Jack Angel

Jack Angel was a California radio man first, a disc jockey at KMPC and KFI, and the training is audible in everything he did afterwards: clean diction, instant changes of register, a voice built for a microphone rather than a stage. He moved into voice work and landed in the middle of the 1980s toy-cartoon boom, where the economics required one actor to play several characters in a single episode. He was Ultra Magnus and Cyclonus on The Transformers, Astrotrain in the 1986 film, and a regular presence across Super Friends and G.I. Joe.

The second act was Disney and Pixar, where he became one of a small pool of performers who turn up in the crowd of nearly every animated feature for twenty-five years. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hercules, Tarzan, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc.: usually uncredited, usually a villager or a background shout, always there.

Two roles stand clear of that anonymous mass. He was the shark in Toy Story, the one who pops up wearing Woody's hat, a joke lasting four seconds that everybody remembers thirty years on. And he was Teddy in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a small, patient, worried voice coming out of a mechanical bear, which is the only performance in his filmography asked to carry real feeling, and it does. He kept working into his eighties and died in 2021, having spent forty years being heard by nearly everyone and recognised by nearly no one.