{"id":13740,"date":"2011-06-15T17:16:05","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T21:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/15\/13740.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:59:58","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:59:58","slug":"greatest-voice-actors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/15\/greatest-voice-actors\/","title":{"rendered":"Greatest Voice Actors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. I came across an IMDB list of 50 Greatest Voice Actors of All Time<\/a>, and I was startled by how terrible the list is. It wasn’t until I had griped to my Best Reader about it that I discovered that it was just some guy posting his own list in that Web 2.0 way, and that it wasn’t put together by IMDB personnel. Ah, the New Web.\n

Anyway, the person who put this together put Mel Blanc at the top spot, which is obviously correct. There will be a large amount of whitespace below Mel Blanc and above whoever is number two. Sadly, this list has Dan Castellaneta at the second slot, which is just crazy. Mr. Castellaneta is responsible for creating the voice for one of the most beloved characters in history, true, and that’s surely good enough to get him in to the top fifty, and you could make an argument for top twenty or so. You could presumably make some sort of argument that would put Mr. Castellaneta ahead of James Earl Jones. Such an argument would be wrong, but you could make it. I don’t see an argument for putting either of them in the top ten. James Earl Jones doesn’t even make the list I linked to up there, which should tell you something about the list.\n

Oh, and the rightful owner of the second slot? Orson Welles.\n

But I’m stuck with a question about the criteria for a list of Greatest Voice Actors, which is what counts as voice acting? Clearly it has to be acting<\/i>, that is, you can’t be playing yourself; Dylan Thomas reading his own poems does not count as voice acting. Vin Scully is not a voice actor, nor is Rush Limbaugh. However, I think that all part-playing for audio, that is, where the actor will not be seen should count. We should count Stephen Moore in Hitchhiker’s<\/i>; we should count Ian Holm in the BBC Lord of the Rings<\/i>; we should certainly count Norman Painting from The Archers<\/i>. I don’t know where that puts them, but they count. A trickier question is John Gielgud, who recorded plays that he was in, recorded plays he wasn’t in, recorded highlights from plays, monologues, poems, old discarded memoranda, shopping lists, telephone directories and technical manuals, all with the superb beauty of the Gielgud Voice. What of that counts, and what does not? My inclination is not to count recordings made of stage performances, even if the cast sits down to make a separate recording for radio or audio only. I’m not sure I can justify excluding those, but they just seem not to fit. I also would throw out highlights from or monologues from—those are obviously voice acting, but they also seem not the thing. But if they are doing a radio play and cast an actor for the radio play, does it matter if there was also a stage play of the same name? Somehow, my answer is maybe<\/i>. And that may be enough to keep John Gielgud out of the top five.\n

As for the rest of the top five, I think Frank Oz is the only person who you could seriously argue challenges Orson Welles for that second spot, having originated two (at least) beloved icons. I would round out my top five with, I think, June Foray and Harold Peary, although there are several others who could make a claim—I need to mention Gertrude Berg, because I will be sad if I don’t, even if I think she winds up in the second five.\n

So what do you think? What counts? Who is at the top of your list? Am I rating Harry Shearer too low? Who am I just blanking on, that I will kick myself for forgetting?\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger recognizes that it would be better to say something such as \u201cGreatest Voice Actors in the English Language\u201d, and is hoping that the fact that the words I do use are in that language will clue people in to the total lack of ferners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flim"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19369,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13740\/revisions\/19369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}