Thursday, April 29, 2010

Voice Actor: Dee Bradley Baker

First and foremost as an update I have lost a total of 12 lbs in the month of April. Who wants to touch me?

OK, now that that's out of the way I've decided that I'm going to start something new on my blog. After listening to one of my favorite podcasts last night called The Forcecast. I decided to download some past episodes and I found one where they did an interview with voice actor Dee Bradley Baker who does the voice of every single clone in the Clone Wars animated series. That's a really impressive feat considering the show is called "Clone" Wars for a reason. So after listening to his interview he brought up some cool things I would like to talk about. But it also gave me the idea to start doing a blog entry for all my favorite voice actors and maybe how they effected me in some way. I think it's a pretty cool idea. So we're gonna start with Mr. Baker since his interview gave me the idea.

Besides being the voice of all the clones in The Clone Wars he has also been Klaus in American Dad, Curt Connors in Spectacular Spider-man, Appa and Momo from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Daffy and Taz in Space Jam, and a bunch of voices in SpongeBob, Ben10, and Fairly Odd Parents. Oh, and I should mention he was also the voice of Olmec in the Nickelodeon series Legends of the Hidden Temple!!! How cool is that???

First I'll mention Clone Wars. There are so many clones in this series and he does the voice of all of them. The most amazing thing is that he gives them all their own personality and tone. It's not like they all talk exactly the same. Captain Rex and Commander Cody are the two leaders each with their own distinct way of speaking, as do a slew of others. When asked why they all talk differently Baker said that even though they were all created after the same mold they are all sent out to work under different masters on different planets so obviously they are going to be speaking differently. I thought that was a really cool touch. Even adding little things like one clone pronouncing the name of a planet one way and a different clone pronouncing it another way. It's subtle things like this that I pick up on and enjoy about this series. Here's a clip of Dee as the Clones. It's the best I can do at the moment. I could go on and on but then this entry would just turn into a straight up Clone Wars blog.

Captain Rex is definitely one of my favorites...


He mentioned something else in the interview that was really upsetting to me. He brought up the fact that when the animated Clone Wars was fist released as a movie in theaters he thought it was so fun to have all his fellow voice actors get to go to the big movie premiere. He said that after doing the voice of Daffy and Taz for Space Jam he and the other voice actors weren't invited to the movie premiere! What is that about? Since this was Space Jam and the majority of the cast was voice actors then who the hell was invited to the premiere besides Michael Jordan, Bill Murray, and Wayne Knight? I am upset with this. But Mr. Baker has a good head on his shoulders and didn't seem as upset as I felt about it. lol

Hope you found this interesting because I am definitely excited about writing about more voice actors in the future. Here is a link to his Homepage where you can listen to his voice demos and such.

Later all!

3 comments:

bluedrakon said...

Let me say that the whole issue that he was not invited to the premiers FUCKING SUCKS! I gues "voiec" actors are not actors in the eyes of Hollywood.

I like the idea of reviewing voice actors as they usually do not get a whole lot of credit. Maybe you can actually work up some questions and see if they will respond to you for interviews??

Seantaku said...

Good call! That would be so awesome! Voice acting is a huge passion of mine and I never really thought of try to contact anyone. Perhaps an interview or something?

Thanks for the idea! I'm gonna look into this

Matt D. said...

It was nice meeting you today at FCBD! Got that pic up at my blog! (BTW, we're Commander Cody fans in this household....)