That Thring You Do
It took nearly forty years, but one of my oldest dreams finally came true: last week I got to do a voice for an animated cartoon. As the decades have passed, I’ve reluctantly given up on most of my childhood dreams, having realised that I will probably never get to drive a steam train; illustrate an issue of Justice League; or be shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a dying industrialist to do battle with giant antibodies accompanied only by a scantily clad Raquel Welch. But getting to do a cartoon voice had remained a tantalising possibility, and I had assumed it would only be a matter of time before Yoram Gross called, begging me to voice the bad guy in the latest sequel to Dot and the Kangaroo. But it never happened. Slowly, I began to assume that Yoram Gross was himself a fictional character.
I first became aware that the cartoon characters didn’t do their own voices when, at age seven, I saw an interview with John Stephenson, the man who did the voice of Mr Peevley, the fulminating boss in Hanna-Barbera’s Help!…It’s the Hair Bear Bunch! (he also did Mr Slate, the fulminating boss on The Flintstones). I, too, did Mr Peevley, in the playground at lunchtime, and while the reviews weren’t great, it did start me thinking. About how much more fun it would be to stand in a small glass booth saying, ‘Drat and double drat!!!’ than to spend all day lugging fridges around, like my then-dad did for a living.
Eventually, I managed to wangle my way into what passes for show business, but in three decades, despite having done literally hundreds of ‘silly voices’ (including my own) on the radio, I had still never been asked to voice so much as a single plasticine ant. Almost all of my contemporaries had given it a crack, and I had interviewed several famous ‘cartoon voices’, including Charles Fleischer, Billy West, the woman who does Bart Simpson, and Greg Fleet, the immortal voice of the Home Hardware labrador. One day on the set of Crackerjack, I was listening agog as actor Bill Hunter explained how his apparently scurrilous autobiography, Stand Where, Say What?, had just been declared ‘unpublishable’, when the great man announced that he had recently been flown to Sydney to play the dentist in Pixar’s next movie, Finding Nemo, with one of my heroes, Albert Brooks. ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘What’s it about?’
‘Buggered if I know,’ replied Bill. ‘It was a “Sit Where, Read What?”’
Several years passed with nary a sniff of a ‘Sit Where, Read What?’ (although I did get to see one of my radio sketches, ‘Grant Spatchcock Gourmet Pizza’, turned into a fabulous YouTube animation). But then, a few weeks back, an offer arose following, as is often the case, a chance meeting at Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment. Producer Colin South, admittedly a few beers down, wondered whether I’d be interested in voicing some sort of intergalactic TV host in an upcoming episode of Dogstar, the occasionally demented sci-fi kids’ cartoon show narrated by Shaun Micallef.
‘What are you playing?’ asked one nonplussed friend.
‘A kind of up-himself presenter with a bizarre accent,’ I replied.
Three people immediately leapt for the phrase ‘That’ll be a stretch’.
***
The voices for Dogstar are recorded at a studio located in a small inner-suburban house, creating the impression that one is attending a madcap, heavily miked swingers party. After the briefest of introductions, I am herded to a microphone, one of six clustered amid the regular actors, most of whom have done this on precisely fifty previous occasions. Among the rabble assembled for episode fifty-one are two men I haven’t seen for over twenty years.
Henry Maas, the unofficial mayor of Brunswick Street, had, with his band, the Bachelors From Prague, supplied several musical numbers for a series of TV specials I’d worked on back in the days when comedy shows were regularly interrupted by, in the case of Benny Hill, the Ladybirds; or, in the case of The Two Ronnies, the Manhattan Transfer. Henry has an ideal voice for animation and, at one point, rolls out perhaps the best full-blooded evil laugh this side of Brian Blessed.
Michael Carman I had met at the ABC back in the late eighties, when he was a regular on The Gerry Connolly Show, along with Frank Thring, who was making one of his final gusty post-Thunderdome appearances. As many would know, Carman does a pretty mean Thring himself, and I have to stop myself from getting him to do all his lines as Frank. In addition, Michael played evil entrepreneur Damien Zukor in one of my all-time favourite bad Aussie movies, 1987’s Day of the Panther: A Jason Blade Adventure, and his villainously drawled line ‘You’re sharp, Blade’ has been a favourite in my household for years. At one point, Michael realises that we’ve skipped a line of dialogue and it takes all of my willpower not to say it.
When it comes time for me to bust out my lines, I try, as usual, too hard to impress my seasoned colleagues, and the ham flies from the bone in thick, rolling clumps. And because I now have Frank Thring stuck in my head, inappropriate Thringisms keep bursting forth. Such is my nervousness that I manage to drain the entire contents of a water cooler in less than two hours.
‘Thanks for having me!’ I blurt to a grinning Colin South at session’s end. ‘I suppose it’ll be years before I get to see the results.’
‘Pretty much,’ he sighs, and I realise that this has been just one small step on what is a very long journey. People would have worked for years on Help!…It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!
For me, it was a momentous afternoon, but nobody I’ve told any of this to has been even remotely impressed. Most of them haven’t seen Dogstar (it’s on in the afternoons), and none of them seem to think of ‘doing cartoon voices’ as being much chop. ‘It’s not exactly high end,’ said one friend, snobbishly.
But what would they know?
As I hear tell, Mel Blanc never stopped getting laid.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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