My brother and I host a podcast, and last week I interviewed Dan Gilvezan, the voice actor who voiced Bumblebee from the original Transformers cartoon (generation 1). He talks about funny stories in the recording booth and his thoughts on the series and animated movie.
Here are the questions I asked him:
- What was it like watching an episode of the Transformers, seeing Bumblebee come to life with your voice? - How do you as a voice actor feel towards your character? Even though Bumblebee is a fictional cartoon, it has to be a really in-depth experience voicing them and seeing them on TV. - Being a voice actor doing kids cartoons, is it hard to play a serious role when something in the script seems funny or ridiculous? Any examples? - I know you talk about this in your book, but can you briefly talk about recording the show? Maybe give one example of recording with the likes of Frank Welker, Peter Cullen and Michael Bell. - I also wanted to touch on how you felt about doing the Transformers movie, but seeing most of the characters killed off. - Back then, you didn’t know that Bumblebee would one day be a huge star, but Spiderman was already famous worldwide. What was it like voicing such an iconic character in Spiderman and his amazing friends? Nervous at all? - In the new live action Transformers movies, Bumblebee’s voicebox is broken and he speaks by using various tv and radio snippets. If they fix his voice for the next movie, would you like to jump back in and voice him again? - What is it like knowing that something you did is watched and loved by millions of people, including multiple generations?
We expanded upon some of the questions (the interview went for 30 minutes), and at the end we talked about the book he wrote (Bumblebee and Me, life as a G1 Transformer).