Voice actor Joe Alaskey passes away

Voice actor Joe Alaskey has passed away of cancer.

http://www.newsfromme.com/2016/02/03/joe-alaskey-r-p/

Here's his IMDB profile:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0016085/

One of his more famous roles was the voice of Plucky Duck on Tiny Toon Adventures. I emailed him back and forth a few times and he was always very kind to me. He was a really great voice actor.

 

Quite a career there.

RIP Joe...

 

That now makes two voice actors from Tiny Toon Adventures who are gone (the other being Don Messick who voiced Hampton J. Pig).

 

It's really sad, all those great voice actors going away..
Nobody can replace them.. period..
He did a lot work.. a great talent he will be missed
R.I.P Joe, you made cartoons fun and enjoyable..

 

my wife informed me of this tonight...R.I.P.

 

There's an interesting story about the WB voice actors (which Joe Alaskey was part of): when Mel Blanc was in ill health and eventually died, his son Noel Blank took over to do several of the main WB cartoon voices for commercials and occasional cartoons. In February 1991, Noel was in a terrible helicopter crash that killed a couple of people and injured Blanc and Kirk Douglas, who was riding along with them. The WB execs realized they couldn't have their entire cartoon voice legacy tied up with just one guy, so from then on they divided up all the voice work among a half-dozen different people and used different ones for different projects.

By all accounts, Alaskey was a really talented guy. I can confirm that Yosemite Sam was a really, really difficult voice to do (particularly for Mel towards the end).

 

Though it's not same as when Mel did it though..
He was best.. my friend met him super nice guy.

 

I kind of miss the fact that instead of using great voiceover people in the big animated movies the last few years they have chosen to go with star power names.

 

Yeah, voice actors in general are not pleased with that trend.

What kills me is that they hired famous people to do the voices of The Chipmunks in the live action movies and then they speed-up the voices so you can't tell it's the famous people at all anyway.

 

That makes me crazy, too. Instead of going with the most talented person, they go with live-action "name" stars to do the voices. There are exceptions. And in fairness to the animation studios, some of the live-action actors are very, very good, like Mike Meyers and Eddie Murphy (to name just two).

I think they're even using different singing voices than their spoken voices, so it's pretty screwy.

 

Yeah, but Myers made them re-record most of the dialogue because he wanted to do the Scottish accent. A hired voice-actor wouldn't do that. And this is after they had to scrap all of the Chris Farley dialogue recordings.

Really, anyone can do Eddie's schtick (see also: Tucker, Chris). I think that Myers added more acting chops to Shrek than Murphy did for Donkey.

Shrek is one of the rare, rare examples where hiring actors to do the voices actually resulted in a good product. But that is the exception, not the rule.

 

I know. Although there are quite a few more: not many people could've done the voice of The Genii in Aladdin as well as Robin Williams. He complained for months that he'd taken the job for a quick $75,000 eek:!!!) and no share of the profits. After the film went to $500 million worldwide and Williams started bad-mouthing the studio, Jeffrey Katzenberg sent him a million-dollar Picasso as a bonus. A couple of years later, they hired Williams for other voice work and paid him a considerably higher fee.

 

Well, that's only part of the interesting story behind Williams and Disney regarding Aladdin...

http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_c.../2000/12/31/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.aspx

If I was going to rank Robin Williams film work, Aladdin would rank pretty high up there as one of his funniest performances, but I'm not sure I'd call what he was doing "voice acting"quite so much as just the same stand-up he'd been doing for 20 years at that point.

I mean, I guess it was voice acting to a degree, but I consider it more a re-hash of his stand-up than proper voice acting (by and large).

 

I have to post the intro to the criminally short-lived The Plucky Duck Show in tribute to Joe.