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Fry, Fry Again? Futurama May Be Back, Bringing Billy West With It
Billy West has created a slew of trademark voices for cartoon characters, like Stimpson J. Cat for John Kricfalusi's Ren & Stimpy and Dr. John Zoidberg and Phillip J. Fry for Matt Groening's Futurama. He's also perfected the classics like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Popeye. But, by far, his most interesting voice is his own: a voice that says when it comes to show business, he likes what he does but doesn't always like what he sees. "I sound so bitter when I'm talking about show business and all that, but I've seen so much come and go that I want to do something to change things," West says. "It's like I'm fed up…I'm not a nasty guy. I'm actually fun to be around, but I have quite a commentary on life." West says becoming a voice artist isn’t something he tried to break into on his own. "In my case, it chose me," he says. "I didn't really choose it. I was always making noises and doing impressions of teachers or family members. I never thought I would be able to do anything with it." He focused his energy on his guitar, playing from band to band for about 17 years. But the voices in his head kept creeping back into his life. "I used to do the voices on stage and people really seemed to like it and I got into radio as a result of that." In the 80s, a friend turned his voices over to WBCN in Boston where the morning DJ, Charles Laquidara, kept inviting him to perform on his "Big Mattress" radio show until it became a regular job. But he soon got the itch to move to New York and got the attention of a radio talk jockey named Howard Stern, thanks to WBCN general manager Mel Karmazin. Stern first put him on the air after hearing his impression of a dying Lucille Ball. "I did this stuff in Stern's room while he was having his lunch, and he had potato shooting out of his nose, and he was saying [in Stern's voice] 'You gotta do this tomorrow,'" West says. He became a regular player on the Stern show in 1990 doing grotesque send-ups of celebrities for the next six years. West says the style was quite a switch. "[In Boston,] it was more like trying to be clever and not provocative so much, but Stern went for it," he says. "They went for the jugular with everything. I wasn't used to that style but I'm a quick study…and I was able to transform into an attack dog like I was wielding some puppet and the puppet would be so filled with venom and it got to be funny. To me, dead-on impressions aren't important. If you're funny, that's all that matters." During his stint with Stern, he landed his first gig in cartoons doing voices for a revival of Beanie and Cecil for ABC, where he met animator John Kricfalusi, creator of the cult classic Ren & Stimpy. Kricfalusi turned West’s Larry Fine impression into the voice of the fat cat opposite John's ill-tempered Chihuahua. He also provided the voice of Doug, another (less provocative) Nickelodeon cartoon. When Kricfalusi's twisted creation became a sensation and he got tired of flying through four different time zones three times a week to record voices, West decided to go, well, West. All was well until Nickelodeon fired Kricfalusi over creative differences and West had to fill the shoes he left behind as the voice of Ren. "I had to take a lot of crap from that camp," he says. "They would flame me. I put up with it for 10 years. This fucking guy was a rock in my shoes for 10 years with his minions attacking me wherever I went. I finally got sick of it and I got my own Web site, and I started fighting back." West says he can understand why fans can get so worked up over something as miniscule as a TV show, but it got too personal. "It's just because it was good; there aren't a lot of things that are good, and I think that when something truly is good, it stands out," he says. "People thought I had something to do with this personally. The argument was, 'You could have stuck with John. You could have said, well I'm not doing the show if John doesn't do it…' All I owe anybody is a good job. "
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