice of Bugs Bunny this week. More than a dozen actors have tag-teamed in the job since Mel Blanc passed away. While our friend Bob Bergen has done the overwhelming majority of Porky Pig jobs since then, most of the actors are temps. This means that none of them "owns" a role to the extent that they can do as Mel did and command a lot of money for any given job.
My friends Greg Burson and Joe Alaskey used to do a lot of Blanc replication. Both have joined Mel in that big recording studio in the sky. Both used to complain mightily about being asked to audition each time some Warner exec or director wanted to personally select who'd be the wabbit or the tweety bird in his or her upcoming project. Greg would say, "It does me no good to point out that they have hours of tapes of me doing Bugs and that I've done him in twenty cartoons. I still have to go in and read for some director who thinks he's the only one in the place qualified to say what Bugs should sound like." (I am not suggesting that a few of them weren't.)
But Disney does it right, as Disney so often does…and Kait may have landed not one job but decades of them. I met her way before she was a professional and was trying to break into the field. She attended every one of the Cartoon Voices panels I've hosted at Comic-Con, studying and listening and absorbing…and one day, she was successful enough in her goal that she was on the panel. Everyone who knows her and knows of her is very happy at the news.