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Futurama Voices Could Be Recast
Svippy writes "According to reports surfacing on the Internet, Futurama may be recast. The animated series is due to return next year on Comedy Central, but may not be the same as we once knew it. 'As part of the announcement, the show's producers said stars including West, Sagal and DiMaggio had all signed on to return. Turns out that wasn't true. The stars had all expressed interest in returning. But with the budget for Futurama dramatically slashed, the salary offers came in well below what the thesps were asking.' Phil LaMarr posted 20th Century Fox's request for auditions on his Facebook page. However, some are skeptical about whether it's a real casting call or purely a stunt to reduce the salaries of the voice actors."
You know, when a new voice appears on an old show playing an existing character (memory escapes me at this moment for an example, but I know this has happened), I always wonder why folks generally don't just make the new voice sound like the old voice. This happened to at least a couple childhood cartoons of mine - the voice suddenly changed and ... WTF?
Let's hope they decide to bring in folks that sound the same (or very similar) if they do recast. Having different voices would be pretty lame.
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20th Century Fox Television claims the voice actors wanted 75,000 dollars per episode. Which is apparently close to ten times as much as usual.
This seems extremely unlikely by these people, who love and worship the show, that they would risk its stability for their own greed.
My assumption is that 20th Century Fox Television is either making stuff up or playing some gag.
Clicked pie.
On the other hand the media corporations may use it as a way to copyright a voice, even in a way that the original actors themselves can't sound like that out of the contracted uses.
On a similar note does anyone own Darth Vader's breath sound effect?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
The difference is they're recasting the characters, not creating a new story line with new characters. Actually, I'd prefer if they did the later. Like Star Trek, Futurama's premise could work if told from a different perspective. Imagine the original Star Trek was recast rather than creating the Next Generation? Futurama's intelligent approach to parody is what makes it great. I'd miss Bender and Fry, but not enough to suffer through other actors mimicking their voices.
It could even breath some life into the series, the last two DVD releases felt like the current story-lines were running out of gas (Leela-Fry relationship, Nibbler's true identity, etc). Bender's Game really seemed like the writers out of ideas.
on the show? The crew gets into a horrible accident that requires them to get voice box transplants, and Bender's voice gets erased and he is programmed with a different one.
This is almost as bad in a TV series when an actor or actress is replaced with a different one, and it usually happens to Soap Operas and really Cheesy TV shows. The only TV show to do this on a regular basis and still survive was Saturday Night Live, who kept reinventing themselves with new comedians.
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Maybe this (or the more normal work schedule of a normal series rather than the "movies"), will get some of the voice actors to return to their original form.
I think that some of the actors (particuarly Phil LaMarr, interestingly) never quite got the hang of their old characters again.
Losing the old cast would still be a death blow to the show, though.