Rob Paulsen

Paulsen has voiced more than 250 animated characters and performed in over a thousand commercials, which is the number that tells you what the job actually is. He came up through 1980s television animation as Hadji in Jonny Quest and, more consequentially, as Raphael in the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the loud sarcastic one.

Then Animaniacs, which is the peak. Yakko Warner is a vaudeville performer written by an adult writers' room and voiced at a speed that should not be sustainable, and Paulsen played Pinky opposite Maurice LaMarche's Brain on the same show and its spin-off. A Daytime Emmy and three Annie Awards came out of that work. What he is good at is elasticity plus diction: the voice will go anywhere and you never lose a syllable, which is why he gets handed the patter songs nobody else can survive.

Twenty-five years after Raphael he returned to the same franchise as Donatello in the 2012 series, which almost never happens in voice work and says something about how the industry regards him. The rest of the resume is the childhood of two generations: Carl Wheezer in Jimmy Neutron, P.J. in the Goofy films, Mark Chang in The Fairly OddParents, Brick and Boomer in The Powerpuff Girls, Jaq in the Cinderella sequels, Bobble in the Tinker Bell films, and enough Scooby-Doo and Ben 10 to fill an afternoon.