When I was a kid, I was captivated by the field of acting, but especially the voice actors in animation. Don Smart as Tennessee Tuxedo, June Foray as Rocky, Casey Kasem as both Shaggy AND Robin...I tried imitating them all as a kid, with little to no success. But my absolute hero was Mel Blanc, the Warner Bros. staple who could seemingly do anything with his voice, even imitate his own imitations:
Of the many failures in my life, the fact that I have neither the talent nor drive to be a paid voice actor stings the most, because I'm constantly attempting to do voices, to the consternation of my friends and family and students and passers-by, and I can delude myself into thinking I'm not horrible at a few of them.
Like many kids, I briefly did acting in high school in a Theater class, where the failed voice actor temporarily became the failed actor. In my two years in Theater, at least the gamut of failure was wide (from what I can remember), as I played Sherlock Holmes, Fagin from Oliver Twist, The Wicked Witch in Snow White, an off-stage "Voice of Doom," the Tin Man in a brief scene from The Wizard of Oz, and Gregor Samsa in a brief scene from Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Ever see a 6'6" kid just shy of 160 lbs. try to pretend to be a cockroach on a stage?
I also had two other parts where I brought my shallow set of skills to bear in two different one-act plays. In one, I was the cowed boyfriend of a '50s femme fatale, and in the other, I was an obliging '40s elevator operator. Because I still had echoes of the peripatetic talent of Mel Blanc ringing in my head, I decided to bring something not on the page to both parts, inspired by the voice who could do anything. (That's right...I'm blaming Mel Blanc for what follows.) For the boyfriend, I decided to play him as lisping and closeted -- which certainly brought another dimension to the role -- and for the elevator operator, I dusted off my best blackface/"Amos & Andy" patois. And since it was the late '80s, and since I was the son and grandson of prominent educators in our small community, I was never told that maybe, just maybe, I might wish to rethink those choices.
I thought about those experiences over the past three days as several white voice actors such as Allison Brie and Jenny Slate came to the understanding that they shouldn't play non-white roles. Granted, this understanding isn't a new thing, as Hank Azaria (featured in the above video) has been playing non-white characters on The Simpsons for decades, but it's interesting to see the recent volume and velocity of this sea change in the perception of voice acting. I have to admit that when I was initially confronted with this news, my contrarian streak popped up, helped no doubt by the voices of Mel Blanc that still ricochet through my head from time to time. I mean, Bart Simpson is voiced by a middle-aged woman, and Bobby Hill from King Of The Hill was voiced by Pamela Adlon, so why can't we let actors act, gender and age and, yes, race be damned?
But of course, that take on race -- just like my racist-as-shit teenage turn as a capital-S Stereotypical elevator operator, a skinny white kid with a cast on one ankle pretending to be an older African-American worker not two generations removed from fucking SLAVERY, and pretending poorly at that -- is ignorant and wrong. There's enough talent in 21st Century voice acting to represent as many different people as possible, and when we hear different voices, we might get to hear different stories. The systems in place didn't allow those voices to be literally and figuratively heard at the time, but to challenge and overturn those systems now has the potential to benefit everyone involved in the creative process. At heart, I'm just still jealous that I'm not part of anyone's creative process, so Tom Root (co-creator of Robot Chicken and my former editor at my college newspaper CM Life back in the '90s), if you're out there, wanna take a chance on a middle-aged white guy? I do a pretty solid Jeff Goldblum.
Of the many failures in my life, the fact that I have neither the talent nor drive to be a paid voice actor stings the most, because I'm constantly attempting to do voices, to the consternation of my friends and family and students and passers-by, and I can delude myself into thinking I'm not horrible at a few of them.
Like many kids, I briefly did acting in high school in a Theater class, where the failed voice actor temporarily became the failed actor. In my two years in Theater, at least the gamut of failure was wide (from what I can remember), as I played Sherlock Holmes, Fagin from Oliver Twist, The Wicked Witch in Snow White, an off-stage "Voice of Doom," the Tin Man in a brief scene from The Wizard of Oz, and Gregor Samsa in a brief scene from Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Ever see a 6'6" kid just shy of 160 lbs. try to pretend to be a cockroach on a stage?
I also had two other parts where I brought my shallow set of skills to bear in two different one-act plays. In one, I was the cowed boyfriend of a '50s femme fatale, and in the other, I was an obliging '40s elevator operator. Because I still had echoes of the peripatetic talent of Mel Blanc ringing in my head, I decided to bring something not on the page to both parts, inspired by the voice who could do anything. (That's right...I'm blaming Mel Blanc for what follows.) For the boyfriend, I decided to play him as lisping and closeted -- which certainly brought another dimension to the role -- and for the elevator operator, I dusted off my best blackface/"Amos & Andy" patois. And since it was the late '80s, and since I was the son and grandson of prominent educators in our small community, I was never told that maybe, just maybe, I might wish to rethink those choices.
I thought about those experiences over the past three days as several white voice actors such as Allison Brie and Jenny Slate came to the understanding that they shouldn't play non-white roles. Granted, this understanding isn't a new thing, as Hank Azaria (featured in the above video) has been playing non-white characters on The Simpsons for decades, but it's interesting to see the recent volume and velocity of this sea change in the perception of voice acting. I have to admit that when I was initially confronted with this news, my contrarian streak popped up, helped no doubt by the voices of Mel Blanc that still ricochet through my head from time to time. I mean, Bart Simpson is voiced by a middle-aged woman, and Bobby Hill from King Of The Hill was voiced by Pamela Adlon, so why can't we let actors act, gender and age and, yes, race be damned?
But of course, that take on race -- just like my racist-as-shit teenage turn as a capital-S Stereotypical elevator operator, a skinny white kid with a cast on one ankle pretending to be an older African-American worker not two generations removed from fucking SLAVERY, and pretending poorly at that -- is ignorant and wrong. There's enough talent in 21st Century voice acting to represent as many different people as possible, and when we hear different voices, we might get to hear different stories. The systems in place didn't allow those voices to be literally and figuratively heard at the time, but to challenge and overturn those systems now has the potential to benefit everyone involved in the creative process. At heart, I'm just still jealous that I'm not part of anyone's creative process, so Tom Root (co-creator of Robot Chicken and my former editor at my college newspaper CM Life back in the '90s), if you're out there, wanna take a chance on a middle-aged white guy? I do a pretty solid Jeff Goldblum.
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