Jeff Bennett

You have heard Jeff Bennett hundreds of times without ever seeing his face. He is the voice of Johnny Bravo, which he built out of an Elvis Presley impression, and of Petrie in the Land Before Time films, Brooklyn in Gargoyles, Peter Puppy in Earthworm Jim, Ace and Grubber and Big Billy in The Powerpuff Girls, the father in Dexter's Laboratory, Clank in the Tinker Bell films, the Man with the Yellow Hat in Curious George, and Kowalski in the Penguins of Madagascar. He won an Annie Award in 2012 for the last of those and an Emmy in 2016 for his Transformers work.

The skill is range plus reliability. A casting director hiring Bennett is buying four or five distinct characters out of one session, which is why his credit list runs to hundreds of titles and why so much of it reads as additional voices, incidental characters and one-scene parts. He can do broad cartoon bluster, a warm dad, a nervous sidekick and a straight villain, and he pitches each of them at the age of the audience rather than at his own vanity.

A large slice of his filmography sits in the direct-to-video Disney sequels of the late nineties and 2000s, work that is easy to sneer at and that kept an entire generation of voice actors employed. The better showcases are the television series, where writers had room to give his characters personalities instead of functions.