I KNOW THAT VOICE Frank Welker

An overview of the career of voice actor Frank Welker, the man behind such characters as Dr. Claw, Megatron and a truckload of Disney animals.

This strand of the newsletter (as detailed here) derives its name from a documentary released in 2013. Produced by John DiMaggio (aka Bender from Futurama), it’s a fascinating and entertaining love letter to the art of voice acting, featuring interviews with the major names in the field. Per DiMaggio’s statements, only one person declined to participate wholesale, and that was Frank Welker. 

I chose to focus on him for this first installment of I KNOW THAT VOICE, not only because he’s turning 75 in a few days, but also because, among the major voice actors working today, he’s currently the longest serving, having started his career in the late 1960s. His talents are matched only by his modesty, of which his refusal to appear in the documentary is but one example: he rarely grants interviews, he’s a no-show on social media and until very recently he wouldn’t even attend conventions (he’s now a regular at events devoted to the Transformers franchise). 

He is also the rarest of voice actors, in that a lot of his major roles haven’t been dubbed in other languages, due to his most recognizable skill: he can imitate pretty much any animal sound on the planet, a gift he has put to good use in both animation and live action. How good is he? Well, according to fellow voice actor Rob Paulsen, who has mentioned this story on his podcast, Welker was once asked by either Disney or Pixar if he could do the vocal effects for a pig. His answer was “Male or female?”. 

His non-human voice roles include a large chunk of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ output, starting with The Great Mouse Detective (he did the vocal effects for Toby and Felicia) and up to and including the Frozen franchise (Sven’s grunts are his), not to mention live action films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (the monkey), Gremlins (Stripe), Mars Attacks! (the Martians), Species (the alien version of Sil) and Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (yes, that was Welker). When his agent told him Steven Soderbergh wanted him to appear alongside Matt Damon in The Informant!, he initially assumed he was being asked to do vocalizations for a dog (he was actually cast as Damon’s father, in a rare on-camera role). 

This side of his career has partially overshadowed his equally impressive penchant for human voices: a superbly gifted impressionist, his repertoire includes Dustin Hoffman, Steven Spielberg (both of whom he impersonated on Animaniacs) and the late Lorenzo Music, who originated the role of Garfield (although, according to writer and voice director Mark Evanier, the voice Welker uses is a deliberate approximation rather than an exact imitation, per the wishes of the character’s creator Jim Davis). 

In fact, one of his most celebrated roles, that of Dr. Claw in Inspector Gadget, was the result of an early attempt at impersonating Barry White, and it gave him a signature voice that he has used for multiple characters (most memorably the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin). That came about in 1983, a year before he made his debut as another iconic villain: Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, a character so iconic that when Welker reprised the role in 2010 (the first time he had done so since the original Transformers series ended in 1987), his first line was “I have returned”. 

And then, of course, there’s Scooby-Doo. Few voice actors can claim to have hit the jackpot with their very first animation gig, and Welker is certainly among them: in 1969, when Hanna-Barbera launched a new series about a certain dog and his mystery-solving friends, he was cast as Fred Jones, and to this day, save for the computer-animated film released last year, he remains the voice of the adult incarnation of that character (much like Ray Stantz in The Real Ghostbusters, it’s basically what he sounds like in real life). Since 2002, he’s also been the voice of Scooby-Doo himself, a role he retains in the 2020 film. 

And that’s merely a fraction of everything he’s done, within a filmography that includes the original DuckTales,The Smurfs, Tiny Toon Adventures, both feature-length versions of The Grinch, The Simpsons, Futurama, Batman: The Animated Series, and countless more projects. In terms of theatrical box office, he’s arguably the most successful actor no one’s heard of, with enough hits under his belt to challenge the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Harrison Ford. Not that he’d care much about that. He’s happy to just be in a booth, coming up with new ways to astound us with his voice box. As John DiMaggio put it in an interview once, “he’s our God.” And what a blessing his work has been for so many audiences all over the world.