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  • I'm ready.

  • I'm ready.

  • I'm ready.

  • I'm ready.

  • I'm ready to look at impressions.

  • Come quick on that raku everybody.

  • I'm Tom Kenny, animation voice actor known as SpongeBob Square Pants.

  • The ice came from adventure time, the mayor from a polyp, Love girls and 1/2 from Rocco's Modern life.

  • People seem to love to do impressions of animated characters online, so we're gonna rate a couple of them and check him out.

  • I'm ready, Bob.

  • I know it's not easy.

  • It's not as easy as it looks.

  • That guy was great.

  • He brought the intensity.

  • He had the technique, the hand technique.

  • Can you see the big scar that I have there after 20 years of doing that?

  • Uh, no.

  • That's actually not from doing that Guy's bringing it.

  • He's awesome.

  • A character like SpongeBob is really hyperactive, but he also has really quiet moments where he doubts himself.

  • I feel like a failure, Gary, and you also have those moments like like this person was doing where he is and you gotta get all that all has to sound like SpongeBob.

  • SpongeBob has really high highs and really low lows.

  • Emotionally, when he's happy, he's really happy jumping up in the air, freaking out.

  • And when he's sad, he's so despairing that you've seen it on the show, where he actually cries like a lawn sprinkler.

  • Whereas I said, I don't need a therapist because I've got SpongeBob Good morning, Gary.

  • Uh, hey, good morning.

  • Gary gets what Today is, how that's right a day.

  • But first of all, I would like to say to his parents, Don't worry too much.

  • It's probably just a phase.

  • That's what my parents not so maybe it's not.

  • I like that.

  • He brings the color.

  • He wears the yellow.

  • He seems to really be intimate with the ins and outs of SpongeBob, although if he was a real SpongeBob van, he would have SpongeBob on his guns and not Deadpool.

  • I do Gary, the snail to who is basically a cat in snail form.

  • Gerry's a snail of a few words.

  • He's snail of one word me out.

  • But Gary, there's weird gradations to him to like.

  • Sometimes he freaked when he's flipping out.

  • Sometimes he's bored.

  • This guy nails nails Gary to when you're doing voiceover for TV.

  • The union contract is that they get you for three voices Once you go to 1/4 voice, they got to give you a little bump in pay.

  • So they have you for 123 voices.

  • So it pays to be versatile cause they would rather pay one guy to do three voices, then three guys separately to do three voices.

  • So a lot of times you wind up talking to yourself and having conversations with yourself.

  • Brian Wilson once said to me, Wait a minute.

  • So basically, you're a page schizophrenic and I said, Yeah, yeah, that's right.

  • So, yeah, this guy manages to get the timing.

  • He goes back and forth between SpongeBob and Gary without a hitch and manages to firmly grasp his jelly fishing net at the same time.

  • Good object work.

  • Now I understand everything.

  • Now I must be the opposite of my being squint word by Do I like playing the clarinet practice and practice on a long, but I never get me better.

  • This young man has taken it to a whole another level.

  • He's kicking it up a notch.

  • Where something that happens on SpongeBob a lot is that the characters do impressions of the other characters on the show, so he's doing SpongeBob doing an impression of squid word which you know is very meta.

  • It comes a little easier to us because we've been standing next to each other in the recording booth for 20 years now.

  • He really nailed that.

  • That's great.

  • A lot of times you got to do the math because you going sponge, I'll be starting out here and square where it is starting here, Elise.

  • But I'm what I sound like spawned by doing squint.

  • Weird.

  • So you still have to put some SpongeBob in there because he's not that great of an Impressionist.

  • SpongeBob is.

  • That's where the Rubik's Cube aspect of this comes in, where you go.

  • Wow.

  • I'm thinking about this stuff way too much.

  • You're looking kind of fat.

  • Gunter Gonta.

  • You're getting fat.

  • Yeah.

  • Okay.

  • Watch this.

  • Oh, yeah, Yeah.

  • Wow.

  • This guy is obviously a cartoon network guy.

  • He invested in the beard, probably a repurposed Santa Claus beard.

  • So that tells me he's resourceful, which you have to be to be a voice actor.

  • One thing that he gets at there is that the ice king lives alone in this ice palace.

  • The ice king is about loneliness.

  • He's a really lonely person.

  • It's just him and his penguins who kind of only live with him because he feeds them again, much like cats or snails.

  • This guy gets that back and forth that that mental ping pawing that tends to happen when guys are in solitary confinement for a really long time.

  • So that was either an awesome ice King impression or a cry for help.

  • You be the judge they call may the eyes.

  • What?

  • Who dares into the Ice Kingdom?

  • Do you know why I'm here?

  • Do you know what ice King means who you're trying to hit me?

  • He went the interesting route of dealing a Katharine Hepburn Ice King fusion, so his voice is a little more high and keening than the actual Ice King.

  • But it's a valid choice, I would say.

  • Maybe that's what the Ice King sounded like in his twenties before he got so bitter.

  • But still.

  • Ah, valid take on the character.

  • Hey, how about the personals?

  • The Rachael who I love Chicken menu really came down that pogo stick.

  • I definitely thought you were going to keep it.

  • Wow!

  • Rocco's Modern Life and Heffer was the first regular animated series I was ever on, so that's a really important one for me.

  • It's where I first met Stephen Hillenburg, who would go on to create SpongeBob.

  • Steve was a creative director on Rocco's modern life.

  • When I went in to audition for Heffer, I did.

  • My basically an impression of my nephew at the time was like 13 14 years old, but he always acted like he was on the verge of laughing like he was always holding in a laugh with this guy nails.

  • Is that that kind of going up at the end of the senses?

  • Hey, Rocco, it's always kind of going up at the end.

  • He never goes down.

  • In the end, he always goes up.

  • In the end.

  • It's a little bit of like Valley Speak Valley Girl, where everything ends on and up.

  • Come on, give it a shot.

  • Hi, I'm hipper.

  • Whoa!

  • Ooh, that was a hoot Drip that deals were biting, my boy, I'm really Heffer is a harder impression to do for people that's much about.

  • I tend to play ah, lot of characters without any filter, and they're often yellow.

  • A realizing dog from Cat Dog was one of them.

  • SpongeBob is definitely one of them, and Heffer is is for sure, one of them.

  • The thing about F for that this guy taps into is that there's no filter and there's always a lot of joy in him, like everything's wonderful trip that heels were biting My but everything's awesome.

  • And there's never any negatives with Heffer and Spun drops.

  • Kind of like that, too.

  • That's kind of impacted me as a person, like playing characters that are kind of unrelentingly positive.

  • Can't help but give you a more positive outlook on life, which is kind of interesting.

  • So thanks, imaginary drawing characters.

  • Hi, everyone remember me?

  • You could take over my town.

  • Oh, my city, but nobody.

  • I mean, nobody touches my mayor in hat.

  • Now give it back.

  • I know he's got the Heffer nervousness in between 11 1st of all, I felt like this guy's T shirt was trying to hypnotize me, and it was actually working.

  • It's like really, really big man from Rocco's modern life.

  • Stare into my nipples of the future, and it actually was.

  • I'm not ashamed to say it.

  • The mayor sort of has that must mouth fleeing apple ing when his we're sort of like their stuff in his cheeks, things on his lips of yours.

  • Interestingly, this guy is doing the mayor from a polyp love girls.

  • But his kind of nervous laughter in between his lines is 100% Heffer.

  • He probably doesn't even realize that he's channeling those two things at once.

  • I felt like what this guy captured with the mayor was sort of laddie.

  • You don't quite know what the next thing you're going to say is it's sort of coming to you.

  • Hey, Mojo.

  • Jo Jo is destroying Townsville.

  • The You could always tag the live a little bit.

  • Yeah, that always works.

  • A lot of times, voices are amalgams of half baked impressions that aren't really that successful.

  • So the mayor on Power Puff Girls started out as a mash up of the Wizard from the 1939 Judy Garland movie.

  • Wisdom lies back where I come from.

  • We have people called Good Z.

  • Ju is sort of like that, but also a little mix of the old lady in every which way But Loose, which was a Clint Eastwood movie involving an orangutan and Ruth Gordon was on actress That was in that movie.

  • And I remember she said, Give me black, those Z D Oreos and I just remember that line from when I was a kid.

  • Give me back those g d Oreos yelled by this old lady and mashing them up Kind of turned into the mayor from the Powerpuff Girls.

  • Oh, Joe, maybe a supervillain Powerpuff Girls, Come quick Mojo Jo Jo has written Miss Bellum out of the show.

  • This young actor is very enthusiastic.

  • What he gets is you'll see that his mouth is going all over the place when he's doing on the mail.

  • Is that again that that much mouth full of marbles thing the layers off then in a high state of distress?

  • A lot of animation voiceover is really extreme.

  • So anything that it takes to get that sound anything, anything that your mouth will do.

  • Oh, your face can d'oh or your eyes can do on your arms can do anything to get you to that place is all grist for the mill and this guy's got a lot of grist.

  • It's so mind blowing and flattering to see people doing impressions of these characters and that they're still part of people's consciousness and their lives.

  • But there's something about animated characters, the stuff that hits you when you're in your formative stages.

  • That's the stuff that stays with you for the rest of your life.

  • And, man, I've got a great gig.

I'm ready.

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