It’s a Cartoon Existence for Voice Actors

The recording room is small, and it is stuffy as the six actors gather to do pickup lines for “Jetsons: The Movie.” The actors exchange jokes and funny sounds as they settle on their stools, scripts resting on music stands, microphones a whisper away.

They are such a happy group, it’s like watching a bunch of Smurfs. Janet Waldo, looking more like an elf in green mini-skirt and matching shoes and stockings than the voice of Judy Jetson, sits on one side of the room with Penny Singleton, who plays Jane Jetson.

On the other side are the “boys”--Frank Welker, the voice of Little Grungee; Rob Paulsen, who plays Judy’s boyfriend, Apollo Blue; Ronnie Schell, playing robot Rudy 2, and Patric Zimmerman, the new voice of Elroy, Judy’s brother.

Paulsen tries out his imitation of Robert Duvall laughing, while Schell tries to match that with the sound of Cary Grant sneezing.

Then as quickly as someone clearing his throat, they are in character and down to business, watching through a large window for a sign from director Gordon Hunt, who is manning the controls in a small sound booth. It seems tense, maybe because this is a movie and not just a half-hour cartoon. Everyone quickly makes room in the booth for animation guru Joe Barbera as he quietly sneaks in.

Cartoon actors are as different as the voices they portray. San Fernando Valley residents Waldo, Welker and John Stephenson are three who can crowd a room.

When Waldo answers her telephone, she sounds just like a teen-ager. Although long past that stage, it’s easy to picture the bubbly, blonde Waldo as Judy Jetson, the giddy, Space Age daughter of George and Jane in the still-popular 27-year-old cartoon series.

“Judy Jetson is one of the easiest voices for me to do because it’s closest to my natural voice. It’s just me being excited,” Waldo said.

When the futuristic cartoon series made its debut in 1962, Hanna-Barbera made only 24 episodes. “Little did we dream this would become a cult,” Waldo said.

The series proved so popular 20 years later that 51 more episodes were made, followed by two TV movies and “Jetsons: The Movie,” which is scheduled for Christmas release.

“There was a sense of family on the show, of being together so long,” said the slightly built Waldo, dressed in red slacks, red sweater and red boots. “Doing the Jetsons again was like coming home.”

Waldo, who won’t even hint at her age, grew up in Seattle and “never wanted to be anything but an actress” since age 3. Bing Crosby discovered her at a talent search when she was 13, and she did a few movie spots before getting into radio. She was one of three actresses to star as teen-ager Corliss Archer in the popular radio program, which first aired in 1943. She was also teen-ager Emmy Lou on radio and TV’s “The Ozzie and Harriet Show,” and Tony Franciosa’s secretary, Libby, on the 1964-65 TV comedy “Valentine’s Day.”

Radio was good to her in another way--it’s where she met her husband, playwright Robert E. Lee. He was writing for “Favorite Story”; she was providing the voice for Corliss Archer.

Doing cartoons is “much like doing radio, just with more punch. In cartoons, you have to be a little bit bigger than life,” she said. To get a character’s voice, sometimes she needs to see a picture or a cartoon. “Then you create the image in your head so you can sound like her.”

Breaking into a high, sweet and slightly Southern voice, she talks about Granny Sweet on the cartoon “Precious Pup,” then drops it through her nose to demonstrate another favorite character, Hogatha, the incredibly ugly yet amazingly vain witch on “The Smurfs.”

“The Perils of Penelope Pitstop” was fun because race car driver Penelope was a woman before her time, a female super-hero in 1969, long before She-Ra flexed her cartoon muscles. And she loved doing the deep, strong voice of Fred Flintstone’s battle-ax of a mother-in-law because “it was a real switch from Judy. It’s fun to hide behind a large character.”

Her children were thrilled with her job on “The Jetsons.” “They’d drop my name all the time to their friends. They have great awe and respect for my husband, but I got the squeals,” she said.

The walls of the book-filled family room in her Encino home are covered with framed posters of plays written by her husband and his partner Jerry Lawrence--”First Monday in October,” “Auntie Mame,” “Inherit the Wind,” “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” “The Gang’s All Here.”

In Waldo’s small office are cartoon cels (drawings on celluloid that are used to make cartoons) of some of her characters--Grandma and the ghoulishly glamorous Morticia from the cartoon version of “The Addams Family,” lead singer Josie from “Josie and the Pussycats,” Alice from a Hanna-Barbera version of “Alice in Wonderland” and, of course, Judy Jetson.

Waldo said she thinks that an acting background is what makes a cartoon actor more than just “a voice technician.”

“An actor can play a role from the heart, not just from the neck up. An actor immerses himself in the character. You can tell the difference. I feel truly, deeply concerned when Judy has a problem,” she said.

Commenting on how cartoons have changed, she said, “It used to be that cartoons were interesting to adults, as well as children.” Now, Waldo complained, they are a bit boring and often too violent and too much like “one big commercial for toys.”

“The Jetsons” was “a genuine story about a real family who happens to live in outer space. It stimulated the imagination of the audience and triggered a new vista of ideas and imagination,” she said.

Waldo also dubs voices for American and foreign films, imitating everyone from Susan Anton and Sally Field to Aretha Franklin and the late Natalie Wood. If a movie line cannot be clearly heard, or naughty words are taken out for a TV run, voice actors are sometimes used instead of bringing back the star to do these “pickup lines.”

With cartoon voices, Waldo plays three types: a typical teen-ager, a typical young mother and a typical secretary. “Eventually,” she said with a laugh, “I’ll have to be a typical grandmother.”

Welker is anything but typical. He can sing like 15 ducks or impersonate presidents. Welker, 42, actually started his career as a stand-up comic “doing mostly weird stuff” like routines about chickens, ducks, and dogs and cats fighting. He is a relative newcomer to voice acting, compared with such veterans as Waldo, doing cartoon voices since 1969.

It was his dog-and-cat routine that earned Welker his big voice break--a Friskies cat food commercial that led to an audition for a “Scooby Doo” cartoon. Although he yearned to be Scooby, “because inside I really wanted to bark,” he wound up as Freddy, Scooby’s human pal.

Welker, dressed in jeans, a work shirt and cowboy boots, looks like the Colorado country boy he is as he sits in a plaid wing chair in his house on 3 1/2 acres in Agoura.

Posters advertise appearances with the Righteous Brothers, Sonny and Cher, Ann-Margret and Lynn Anderson. Cartoon cels of his characters include Freddy from “Scooby Doo”; “Jabberjaws,” a big shark; Chopper, a motorcycle from “Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch”; the Blue Falcon from “Dynomutt”; Hefty and Poet of “The Smurfs”; Baby Kermit from “Muppet Babies,” and “Foofur,” a big blue hound dog.

And because he has a proclivity for imitating ducks, quackers in varying shapes and sizes waddle across his desk.

The youngest of three boys, Welker doesn’t particularly like his own voice, calling it “high and tinny, kind of flat with no variance, no character.” He would much rather sound like Gregory Peck.

“That’s why I love doing characters,” he said in his best Fred Flintstone. “As an impersonator, you can steal these people for a moment.”

This is a man who loves his job, who can actually watch cartoons and feel like he’s working, a man who counts as his big thrills singing with the Kingston Trio and teaching Elvis Presley to make a sound like a choking dog when they worked together in the 1970 movie “The Trouble With Girls.”

Fluffy characters such as Smurfs and “Paw Paws” are easy, Welker said, compared with the husky growl he used in the movie “Gremlins,” a voice that sounds like it hurts, seeming to be torn from deep in the throat.

People always ask him to do voices at parties, especially for children, and he is quick to oblige. When greeting a young visitor at a recording session one day, he can’t resist barking at her, then welcoming her in the voice of Kermit the Frog, much to her delight.

On Election Day, Welker said, “I cogitated, I studied the issues and,” he said with a grin deep enough to show off his dimples, “I voted for the guy I could do.” President Bush, he said in a convincing imitation, is fun to copy because “he has a kind of ol’ boy voice, kind of like an old Jack Nicholson.”

Welker, gleefully pulling out his collection of cartoon toys from characters he gave voice to, including Brain and Claw from “Inspector Gadget,” has no problem with merchandising cartoons.

He pulls the string on a Mattel See and Say clock, and there is Welker’s voice saying, “3 o’clock. Let’s have some milk and cookies.”

“Animation is very expensive to do,” he said, setting down a bendable Smurf doll on a counter near a Frederic Remington bronze of a cowboy. “If a toy helps sell it, why not?”

Last year, Welker co-created and co-produced a short-lived CBS sitcom, “First Impressions,” about a single father who, you guessed it, did voices for a living.

If Welker is the new breed of funny, versatile voices, Stephenson is the old guard--a stage and radio actor who takes his voices seriously, even when voicing Tom and Jerry in the popular cat-and-mouse cartoon.

In his cartoon work, there were times he was “literally talking to myself.” In one half-hour “Flintstone” caper, he had nine voices and had to mark his script in different colors to keep them straight.

Stephenson may seem a perennial second banana, playing Mr. Slate to Fred Flintstone, Mr. Dingwell to Yogi Bear. He doesn’t see it that way.

“These are the guys the other guys kick around. They provoke the action,” Stephenson said in a stately voice that could easily reach the far rows of any theater.

Mr. Slate, for example, was always making Fred and Barney miserable, but in the end, they always bested the boss. Since Slate provoked the action, Stephenson said, “I never thought of him as a second banana.

The characters, including Doggie Daddy in the “Augie Doggie” cartoon, Fancy from “Top Cat,” Mr. Arable in “Charlotte’s Web,” Finkerton in “Inch High Private Eye,” and the Sheriff in “Robin Hoodnik” are “the fun parts” of his work.

With his courtly manners and resonant voice, Stephenson seems almost too dignified to play cartoon characters. But he said he never feels silly because he doesn’t view his characters as one-dimensional.

“It’s their different facets that are intriguing. You can stretch as far as you want. It’s exaggerated, but it still reflects life.”

Although his two children always got a kick from dad’s gigs, Stephenson always saw voice acting as just a job. Stephenson, who wouldn’t give his age, said he doesn’t do his shtick at parties, and he doesn’t entertain for adults. “Some people can turn it on and off. Away from the mike, I don’t like to do this,” he said.

Stephenson has had a varied career--from stage plays to product pitchman; from television appearances on “Dragnet” and “People’s Choice” (where he played Jackie Cooper’s neighbor, Roger Crutcher, another second banana) to Armed Forces training films and the voice for some Mattel toys. He hosted the travel show “Bold Journey” from 1956-57 and appeared in the 1965 NBC soap “Morning Star.”

Even as a boy in Kenosha, Wis., Stephenson wanted to act. But acting was a risky profession, so he tried studying law. He interrupted his education to serve as a radio operator-gunner flying B-24s out of Kunming, China, during World War II, and when he returned to school, it was as a theater arts major at Northwestern.

Trained for the stage, Stephenson “fell into radio by accident. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1949, I found you had two choices--radio or movies.”

He found plenty of work playing lead and featured parts in hundreds of network radio shows, including the title role in “The Count of Monte Cristo” and the lead in the CBS comedy series “It’s Always Sunday,” but he knew by the 1950s that “radio was doomed. When radio died, you found yourself blending into television.”

Although radio work was low-profile, it was satisfying “because you could wear many hats, you didn’t have to be locked into your own skin. It’s like putting a lamp shade on your voice. Age and image were not barriers.” There were those who referred to radio people as “throat actors,” a term Stephenson sees as derogatory. “They thought that was all they were getting. But they were getting an entire person. You had to be an actor from your toes to the top of your head.”

The early cartoons like “The Flinstones” have held up so well, he said, because the writing was so good and the human condition is the same.

“The beautiful thing about cartoons is that there is no time barrier.” But, he added, with a rueful chuckle, “If we knew they would last so long, we would have asked for more money.”