A Vocal Harvest

Had a couple of days of voice-over work that I would love to replicate the whole year round. You know, the kind of days where you get a call in the early afternoon to send in an audition from home, then you get called by your agent at 5 telling you you've got the job and have to go in at 6 to record, then the producers call you in to their studio the next day to have you do some more. And I thought it was just a myth. More, please!

The best part was that  I was hired to be a sound-alike for none other than the uber-cool actor Ken Watanabe. Me! This validation's come at a good time— at all my Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness sessions I sit and marvel at the other actors: the amazing suppleness of their voices, their mercurial wit, their fast-and-furious banter, and I can't help, sometimes, but feel a bit... arthritic in comparison. So to nail an actor who's voice is far from mine is a great boost.

Let's see, all I need to do is Chow-Yun-Fat and Jet Li, and I'll have covered practically the entire pantheon of male Asian superstars!

Check...

Check...

Check...

And check.
Just wait 'til they hear my Katharine Hepburn!

Studying Mr. Watanabe's voice (mostly using The Last Samurai as a guide) yielded a lot of quiet pleasure. Jackie Chan (my patron saint in voice-overs) and Ken Watanabe come from the same lower register of my voice, but the differences in their speaking are quite distinct, even taking into account their different ethnicities. Mr. Chan, like the characters he plays, has a certain broadness to his speech; he's quite animated (no pun intended) and charming, but simple in his delivery—he saves his flexibility for his movement.


Mr. Watanabe, on the other hand, is first and foremost an actor, and it shows in his delivery. Listen to the colors of his voice, how he employs tone and nuance quite fluidly, and remember that this is not even in a language he was comfortable with at that time. It's quite impressive.

This gig comes on top of continuing Kung Fu Panda work (only five more episodes to record!) and a voice on the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Plus (speaking of pandas), I've got a good role in the new World of Warcraft game: Mists of Pandaria which has just come out. I still can't believe that I'm in this job that I love so very, very much, working (playing, really) with people of the highest caliber of talent, humor and kindness, making funny voices and getting paid for it.

Something to be thankful for, indeed.

Happy Turkey Day!

I wrote my blog, but the dog ate it.

Yes,  yes, I know. MIA. Big time. It was, you know... life. Intruding. Extruding. Imploding. Not one thing, but an aggregate of STUFF conspired to knock me off my regular posting. Mea Culpa. 


I know there's really no excuse, but that won't stop me from listing them:

TOP 10 REASONS WHY I WASN'T POSTING


10. An interminable spring break, with trips hither and yon (New York, Ventura County), equipped with naught but an iPad, which makes for trickier posting. Saw a lot of old friends, my sister, a great play and a few dolphins, but got very little writing done. I need routine, damn it!


9. A miserable tax season, with ever-mounting piles of paper threatening to overwhelm me, à la Brazil:

8. Easter *

     *(Not an excuse—I prepared nothing for Easter this year. We were in a beach house in Ventura and the most I did was buy a Trader Joe's Easter bunny and Trader Joe's jelly beans [both clearly marked with "Trader Joe's"] and leave them next to Ben's bed. I thought we were DONE with the Easter Bunny! When Santa Claus topples, doesn't the Bunny naturally follow? Apparently not: when Ben woke up, he looked at the paltry booty and said "Do you think the Easter Bunny left something at our house, too?" Really, Ben? Really?

8. Work! Last week I had 4 voiceover sessions in 5 days. Plus a couple of on-camera auditions. A rare but welcome concentration of gigs. I did two highly-anticipated computer games (a violent one and a fantasy one; can't say more— non-disclosure forms abound) plus a Kung Fu Panda TV episode. Did you see the one where I play Monkey AND his brother? 

Kung Fu Panda: "Monkey in the Middle" S1
Get More: Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness Episodes,Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness,Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness Games

7. Going back home for my parents' birthdays and my father's back surgery.

6. Recovering from time spent back at home. 

5. Game of Thrones season 2!

4. My Apple Overlords tell me I must move to the Cloud, so I do so. It's just a few simple clicks, right?

3. Install OSX Lion to get on iCloud, buy new Microsoft Word  & Filemaker Pro to replace  ones that no longer work with new operating system, back up all my files, download and install Sugarsync* to sync documents over my devices, get a new iPhoto in order to use Photostream, figure out why everything is running so damned slow... cry just a little.

     *Sugarsync is like dropbox, but you don't have to put your stuff in a special folder to share them over your computers. It's pretty cool. If you try it, drop my name—I can get more storage!

2. I've just started a course on Buddhist precepts, in which you must write two essays a week, baring your very soul (more on that next time).

1. Who am I kidding? Draw Something, anyone?* ** ***

     *I had a whole junkie cycle with that game—infatuation, obsession, and eventually, rehab. Please don't ask me to play. Really. 

     **Still playing W.E.L.D.E.R, which is like Text twist, Scramble, Scrabble, and Tetris combined. 

     *** Hey, give me some credit. I haven't downloaded Angry Birds in Space!*

          *yet.

Onward and upward. Welcome back!

Panda Unplugged

Voice actors are, by and large, as agreeable a bunch of people as you are likely to find in any given workspace. Convivial, pleasant, and almost always entertaining, they are less prone to the excesses of egotism afflicting the greater pool of actors in Los Angeles. Perhaps it's because they're heard but rarely seen; perhaps it's because of how easy most of them are to replace; but voice actors (and I'm not talking about the celebrity voices that dip their toe into our revenue stream from time to time) have a healthy sense of their place in the universe of entertainment, and are not forever trying to conspire to make themselves appear to be more than they are at the expense of others. 


Voice actors cannot lock themselves in their double-wide trailers and refuse to come out. 


Even the verbal MVP's of today's animation, ridiculously talented luminaries like Jeff Bennet, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Tara Strong (go ahead, look them up and be amazed) have always, in my experience, been down-to-earth and generous to their fellow actors. Sure, the dueling verbal pyrotechnics during sessions can approach Robin William-esque proportions, and there may be an excess of Christopher Walken impersonations, but I'm always exceedingly happy to enter the booth for a group recording.

If I... have to HEAR... a-NUH-thuh...impression of me... 

Take, as a case in point, the Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness cast. This is a seriously credentialed group of actors; they have literally hundreds of credits to their names. Every week I'm left agape by what comes out of their mouths (much of it unprintable, even in a blog). Virtuosos in their field, every one of them. And yet, when I asked if any of them would be willing to read at my son's school for a Read Across America fundraiser, they said yes without hesitation. 

The nefarious NEA
promoting reading to our kids!

Read Across America coincides with Dr. Seuss' birthday, and it promotes book reading in schools... across America. One evening during this week our school stays open so the kids can go into their classrooms and listen to teachers read books, followed  by a guest reader who reads to everyone in the Kindergarten classroom, capping off the evening. This year Doug suggested I rope in the cast of KFP, and to my surprise all the regulars (except for Crane- the redoubtable Amir Talai, who had another committment) signed on. They even agreed to come early to rehearse. Rehearse!

Tigress and Mantis (Kari Wahlgren & Max Koch, the bawdy Astaire and Rogers of the group) arrive at school first, followed closely by Shifu (Fred Tatasciore, our own personal Zen Lebowski). We gather in the Kindergarten. They marvel at how small the chairs are. Kids (including my son) keep popping their heads in, excited. All around the playground there is the sussurus of whispering children: "Is Po here? Is Po here?" And then he arrives, the quicksilver-tongued rock star Mick Wingert, who apologizes for being late though there is still ninety minutes before showtime. 

No one asks for room temp Evian, or green M&M's. 


The reading goes great. The kindergarten is PACKED, standing room only. I select two stories: Small Brown Dog's Bad Remembering Day, and Lewis Carrol's "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Plenty of characters to go around. 

The kids squeal with delight, especially when we throw in our Kung Fu Panda characters' voices. Fred & Max make a perfect Walrus & Carpenter. I have a particular fondness for Kari's plucky but ill-fated little Oysters, who sound a bit like Jimmy Neutron crossed with a mollusk. Mick has an great voice for the Small Brown Dog, but we make him scrap it and do his flawless Jack Black impression because ya gotta give the audience what they want. 

Max, Mick, Fred, Kari and me: Panda Unplugged.

Afterwards, kids rush up, crayons and scrap paper in hand. A little girl named Dot tells Max that she's totally in the Mantis camp. The actors gladly sign autographs. Parents nod their appreciation. It's like our own mini Comic-Con, right there.

Maybe 50-60 kids, plus parents: better than some non-Equity shows I've been in.

Legends of Awesomeness, indeed. 

Give Me An Hour of Your Time

This has got to be my favorite day of the year— the annual Death of Daylight Savings Time. It's the glorious retreat of an hour. Fall back! Fall back! The one day of the year where I can get up to find the Time Fairies have miraculously given me another sixty minutes to rest. It helps that my son is old enough to fully appreciate this phenomena and not ruin my precious hour of repose by daring to awaken at the usual time. Of course, it's important not to squander said saved time by anticipating it the night before and staying up an hour later, but even then: to rise with more light and still be perpetually early! I go through day savoring this gift anew: "It's ten o'clock now, but I'm saying it's nine!" "Now it's lunch, but we're really eating at one!" It's like we are able to plunge the hours itself into our own personal crucible and bend them to our will. Hephaestus, eat your heart out!

Of course, it also helps if you skip your meditation at the Zen Center because it's raining and you can't find a parking space (bad Buddhist! Bad Buddhist!) so you arrive at the Farmer's Market early and miraculously it stops raining as soon as you arrive and you walk through the shiny streets where the market is uncrowded, the produce is glistening with rain, the air is crisp and clear and life is beautiful. Could this day be any better?

Hmm. It could also be that the cafe mocha which I drank before I was going to go meditate (bad Buddhist! Bad Buddhist!) is causing this euphoria. Eh, let's just roll with it. 


Good news for a good day: the long-awaited, much anticipated (at least by me) "Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness" is finally making it's official debut tomorrow on Nickelodeon. They're playing a new episode twice a day (5:30 and 8:30pm) for the whole week, and then airing it weekly after that. 

Here's a review from Variety which is pretty fair:
Variety Reviews - Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness - TV Reviews - - Review by Brian Lowry
Interestingly, as oppose to other entertainment reviews, I'm usually not anxious at all about what is going to be said about me in TV show animation. This is because (non celeb) voice actors are rarely mentioned at all, and if they are, it's usually en bloc. We're the Invisibles behind the cartoons, and that's fine by me. Now, message boards are a separate matter... we'll see. 

Speaking of which, remember that "Chicago Code" I did last summer, where I had to speak Cantonese on a day's notice? The producers didn't really care what I sounded like, but apparently a viewer did. On a message board for my entry on IMDB, one "indigojiu wrote under the banner "incredibly bad actor": 
<<Jut [sic] saw him on Chicago Code> What language was that??? Definitely NOT Chinese.>>
Can't say I disagree, indigojiu. That wasn't  Chinese. Let's call it— an homage to William Shatner-ese. Is that so wrong??

A New Panda in Town

For those of you who think that I spend my days playing Angry Birds and baking cobblers... well, you're mostly right. But wait! I have proof of legitimate and gainful employment: tomorrow, Monday 19th, Nickelodeon rolls out a sneak preview of a series that will start in November—KUNG FU PANDA: LEGENDS OF AWESOMENESS. 

It is, in my biased but usually-jaundiced view, pretty awesome. The animation looks great, the writing is whip-smart, and it's got the movie's combination of hi-larity and heart. I play Monkey, one of the Furious Five. (I need to have a little altar dedicated to Jackie Chan, the movie's Monkey, to thank him properly for being responsible for my livelihood. I got my start in voiceovers sounding like him in "The Jackie Chan Adventures," a show which gave me a crash course in voice acting, gave me cred and landed me the crackerjack agents I have today.) 

Tune in if you can. I think it's on at 8 PM, but check your local listings. The Nickelodeon website will give you all the info you need, plus some clips. The episode is a good one for me; it's a nice spotlight to the relationship between Po the Panda and Monkey. 

I am not, of course, acting alongside Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, Seth Rogen, David Cross & Jack Black, but if you closed your eyes during a recording session, you might think otherwise. These actors are phenomenal, and not just at sounding like celebrities. Kari Wahlgren. Fred Tatasciore. Amir Talai. Mick Wingert. Max Koch. Their names might not be familiar, but in the voiceover world, they are titans, or on the way to becoming one.  We mostly record as a group, and though I'm occasionally awed and intimidated by their quick-morphing, borderline-schizophrenic verbal shape-shifting, I love hanging out with them. They're like family, a family in which Scatman Crothers sings duets with Christopher Walken, and Tony Soprano stops by for profanity and cannoli.
(WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CLIP IS NSFW- BUT PRETTY DAMNED FUNNY):

Of course, I could be setting myself up for a big, hubristical ostrich egg on my face... recasting voices is notoriously easy in the animation world. I was on a series where the main celebrity villain was recast during a season and recorded with different actors, but they ended up reverting back to the celebrity... and he never knew he'd been dumped and then rehired. You should never count your voices until they've aired. But, unless you tune in Monday and hear Daniel Dae-Kim's voice coming out of Monkey's body, you'll get to hear me at work.  It's a total joy.