Whether playing heroes or villains, in leading or supporting roles, Pat Fraley has brought a wide array of characters to life and been part of some very talented casts.







He was the title role in “Bravestarr,” played Jake Kong Jr, Ghost Buggy and Scared Stiff in “Ghostbusters,” Ace, Airtight, Barbeque and Wild Weasel in “G.I. Joe” and appeared across a multitude of series for various studios during the 80s.







In 1987, he landed the roles of Krang, Burne Thompson and Baxter Stockman in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” where he would also add Casey Jones and dozens of other minor characters.







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







Pat Fraley: I was always going to be a performer from four years old on. My mother told me I was special at four years old, and my whole career was about proving her right. She was wrong, but along the way, I got a career.







I trained to be an actor. I moved to Australia to do Shakespeare. Someone called the theater and said, “Do you have anyone who can do a Jimmy Cagney accent? ” and they said, “Oh yeah, we've got a Yank in the company now.” They figure we Americans all sit around and do impressions of each other. I went into the studio and did the impression. They said, “We like you,” and I went, “Why? ” and they said, “It was so big. We can't get the other actors to be that big.”







I realized as a very young man that I was very good at exaggerated work. I had grown up around the deaf, as my grandfather was the superintendent of the state deaf school in Idaho, and our whole family was exaggerated. I did very well in theater when they were doing French farces, but if they were doing Chekhov, the pilot light went out for me. My whole journey was to be more normal or less exaggerated, whereas most actors work to be more exaggerated. I had a gift for it, I grew up like that.







About three or four years later I moved back to the States and got my first job at Hanna-Barbera doing Scooby-Doo villains. I took off from there, I was a very fortunate actor to have figured out what I did best early.







True style is based on flaunting your limitations. I say limitations because in our disparaging we usually hear about how we are dynamic in a negative way. I was a class clown and a loud mouth and a know-it-all—well, I became an actor and a teacher.









SM: You did a number of series with Filmation. How did you get involved with them and what were your experiences working at that studio?





PF: That was one of the fondest experiences I had doing television series. First, I got an audition that was successful. Once you worked with Filmation, you became part of their repertory company. They would come up with a new idea for a show, and Lou Scheimer would invite the cast to the facility. Filmation was the last animation house to do everything including the painting of cells, the writing, everything in one house. Lou would have a cup of coffee, and offer us one, and show the designs of the characters to us and say, “Which ones do you want to play?” We got to choose the roles that we wanted. We'd do a little taste of it, and he'd go, “That's good, now can you do this one as well?” In those days, they got three voices per 22.5-minute show for the price of the contract. We never had guests at Filmation. We did everything, and we'd throw in extra ones—which we weren't supposed to, but we did.







The recorded tracks were edited here in LA. They didn't send them overseas, so we didn't have to even have line numbers, so we could record a show in 20 minutes, or 40 minutes because we weren't slowed down by slating numbers so Korean or Filipino or Japanese animators could follow it.







It was a very wonderful time working with wonderful actors like Frank Welker, Peter Cullen, Alan Oppenheimer, Linda Gary, some of the regular players at Filmation.







SM: One of the series for which you get most acclaim is “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” How did you land that role, and what were your experiences with that show?







PF: I replaced the director who had voiced it himself. He had chosen about four characters to do in the show, and I was called into audition for it. I looked at the script, and looked at the name “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” and thought, “Oh, this is going to be a turkey.”







This character Krang was described as an evil, body-less, burbling, chortling blob of a brain, but funny. They said, “Are you ready?,” and I said, “Give me two minutes.” I just slapped things to the wall. I thought he's going to be undulating, he's evil, so I'm going to give him a high-pitched range, and since he's a blob of a brain I'll make him cottony-sounding. On top of that, I've got to be funny, so I'll play him as a Jewish mother. I also had a trick that I pulled from recess in third grade of talking backwards, where you draw air in instead of breathing it out. I would put that at a lot of lines, and I got that from having four boys in five years and having to deal with them. I would yell at them, and it would give me heartburn, and Krang was always angry all the time, so I thought, “What if he had heartburn?” and that talking backwards every so often accomplished that in my mind.







I also played him as a loser. At the end of almost every script, he would say something like, “Finally I will rule the universe!!!” and then there would be a big “Oh, no!” It was intended by the writer to be yelled, but I would say it quietly to himself as if he knew he was going to lose on some level.







I was fortunate to work with James Avery, who played Shredder. Shredder was very loud and had very little range in his voice or his emotions, he was always angry. I had a high pitch range going high and low, and much more expressive, so the two of us balanced and contrasted and we used to refer to ourselves as the Odd Couple of outer space. Sort of a bad marriage.







I sat alongside Rob Paulsen, and we love ad-libbing. In the first season, we ad-libbed a great deal on our scripts, we would change lines, add lines. After the first year, and we became so popular, they clamped down on us, but that was okay because the writers had a sense of how we were playing our roles and our relationships, and they started writing for them. Going back to Shredder and Krang having arguments like a couple.







It was a very well cast show. There's Barry Gordon playing Donatello, kid of the egghead, and it turns out he was going to law school at the same time as he was performing the role, so it wasn't unusual to see Barry come into the studio and recording and have law books he was looking at while he was working.







Cam Clarke—who by the way is my cousin—was playing Leonardo, who was kind of the straight Turtle, and given the role of keeping it together and exposition, and he has the voice and the demeanor of a hero, so he worked very well with that.







Townsend Coleman was playing Michelangelo had at least three teenage kids, so he knew the culture of that time. He knew the lingo, and he knew how teenagers behaved. Rob Paulsen is a born smart aleck and worked so well as Raphael because of that.







Of course, Peter Renaday (who also voiced Splinter) was so wonderful as Vernon. I was originally given that role but said I couldn't do that one because of my other roles. I had Baxter Stockman, Burne Thompson, and Krang, and Vernon was too much to do. It turned out that Peter Renaday took it over and he was the funniest person in his cast. We laughed more at his performances as scaredy cat Vernon than anyone else.







SM: When you have multiple voices, do you bounce between the voices or do you record all of one and then go back and do the other?







PF: For some, when it's complex and you have a lot of dialogue with yourself as two different characters, some people do that, but we never did that, and I don't do that. You just take a moment to pause and change your character, do it, and then go back to the other character. The reason why I did that is that, if I say a line, and then I respond to it as the different character, I have the best shot at the acting working well. The responses matched up to the initiation line, and that was more important and more difficult to match than changing your voice.







SM: You recently played Krang again with the original cast for the current Nickelodeon series. Did you record together or was that a solo job?







PF:We didn't record with the new cast, but we did record dialogue with each other. There were a couple of times when we were all together, or at least two or three of us were, so that was a joy







SM: You have been teaching for a long time, and the amount of courses you have listed on your website is remarkably diverse. What led you make teaching such a big part of your life?







PF: I was always a teacher and a performer. When I was a kid, and we would play army or cowboys and Indians, I would teach the other kids how to die really well. I taught for college on the side and started my career in Australia teaching at Flinders University at Adelaide, South Australia.







I teach more now then I had time to in previous years, and in fact, I do home course studies and have 6000 students around the world. People will take a course, pop out for a month or two, and then come back. I find it really satisfying because they record their homework, and I comment on it and send it back, so I have an interaction with the students.







I teach a course on character voice versatility or audio book technique—they choose what they want to take, and they're generally five-week courses. It's a joy working with so many different kinds of talents, with different interests in voice-over application.







SM: When you do live teaching seminars, you often work with other actors and talent such as Brad Garrett. How did you come to do this team teaching and meet your collaborators?







PF: I met Brad when he decided as a young man that he wanted to get off the road as a stand-up comedian. He was opening for Sinatra and Julio Iglesias and these big names, but he really wanted to spend more time doing sitcoms, movies, and animation. We met doing “Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n Wrestling.” He says I mentored him, but really all I did was encourage him to be as funny as he was when the microphone wasn't hot. He would ad lib and be wonderful and funny, and then he would kind of lock down. I sort of was the kid next to the funny kid in 5th Grade who said, “Go ahead. Do it.” Really, I just acted as an encouragement for him. Over the years, we've taught together and become close friends, and he is indeed the funniest man I've ever met and a very skillful teacher as well.







I often have guests that I work with because it's the way that I learned, and it gives students two perspectives, and they get more value out of the events that I put on. I try to get the best people in the various areas of voice-over as guests. Teaching with the casting director Natalie Lyon from Pixar, Barbara Harris who is the most successful casting person in the history of film with post production, doing ADR and looping. As well as June Baker in New York, who is a phenomenal teacher. I often collaborate with when I fly into New York to teach.







I'm only as good as the elbows I rub. It's been my way of advancing as a talent and a teacher, and I always learn from them.

