Maurice LaMarche
From Transformers Wiki
Maurice LaMarche (born March 30, 1958) is an Emmy Award-winning Canadian-American voice actor and former comedian. Some of his most notable roles include (take a deep breath, everyone)...
The Brain from Pinky and the Brain (opposite Rob Paulsen), Morbo, King Lrr, Kif Kroker, Calculon and others in Futurama, Dizzy Devil in Tiny Toon Adventures, Magneto in Marvel: Super Hero Squad, Destro, Serpentor and many others in the DiC seasons of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Chancellor Neighsay in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight in The Tick (yeah, baby, yeah!), Mortimer Mouse in Disney's House of Mouse, Verminous Skumm and Duke Nukem in Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Big Bob Pataki in Hey Arnold!, Doctor Doom in Ultimate Spider-Man, Toucan Sam in the Froot Loops commercials, Dr. Egon Spengler in The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters, Calendar Man and Mr. Freeze in Batman: Arkham City, Father in Codename: Kids Next Door, the former voice of Inspector Gadget, (one of) the current voice(s) of Yosemite Sam, and a bajillion other characters.
Phew!
He is also the source of the ungodly belch heard in Elf and The Critic.
Contents |
Voice roles
The Transformers
Transformers: Rescue Bots
Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015)
Convention appearances
Notes
- LaMarche was only in one episode of The Transformers, when he played Six-Gun in the episode "Thief in the Night". In an interview with Quick Stop Entertainment, he describes the recording session for this episode as "the longest session of [his] life", due to Wally Burr's "unusual directing style":
- He line read you 72 times on each line. He just made you parrot back what he did into the microphone. And you always… in fact, that director is the reason there is now a four hour recording session rule in the SAG basic contract for animation. Because it used to be 8 hours. Now, nobody was there 8 hours, but that was the allowed minimum. [sic] Until this guy came along and started directing Transformers, and all of a sudden, you were there 8 hours. And the way voice actors make their money is volume. As my friend Rob Paulsen is fond of saying, "Volume baby. Volume." So even though you’re booked for four hours, if they know you’ve got a 2:00 and you’re in there at noon, they’ll get you out for 2:00 because they know you want to get on and make another session fee. The one thing that you’ll find in our business is most of us work for scale. The idea is how many times a day do you work for scale. But this one director...would just keep you there.[1]
- At BotCon 2013, Maurice read a prepared and lengthy apology for the interview, as Wally Burr was also in attendance. He said that while he stood by some things he said as far as directorial style, he took back much of it, especially apologizing for his tone. Of special note was his admission that if he was contracted for an 8 hour session, he should expect to work the full 8 hours. After the apology, Burr stood up, being in the crowd, and the two men shook hands.
- The one episode Maurice worked on was the one that Casey Kasem walked out on, so situations may have been unusually hurried and tense on that day.
- He is famous for his almost-flawless Orson Welles impression. Sadly, he never got to meet Welles; the closest he got being at the recording studio less than five minutes after Welles had left.
- Derrick J. Wyatt had envisioned Maurice as the Animated version of Unicron cause of the Orson Welles connection.
