This evening, I found a copy of the old animated Return Of The King DVD in a dump box for $7. I bought it, if only to have a copy of the great Orc marching song, “Where There’s A Whip, There’s A Way.”
HAD to play it for the family, when we got home. Wang-Kette snickered. Mrs. Ka sat there with her mouth open in shock the whole time. Was great.
…but then, we decided to poke around on the disc a little further. Check out various songs and scenes. And the voices… well… the voices began to … GET to me. Cognitive dissonance. Confusion. Deep weirdness.
Bilbo and Frodo are both done by Orson Bean, and Gandalf is done by John Huston, and that’s okay. Hell, John Huston sounds more like Gandalf than Ian McKellen does.
…but Samwise immediately made me think Planet Of The Apes for some reason. I don’t know why, but I kept thinking about talking monkeys. It took me a minute to realize that the voice was Roddy McDowell.
Elrond, on the other hand, I found… disturbing. I kept expecting him to outline a plan vhere ve vill get dat stupid moose and squirrel. I checked the credits. Yup. Paul Frees, best remembered as the voice of Boris Badenov, from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle show.
It got worse. Denethor’s voice is provided by William Conrad, best remembered from his old cop shows, Jake & The Fat Man, and Cannon. Weird, hearing a big fat man’s voice coming out of that little skinny old dude.
…but when the battle of Pellenor Field breaks out, it’s every man for himself. Most of the rest of the voices seem to be provided by the cast of Scooby Doo, Where Are You? Don Messick seems to be providing several voices, and Merry’s voice is the very distinctive Shaggy… aka Casey Kasem.
It’s a damn weird thing to hear Shaggy up there, spouting Tolkien’s florid prose. I kept expecting Pippin to reply, “Eheeheehee! Right, Raggy!”
What’s worse, both hobbits are in the thick of it when the Witch-King of Angmar shows up. I have no idea who provided the voice, but it was the same guy who always did the monster on Scooby Doo when the monster shrieked or did a high-pitched banshee cackle. This actor did a very similar voice for Starscream on the old Transformers cartoon, and may be the least attractive voice I’ve ever heard out of a human, the vocal equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard. Fortunately, we don’t have to listen to the Witch King for very long, before Pippin trips over a rope and bowls him over, and Merry accidentally drops a bathtub on him, and then Eowyn pulls his mask off to reveal that the Witch King is actually Farmer Maggot, who’s still pissed off at Merry and Pippin about those carrots…
Man, where did my suspension of disbelief go?
