Saturday, June 11, 2011

8 Actors You Won't Believe Voiced Famous Cartoon Characters Read more: 8 Actors You Won't Believe Voiced Famous Cartoon Characters | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19239_8-actors-you-wont-believe-voiced-famous-cartoon-characters.html#ixzz1OzXxAF1q

8 Actors You Won't Believe Voiced Famous Cartoon Characters

Did you know that Hulk Hogan didn't play himself in his terrible Rock 'n' Wrestling cartoon? That was actually the voice of Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond. We know, we were shocked, too. That's why we decided to go out and look for the most surprising voice acting credits ever. Did you know ...

#8.

Vin Diesel Was The Iron Giant

You know him best as ...

Vin Diesel's impressive acting credits include playing tough guys who reluctantly save the universe, tough guys who reluctantly work as secret agents and tough guys who reluctantly drive cars. A devoted character actor, Diesel plays morally dubious antiheroes about as often as he plays bald, muscular men. Really, the only way this guy could do a movie aimed at kids would be if he played a tough guy who reluctantly babysits children and ... oh shit, that already exists, doesn't it?

But he was also ...

The Iron Giant, from the film of the same name. Before he even became famous, the guy from Fast Five voiced the title character in the timeless story of the friendship between a boy and a giant alien robot.

And it ... kind of looks like him.

Granted, his voice is pretty filtered and his lines are mostly grunts and monosyllables, but Diesel actually did a pretty good job here. Unsurprisingly, The Iron Giant is his highest rated IMDB credit after Saving Private Ryan, which doesn't even count because we're pretty sure he got killed in like the first 20 minutes. Anyway, here's some footage of Diesel recording the Giant's voice:

The Iron Giant's director, Brad Bird, went on to make Pixar's Ratatouille and The Incredibles -- but sadly he didn't cast Diesel in either of them.

#7.

Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Was Shredder

You know him best as ...

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Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, played by James Avery, was known for being a strict man, but only in a sitcom would a "strict man" put up with all the shenanigans caused by Will Smith's character (played by an annoying wannabe rapper called "Will Smith"). Any real person would have sent Will back to Philadelphia (and certain death) after like two weeks. In truth, Uncle Phil was a kind, patient and understanding man who came to represent the father figure Will never had.

But he was also ...

The same actor also voiced Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.

That's right, for over 100 episodes, the man best known for playing a dull, conservative judge/socialite also lent his voice to an Asian ninja master best known for living inside a giant mechanical eyeball and hanging out with a hideous man-hog and a disembodied brain. Also, for being a huge jerk. If you grew up in the 90s, this is the closest thing to finding out your grandpa and that bully from school were actually the same person all along.

Here's Avery talking about Shredder and the hidden levels of profundity within the character, plus openly admitting the interaction between him and Krang was played "like an old married couple."

If that's his idea of an old married couple, we're thinking things turned pretty bizarre in the Banks mansion after Will, Carlton and the girls left.

#6.

Grandpa Huxtable Was a Thundercat

You know him best as ...

Between 1984 and 1992, Earle Hyman played Bill Cosby's father in The Cosby Show, despite being only 11 years older than the star (the conception could have been a touching flashback episode, right?). Grandpa Russell "Slide" Huxtable was a trombone player, a proud graduate of Hillman College and a really bad buyer of sweaters.

BAM!

But he was also ...

Panthro from the Thundercats. At the very same time he was playing Russell Huxtable, Earle Hyman was also moonlighting in animation as a humanoid warrior feline from outer space.

Panthro was the resident mechanic in the Thundercats and also the least clothed one after Snarf. We have no idea what it is with aging African-American male actors playing martial artists on cartoons in the 1980s, but this does raise an interesting question: Who would win in a nunchaku throwdown -- Uncle Phil or Grandpa Huxtable?

We will never be able to watch Panthro in action again without imagining Cosby's dad in the same situation:

Earle Hyman talked about voicing Panthro in this podcast (starting at around 19:00), and he says it was an easy job because he just pretended he was talking to his cats, which makes us think he probably misunderstood the plot of the series just a little bit.

#5.

Fergie Was the Blonde Girl in Peanuts

You know her best as ...

Getty

Stacy Ann Ferguson, aka Fergie, is best known for being in the Black Eyed Peas along with will.i.am and the other ... two, three guys? As one of the six members of the band, Fergie is partly responsible for the worst song in human history, some of the dumbest song lyrics ever and plagiarizing other people's music. In recent years, Fergie has done some film acting (Planet Terror, Nine) and voice acting work (Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Marmaduke), because apparently professional voice actors just aren't good enough for movies anymore.

But she was also ...

Sally Brown, Charlie Brown's little sister in Peanuts. Sally is remembered for her ill-fated one-way crush on Linus and for not being too bright.

Also for looking like Charlie Brown in drag.

Before you start complaining about Hollywood raping your childhood with all these goddamned celebrity-studded remakes, Fergie was the one of original Sallys. As Stacy Ferguson, she voiced the character in two classic Peanuts movies and The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (where she also voiced Patty), starting when she was only 9. Here's what she sounded like back then:

And apparently she can still do that voice, which means that if they did a big-budget CGI Peanuts movie, casting Fergie would be a good decision for once.

Monday, March 21, 2011

6 Groups Who Don't Work as Movie Bad Guys Anymore

Romantic comedies can get away with the protagonists fighting their fear of commitment. Puzzle games can have you fighting against the lack of vowels in your Scrabble hand, but a good shoot-em-up in any medium needs some properly villainous bodies to be shot at.

One of which should always be played by Alan Rickman.

The problem is that current events and the audience's craving for novelty are drying up everyone's go-to staples for villainy. It all started with:

#6.

Russia

The fall of the Soviet Union caused a lot of problems -- such as political and economic disarray, missing nuclear weapons, runaway crime, that sort of thing -- but probably the worst thing about it was that moviegoers lost maybe the best bad guy country we'd ever had, aside from Nazi Germany. James Bond used to be a lone man taking on a massive evil empire with just his wits and lovemaking skills. Then one day in the 90s he finds himself fighting newspaper owners.

Oh no, he's going to write something mean about you!

In War Games, a young whippersnapper hacker found himself almost accidentally starting (and then stopping) a war between two superpowers that would have annihilated the earth. Now movie hackers just blow up people's computers and change traffic lights. Red Dawn was scary in addition to silly because, you know, maybe they weren't going to invade us exactly like that, but you still actually worried they might invade us.

By cloaking themselves behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy (almost like a veil, or curtain, made of some kind of metal) Russia freed America's imagination to fill in the many blanks with details that were 10 times worse than reality. According to the movies, Russia was ahead of us on everything -- space, missiles, sexy women spies, you name it -- and at any moment they were poised to burst out and destroy us.

Or break us, as the situation may require.

When they tore down that wall, as Reagan had asked them nicely to do, it was a huge letdown to find out our invincible adversaries had been basically eating their shoes to keep from starving. Shoes they had to wait in line to buy in the first place.

Let's see love shoe shopping now, ladies.

Now, the good news is that Russians are just as nostalgic for the old days as action movie lovers (because at least then they had shoes to eat), and have been moving further and further toward old repressive Soviet policies. Not coincidentally, Russian bad guys have started to pop up again in movies like Iron Man 2 and games like Modern Warfare 2. The actual country still isn't back in top villain form though (where they'd have a massive army of soldiers wearing instead of eating their army boots), which means movie and game makers usually have to go with rogue Russians or Russian mobs.

#5.

Middle Eastern Terrorists

With fictional Russian villains bailing on us, fictional terrorists stepped up to fill the gap. It made sense. Terrorists were always bad. They blew up innocent people. You could easily shoot 50 of them in a movie without anyone having to feel guilty.

Or tie them to a missile or whatever.

The only problem is that you could only have about 50 of them. Terrorists were evil, but they were little roving gangs of evil dudes, sneaking around, using whatever weapons they could piece together. You couldn't have an epic war with them or anything. Bring a horde of missile-equipped helicopters to fight a bunch of guys with homemade explosives strapped to their riding lawn mowers and YOU start to look like the bad guy.

Oh yeah, giant missile birds. Those are fair.

When we went to war in Iraq, and then Afghanistan, and then Iraq again, movie producers wet their pants with excitement because they were no longer just stuck with small-time terror cells, but actually had real life bad guy armies they could use for big old movie battles. Sure, the factual ties between Iraq and terrorism were a little shaky, but the important thing was that audiences basically saw these enemy armies as the big military side of the characters that blow up planes.

And if you're watching something like Hot Shots!, you're not thinking too deeply about the moral ambiguity of the Gulf Wars.

But while it was a little easier to play the first Gulf War as bad vs. good, by the time we went back again, it was a lot more complicated. So at this point, you can't tell any kind of war story in the Middle East without accidentally making a political statement. Even the cartooniest action flick is going to be interpreted as "pro-war" if you set it in the Middle East without saying anything about the complexity of the situation.

Nobody ever brings up the legitimacy of Nazi zombie claims to land.

After all, as a wise cartoony action flick once said, "Shit just got real." It's hard to ignore how real and current the situation over there is, so almost all Middle East war movies nowadays are gritty and complex and try to make sense of war. It's not really any territory for people who just want to make your average bad-guys-good-guys action fest.

#4.

China

In the real world, China is the rising new star on the Western world's international threat matrix. They're poised to economically dominate the world, and their military is not too shabby either. All those World War III-genre screenwriters who went dormant after Russia collapsed are now being revived from their cryogenic chambers to start writing China-threat scripts.

The best example of China becoming the new Russia is Red Dawn, the iconic Cold War invasion movie, which was recently being remade with China literally replacing Russia.

Unfortunately they ran into a snag: While we had a "Cold War" with the Soviet Union, our differences with China are more like a "Passive-Aggressive Catfight." We're not actually physically fighting China anywhere in the world, and neither country seems to even be thinking about it. Instead, we're duking it out with snide comments and aggressive economic policies.

And a little bit of lead poisoning.

We're actually talking to and trading with China, and although we have a lot of arguments about that trade, nobody wants to see it stopped. So pretty much anyone that likes making big money in the global economy can feel the squeeze when they want to talk shit about China. Including movie studios.

That's why the new Red Dawn is being hurriedly edited in post-production to remove all references to China and change the bad guys to ... North Korea.

Whoever his agent is, he deserves a raise.

Considering that North Korea doesn't even have the boats to send an invading army over here (or the shoes to feed them), the movie's marketing is also being changed from action to comedy.

It's not just Hollywood that's scared. The new game Homefront also caved under pressure to switch its baddies from China to Korea, but at least they had the sense to have the two Koreas unite in the game's alternate reality, so only half of our invaders are starving to death and would defect the moment they saw a Dairy Queen.

If these were North Korean troops, they'd be inside already.

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Saturday, June 11, 2011