“I was a cartoon freak”: the animations that John Goodman hated
Casting Robin Williams to bring his signature freewheeling style to Aladdin opened the doors to a debate that’s still ongoing today, but John Goodman has been just one of the many actors to benefit from animated movies adopting the now-standard practice of hiring celebrities for major voice roles.
When it comes to the biggest animated productions in the industry, those who make their living as professional voice actors have found themselves increasingly marginalised when the likes of Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony have more often than not loaded up their ensembles with famous faces and sent them into the recording booth. However, that’s not to say the performances have been roundly lacking.
Goodman’s distinctive tones have come in particularly handy in carving out a lucrative side-line. From voicing Santa Claus in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie and embodying Pacha in The Emperor’s New Groove to taking over as Baloo in The Jungle Book 2 and bringing gravitas to insect Layton T. Montgomery in Bee Movie, he’s done it all. That also includes hamming it up as a giant alien robot in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Last Knight.
Of course, the most famous voice-only performance of Goodman’s entire career is undoubtedly that of James P. Sullivan in Monster’s Inc., Pixar’s Academy Award-winning favourite. He’d go on to reprise the role in not only the prequel Monsters University and sequel series Monsters at Work but also the short films Mike’s New Car and Party Central and a cameo in Cars.
He’s basically an animated veteran at this point, then, with Goodman admitting to the BBC that one of the many benefits of doing voice work is that “you don’t have to shave, you just read into a microphone”. Not that he’s ever been accused of phoning it in, especially when the star outlined his lifelong adoration of cartoons, albeit with a couple of notable exceptions.
“I liked Popeye. When I was a kid, I loved Popeye, but the old ones, the real old ones,” he said before aiming a shot across the bow at a pair of classic characters. “I hated Woody Woodpecker and Scooby-Doo, but I was a cartoon freak. So when my daughter was born, I went out and got all this stuff, so we could have something in common.”
From the sound of it, Scooby-Doo and Woody Woodpecker were effectively outlawed in the Goodman household because the patriarch viewed them as unworthy of his child’s attention. His comments gave the impression that Popeye may have been foisted upon the youngster instead.
The Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe-winning performer knows what he likes, and he knew what he wanted the next generation to like, too, but solving mysteries and wolfing down Scooby Snacks definitely wasn’t a part of it.
