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Fry, Fry Again? Futurama May Be Back, Bringing Billy West With It
(cont.) West's next starring role was Phillip J. Fry for Matt Groening's Futurama (which West says is rising from the FOX network graveyard), where he used his "25-year-old voice" for the orange-haired simpleton and a dozen other voices for supporting roles and lesser characters. "It's the first time I ever really used my voice for a cartoon because I thought that's the one voice they'll never be able to replace," he says with a laugh. "Copycats can do characters but it's hard to imitate somebody's real voice." He auditioned for Fry, the ultra-old Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth and the perpetually pathetic and poor Dr. Zoidberg, who West says is a blend of the voices of George Jessel and Lou Jacoby. He also auditioned for the role of the smoking, drinking, egotistic robot, Bender. That role went to actor John DiMaggio, which is one West says he was glad DiMaggio scored. "John nailed it," he says. "That gave that thing life and [John's] very, very funny, so he knows how to play comedy better than most people." Futurama stood out in a lot of ways, from the writing to the three-dimensional images mixed with hand drawn animations. "I think by far it was the best thing I ever did," West says. It was also one of the few mainstream animated projects that let professional voiceover artists like Tress MacNeille, Tom Kenny, Phil Lamar and Frank Welker play and develop voices for characters, and let celebrities play celebrities, a welcome change from one of West's biggest pet peeves. "[Celebrities] don't belong playing characters, " West says. "None of them are any good except for a few guys like Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy or Mike Myers. They understand what it's like to physically transform your voice into something unrecognizable compared to yourself, and actors are not that good at it. … [Studios] spend zillions on visuals but as far as voice tracks go, they're flat-lining and there's just no magic there basing everything on celebrity, the most artless, bloodless, Godless idea I've ever heard." West says he and other voiceover artists still audition for celebrity parts even if "Karl Rove had a better chance of getting a voice in a cartoon than I did," but he's still providing tons of voices for video games, commercials and cartoons like Nickelodeon's Jimmy Neutron and the Cartoon Network's My Life as a Teenage Robot. He's also returned to his musical roots with his band, Billy West and the Grief Counselors, and their first album Me-Pod, is available at his Web site. The album features songs in a variety of styles from ramblin' country to hard rock to Chicago blues. He plays lead guitar, vocals and a mean John Lee Hooker. With the help of Ren & Stimpy writers Jim Gomez and Bill Wray, he has also produced his own pilot called Billy Bastard, (www.billybastard.com) a semi-autobiographical show that mixes live action with puppets. Right now, there's only a Web site, a trailer and an 11-minute pilot, but West says thanks to the "glut of adult shows," there's some interest from several cable networks in expanding it. And unlike other "edgy" comedy shows, Billy Bastard doesn't know the meaning of the word. "Here's my problem with anything that tries to be edgy: It's fake because they don't go all the way." he says. "They slide right up to the side of what they consider to be obscene, but they won't commit to it, so it's fake. It just doesn't ring dangerous, this phony dangerousness, oooooooh. We didn't have focus groups or tests or anybody. We made each other laugh, that's how Looney Tunes were made. They didn't think too much about it. They didn't have a lawyer writing comedy." He says, even if Futurama comes back and keeps him behind the mic for years to come, producing his own projects is the next logical step in his career. "It's the first time that I put something together that I own because that's the ultimate level of where you have to go," he says. "You can be the greatest voice guy in the world and you can still be replaced by Seth Green."
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