Hank Gillette sends this question my way…
As someone who has cast actors for animated cartoons, maybe you have some insight on this: Why do the people at Warner Animation keep recasting the parts in the DC animated universe?
For example, if you had the choice, why would you cast anyone other than Kevin Conroy as Batman? Is it because Kevin Conroy is too expensive? Is it to keep Kevin Conroy from getting too expensive? Is it just to keep any one actor too identified with a character, the way Mel Blanc was?
Well, there can be a number of reasons starting with the fact that creative control of corporate-owned properties keeps getting passed around the firm and not everyone who is in charge of some project may see the character(s) in the same light as those in charge of a previous project. They want to put their personal stamp on this project and that may involve abandoning much of what their predecessors did.
Or to come at it from another angle, someone doing a new Batman film or show may not like what Kevin Conroy did. That's not my opinion but it could be someone's.
Not long ago, I was contacted by a producer who thought a deal was 99% set for him to helm a new cartoon series starring a very famous character. This was not a character controlled by Time-Warner but it was one as famous as some of theirs.
Now, as you know if you follow this site, when someone in Hollywood tells you a project is "99% set," that means it's maybe 10% set, maybe less. It might happen but it's more likely that it will not, at least for a while. But I met with the guy and it quickly became clear, because he said it pretty explicitly, that he was determined to do such a unique, renovated, different take on the character — simultaneously taking it back to its primal roots and far from everything that had ever been done with it before.
Everyone, he believed, would hail him as the character's savior and greatest custodian ever. I'm hearing now that it ain't gonna happen but if it had, he wouldn't have wanted anyone who ever voiced (or wrote or drew, etc.) the character involved in HIS version. He was new to the character so everyone else had to be.
And of course, sometimes actors become unavailable…or they want too much money. I don't know that Kevin Conroy has ever done either but he was just your example and you wanted to know about how come that happens a lot there. It certainly has with some actors.
Since the great Mr. Blanc left us, at least ten different actors have done the voice of Bugs Bunny. I think some of them are better than others, don't you? If you were put in charge of a Bugs Bunny project there, might you say, "No, I don't want that guy, I want this guy?" And you're right: They don't want anyone to ever be The Voice of some character the way Mel was. Even if that person doesn't demand more money, he or she is a temp.
Batman, like Bugs and all these characters, are viewed as corporate assets for all eternity. Whoever does their voices now is just the person doing them now. Personally, I think they make a mistake by changing the voices and other things about the characters as often as they do. It makes the characters more generic, less special. But that's the way characters are treated when eighty different people control them and those eighty can be replaced by eighty others next year.
For more on this, listen to or watch the episode of Stu's Show I appeared on last week with my pal Bob Bergen. Bob has been the voice of Porky Pig in most but not all of Porky's appearances for the last several decades. As new Porky projects come up, he is often asked to audition for them. They have hundreds of hours of recordings of him doing Porky but every so often, he has to satisfy someone new that he can sound like The Pig. That's the way the game is played. Like most games in this world, some rules may not make sense but you either play by them or you don't play.
