- We'd walk in, Seth would go,
"Hey, how you doing, Phil?".
It's like, "Good, good, how are you?".
It's like, "All right, here we go."
"It's raining sideways."
"Okay, one more, angrier."
"It's raining sideways."
"Cool, thank you."
- You will not best me this day, vile henchman of Aku.
- I wasn't cut out to be a bureaucrat any way.
- You know Blue, no, this is Coco.
- It's gon rain.
- I am confident you will make the right choice.
- Hi, I'm Phil Lamarr.
I'm a voice actor.
I'm known for the voice of Samurai Jack,
characters on Futurama, Family Guy,
Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Mad TV,
Justice League, or anything else you watched 15 years ago.
And today, we're gonna be doing a little cartoon breakdown.
♪ When I was born it was a hurricane in Kingston Town ♪
♪ With a foot and half of water ♪
On the show, Futurama, which is set in the year 3000,
every company will have a certified bureaucrat.
And my character, Hermes Conrad,
is the certified bureaucrat of Planet Express.
- Wow, you look happy.
Is someone fired?
- Better.
The Central Bureaucracy is conducting
an inspection tomorrow.
- I first got involved with Futurama just auditioning.
I think I was still working on Mad TV at Fox.
Came in along with hundreds of other people
to audition for the guy who created The Simpsons.
It was a little intimidating.
It was tough trying to figure out
where the character might be
'cause it was a brand new show.
We knew it wasn't The Simpsons, but that's all we knew.
And I'm looking at the character,
and they're telling me he's, you know,
a bureaucrat, an accountant.
So I think I was doing just sort of a,
you know, this kind of voice.
Ah, yes, Fry, Professor, I'd like you to meet someone.
This is Doctor Zoidberg.
Then about three episodes in,
the writers sort of realized that the Hermes character
was fine, but they didn't really have anything
that was working, working.
And I remember Matt Groening coming up to me
in the hallway, and said,
"Well, we just wanna try something with Hermes.
"Can you do a Jamaican accent?"
I said sure, I can do that.
I auditioned for Cool Runnings
just like every other Black man in 1980 whatever.
Adding the accent gave the character
another dimension, added depth.
'Cause all of a sudden instead of just writing
accountant jokes, they were writing Jamaican jokes.
And then laying accountant stuff on top of 'em.
Like okay, so what if he's sort of laid back
but not laid back at all.
I think actually, had Matt not suggested that,
I probably wouldn't be sitting here.
I probably wouldn't have made it past episode four.
- This isn't supposed to be fun.
We've got a job to do,
and we will do it better without distractions.
Understood?
- This was really a powerful, special moment for me
'cause I grew up as a comic book fan.
It was wild to be The Green Lantern.
I'd seen Bruce Timm's work on Batman Beyond
and knew the character designs and all that.
And in terms of finding the voice,
that was sort of easy to do.
Because the way he draws men,
they've got these little tiny legs
and these great big chests.
So you feel like everybody's gotta have a deep voice.
They talked about the character.
It was like, well, he was a Marine.
He was from Detroit.
And I'm like oh well my dad's from Detroit.
So I added a little bit of a level,
sort of an homage to my dad, because my dad
was like a, you know, sort of this smoky voice,
so I wanted to put a little of that in there.
So it wasn't just, you know, I'm big hero.
It was also a little bit of this, you know.
The guy has, he's been somewhere.
He's done some things, you know.
My name is John Stewart, Green Lantern of sector 2814.
- And now here's Ollie Williams
with the Black-u-Weather forecast.
Ollie?
- It's gon rain.
- I also play the part of Ollie Williams,
the Black-u-Weather forecast weather man on Family Guy.
That's about the easiest job in show business.
'Cause he's got one line.
It's gon rain.
That's it.
I would come in to record,
and Seth would be directing.
And it would basically be a 30 second work day.
We'd walk in, Seth would go, "Hey, how you doing, Phil?"
It's like, "Good, good, how are you?"
It's like, "All right, here we go."
"It's raining sideways."
"Okay, one more, angrier."
"It's raining sideways."
"Cool, thank you."
- Let's go live to Ollie Williams
with the Black-u-weather report.
- It's raining sideways.
- Sounds rough, Ollie.
- There have been a few times
where you stretch it out a little bit.
The time that they cut to Ollie, and he was high.
[laughs]
- How's the weather look, Ollie?
- Not too bad.
- But generally speaking,
it's a very nicely self-contained joke.
- Aku!
I've been really lucky to work with some of
the most creative people of the last 20 years.
Seth MacFarlane, Bruce Timm, Quentin Tarantino.
- I don't remember asking you a goddamn thing.
- And Genndy Tartakovsky is definitely among that pantheon.
He did something with that cartoon
that had never been seen in American animation.
The first episode has nine and a half minutes of silence.
[intriguing music]
Which was unheard of in children's animation
on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, all those shows.
Everything was [gibbers].
No, he said, I want a show that has action.
[gong rings]
- No, it cannot be.
- It also tells a story with everything at our disposal.
Not just words.
Music, sound, color.
And it was also I think groundbreaking
in that the characters had no black outlines,
which at the time nobody did.
We sat down in the booth and Genndy was there
and just sort of you work back and forth
with the creator to try to find the voice
that he's hearing in his head.
The only reason he had an accent
was to tie him to his roots
and to honor that he was coming from ancient japan.
And it was interesting because a few years before
I was part of a comedy group that was
predominately Japanese called Cold Tofu.
Lot of the folks in the group were, you know,
first or second generation Japanese-Americans
who had grown up hearing Japanese.
And I noticed that they had, not an accent so much as
just a way of speaking, which is like
oh this is how you speak English
if you're hearing Japanese
at the same time you're hearing English.
So instead we had a little bit of the accent.
There were simply words that he would say
in a way that he had heard something
differently growing up than you had.
[gasps]
- I'm home.
I'm alive.
- Virgil was a 14 year old boy in city of Dakota
who accidentally gets superpowers
and then becomes a hero.
But at the same time, he's also a 14 year old boy.
So he's gotta go to school,
he's gotta finish his homework.
He's gotta deal with his annoying sister.
- Since when does your narrow behind play football at all?
- Who asked you, Miss Nosy?
- And fight for what's right.
That was actually my very first show
where I was the main character.
And it was the first time that a teenage
African-American superhero was the star
of his own cartoon.
As a comic book person growing up,
reading mostly stories that didn't reflect my life,
it was so amazing to actually be part of something
that did, and Denys Cowan and Alan Burnett
and Dwayne McDuffie, all of the creators
were so great about making it good stories first.
And also dealing with things that actually mattered.
The show won a Humanitas Award
for an episode we did about guns in school.
They did these great stories that were fun
and exciting, but somehow grounded in something
that felt real.
So it wasn't like, "This is a very special episode."
No, it was just Virgil dealing with the stuff in his life.
You know, 'cause, you know, I'm a city kid,
and this is sort of things that happen.
But he had electrical powers.
- Please welcome Bolbi Stroganovsky.
- Hello fellow learners.
Call me Bolbi.
- I also did the voice of Bolbi Stroganovsky
on the Jimmy Neutron cartoon,
which is weird beyond weird.
It's a great show,
and they had been going for a while
before they brought me in to play that character.
And I think I played maybe a couple other characters.
But that's the one that people still remember to this day.
Bolbi is just strange and weird.
And that's all, that's really it.
♪ Slap slap slap ♪
♪ Clap clap clap ♪
♪ Slap slap slap ♪
♪ Clap clap clap ♪
Basically my whole point was to try to make
Jet and the producers on the other side of the glass
crack up 'cause all they knew was just like
well, he's just, he's the weird kid at the school.
And he's from like a weird foreign country.
Oh, you mean that Bolbi is from a country
where they worship giant space rats?
I just went as goofy and as crazy as I could.
And it worked.
[laughs]
- And many Atlanteans were injured.
But I could have been far worse.
- In playing the part of Aquaman on Young Justice,
that was a really sort of interesting path.
Because originally I auditioned for Aqualad.
'Cause that was one of the main heroes in Young Justice.
And didn't get it.
Then of course, I heard what my buddy Khary Payton did,
and I was like oh dang.
No that's it.
If I had heard mine and his,
I would have fired me and hired him.
Greg Weisman, the creator threw me a bone.
Said, "Okay, we're gonna make you Aquaman."
I'm lik, "Oh, I get to be Black Aquaman!"
Nope, nope.
Regular Aquaman.
Oh, oh, okay.
[speaks foreign language]
- On Young Justice, they managed to do something
that nobody had been able to do for 40 years.
[speaks foreign language]
Which was make Aquaman cool.
He was always the afterthought.
Until this.
They sort of recast him as regal.
He was the king of Atlantis.
And it's like oh, right.
If you the king of the ocean,
you kind of the kind of 75 percent of the world.
That's power.
And you saw from that point on
that versions of Aquaman
suddenly were grounded and cool,
and then you get to Jason Momoa
and like oh, now he's sexy, you know.
- [Duchess] Get out!
- That is Duchess.
She thinks she's the best idea ever thought of.
- I also played the part of Wilt
from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.
And Wilt was the sweetest character.
That whole show was about little kids'
imaginary friends and where they go
when the kids grow too old for them.
So it was this whole house,
and we all were created by little kids.
And Wilt's creator was basically
Michael Jordan as a little boy.
And he created a basketball playing imaginary friend.
But then, once, you know, he started getting scouted,
he didn't have room for that.
So, you know, Wilt was just,
sorry, is that okay?
So much fun playing a sweet, sweet character
and such a great, just heartfelt show.
It was created by Craig McCracken who did Powerpuff Girls
and Lauren Phelps before she went on to do My Little Pony.
So they're no slackers.
[mysterious music]
- You must bring this ship in.
The only way we can stop--
- I got to be part of the Star Wars universe
for the first time playing the role
of the Jedi Kit Fisto,
which was, not a new character.
He'd been introduced in the Attack of the Clones.
But never spoke in the live action movie.
And so when they brought the character
into the animated world, he had a voice.
And I guess George Lucas had the idea that
the aquatic aliens should all have some sort of
island, Caribbean flavor.
So that's where the idea of Kit Fisto
having a sort island accent came from.
And to me, he's great because he's the Jedi who smiles.
You know, he is not afraid to take off his shirt.
You'll never see Obi-Wan Kenobi do that.
But I'm in the water, so it makes sense.
As anybody who grew up in the 70s,
to be a Jedi, is so cool.
Even tho I'm just a voice of one.
One of the interesting things about voice acting
is it's different from on camera acting
as movie acting is from stage acting.
What you're doing at the core is all the same.
You're taking some imaginary circumstance
and trying to make it real for an audience.
You have to look at those words on the page
and instantly make it come to life.
You know.
I'm Phil Lamarr, and this has been my cartoon breakdown.