A Voice of My Childhood: Jim Cummings

(Guest Post by Tyler)

Hey y’all, Tyler here – your resident Bulbasaur writer! It’s been a bit, but I was so glad to be join FanExpo Dallas again this year.

I didn’t quite have much time to put together a costume. So I ended up wearing a Bulbasaur cap that Spencer was sweet enough to get for me for my birthday (I truly do not deserve him), and building the rest of my fit around that. It’s been a couple of years since I wrote my article “Bulbasaur at the Zoo” for this blog – and now, I have “become” the Bulbasaur at the zoo. Poetic, right?

This year, schedules didn’t line up well for our crew, so I couldn’t meet up with everyone. I ended up mostly walking around with my brother, who hadn’t ever been to a comic con before. I enjoyed showing him around, and we appreciated seeing the creativity of so many people in their costumes and their merchandise. When life’s so crazy, it’s refreshing to be able to be with people to just “enjoy” things.

For me, the highlight will always be walking the vendor floor. But this year, I was also able to do something different. I attended a panel by the incredible voice actor, Jim Cummings.

Jim is known for many voices from several different properties. Some of them include:

• Winnie the Pooh
• Tigger 
• The Tasmanian Devil
• Ray in The Princess and the Frog
• Hondo Ohnaka in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels

There are literally hundreds more. During this panel, I was looking up his IMDB and Wikipedia page and realizing how many more characters I knew but hadn’t realized were his voice. He talked about his processes of voicing some of these characters. He would do some physical movements and even stand like the character to really project that character’s essence into his voice. Something he shared as well that found interesting is that he never read the scripts before doing a recording session. He explained that these scripts can be hundreds of pages long, so he would just make sure he could get in character beforehand and just read it as they go along.

It was fun to listen to him share some of his experiences as a voice actor. He talked about one time doing voice work for a movie, but actually his part ended up getting cut entirely from the work. He unfortunately didn’t find out about this until the movie premiere, which he attended with his family. The director didn’t see him until after the viewing and apologized for notifying him earlier. (I am writing this weeks after the comic con, but if I remember right, it was for the movie Surfs Up, about the surfing penguins). He also told about a time that they misspelled his name in the credits of the final cut of a movie, even when he was a pretty well-established name in the industry. (Imagine the intern that was probably fired for almost offending a legend in the voice acting industry).

I was absolutely excited to be there. While I am your in-house Bulbasaur writer today, I love many different fandoms. But one of my first was actually Winnie the Pooh. My mom actually nicknamed me her Pooh Bear growing up – because I would love watching the movies, and because I would do nothing but eat and sleep all the time. He did end up doing the voice for us, as well as a couple of others, and it felt incredible to hear it live. (And in an appropriate setting, at least. I would have hated to be one of “those fans” who goes up to him outside of a panel and beg him, “Do the voice!!!”).

It was also humanizing to see him as just a person, talking normally and joking around. As silly as it is to say, I had to remember that he is just the voice of Winnie the Pooh and other characters. He is not those characters themselves. This was especially interesting to me, because sometimes he would say jokes that weren’t necessarily distasteful, but were a bit more off-colored than what you would hear in a Winnie the Pooh show.

(Nolan North, another voice actor, was also on the panel. But I was focused more on Jim, so I didn’t take any notes)

In the end, I was really glad to be able to do something different than I have at cons before. To sum it all up, I just say: while it’s cool to see the actors who voice your favorite characters or play as your favorite characters, I hope that you yourself stay attuned to the voice of your own inner child.

(My inner child is saying to go eat something and take a nap. Good to know that I still have a bit of Pooh Bear in me).

More Content You Might Like:

• "Something For Everyone: Fan Expo Dallas" by Ryan
• "Dallas Takes Center Stage: A Nostalgic Reunion" by Jason
• "How to Speed-Run a Comic Con" by Tyler