Futurama's Billy West Made A Rare Mistake In Into The Wild Green Yonder
Voice actor Billy West plays several of the lead characters on Matt Groening and David X. Cohen's 31st-century sitcom "Futurama." His voice for Fry, he has said, is essentially how he sounded when he was in his 20s. He also voices the elderly Professor Farnsworth, the incompetent lobster Dr. Zoidberg, the blow-hard Shatnerian space captain Zapp Brannigan, and the severed head of Richard Nixon. He's also played a wide variety of store clerks, alien slugs, terrifying robots, and North Pole elves in his tenure on "Futurama." There is nothing, it seems, he can't do.
It also takes a great deal of professionalism to be so silly. Voice actors, especially prolific ones, have to recall how dozens of characters sound in a split second, able to call up whatever voices a scene needs. In West's case, he likely has to have conversations with himself, using two or more unique voices in a single scene.
For its first four seasons, "Futurama" stuck to a pretty typical schedule, churning out 13 to 22 episodes per season as many TV shows do. Then, in 2003, "Futurama" was canceled. Thanks to high DVD sales, however, "Futurama" was given a second chance in the form of four straight-to-DVD movies released in 2008 and 2009. While each movie was eventually aired as four separate episodes, they were released — and made — as whole 89-minute films.
The production on the four movies was a lot faster than the TV series was back in the day, and by the time they got to the fourth, "Into the Wild Green Yonder," Billy West was feeling the pinch. Talking to Movieweb back in 2009, West even admitted to making an amateur mistake that no professional voice actor ever commits: he started reading his lines in the wrong voice.
The dreaded voice mix-up
Working on the four "Futurama" movies — "Yonder" was preceded by "Bender's Big Score," "The Beast with a Billion Backs," and "Bender's Game" — "was a lot of work," West said, "but it was nothing but fun." West loved the idea of making straight-to-DVD movies because it allowed the series to continue and "Futurama," he said, was his favorite show. But burnout is very real. West described his workday thus:
"We did them really fast. We did a lot of stuff at once, not like the TV show where it would be one every week, but we didn't have to do an hour-and-a-half movie every week, just a half-hour show. So I was in good shape. But by the time we got to these DVD movies, I never really knew what it was like to carry on in the fashion with the characters for an hour and a half, and it would take four hours to record."
West's co-star Phil LaMarr — also present for the Movieweb interview — handily pointed out the old way of doing things. In a typical 30-minute show, a central voice actor will work four-hour recording shifts three times every five weeks. For the movies, it was four episodes of material that had to be completed in one week. West, LaMarr fairly points out, played three of the main characters. No one was working longer hours than he. West admitted that he was very, very tired on the day of the ... incident. He said:
"I started to falter. And one day I lost my mind and I did something that I had never done over all the years. I did the wrong voice for a character and everyone went, 'Ohhhh.'"
It seems in the voice-acting world, that is rare.
Which voices did he swap?
LaMarr, to defend West, said that all voice actors do make this slip-up from time to time, even if it is uncommon among most professionals. No one, however, had ever seen West do it before, so the showrunners knew he was tired. LaMarr also wanted to illustrate, saying:
"To give you an idea of how rare that is, in the first episode of 'Futurama,' there's a scene where Fry has just arrived and the Professor is bringing Fry to see the Planet Express doctor, Doctor Zoidberg. Billy is playing all three characters. This is the first recording and he recorded all three of those voices talking to each other for an entire scene on the fly. Usually, when people have multiple characters in one scene, you'll do one time through where you just read one character, you'll do another time through where you'll do the other character."
West, however, "had all three talking to each other flawlessly. Watch that season and you cannot tell it's the same person doing all the voices. There's just absolutely no way to tell." It seems that for "Yonder," for the first time, West was just off his game
Naturally, the Movieweb interviewer, Brian Gallagher, wanted to know which characters had been transposed. West answered:
"It was the Professor voice coming out for Zapp Brannigan. Something real incongruous."
Zapp Brannigan is known for his idiocy and lasciviousness. Hearing his dialogue in the Professor's "doddering old fool" voice would have been incongruous indeed.