CHAPTER SEVEN

Zany to the Max

The late 1980s and early 1990s were an exciting time to be in the cartoon biz, a period that would come to be called the animation renaissance, when studios were revamping their animation departments after a long, slow decline in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was a time of energy and creativity not seen since the cartoon glory days of the 1930s and ’40s. Audiences flocked to the art form on the big and small screens.

Disney’s newly reconigured animation unit put out The Rescuers in 1977 and The Fox and the Hound in 1981, then broadened into television. After former network executive Michael Eisner took over the studio in 1984, he drew on his television experience to start up Disney’s first TV animation since the 1950s with Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears, inspired by the candies, and DuckTales, adapted from the Scrooge McDuck comics.

As the syndicated block of cartoons under the Disney Afternoon banner caught on with children, the Fox network countered with its own FoxKids block, turning to Warner Bros. for content. The Warner Bros. studio had largely abandoned its storied animation division, which gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the rest of the Looney Tunes. But a $100 million deal with Fox brought it all roaring back. Warner Bros. supplied most of the FoxKids programing until it launched its own channel, The WB, a couple years later in 1993.

For voice actors, that meant work. When I wasn’t at Hanna-Barbera, I was at Disney working on DuckTales, TaleSpin, Goof Troop, and Gummi Bears, then I’d dash down the freeway to Warner Bros. for their new shows. Among them was Tiny Toon Adventures, a younger version of the famous Looney Tunes cartoons, with Tress MacNeille as little Babs Bunny and Maurice LaMarche as Dizzy Devil. I played Fowlmouth, a chicken whose every other word was a swear word, beeped out in the cartoon. And I did Arnold the Pit Bull, which was just sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger—a giant Venice Beach pit bull that walked around in a tank top and a Speedo.

Andrea Romano handled casting and directing. I had become fairly close to Andrea at Hanna-Barbera because she was Gordon Hunt’s assistant. Andrea got this great new gig at Warner Bros. as Kids’ WB was becoming a studio priority. She would go on to become a legendary voice director of Batman, Superman, Freakazoid!, Animaniacs, and Histeria! She has so many Emmys she puts them in Barbie clothes.

Tiny Toons was the brainchild of Tom Ruegger, a New Jersey boy and Dartmouth grad who got his start in animation at Hanna-Barbera writing and producing Snorks and Scooby-Doo spin-offs. And the executive producer was Steven Spielberg, as part of a big new deal with Warner Bros. to use his magic touch to produce content. With Mr. Spielberg in charge, the show had a big budget and a full orchestra, just like the old days at Warner Bros.

Tiny Toons became a hit, winning a couple of Emmys, and it wasn’t long before Mr. Spielberg came back with another show, with the same group of writers and Tom Ruegger as the showrunner. Tom approached me and said I’d be perfect for this show, which he described as a vaudeville-inspired variety program about three once-forgotten Warner Bros. cartoon characters living in the studio’s landmark water tower.

I immediately knew this was the opportunity of a lifetime. There would be smart writing reflecting Tom’s comedic genius and original songs backed by lush orchestration. This was a new show with never-before-seen characters that also had a strong connection with the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. This was my shot at being part of something with the potential to become a modern animation classic, much like the Looney Tunes I grew up with.

Tom said that normally he’d give me a job straight out, but since the show was new, and since it was part of Steven’s deal, Mr. Spielberg himself was going to be making all the final decisions, including casting.

“You have to audition,” Tom said.

“Sounds great,” I said. “Where do I go?”

He gave me the times and location. I asked him what the show was called.

He said, “Animaniacs.”

It was a long process. The studio opened up casting to all the agents in New York and LA, and from what I understand, they listened to six or seven hundred auditions for every character. It was done in person at a place called the Sound Castle in East Hollywood, where we had recorded another Warner Bros. show I’d worked on, Taz-Mania.

The producers gave me drawings of all the characters that fell under the Animaniacs umbrella. I was told their names were Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, two brothers and a sister with the last name of Warner. I got to pick and choose which characters I wanted to audition for. Since Dot was a girl, I read for Yakko and Wakko.

I couldn’t glean much from the drawings. The characters were black-and-white and looked a little like Mickey Mouse. The names offered clues—Yakko probably talked a lot, and Wakko was probably crazy.

My cartoon voice activator went to work.

Different voices emerge in different ways. In cases like Hadji, the producers have a clear idea of what they want, and I try to follow their instructions. But more often it’s an evolving process, a collaborative effort that relies as much on spontaneity and serendipity as it does on careful planning.

I don’t consider myself a mimic or an impressionist, though there are elements of that in my work. I consider myself a performer. That said, I do cook up my own voices, and they come to me from everywhere. I’ve got a pretty long commute from the studios in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley to my home on the eastern edge of the Valley, so I spend a lot of time alone in my car imagining and practicing new characters.

I might pick up an affect from somebody I hear in a shopping line or on TV. I try to find the little nuances. I home in on those nuances and the diphthongs and the way people drop consonants and add them or don’t use the appropriate pronoun in front of a word that begins with a vowel. These are all things that help create an honest and believable character.

My brother-in-law, who’s from Shelby, North Carolina, can speak in a generic American voice. He might say to me in that voice, “If you’re not careful, you might break an arm.” But if he’s talking to his southern pals, he’ll dial up the redneck accent and say, “Y’all best watch yourself, ’cause you might break a arm.”

The key is “A arm.” Immediately that hits the listeners’ ear as something that’s appropriate in the context of the character.

I also have dialects that I’ve been working on for a long time, because they’re more difficult than others. A South African dialect is a very hard one for me to do. I listen to it, I try to do the best I can when I hear it, but it’s strange, because if you’re not careful, you start speaking in an Australian accent, which is different but sort of similar, too.

There are voices that are harder for me to do than others physically. On The Fairly OddParents, I play a character who’s an alien that looks like an octopus with a clear head. His name is Mark Chang, but he talks like he’s a surfer with a Malibu vibe. It’s a balls-out voice that comes from deep in the throat, and I’m good for about forty minutes until the pipes give up.

Voicing characters is an art, but it’s also a craft. There’s a big difference between just having an aptitude for making your friends giggle and using those skills to pay your mortgage. Many people can conjure up a silly voice. I was certainly making them when I was a kid. Everybody can say, “Eh, what’s up, Doc?”

The question is: Can they speak like Bugs all day long in all sorts of dramatic and comedic situations? It’s the difference between saying, “Hey, hey, hey” or “Yabadabadoo,” and bringing the characters to life in the context of the story.

I submit that voice actors are actors. When you think about it, Jack Nicholson has his little Nicholsonian things, and he does them all the time. Whether he says, “Hey, Mrs. Mulwray, you better watch out,” or “Take the toast and hold it between your knees,” it’s different roles, but it’s clearly him. We like Jack because he has that X factor that makes him a movie star, but he doesn’t change the way he sounds all the time. He changes the way he behaves and the way he executes the character. Same with cartoon characters. If you listen carefully to Mel Blanc, Daffy and Sylvester are not that dissimilar, but they’re different characters and they’d be performed differently. It’s all in the acting.

The other key difference between amateurs and professionals is versatility. Many people are pretty good impressionists. Everybody does his own version of Christopher Walken because he’s so affected and has those weird pauses.

But not everybody could do Chris Walken as a duck, or Chris Walken as a duck underwater. Or Chris Walken as a duck underwater falling in love with a starfish. And can you do the starfish, too? Then consider this: What if Chris Walken doesn’t just express his love in words, but in song? Can you sing like Chris Walken underwater in love with a starish?

I’ve had stranger requests.

Who knew when I was twelve or thirteen doing parody tunes that at sixty, the difference between earning a living and not would be the fact that not only could I sing, but sing in character. It’s a key arrow in my quiver, one I reach for all the time, no more so than when I auditioned for Animaniacs.

The only instruction I got for Animaniacs was “Go for it.”

As I said, the first thing I notice when trying out new voices is the physical characteristics of the character. If you look at an elephant, you know it’s got a certain kind of voice. If you look at a whale, you know it’s got a certain kind of voice, but when you look at Wakko, who isn’t even a discernible creature, what do you even think?

His tongue was hanging out of his head a lot and he had this goofy hat on and he didn’t have any pants on and his name implied that he was maybe a little bit left of center intellectually. He was the one who would bring a big mallet out of his goofy sack and pull out an anvil. He was the nutjob of the bunch. So I tried to offer my take on being a little nutty, goofy but not Goofy.

For Yakko, the producers told me that he was the big brother, the de facto leader of the three, and that he was called Yakko because he talks a lot. He was quick with a joke and quick with a smart quip and quicker with a double entendre.

So that was all written out for me, and then I could start to mess with that on my own and start to bring in my own sensibilities based on what the producers thought they wanted. I used my own voice to start out, because I had already done characters that were kind of quick-witted in my own voice. Raphael from the Turtles was a good example.

After I tried this for a while, one of the producers asked, “Do you do Groucho?”

I’m not an impressionist, but I can probably say, “Guess the magic word and win a hundred dollars” with the right vibe.

Then they asked, “Can you do Groucho on helium? And sing that way?”

So that’s what I did.

The audition process went on for a long time. I’d read alone or with other actors. I’d do a session, then come back and do another one. I had six callbacks over a month and a half, and along the way I threw in other voices. One was for a secondary character named Dr. Scratchansniff, a sort of mad scientist. For him, I did my interpretation of Dr. Strangelove from my all-time favorite movie, but combined Peter Sellers with another character I love, Ludwig Von Drake, who’s Donald Duck’s uncle. I loved that thick German accent: Sellers as a duck.

Every time I’d go in and read, the producers would pat me on the back and say, “Attaboy, Rob.” They kept telling me, “You’re our guy. You can sing in character. You can do whatever we want you to do.” And then they’d call me back for more.

I asked Tress MacNeille, who was going out for Dot, “So, what do you think?”

“I think I did pretty good. They seem like they really want us,” she said.

We were all friends anyway, and they did keep saying, “Oh, it sounds good. Hang in there, man. We’re paring it down.” Trying to give us a nod and a wink. But you never know for sure. So many times a producer who truly wanted me would say, “You’re my guy,” and then something would happen and they’d say, “No, we’re going to go with this other guy.” It’s the way it goes.

The more I auditioned, the more I felt this show was perfect for me. I had never felt more confident about a role in my career, so much so that I allowed for some hubris to seep in.

After one audition, I told Tom and Andrea, “You know what, you guys, if you don’t hire me for this, you’re making a big mistake.”

I was laughing as I said it. They were laughing. But I’d never been more serious about a job in my life.

The final decision was up to Mr. Spielberg. He wanted to evaluate the auditions blindly, with no idea who was doing the voices, influenced only by what he heard. So the producers numbered audition takes instead of putting names on them.

Tress nailed the Dot voice from the beginning, and it really never was a competition. She’s that good. She knew that playing cute was not about being cutesy.

Tress has this skill to take a character that could be one-dimensional and give her depth. Dot was cute, and she was willing to drop an anvil on your head. People can’t ignore her, but when they start to make too big a fuss over her, she’s like, “All right, I’ve had enough.”

As for Wakko, a favorite surfaced in that force of nature named Jess Harnell. I had never worked with Jess, but it didn’t take long to spot his talent. What he did with Wakko was take wacky in a whole different, surreal direction. Rather than go with the obvious, like I did, he suggested to the producers: What about the Beatles?

Being cartoon producers, who’ll try anything once, I’m sure they all looked at each other and said, “Why not?”

That’s the beauty of auditioning in front of folks. These days, so much of auditioning is done at a distance. You get the drawings and a character description, then record the voices and send off an MP3. This is to save money, but it comes at the cost of creativity. With an in-person audition, you can ask questions, bounce off ideas, try more things, dare to be weird. I perform better when I’m playing with another competent actor.

Jess had always done a spot-on impression of every Beatle. Each voice was completely distinct—John was different from Paul who was different from George who was different from Ringo. What Jess ended up doing for Wakko was Ringo as a baby.

And it was amazing.

For Yakko, they sent Steven ten recordings of their ten favorite versions of the character.

I later found out I was numbers two, three, four, seven, and nine.

I can only think it’s because Tom Ruegger and the other producers, all of whom I’d worked with before, wanted me and worked to stack the deck in my favor. But they didn’t do that until I had already proven myself. They didn’t want to run the risk of Mr. Spielberg saying, “I’ve heard Rob a whole bunch of times. I’m kind of getting tired of him.”

The producers also had all of us read for a secondary character named Pinky who would appear in short features sprinkled into Animaniacs. As it was described to me, Pinky and his cohort, The Brain, were two lab mice bent on world domination. They were modeled after two real-life people who were animation directors and creators in the Warner Bros. fold: Tom Minton was the physical model for The Brain, and Eddie Fitzgerald was the model for Pinky.

Peter Hastings was on Tom Ruegger’s team, and he and Tom came up with Pinky and the Brain. It was a buddy comedy, not too different from Abbott and Costello, with a smart one (The Brain) and a dumb one (Pinky). The smart one thinks he’s smart, but the dumb one always seems to have the better ideas.

Maurice LaMarche auditioned for The Brain. As a regular on Taz-Mania and on Tiny Toons, he was always part of the equation. Moe started out as a stand-up comedian who used to open for Rodney Dangerfield and was on the Young Comedians special in 1989. He’s also a world-class impressionist and has always done a spot-on impression of Orson Welles.

They had a bunch of different people lined up for The Brain. But the second Moe opened his mouth, doing his Orson Welles impression, they said, “That’s it.”

It was now a question of who would be Pinky. My friend John Astin read for the part. John’s a great actor, but he’s the first one to tell you he’s not about switching his voice around: “I do one voice and I’m confident in my ability, but the voice you get is mine.”

When I auditioned, I did different stuff with my own voice, differ ent attitudes of my own voice, impediments, no impediments, dialects, no dialects. Then I threw in the Monty Python Cockney thing.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the news about casting. It was March 1992, and I was running errands. My wife’s passion was—and is—photography, landscapes primarily. I was picking up her proof sheets at a photo lab in Hollywood when my pager went off with my agent’s phone number.

I found a pay phone and dialed my agent.

“Sweetie,” she said, “you got it.”

I kept it under control as I listened to her tell me that it was Mr. Spielberg who said, “I really like this idea of pairing Orson Welles with a wacky, nondescript, goofy British guy.” He also liked the idea of Groucho on helium for Yakko. He even liked my Scratchansniff.

I hung up the phone and went back into the photo lab, calmly thanked the staff for the proofs, and returned to my car. I then screamed.

“I did it! I did it! I did it!” I shouted. I was bouncing in the driver’s seat and thrusting my fists. People must have thought I was having a seizure.

I was about to embark on a wonderful journey. And I was going to do it with my friends, for Tress of course got Dot, and Moe landed The Brain. This show would change my standing in the acting community. It would also change my life.

After casting, the final major piece to the Animaniacs puzzle was perhaps the most inspired. Since the show featured all-new songs that had to embody the whip-smart, double entendre, wacky theme, producers couldn’t just hire any writer. They needed a genius. They found it in Randy Rogel.

Randy was an unlikely cartoon writer. A West Point graduate, he’d worked as a sales manager at Procter & Gamble in Seattle but also had a love of show business. In his spare time, he ran a little local theater.

After a decade in corporate life, he pulled up stakes and moved with his family to Los Angeles to try to make it as a writer. He broke in writing for Batman: The Animated Series, then went out as a writer for Animaniacs. Tom Ruegger couldn’t quite see Randy, with his military education and experience writing the dark and moody Batman, as a fit for the zany Animaniacs.

Then Randy came up with a song for the show. His audition tune landed him the job as both a scriptwriter and songwriter. It was to be the first song we’d record for the show.

So weeks later, after the show was cast and Randy was on board, I found myself at home in bed. My wife was watching TV while I had my headphones on, listening to Randy’s piano guide track while reading the sheet music. I remember her looking at me strangely, because I blurted out, “This is unbelievable.”

“What?”

“Let me sing a little bit of this.”

“That’s crazy,” she said after hearing a few bars. “Is that like the countries?”

“Yeah,” I said, “pretty much all the countries of the world, but they’re rhymed.”

“Yakko’s World” was the first song Randy had written for Animaniacs, and it got him the job as the show’s primary songwriter. It was one of those clever list songs the likes of which I hadn’t heard in decades. It reminded me of that crazy, remarkably clever tune by Tom Lehrer about the periodic table of elements.

As I went through the song the first time, I was struck by how this bright, bouncy tune was deceptively sophisticated, something that I’d find reflected in all of Randy’s writing. The countries not only rhymed, but they were geographically clumped. He starts with North and South America by and large, then he goes to Europe, then to the rest of the world.

And the song was visual. You could easily imagine Yakko singing and dancing and pointing to a world map, long before the first artist got to work. I’m just an actor and a singer, so I was in awe of the craftsmanship and creativity of this song. I realized that I was truly in the big leagues of animation.

I worked on “Yakko’s World” for a few days, a week maybe, and then recorded my vocals for it at the Sound Castle. There was no orchestra. Randy wasn’t even there, just Randy’s piano guide track in my earphones playing the melody.

It was not an easy song. The lyrics fired off like a machine gun. The countries came fast and furious. It put me on a vocal tightrope, belting out an up-tempo tune to the melody of “The Mexican Hat Dance” that threatened at any moment to tie my tongue in knots. All while singing in Yakko’s high, Marx-brother-on-helium register.

But I felt good about it as I was singing—grooving to Yakko, the countries pouring out, the beat tight and right. When we were done, everybody kind of looked at each other in the booth and said, “I think we got it.”

After a stunned pause, the producer finally said, “Do you want to do another one?”

I said, “Sure.”

So I did a second take in which I harmonized with myself. I just had them play it back and did one where I sang like a third above the melody. It wasn’t as good as the first one. So we kept the first take. Easy peasy.

That was it. One take, goodbye, for a song I will probably still be singing when they put the last nail in my coffin. An orchestra later provided the music to go with my vocals, and the song was synched to the delightful animation that had Yakko bouncing around with a pointer stick in front of the map.

I like to think I’m good at my job. This wasn’t my first musical rodeo, even on a bucking bronco of a tune like “Yakko’s World.” But there are a zillion Hollywood folks who could sing that song. The magic is being able to write it.

I’ve since done countless live shows on the road for the last couple of years with Randy, performing his music in small clubs and big concert halls for a show we call Animaniacs Live. “Yakko’s World” is always the highlight of the show; Randy has updated it with a version that includes countries that didn’t exist when he first wrote it.

People often ask me if I’m sick of singing that song. Not at all, man. It’s when people don’t want to hear it that I will get worried.

I’m always amazed at Randy’s talent. Once during a performance at Joe’s Pub in New York, when a subway rumbled beneath us and shook the venue, I stopped and said, “I’m sorry, hang on a second. That wasn’t an earthquake, that was Ira Gershwin rolling over in his grave.”

It’s cartoon Sondheim. It is smart. It has internal rhymes. It is deeper, with several levels, like all of Randy’s music. At the risk of using a double negative, his music is never not wonderful. Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like “Yakko’s World.”

I recall that about six months after we recorded it—but before the cartoon aired—I was driving home from work and got a call.

“Rob Paulsen?” said a voice on the phone.

“Yeah.”

“Jean MacCurdy.”

The first place I went was: Oh my God, I’m going to be fired. Mac-Curdy was president of Warner Brothers Animation at the time. I couldn’t think of any other reason she needed to reach me. It was your typical insecure actor response.

But she was just calling to tell me that they had gotten the first bits of animation of Animaniacs back from the artists. She couldn’t believe how wonderful it was. She marveled about “Yakko’s World” and how it fit together so beautifully.

I hung up and breathed a sigh of relief.

The next time we got the sense that we had something special was when we saw the orchestra: more than thirty pieces for every half-hour show, just like what Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn used to do for all the old Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons.

We were invited by the lead composer, Richard Stone, who has since unfortunately passed away, to see recording sessions whenever we wanted, and that was a remarkable thing to watch. We only laid down the vocals. Then these world-class players gave it that orchestration. Like Randy says, they can read music faster than we can read words.

The thing that was so mind-blowing was the response from the orchestra. I was treated like a pop star. “Yakko’s here!” the musicians said, and they asked me to sign their sheet music. I kept looking over my shoulder, thinking, Do they have any idea who I am? I mean, I’m a voice actor. These guys have been studying the French horn for thirty years.

Once we started singing Randy’s songs, all of us—cast, crew, producers—realized that “Yakko’s World” was only the start. He was not a one-trick pony. After I did “Yakko’s World,” Jess Harnell did the states and the capitals, and on it went, one incredible song after another.

The scripts for the episodes were great and the jokes were funny. The stories were not geared strictly for children. They were purposely written to appeal to a broad audience. The edict from the top was to not condescend, and so every week we would look at each other with a raised eyebrow, thinking, How the hell are they going to get this through?

There were double entendres, hip cultural references, political references, movie references, lampooning of all kinds of sacred cows. And each double entendre got an exclamation point in the form of our jaunty tagline: “Good night, everybody!”

“We had been on these cartoon shows for three years, and they had given us a lot of freedom. Steven had given us a big budget,” Tom would later tell me on my Talkin’ Toons podcast, speaking of the first round with Tiny Toons. “So when that had wrapped up and that had been successful, they basically came to me and said, ‘What’s the next one? What’s the sequel? What do we do next?’ Now we had the freedom to really explore brand-new characters—Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, Pinky and the Brain, Slappy. Every sort of step along the way was perfectly laid out, because now we had this great experience with the actors, these voice actors. They were encouraged to bring more to the table. The writers were really in sync. The directors were brilliant. The music, of course, became a huge part. Tiny Toons had some great scores. Now we had some great songs to add to the mix, and that made a big difference.”

Then people would start showing up to be guests on the show. Roddy McDowall and Cary Elwes and Olivia Hussey and Buddy Hackett. John Glover, Bernadette Peters, Dick Clark, Ed McMahon, over and over and over again. Did I mention Ernest Borgnine? It was probably after six months that I thought to myself, This really became as big as I thought it would.

To preview Animaniacs for the public, the studio went big. In July 1993, two months before it was to air, Warner Bros. reserved a huge meeting room at San Diego Comic-Con, the big kahuna of pop culture conventions. This was my first Comic-Con and, for once in my life, I was left speechless. Tens of thousands of comic book geeks and sci-fi fanatics, a brother- and sisterhood bound by a shared passion for fantasy and humor, many of them squeezing into spandex superhero costumes like shiny silver sausages. Our room was packed.

On the dais at the front of the room, I sat at a table next to the show’s creative brain trust: Tom Ruegger and another writer-producer, Peter Hastings, along with Warner’s animation brass. On the big screen over our head beamed an episode that included the “Yakko’s World” segment, the first time I had seen it with full orchestration.

The jokes killed, the song lyrics tickled, the animation leaped off the screen. The audience fell in love with our water tower trio, erupting in applause and showering us with questions at the Q&A that followed.

One woman in the front row, whom I can describe only as Patti LaBelle dressed as a Klingon, with a gold lamé getup and what looked like a pie tin on her head, stood and asked, “I have a question for Mr. Paulsen. That country song, that was you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Did you improvise that song?”

I looked at everybody to my left and right. They raised their eyebrows, then chuckled.

Smart-ass that I am, I said, “Yes, I did in fact improvise the entire song. I got it on the first take. Then I improvised a song about everybody who plays major league baseball, in alphabetical order.” She looked confused. I said, “I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

Her question spoke to the genius of Tom and the other creators who pulled off an incredible feat with Animaniacs. The gags and comedy bits and music tumbled out in a loose, spontaneous fashion that belied years of meticulous work and planning by an international team. So many people ask if we improvised the whole show that Randy now jokes, “We tried that, but the animators couldn’t keep up.”

So much of the success of Animaniacs is due to Steven Spielberg. I had first worked for him several years earlier doing behind-the-scenes voice work on one of his films. I got into this little-known corner of the movie business when a woman called me out of the blue one day saying, “I have a loop group.”

I said something dumb like, “That’s wonderful. Do you do loops in the sky in planes? Are you loopy?”

“No,” she said, “I got your name from somebody else who said you might be right for this job.”

The loop group was made up of actors who record things like background conversations or lines of dialogue to be inserted into movies that were already shot, your voice coming from another actor’s mouth, often when the actor’s head is turned away or is offscreen so the effect isn’t jarring. It’s done if a line gets changed or the actor screws up or the director simply isn’t satisfied with the original delivery. Another name for it is ADR, for automatic dialogue replacement.

One of the first times I worked on a loop group was for Endless Love, the 1981 forbidden teen romance story starring Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt and featuring the screen debut, in a tiny role, of an unknown actor named Tom Cruise.

The looping session was overseen by the director, the Italian legend Franco Zeffirelli. I was a kid in my twenties and had no idea what he even looked like, but I sure knew his work. He directed, in my opinion, the definitive Romeo and Juliet in 1968, with Leonard Whiting and the incomparable Olivia Hussey, with whom I’d later work on Pinky and the Brain.

Zeffirelli had presence. Once he walked into the room, everyone knew at once who he was, Continental with a sweater thrown over his shoulder and an interpreter at his side.

All us loopers were lined up to meet the maestro. He walked up and down our group of actors, very kind to us, shaking our hands, never treating us like the B team. It was like a meeting with the pope.

After I shook his hand, he walked to the next actor, then came back to me. Through his interpreter he asked my name. I told him. Then in his heavily accented voice he asked me, “Rob, haven’t we worked together?”

I said, “Gosh, Mr. Zeffirelli, not unless you directed some Jack in the Box commercials.”

He looked at his interpreter, who said something in Italian, then the director burst out laughing. He pinched my cheek and said, “Thees one I like.”

I couldn’t tell you what I did on the film, though I can assure you it wasn’t anything for the sex scenes.

That came later.

Warner Bros. brought me in for a looping session with my friend Annie Lockhart—the daughter of June Lockhart from Lost in Space— who, like so many of us, you’ve heard without knowing it’s her. (Most recently she voices the dispatcher on Chicago Fire.) Our task was to loop the famous scene in Risky Business in which Tom Cruise gets hot and heavy with Rebecca De Mornay on a subway train.

Annie and I were standing there in the old Warner Bros. Hollywood studio on Formosa, feigning smooching sounds, but it didn’t sound right. I looked at Annie. “If we’re going to do this, why do we just do this?” I said. “I promise I brushed my teeth.”

She chuckled and said, “Okay.”

If you listen very carefully, at the beginning of the scene, as Phil Collins sings “In the Air Tonight,” you can just hear Annie and me kissing.

I’ve looped maybe twenty movies, so many I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember what I did on all of them, though sometimes I’ll be watching a film and say, “Hey, that’s me.” We all made extra money looping in those days. In Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, Vincent D’Onofrio played a young Orson Welles—but the voice belonged to my pal Maurice LaMarche.

My most memorable looping gig had to be for the 1987 Star Wars spoof Spaceballs, directed by Mel Brooks and starring Bill Pullman and John Candy. We had an incredible cast of loopers who’d go on to bigger and better things: Nancy Cartwright, veteran voice actor Corey Burton, and an up-and-coming improv genius from Groundlings named Phil Hartman.

A half dozen of us were in the ADR session, which Mel Brooks directed himself.

“Listen,” he told us, “we got this thing coming up where Bill Pullman crashes on a big desert planet and we got these little people walking around and they’re called the Dinks. They walk around going, ‘Dink, dink, dink.’”

“There’s this one Dink,” Brooks continued, “who comes back later and brings water to Bill Pullman. I gotta have a name for that Dink to refer to him later in the movie.”

I elbowed Phil. “I got something,” I whispered, and I told him my idea.

Phil rolled his eyes, then said, “Tell him that.”

“No, no, no,” I protested.

“Tell Mel your idea,” Phil pressed.

So I said, “Mr. Brooks.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Rob Paulsen.”

“Whataya got?”

“How about Gunga Dink?”

Phil gave me a congratulatory back slap. The other actors laughed.

Mel Brooks said, “What’s your name again?”

“Rob,” I said.

“Let me tell you something, Rob: wit is shit, funny is money. Who’s got something else?”

I went on with the gig—we all said, “Dink, dink, dink”—but I was heartbroken. Phil tried to mollify me, saying that Mel was pissed because he didn’t think of it. Years later, a friend of mine had Mel on his podcast and related this story.

Mel didn’t remember the episode, but admitted that his “wit/shit” remark to me “sounds like something I would have said.”

That’s the closest I would ever get to Mel Brooks vouching for my comedy chops.

I would become good friends with Phil Hartman. Not long after this looping session he called me, excited, to say that he’d been cast in Saturday Night Live. To me, he was always terrifyingly inspirational. He would make what he did seem so effortless. He had incredible range and was absolutely fearless. He could inhabit a full-fledged character and make it his right away, a skill he honed in improv. I told him I wanted to be able to do that, too. Phil helped me realize it was not about mimicking his character process, it was about finding my own tools to be the best actor I could be.

I remember so clearly the day I found out that we had lost him. It was 1998. I was in Burbank, driving to a studio for a gig, when Tress MacNeille called me. She was close to Phil from their days together with the Groundlings.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s a bunch of police cars at Phil’s house,” she said. “You might want to turn on the radio.”

The news reports said Phil had been shot to death by his wife, who also took her own life. I was shaken. I pulled over. I bought a cup of coffee from Western Bagel and sat in a daze. I still can’t drive by that shop without it all coming back.

For the ADR work on the Spielberg movie, I went to the recording studio at Universal. The film was then called A Boy’s Life. Mr. Spielberg came into the recording studio himself and told us more about the story. It involved an intergalactic thing, but he said no more. He showed us scenes in which the character was blacked out.

There was a sequence in which doctors tried to save the creature’s life. Spielberg had cast real physicians to lend the scene an air of authenticity. They could rattle off the tricky medical jargon, but some of their delivery was a little dry.

A couple other actors and I then spent a few hours saying things like, “We’re losing him!” to juice up the drama.

A Boy’s Life wound up being called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and was a blockbuster in 1982, of course. You won’t find me in the movie credits on screen. But if you call up IMDb, I’m literally the second to last person listed next to “ADR loop group (uncredited).” I still get residual checks for a buck eighty-five.

More important, I entered Steven Spielberg’s universe. I did on-camera work for his show Amazing Stories, playing a guy who worked in the gift shop at the Alamo and then went back in time and fought with Davy Crockett. Then I got hired on Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures with many of the same voice actors on Animaniacs.

We had a lavish launch party for Animaniacs on the Warner Bros. lot at the foot of the water tower. It was September of 1993, and everybody was there—the cast, crew, writers, animators, storyboard artists, and musicians. While we were all down there for the party, Steven Spielberg shook everybody’s hands and thanked us. I was there with my son, Ash, who was eight years old. Mr. Spielberg walked up to a group of us, and I’m sure that somebody said to him, “Okay, now, this is Rob Paulsen. He’s Yakko.”

He shook my hand. “Oh, Rob, they’re so great. Pinky and Scratchansniff and Yakko. Just great work. We’re so proud to have you.”

He was so effusive in his praise to all of us, and before I could get it out of my mouth, he looked at my son, Ash, and he said, “Is this your boy?”

I said, “It is.”

He said, “Do you think we could get a picture together?” He knew everybody wanted a picture with him, and he defused it immediately by offering. It was a small gesture but went a long way with a guy like me.

Around this time, Jess Harnell had a friend who was a really incredible airbrush artist. Jess came to work one day with a fantastic biker jacket with an Animaniacs logo and the three characters, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, and the water tower and “Steven Spielberg Presents” and all that on the back of the jacket. Beautiful.

We all bought one. Ultimately we had six made. One each for Jess Harnell, Tress MacNeille, and myself, one for Tom Ruegger, the creator, one for Andrea Romano, our voice director, and one for Mr. Spielberg. We had given the jacket to Tom Ruegger and said, “Next time you see Steven at a story meeting, please give him this jacket with our compliments.” A few days later, I got a phone call at home from a woman who said she worked with Steven Spielberg.

“We understand you have this jacket for him, and he was so flattered, and maybe you guys would like to come over and have lunch here at Amblin on the Universal lot?”

I thought people were screwing with me. “Yeah, thanks a lot,” I said. “If you could just tell Steven I’d love to, but I’m too busy flossing my bowling ball next Tuesday.”

She chuckled. “Yeah, well that happens all the time,” she said. “No, this really is his office and he really was very touched by your collective offer. Do you really want to come over and have lunch and spend an hour with Steven and give him the jacket and talk about the show?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

A few days later Tress, Jess, and I walked in to the Amblin offices at Universal Studios. Mr. Spielberg was a little bit late. As he came out to meet us, Tress’s eyes lit up.

“Hi, Tress,” he said.

“Hi, Steven,” she said.

I thought, I’m friends with somebody on a first-name basis with Steven Spielberg.

As Mr. Spielberg brought us into the meeting room for a catered lunch, he instructed his assistant, to “hold his calls,” just like important guys do in the movies, and we didn’t get one interruption for the whole hour with him.

I had worked for Mr. Spielberg on E.T. and Tiny Toons and Amazing Stories, emphasis on work for—an employee, no different from thousands of others. I had never been granted this kind of face time, for Mr. Spielberg sits atop all others in my business. One phone call from him can make anything happen in Hollywood: a movie, a series, a video game. We were journeymen actors getting the Hollywood equivalent of a papal audience.

He asked us a bunch of questions about what we thought of the show and any ideas we had, took some pictures, and we gave him the jacket.

Afterward, I called my parents right away: “You are not gonna believe what I just did.”

Now I know what some of you may be thinking: I’m heaping praise on the most powerful man in Hollywood, and one who for decades has been my boss. Real brave.

But I’ve found that there are very few people who have reached that level of success and have his class. He serves as a wonderful example of how to behave if you’re fortunate enough to cultivate some sort of power and celebrity—how to walk through your life and be able to make people feel as though they are every bit as important to you as you are to them, and that’s a big deal, man. He could easily be like so many other assholes in their orbits. Instead, he makes it about you, not him, and I’m convinced his interest is genuine.

Twenty years later, this became dramatically apparent when Mr. Spielberg easily could have replaced his ailing Yakko.

Yeah, I’ll go to bat for Steven Spielberg.

As I said, the recurring joke in Animaniacs was that nobody really knows what kind of creature Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are supposed to be. While nobody ever specifically said they echoed Disney’s favorite rodents, the similarities are hard to miss. Once, this turned into an uncomfortable situation.

Somebody in the promotions department in marketing thought it’d be a great idea to put this giant sort of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade inflatable Yakko on the water tower. Apparently nobody told Bob Daly, who was running the Warner Bros. studio at the time with Terry Semel. The story goes that he apparently came back from lunch, and this giant balloon had been inflated.

“What the hell is Mickey Mouse doing on my water tower?” he supposedly said.

Yakko was deflated and off that tower in less than twenty-four hours. I submit if you find Jimmy Hoffa, you’ll also find that Yakko.

Animaniacs first aired on Fox Kids in 1993, the right show at the right time. For both FoxKids and The WB, it was a consistent ratings winner. Two years after it debuted, the Pinky and the Brain segments became so popular they were spun off into their own show.

As the ratings for both shows soared, Warner Bros. sent Tress, Jess, Maurice, and me on the road, usually to visit one of the new WB stores popping up around the country. While Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles gave me a taste of the power of animation, it was Animaniacs that proved just how deeply this new generation of cartoons had penetrated the American psyche.

We had become mini-celebrities. Since we did a cartoon, many of our fans were mini, too. Moe and I once did a Pinky and the Brain autograph signing at a Warner Bros. studio store. It was a Sunday morning, just after church. One family came up to us with two little boys, all dressed up in their Sunday “go to church” clothes, suits and ties. They clearly had spent quite a while outside to meet us, and the wait had taken a toll on the youngsters.

I could tell that this little fellow was looking unwell, and his mom kind of fanned him, so I thought we’d better get this show on the road. We had all our pictures out and were ready to rock and roll.

“Look, it’s Pinky and the Brain,” the mom said to one of the boys.

I stuck my hand down and said, “Hello, what is your name?”

He answered by throwing up. I mean, from deep Down South throwing up. He threw up all over me, the pictures, everything.

The mother was absolutely mortified.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “I have a child. I know what projectile vomiting is all about.”

I felt so bad for the little guy. I looked at him and I said, “It’s quite all right. You had blueberry pancakes for breakfast, didn’t you?”

“Mm-hmm,” he mumbled.

They cleaned him up. He got his picture with us, minus the blue vomit. To this day I wonder if that little boy could ever watch Pinky and the Brain again.

As for Maurice and me, this was one of countless bonding moments. He has become one of my dearest friends, and years later, when I was getting the bejesus zapped out of my throat with radiation, Moe was the first of my animation friends at my side.

Jess I first met on Animaniacs. He came in as this wide-eyed kid with this ton of hair. He’s a rock-and-roll singer, a great studio singer, and Animaniacs was the first cartoon show he’d gotten. He got a kick out of it and channeled the fruits of his success in a way that only Jess could. He too has become a close friend, and as much a character in real life as any of the roles he’s voiced.

As an example, when Tress, Jess, Randy Rogel, and I were preparing for an Animaniacs Live! show years later, we went to Randy’s house to rehearse. We were warming up with the piano when Jess called me. I figured he’d be late, because it’s not unusual for him to be a little bit late. He said, “Robby, Robby, Robby, it’s Jess.”

“Hey, yeah, buddy. I recognize the number. You okay?”

He goes, “Yeah, I’m gonna be a little bit late. Dude, I’m so sorry. I’m stuck in an elevator.”

I asked Jess where he was.

He said, “In my house.” Jess had a three-story home with a toy room and a video room.

Only Jess would have an elevator in his own home.

Of all the characters I’ve done, Pinky holds a special place in my heart. He has not only charmed audiences of both kids and adults, but he so impressed the television community that he helped me earn three Emmy nominations in a row.

Here I have to clarify. There are Emmys and then there are Emmys. My friend Maurice has won two prime-time Emmys, in 2011 and 2012, for outstanding voice-over performance for a variety of characters on Futurama. These are the Emmys most people think about, the ones for shows like Game of Thrones and Modern Family that air after 7:00 p.m.

For a time there, Moe and I were eligible for a prime-time Emmy for Pinky and the Brain. The network bumped us to 7:00 p.m. on Sunday nights. Unfortunately that put us up against the CBS juggernaut 60 Minutes, which had dominated the ratings in that time slot for about a thousand years. It was a death spot, and we quickly died.

Pinky and the Brain returned to its rightful afternoon slot and did just fine, collecting all kinds of trophies at the daytime Emmys, the ones that honor shows that air during the day, like soap operas, talk shows, game shows, and children’s programming.

In May of 1997, I was up for my first daytime Emmy for playing Pinky. They threw a huge awards show at Radio City Music Hall, with Susan Lucci and Regis Philbin hosting. Fred Rogers got a lifetime achievement award for Mr. Rogers.

Although I didn’t stand a chance against the all-star nominees— Louie Anderson for Life with Louie, Lily Tomlin for The Magic School Bus, Dennis Franz for Mighty Ducks, and Rita Moreno for Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?—this was a big deal for me and my family. I brought Parrish, Ash, and, at Parrish’s insistence, my mother, Lee.

Of course nobody knew who the hell I was. But Mom got a big kick out of it, and so did I. From the first time she introduced “Robin Paulsen and his neckitar” in the living room, my mother was always my biggest fan. She would have been impressed if my career had ended with the Jack in the Box commercial. I wanted to give her a gift nobody else could.

We drove all of eight blocks in a limo then walked the red carpet, where the photographers of course had no idea who the hell any of us were.

When I was very young, my mom used to say, “If your horn is worth blowing, somebody will blow it for you.” So she turned to the photographers and said, “My son is here because he was nominated for an Emmy. Do you watch Animaniacs?” Then, to me: “Do the voice, Rob.”

After I did a little Pinky, my mom said, “That’s my son.”

Louie won the Emmy, but no matter. It was worth it just to see my sweet mom so happy in her beautiful dress, accompanying her goofy oldest child to this fancy-schmancy Emmy thing.

The next year, the show moved to Los Angeles, and I scored another nomination for Pinky and the Brain. Once again, Anderson took the prize. I made it a hat trick in 1999. This time, it was now or never. Season four of Pinky was wrapping up, and we hadn’t recorded anything new. The same for Animaniacs. Although no official announcement was made, it looked like it was over. The actors had already begun working on other shows.

This had been a difficult year for my wife. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in January of 1999, and three months later her father died. The radiation treatments had knocked her for a loop, and to this day she doesn’t feel 100 percent. By the time of the Emmys in May, she was cancer-free but still on the mend from the treatments.

So with the Emmys bouncing back to New York, we turned it into a celebration of my wife’s health. The ceremony was everything we had hoped for. My wife looked like a zillion dollars in her beautiful Gilles Savard gown, and my boy and I cleaned up pretty good, too. After two years of rentals, I bought my first tux. Warner Bros. went all out, sending a big contingent and planning an after-show bash at the swanky 21 Club.

After the red carpet, I sat with my wife and son and the entire WB contingent from Los Angeles. Our category came up, and despite my two previous losses, I was still full of nerves. They have a camera right there in your face. The presenters were Whoopi Goldberg from The View and Tom Bergeron from America’s Funniest Home Videos. They announced the nominees: Louie Anderson again, Dom DeLuise and Ernest Borgnine from All Dogs Go to Heaven: The Series, Jeffrey Tambor from The Lionhearts, and yours truly.

I again wasn’t feeling good about my chances. But the fact that it was four big names and some guy from Michigan made this all the more important to me. I felt like I was representing the voice acting community who, by and large, were still relatively anonymous.

A lot of what came next was a blur. I know I heard my name. I know I freaked out and dashed up to the stage. I remember looking out at the audience and spotting Rosie O’Donnell, Barbara Walters, and Susan Lucci, who had made news that year by breaking her epic losing streak, winning her first Emmy in nineteen nominations for All My Children.

“Wow,” I said, “I’m the only person here I don’t recognize.”

I remember thanking my wife and my son and Mr. Spielberg and Tom Ruegger and Andrea Romano and Jean MacCurdy and everybody else at Warner Bros.

I remember looking in the crowd and seeing in the third or fourth row the hockey star Wayne Gretzky and his wife, Janet. Wayne was finishing his career with the New York Rangers, and they attended the ceremony because they were both big soap opera fans.

I remember saying, “And Wayne Gretzky, you’re not gonna believe this, but I was in your basement two weeks ago.”

The audience kind of chuckled like, “Who is this man and why’s he making an ass of himself?”

As fried as my synapses were, I was speaking the truth. I had been to his house.

I had been invited to a children’s charity golf tournament somewhere in southern Ontario. I played some golf, signed some autographs, and gave the keynote speech. The morning they picked me up at my hotel to go to the event, I was told we had to make one stop in Brantford, which is a small town in Ontario, to pick up another fellow who was going to join us. We pulled into a little home, and they told me to go to the door and get the guy. His name was Walter.

I knocked, and Walter Gretzky answered.

“You must be Rob. I’ve heard all about you. I understand you’re a hockey player,” he said.

“Yeah,” I stammered, “I’m a hockey player.”

Mr. Gretzky is almost as famous as his son in hockey circles. I was transfixed, humbled, and nervous just to be there.

He said, “How about coming downstairs and having a look in the basement? We’ve got all of Wayne’s stuff. It’s getting ready to be shipped off to the hockey hall of fame.”

He had everything, and I mean everything, down to the first tooth that got knocked out of Wayne’s mouth, the first stick Wayne ever used, the first Wheaties box he was ever on, the first Campbell’s soup can he graced.

I must have spent a half hour down there. It was miraculous. It was just too cool to miss, too cool to not mention at the Emmys. To this day I’m sure Wayne Gretzky wonders just what the hell I was talking about.

At the Emmys, there’s a big clock with a minute timer in the back of the theater showing the time you get to say your thank-yous. I looked over to stage left, and Dick Clark, the producer of the show, was in the wings pointing to his watch and doing that circling-the-finger motion that means “Wrap this up.”

I got done, or thought I was done, but as I walked off the stage, I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked at Whoopi Goldberg and said, “Holy shit, I didn’t thank Maurice.”

I mean, it’s not called The Pinky Show.

She said, “You can’t go back out there now, honey.”

My first task, once I got down to the bowels of Madison Square Garden, was to find a pay phone so I could make a call to Maurice to let him know: a) that I won, b) that I forgot to thank him on television, and c) how sorry I was. He didn’t answer, so I left a message, then went back upstairs feeling terrible. (We later embraced when I got back to LA. He’s still including me in his plans for world domination, last I checked.)

I was standing backstage, waiting to go in to speak to the press about my little Emmy, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and it was Fred Rogers. The day was becoming more surreal by the minute. I believe he probably did this to everybody, but he took my hand with two of his. He looked me right in the eye, and he said, “Young man”—I was forty-three at the time—“congratulations. Your parents must be so proud of you.”

To this day it chokes me up thinking about it. All I could say was, “Thank you so much, Mr. Rogers. I don’t know how to thank you. This means so much to me.”

He remarked about how important children’s television was and said I conducted myself beautifully onstage. In an instant I recognized what it was about him that made him so special. He exuded class, gentleness, a grace that was palpable. It was like I had been blessed by the pope. He was a very special human and my one- or two-minute exchange with him was worth a lifetime of joy and inspiration. Incredible.

Another individual who came up to me afterward and was just delightful was my fellow nominee Louie Anderson. “I never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I want to congratulate you,” he said. “You’re the only one that really should win one of these goddamned things.”

I never went back to my seat. Somewhere out there might be a guy who made a few bucks as a Rob Paulsen seat filler, you got me. My wife and son and I, all decked out in our formal wear, grabbed a cab for my brother Mike’s house. He lived close by in Hell’s Kitchen with his then partner, now husband, Jim.

He answered the door, and I could see the awards were still playing on TV. I held up my Emmy, and my brother and brother-in-law went nuts. After we left my brother’s place, we went to 21.

The next day, I walked through JFK airport with my wife and son and, so help me, my Emmy. I couldn’t help myself. We got on the plane and the flight attendant said over the speaker, “We have an Emmy winner here, Rob Paulsen,” and everybody applauded.

Rightly or wrongly, awards represent credibility in Hollywood. I’m now an Emmy-winning actor. On the other side of the coin: I won an Emmy for a cartoon show.

I don’t get better tables at restaurants. My price didn’t go up. I didn’t all of a sudden start commanding 300 percent more in salary. I even had producers whom I met after I won the Emmy, six or seven months later, say, “Hey, congratulations. Gosh, I hope we get to work together again. I hope we can afford you,” and they’d kind of chuckle.

“Are you kidding me?” I’d say. “Call me.”

The statue holds a special place in my home. It makes for a good conversation piece, like when somebody comes over to fix your furnace and they walk through the house and say, “Wow, is that an Emmy?”

I say, “Yes, it is,” and I tell them what I won it for.

Then their face drops. “Oh, a daytime Emmy.”

I realize that a daytime Emmy and five bucks will get you a grande Frappuccino at Starbucks.

But this Emmy is my Emmy. And I’m going to keep it.