VOICING GENERATOR REX

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I have a weird job. Some days, it’s a little weirder than others. And, y’know, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Good thing, too… because it’s all I really know.

After the BEN 10 animated series proved itself to be a success (talk about an understatement!), myself and my partners in the creative powerhouse known as Man of Action found ourselves with more work in the animation field than we knew what to do with. So, of course, we all dove in head-first. One of these gigs was the creation of another original series for Cartoon Network called GENERATOR REX (based on the short-lived Kelly/Rouleau Image comicbook, M. Rex).

I won’t bother pitching the show here. If you know, you know. And while not nearly as successful as BEN 10 clearly was, this show seemed to hold its own and is still remembered fondly to this day (which is an achievement in and of itself in a day and age where so little sticks and most things simply slide right off the surface of the pop culture bubble without leaving so much as ripple in their wake).

Season Two, Episode Seventeen was titled “Grounded” and it involved Rex being forced to stay in Providence, essentially in lockdown. That’s when his best bud on the outside, Noah, shows up with a quartet of “punk teenagers” in tow to bring the party directly to Rex. And, of course, chaos ensues. The punks are rowdy, rude and generally a pain in the ass.

First of all, the visual designs of these punks were modeled after, you guess it, Man of Action themselves. If you know us, it’s easy to see. Then, to add insult to injury… myself, Joe Kelly, Duncan Rouleau and Steven T. Seagle, were actually cast to voice these characters, named “Shades”, “McKelly”, “Dunky” and “Beagle”, respectively.

As you can probably hear in these clips, they pitched up our voices electronically in post-production to make us all sound more like the teenagers we were portraying. But we still managed to put our own acting stank on it (for better or worse).

As it turned out, I personally did the final script polish on this particular episode, so I tried to make sure none of us said anything too cringy. Although your mileage may vary (keep in mind, it’s a cartoon made primarily for a kid audience)…

As a self-contained “bottle episode”, it worked well enough. And the novelty of having the show’s creators appearing in the episode gave the whole thing some added juice. Not to mention, our characters got to fire patented Providence blaster rifles. So, that’s something, at least…

I have to admit, being any kind of “voice actor” -- at even the lowest levels imaginable -- was never on my bucket list. I much prefer directing the actors who have a real talent for it (which I ended up doing a bit of on BEN 10). But I guess the sheer weirdness of doing it at all held some momentary, morbid fascination that I felt was worth indulging. And the fact that the characters were meant to look like us made the whole thing even more appealing, if not incredibly surreal. So, ultimately, I’m glad we did it.

And seeing us get our “comeuppance” at the end of the episode undoubtedly provides some degree of satisfaction for any haters out there…

So, yeah… pretty weird, right?

Just don’t ask where the name “Bobo Haha” came from…

And as long as we’re sharing so much video, here’s an EXCLUSIVE look at a scene from the upcoming Spider-Man Brand New Day film. It’s a cool action set piece featuring Spidey vs. the Hand!

Joe Casey

USA