The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who's Who of Cartoon Voice Actors by Tim Lawson and Alison Persons

The Magic Behind the Voices: A Who’s Who of Cartoon Voice Actors
by Tim Lawson and Alison Persons

For anyone who grew up on the television repeats of classic animated cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Mickey Mouse from Disney, Looney Toons from Warner Brothers, and Popeye from Max Fleischer, up through the earliest of the popular new animated shows of the first years of the 21st century, this book is a marvelous trip down memory lane.

Editors Lawson and Persons have compiled a focused look at 39 major voice performers, many of whom were still active at the time this book was published in 2004. Each actor gets a biographical portrait, of from 2 or 3 pages and all the way up to 14 pages (for Daws butler), giving the performer’s background and often humorous anecdotes from their career. After the biographical portrait is an extensive list of that performer’s animated credits. Those credits can stretch from less than a page for some performers, up to 19 pages for such legends as Mel Blanc. While the authors tried to provide broad coverage of performers across the decades, there tends to be an emphasis on actors whose credits fall in the late 1970s through the 1990s.

The release of the recent live-action Christopher Robin film, in which the fantasy characters of Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and friends escape from the Hundred Acre Wood into real-life London, is a perfect example of where this book comes in handy. Actor Jim Cummings provides the voices of both Winnie the Pooh and Tigger in that film. Cummings has provided the voice for Winnie the Pooh ever since the original voice actor Sterling Holloway passed in 1992. And, Tada!, this book has wonderful entries for both Holloway and Cummings!

If you’re a fan of pop culture and animated cartoons and feature films, who grew up any time from the 1970s through the 1990s, you’ll most likely enjoy this look back at some of the major talents you grew up with. My only wish is that they’d been able to include even more entries than they did!

[ Publisher’s official The Magic Behind the Voices web page ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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