I’ve been seeing the commercials for the new Yogi Bear movie. They have Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake doing the voices of Yogi and Boo Boo. Now I give them credit - they both appear to be doing a pretty good job of imitating the original character voices done by Daws Butler and Don Messick.
But why did the studio bother hiring two celebrities to voice these characters? Butler and Messick are deceased but why not just hire two current voice actors who could have done the voices, presumedly for less. Is anyone going to care that it’s Justin Timberlake and not John Smith who’s impersonating Don Messick? Is having Aykroyd’s and Timberlake’s name on the poster really going to sell more tickets?
Yes. Probably Timberlake moreso then Akyroyd. They will absolutely sell more tickets with those names over not having any big names involved.
You could similarly ask the question as to why we use movie stars in any movie. Think about a movie star that, being in a movie, might persuade you to go see it (or rent it). Now, there are, what, 8 billion people in the world. Surely someone else could do just as good of a job as your person…but would you still see the movie if it was a nobody?
Unfortunately yes. It gives the movie more credibility to some people.
“What?! A Yogi the Bear movie? Who threw this piece of garbage together? It looks horrible. I’d never go see that or take my kids to it. Put together by a bunch of nobodys. Wait! Dan Akroyd and Justin Timberlake’s voices are in it? I like those guys. They wouldn’t put their names on a sucky movie, would they? If they can afford to hire them they must have some money behind this thing. It’s suddenly sounding legit.”
But even so. I can see a Justin Timberlake fan going to see The Social Network for their idol but Yogi Bear? You can’t see him and you can’t really hear him.
Garfield may have been a terrible movie but you would have at least recognized Bill Murray’s voice in it.
Justin Timberlake and Dan Ackroyd will get invited to every talk show - early morning, day-time, night-time - newscasts, whatever. Two anonymous voice actors will not. You can put their pictures on the posters. You can do interviews with them to put on the DVDs and make commentary tracks. You can use them before, during, after, and long after the movie itself. The marketing value of this is enormous today. Movies are not about movies; they’re about making money for years and years in a thousand different ways. Names sell. Anonymity doesn’t.
You’re talking about Lorenzo Music? He was supposed to be doing a Bill Murray voice when he did Garfield? I thought that was just his usual cartoon voice - pretty much the same voice he did as Carlton the doorman (and for all I know it’s his normal voice).
He played Peter Venckman in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, also. Murray made an observation that the other actors got the voice sounding pretty close to the actors from the original movie, except that Venckman (Murray’s character in the film) sounded like Garfield the cat. The result of Murray’s comment was that the producers of the Ghostbusters cartoon replaced Music with Dave Coulier as Venckman’s voice.
There’s an anecdote that when the Beatles first watched Yellow Submarine (the animated feature film where actors impersonated the Beatles’ voices) all four of them independently said that the actors impersonating the other three sounded good but the guy impersonating them sounded nothing like their real voice.
That’s kind of strange. It agrees with everyone’s experience of listening to their own voice. But you’d think they’d heard their own voices enough while listening to takes of their recordings. I suspect they were just joking, which wouldn’t be unusual for them.
I think Yogi Bear is going to flop bigtime. There’s really not any nostalgia for it among kids- I doubt most know who Yogi is- and adults don’t have the kind of nostalgia that sells movie tickets. (That said it’ll probably open at $200 million just to prove me wrong.)
How do we chart the evoloution of casting celebrities to do voices in animated features?
Used to be that the natural way to go was to use professional (though largely unknown) voice actors- which was fine because the visual animated character was what was meant to sell the movie, not the voice performer.
Seems the rise of the celebrity voice performance occurred in the mid to late 90s.
1989 The Little Mermaid: Jodi Benson, Samueal E. Wright, and Pat Carroll
1991 Beauty and the Beast: Paige O’Hara and Robby Benson (supporting perfomers Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach, and David Ogden Stiers were the “megastars” by comparison)
The rise of celebrity voice perfomers must have been inspired by Robin Williams as the Genie in Aladdin.
Maybe also that the rise of Dreamworks Animation posing the first real competition for Disney Animation led to increased celebrity casting as one studio had to try to “one-up” the other.
Professional voice actors share your beef. The bottom line is quite simple:
They do it because it makes money.
Thats it, period, end of discussion. The movie producers – who are already working in animation, and thus can’t feature famous LOL actors OMG – want to feature famous actors. Because people really do spend their movie buck based on “yo i know that person!”.
It’s true for all the Pixar movies, too. If they use celebrities, it must attract more attention. Look at how many stars they cast in Toy Story back in 1995. They do a great job, but they may have been able to make it without them.
Of course, look at How To Train Your Dragon. Most of the actors in it aren’t super famous and the movie was excellent. Some movies still use minor celebrities for voices.
That would be a plausible argument - if there were evidence it was true. But the fact is that a lot of movies, maybe even a majority, don’t make money. So studios can’t claim that they always make the right decisions based on empirical evidence.
And keep in mind I’m not dismissing all celebrity voices. I have no issue with casting Tom Hanks and Tim Allen to provide their voices to Woody and Buzz. But why cast a celebrity when you don’t want them to use their regular recognizable voice?