I Know That Voice Page #5

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I chose to take that

as a compliment.

So he tried,

he tried, tried out.

No, no good.

He agreed, no good.

Uh, and then Don...

John DiMaggio came in

and John did this, you know,

kinda drunk, aggressive,

belligerent but not scary.

Just kind of over the top,

you know,

guy had one too many, right?

And that was it.

It just made us laugh so much.

Slim Pickens.

What in the hell

in the wide, wide world

of sports is going on?

The drunk at the end

of every bar.

I'm gonna tell you something.

And then there was this guy,

a friend of mine,

Ralph Columbino from college

did a Charlie

the Sausage Lover.

Sausage,

you got all kinds of sausages.

You got dry sausage,

you got sweet sausage,

you got wet sausage,

you got hot sausage.

So I... you put those three

in a blender

and you get Bender.

Then I do this.

Okay, sure.

Thanks to you I went

on a soul searching journey.

I hate those.

Now give up the free will!

Now hand it over.

You want it?

Come and get it.

Why you lousy...

In my mind that's the voice

that Bender should have had

and always w... but we didn't

know, we didn't know.

So John nailed the character

and actually pushed

the character

in that direction.

Da-da-da-da-da-da

Wap

You know, Billy West

and Jim Cummings

and Jeff Bennett,

I always say they have

this Rolodex in their head

and they just flip through it

and it's like, okay,

like, by decade, you know,

'40s weird accent

or whatever and just,

you know, they have

all these references.

Dr. Zoidberg who uh, when they

showed me the drawings,

he had all this cool meat

hanging off his mouth.

And I thought,

"Well, he's gotta be

impaired somehow. "

And I thought

"What marble mouthed

peripheral actors

were there in history?"

And I put two together,

one was a vaudevillian

named George Jessel and he had

a marble mouth, like this.

But then there was also

an actor named Lou Jacobi

who came out

of Yiddish theater.

And he was a marble mouth, too.

To have this voice who

was just Dr. Zoidberg

like, "Young Lady,

bring me a sandwich"

from the dumpster.

"And leave the maggots on it. "

Oh, Danny Boy

The pipes,

the pipes are calling

Who-y boy?

We come from radio,

stand up, improv,

the stage, and music.

You have to have an ear.

You have to hear yourself

in your head.

You have to have command

of your instrument.

It is kind of like

conducting, isn't it?

You know,

I've got my score here

and I've got the actors there,

and you go boom

and the band starts playing.

A musical ear is invaluable

to you in animated work.

The music part of it helps you

'cause every character

has a rhythm.

Like if you're thinking of

Yogi Bar it was like music.

There's a certain musicality

if I kind of go

all over the place.

It's interesting, although

I'm speaking right now

and I'm going up

on my questions

it's kind of the nature

of this guy.

Like, I don't know,

should I really do it,

but if I stay

on one particular spot

of all of sudden...

singing a note, you know?

And I think that musicality

is... is sort of

part and parcel about

what voice actors do.

The characters that I do,

they each have their own

kind of, they have

their own rhythm,

their own kind of beat board,

their own kind of...

I mean, you know,

Nelson Muntz,

that's pretty rough.

Kind of maybe

akin Nelson Muntz too...

The thing about

huckleberries is

once you've had fresh you'll

never go back to canned.

It's forceful, right?

And then you get

a Ralph Wiggum and his

is sort of lilting, right?

And kind of lifting.

And you could sort of,

if you were to sort of

graph it out in the hospital,

you know how you have

a heart rate?

Ralph's would be all

kind of wavy and light

and Nelson's would be...

There's a cadence

and there's an intonation

and a rhythm to characters.

And I think that's

the music in them.

The bad guy walks in...

into the saloon or whatever,

you'll notice that the theme

from the movie shifts

into a minor key.

And bad guys have minor keys.

A lot of us are musicians.

Some of us are singers.

Some of us can play

beautiful piano like this.

I, unfortunately

am not one of those guys.

I heard directors trying

to tell actors, you know,

how to do a line

and they'll say, you know,

"No, Mike,

you don't understand. "

Okay, now musically that's

ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, okay?

And the guy will go, "No, Mike,

you don't understand. "

And it's like, no, no Mike,

you don't understand.

And if you're musical

you give 'em

what they want

that much quicker.

It also just enables you

when you're taking apart,

like an impression, you know,

you can do it musically,

you know, like you, you think,

like, guys, you know

if you're doing Walken

the first thing you gotta

do is think of like,

where he sits in the scale

and that's like:

aaahhhh

That's the note,

so you got that.

Then you start putting music in

and it's like,

on the ends of the words

you go down, see, like this,

and you get fun,

you go up and it's like

notes on a staff,

you know what I'm saying?

And I see

that he's taking his time,

he's pausing, yes,

and ending up

on minor notes sometimes.

No punctuation.

Mary.

Had a little lamb.

Wow!

He said suspiciously.

I like my James Gandolfini.

He's one of my favorites

because "The Sopranos"

was a good show.

Marlon Brando is.

Oh, I do "The Wizard of Oz. "

I wanna go home,

I wanna go home,

Uncle Henry, I'm frightened.

Rosie Perez.

infinity plus infinity.

Sometimes when you win,

you actually lose.

Singing George Bush.

This land is your land

This land is my land

I'm a Texas tiger

You're a liberal wiener

Even if you don't really

do the impression well

you're still doing a character.

You're still doing, you know,

your version of that character.

I was reading

that "Family Guy" script,

I'm gonna go on

that audition I was like,

"Man, this is such

a good script,"

how am I gonna get this part?

What if it sounded like

Buffalo Bill from

"Silence of the Lambs"

and they're like

'What does that even mean?'"

So I did all the lines

like that.

Can I interest you

in a 16 piece?

Maybe with some extra honey?

Would you like a Pepsi?

And it started there.

So I did all

the lines like that

and it just sounded

so weird.

And I think they liked it.

Initially this was basically

a Phil Hartman impression

so uh, so, yeah,

it's a great skill to have

because you can then

take that voice and...

and twist it or put

a different accent on it

or... or do the bad impression

of it and it might even

be funnier, you know.

I think Hank Azaria said

that, you know,

he's just doing

bad impressions.

They're wonderful voices,

he's amazing, you know,

and they fit the characters

so perfectly but he, you know,

they're basically kind of

a little off impressions.

Lou... Lou the cop, for example,

is a pretty bad Stallone,

pretty lazy Stallone.

Chief Wiggum is sort of

almost Edward G. Ro...

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