With extensive credits in animation, anime, video games and voice matching, odds are you have heard Sandy Fox and Lex Lang at some point.







Fox is best known for voicing Betty Boop in various media since 1991, and has done work on “The Simpsons,” “Futurama,” “King of the Hill,” and films such “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Maleficent” as well as a long list of anime roles.







In addition to voice matching hundreds of actors in film and TV, Lang has roles on “Justice League,” “Batman: Brave and the Bold,” “Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes” as well as playing Sanosuke Sagara in “Rurouni Kenshin,” Goemon Ishikawa in “Lupin the 3rd” and Kenshiro in “Fist of the North Star,” which was one of many roles in which he plays opposite Fox.





The couple return to Fox's hometown Sept. 26-8, when they are guests at the Pittsburgh Comicon, where they will be hosting panels all three days of the show.





The Swerve Magazine: How did you get started in voice acting?







Lex Lang: My very first voice over job occurred several years before I got into voice over. I was at the Musicians Institute, at the time the Guitar Institute, in California, and I was sort of the spokesman for the Guitar Institute, and my very first voice over was on the promotional video for students who were interested in going to the university.



Then several years later, it was recommended to me by a friend to do walla on Power Rangers. I started there and then from there, I got little bit parts here and there, and then got into animation and voice matching.







Sandy Fox: I was working for the Walt Disney company in the 80s, and I was asked when I was working there to often voice Snow White or Mikey and Minnie for a project or a parade. In 1990, I took a voice over workshop with Sue Blu when she came to Orlando, she's a very big animation director and voice actress in LA, and that was my first introduction to voice over.









In 1991, there was a job position in Hollywood at Universal Studios for Betty Boop, it was a character for the park, and to go on tour. So I decided I wanted to move to Hollywood and pursue voice acting, and one of my first jobs in 1991, besides doing Betty Boop full time for Universal Studios Hollywood, was working on “The Simpsons.” I worked on “The Simpsons” for three years, I did all the extra kids voices and extra voices in their ADR walla group.





SM: You guys have done vocal work over a variety of mediums. Does the approach change whether you are doing anime or American animation or video games?







SF: Oh, absolutely. First of all, technically, it's a completely different process. When we're doing traditional animation, we're usually sitting with the whole cast, kind of radio theater style. So we read through the whole script together, so you're actually working with and reading opposite the characters you're in the scene with.







In anime, you go into a booth by yourself, and you're actually hearing the Japanese first, and then you're voice dubbing the English lines, so that's a much more technical process. I believe that is the most challenging and difficult part of voice acting, as you have to really bring the acting and the emotion to the character as your matching the flaps. And in traditional animation, there's more room to improv because they are animating to your voice whereas in anime dubbing you're dealing with what's already been animated.







LL: It also differs from doing promos or trailers or voice matching, where's it's a completely different animal again. Like for example, for voice replacement or voice matching, we'll come in and see the character in the movie already, and they'll have done all their lines, but the director may not like the accent the actor's chosen or they might not like the specific details of how they're acting.







SF: In video games, another unique process, you'll go in, any you might have up to 400, 800 lines per session. You're just firing off different reactions, like my character's taking hits in the game. You just go through all those different reactions.







LL: You might have to do, say 15 reactions where the director will say these are different levels of damage to the player when they're using your character. The director will guide you through a lot of different levels, and you might do 10 levels on 15 different reactions, so that's 150 different types of reactions based on the character being hit by some weapon or something. It's the same with the character throwing a punch, the character throwing a kick, the character receiving a punch, the character receiving a gunshot. You do just lots of variations because they want it to keep it fresh in the game, so if your character's being played throughout the whole game, you're really hearing variety of different reactions every time the character gets hit. In the old days, they would just record three and have the same sound every time you got hit.







SF: They'll also give you a time. Sometimes those games, especially if they were done in Japanese first, you have a time limit, do this hit in a second or half a second. Or do this line in three seconds. It's very technical in that aspect.







SM: You had mentioned doing vocal matching and ADR, how did you get involved in that?















After doing a couple of them, some of the producers that I knew at the time realized I had an ability to mimic whatever I hear pretty well, pretty quickly. I became one of the main guys in Hollywood that does voice matching, and since I started I've probably done 3-or 400 voice matches for every actor under the sun from Christopher Walken to Sean Connery to Charlie Sheen, Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise. Most of the time it's just like one or two lines.

LL: I had been doing voice over about a year and realized I was a very little fish in a very large pond. It wasn't as big of a pond as the whole acting community in Los Angeles because there's literally millions of people doing it in LA, but it boiled down to 10,000. I decided that in order to stand out, I had to create my own job, so to speak. I made some business cards that said “Voice Match Specialist” and I went to the studios and gave them out.You wouldn't believe how much of a demand there is for soundalikes. What will happen is the actor is doing their scene, and there may be a technical difficulty or a little noise on the set, and usually the actor will do one ADR session as part of their contract to fix the little things like that. But often after the principal actor has done the obligation to his contract, then they will find new things that need to be fixed or new lines that need to be added, and what they'll do is audition a group of voice actors to replace those lines.After doing a couple of them, some of the producers that I knew at the time realized I had an ability to mimic whatever I hear pretty well, pretty quickly. I became one of the main guys in Hollywood that does voice matching, and since I started I've probably done 3-or 400 voice matches for every actor under the sun from Christopher Walken to Sean Connery to Charlie Sheen, Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise. Most of the time it's just like one or two lines.





I had an occasion where I had to re-dub 38 lines for William Hurt on the remake of “Lost In Space.” What happened for that film, he came in and did all of his lines, and there were three different cuts, a studio cut, a director's and a producer's cut, and when they finished, they had to replace 38 lines. He was in an ashram in India, out of touch and off the grid.







It ended up being a couple weeks of work. Even though the movie itself is a little wacky, you can hear me all over the place. I had to re-voice the guy at the control panel when they're launching the Jupiter 1. The original actor had done a Russian accent, and the director did not want it to be a Russian accent, so I re-voiced him, did the 38 lines for William Hurt and then there's a spider creature that Gary Oldman turns into at the end, and I did the spider creature. That's a good representation of the variety of things you may be asked to do as a voice replacement actor.







I just did, me and three other guys, nine days of working on the new Planet of the Apes movie, where we did all of the primates. So besides Caesar and a few other leads, there's thousands of apes, and we did every single one of them. We had to study primate sounds in all different sorts of scenarios, whether it be primates that are fearful, attacking, curious, injured, all kinds of stuff. They gave us all of this audio, and it was to bridge the gap between what a real primate sounds like and what the actors that were playing the three leads were interpreting what a primate sounds like, which was vastly different. We found a happy medium, so that the viewing audience never feels, “Andy Serkis' character sounds too human” or “Those other apes sound too ape-like.”







SM: Both of you have taken over roles, Sandy with Betty Boop, and Lex with Han Solo in Star Wars video games. How do you approach taking over iconic roles like these?







SF: To portray Betty Boop and Betty Boop's voice is such an honor because she is the Queen of Cartoon, she is the very first talking cartoon and an international icon known all over the world. I was working at Disney World in Florida, and at night I was working at Bennigan's, which is like an Irish pub. I was the hostess, and I was the one at 2 o'clock in the morning, “Last call for alcohol” over the microphone, and this man walks up to me named Steve Torrico, and he has a 1920s orchestra, and he said, “Oh my gosh, that voice! You sound just like Helen Kane.” She was a very famous pop singer in the 1920s, and she was one of the many women that did Betty Boop's voice. She actually had that “boop-boop-be-doop” in her scat. Betty Boop was actually based on a lot of these 1920s pop singers. He said, “Do you sing?,” and I said, “Yes,” and he said “Come audition for my orchestra.” So I started singing with the Coconut Manor Orchestra singing all the songs of the 1920s era and the Betty Boop songs, and I did that for 11 years. I opened up jazz festivals for Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie and Cab Calloway.







Like I said before, in 1990 there was a call for a Betty Boop in Hollywood, and I drove out from Florida, and auditioned and got the role and was approved by King Syndicate. When I started in 1991, I traveled the world and did radio shows, and TV shows and interviews, and then a few years ago in 2012 they kind of rebirthed Betty Boop in this new campaign for Lancôme, it was a short commercial film by Joann Sfar, who is a really famous comicbook artist. They did this beautiful commercial, and they flew me to Paris to voice Betty Boop.







LL: For Han Solo, I think they auditioned 1600 people in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, I think it was 400 in each city. I personally have been a huge Star Wars fan my whole life, especially Episodes IV, V, and VI, I was just very, very into them, especially through my youth. I was one of those people who would cosplay as Han Solo at these sci-fi conventions, and I was always one of those people on premiere nights, camping out the night before. It was a big deal, so when I was cast as Han, it was really a dream come true, but then it became the biggest challenge I ever had as a voice actor.







To sound as much as you can to the character of Han Solo as Harrison Ford portrayed, they'll have those iconic lines like, “Don't worry, she'll hold together.” But then what happens, is it becomes an extreme challenge when they add another 600 lines that weren't in any film, and you're sounding like someone else for six hours. As a voice match person, you basically flex your throat in different ways. When you're doing Han Solo, it's not what Harrison Ford sounds like now, it's the brash, renegade space pirate thing. That's all cool for maybe two hours, but then the voice—like flexing a bicep for two hours straight, you can't even hold your arm out straight—so the challenge became not sounding like Kermit the Frog after two hours.







In terms of how it feels to do an iconic role, it's a challenge and a thrill at the same time. I know for Sandy, she's such a natural at hitting Betty Boop perfectly, I know it has some challenge to it, but she just slides right in, and you don't even sense that there's anyone doing Betty Boop, it's just, “There's Betty Boop.”



SF: I think for me it's such a joy and in so many different aspects, I lived the character; as a singer working with the band, I sang all the music for 11 years and toured, in Hollywood I actually portrayed the character, and toured Japan and Europe as the living Betty Boop character, so I actually walked around in her body, so I've experienced her in all dimensions.







SM: I also wanted to about some of your environmental endeavors, such as H2Om. How did that come about?







LL: H2Om is a natural spring water company. What makes it very unique is that it's kind of an interactive water in the sense that we put positive words like gratitude, prosperity, love, joy, peace on the label, and we call it “Water With Intention” and we ask the question “What intention will you create today?”







So that's the concept behind the water, the way it emerged though a real long series of synchronistic events that began in Hawaii, where we were doing a meditation on the beach, and we were saying “Let's send out positivity in the water so that no matter where anyone is in the water anywhere in the world, they'll catch some of this positive vibe we're putting out.” We walked into town, and we were having a breakfast, and on the breakfast table there was this magazine called “Inspiration Magazine” that said on the cover, “Send your blessings into the water: the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto,” who is a Japanese water researcher, who's taken photographs of water before and after it's been subjected to different vibrations, whether it be music or photographs or people putting intention towards the water, positive and negative. (The water) receives the vibratory signatures and reflects them under the microscope.







When we came home, we were invited to the premiere of this movie called, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” It talks about quantum physics and how we manifest things in the world. Again, we weren't thinking about starting a water company. All of the sudden we saw Dr. Emoto again, and said “Oh look he's in this movie too.” The following morning, at about 4:30 in the morning I woke up from a really powerful dream and I saw in front of me, like it was hanging on a banner it said, “H2Om:Water With Intention: Think It While You Drink It.”







It took about 2 years to get all the IP portfolio, and find the right spring. Then we made just a couple pallets of water, thinking it would be for farmer's markets and things like that. It was very, very well-received. We got a call from Sting to be the water for his Rainforest Foundation event at Carnegie Hall. The Wall Street Journal called and told us there was a science journal coming out that talked about water's receptivity and those information panels, and they wanted to know if we would want to be mentioned in that article. We got into Whole Foods via a local vendor program while we were test marketing. We won the best tasting water in the world at the Berkley Springs International Water Tasting. We partnered with Deepak Chopra and the Chopra Center as the official water at the center.







SF: We're still on the journey. It's still taking us into new places. Lex and I have become certified Chopra meditation teachers, we're certified hado instructors under the work of Masaru Emoto, and we actually go into middle schools, through our Love Planet Foundation which is our non-profit that we started in 2001, and educate on environmental awareness and teach some of the principles of hado and mindfulness, and how to keep our groundwater clean. It's a way that we can give back.







Speaking on the power of intention, I was born in Monroeville, so I'm really excited to be coming back to be part of the Pittsburgh Comicon. I grew up is Swissvale, and it was 1976, I was in 7th grade, and my girl friend and I are sitting on my front porch, and she's like, “Where do you think you're going to be in 1995?” And I said, “I'm going to be in Hollywood.” I've always had a dream to be a performer and an entertainer, and to be in this industry. I was in musicals in high school. My very first job was performing my summers at Kennywood Park, I was a singer on the main stage show there. I worked two years doing that before going to work for Disney. Just the power of our intention and holding our dreams and not giving up on them. That's what I do, that's what I want to be in the world.

