Animaniacs star Jess Harnell is returning to the role of Wakko Warner for the first time in 22 years, but he has kept himself quite busy during the time in between the original series and Hulu's revival. With over 300 acting credits to his name, he has voiced such iconic characters as Crash Bandicoot, Ironhide from the Transformers film franchise and Rick and Morty's Scary Terry. However, coming back to the Animaniacs felt like returning home for the veteran voice actor.
Speaking to CBR, Harnell explained how his Animaniacs castmates became like family to him over the years. He broke down why the animated series is edgy, not mean and how it strikes that balance to appeal to children and adults alike. He shared his hopes that parents and their kids will be able to enjoy the series, as well as how he relates to Wakko's free-spiritedness. He also looked back at some standout moments from his voice acting career, recalled his first encounter with Batman legend Adam West, discussed his musical background and upcoming album and more.
CBR: What is your favorite part about voice acting?
Jess Harnell: You know, that's a good question, and the simple answer is kind of twofold. One is that I'm very fond of saying that voice acting is the only career that you could possibly have in show business or elsewhere where you can be the dad and the kid and the dog all at the same time, the same day, the same session without once visiting wardrobe, and you're still usually done in about 20 minutes. So that's a big plus for me.
So on the business side, that's what I love, and on the personal side, what I love about voice acting is that most of the stuff that I work on, you know -- I mean, obviously, I do commercials and stuff like that, too, but the lion's share of the stuff that I do is stuff that makes people happy. I think that anytime you can have a job that actually brings more happiness than it does pain or sorrow or exclusion or some of the other bad stuff that's going on out there, you're lucky to have it. I'm very blessed to have this one.
How has COVID changed the way you work? I've heard there are closets involved.
Unfortunately, mine has like 2000 pairs of sparkly trousers in there, so that's not bad. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, the nature of the business, in terms of doing animation, has changed a whole lot over the years, because back in the day, even with the initial run of Animaniacs, you would have a group of us all in the room together! There'd be usually between four and 10 actors at any given time doing an episode of a cartoon.
Well, over the years, that sort of phased out, and it became working solo. You know, I always try to find the good part in any set of circumstances, and in this one, it's that I get to go in there and work really, really fast. I'm usually done with any given show in about half an hour, and I can go have some Chinese food.
With Animaniacs, when the reboot started, they made it a practice to have us all there together, because they wanted us to bounce off each other, which was a good idea, because we're really good together. We know each other's instincts, we know where each other are going, and we can play along really, really well with each other.
But since the pandemic, yes, necessarily so, we are all working not just alone, but isolated. That is a little bit weird, and you got to really focus in on what you're doing and try to remember that it's supposed to be fun, even though you're trapped in a closet with no way out! [laughs] In fact, on these sessions that I'm doing at studios, and this just happened today, I'm doing a Hearthstone session -- that's like World of Warcraft -- I'm doing that tomorrow. This morning, I woke up and I had to fill out a three-page release all related to COVID and "Has this happened?" and "Have I done this?" and "Have I been here?" and all this other stuff.
When you walk up to a studio, instead of going in and saying hi to everybody and visiting the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of water or whatever, they have one person meet you and they take your temperature and they put you in the booth and you don't see the engineers and they don't see you and you don't see the client and they don't see you and you wear your mask until everybody's out of the room. It's all this stuff!
And I'm not bitching; please don't get the wrong idea. I'm just relating to you the way that it is. Obviously, we still have a pretty damn good, but it's definitely a different set of circumstances, and I do miss the sense of community that we have not only with voiceover, but in the world at large that this 2020 year has brought about for all of us. I'm looking forward to it being the way it used to be because I miss seeing people smile without masks on their faces, you know?
Of all the projects you've been involved with, what's the one that surprised you the most, in terms of fan reaction?
Oh, that's a good question. They work in different ways. It's like sometimes, you never know what's going to really hit the bullseye in popular culture. I remember, years ago, I did a number of auditions for a certain cartoon and that came down to the wire and I almost got the role and I didn't, in the end. That's fine, because the guy who got it did a fantastic job, but I remember thinking, "Well, you know, how long is a show about a talking sponge gonna last, anyway?" So you never know! You never know what's going to hit the zeitgeist, and there's certain things you get your hopes up about and think, "Oh, this one's gonna be a very big deal" and nobody ever hears of it! And there's other things that last forever.
One of the ones that freaks me out a little bit, as of late, is Rick and Morty. I did a voice of a character called Scary Terry, who was like a parody of a Freddy Krueger character. His big catchphrase was that every line he would say, he would tag it with the word "bitch," because Freddy Krueger would be like, "Welcome to my nightmare, bitch!" and all this kind of stuff, right? So he says, "Oh, how are you, bitch? Good to see ya, bitch!" and all that kind of stuff.
Well, I did it. I forgot about it. Scary Terry's got like six Funko Pop figurines, T-shirts, all kinds of talking toys and it's like, "Man, I did that thing in 20 minutes, and it turned into this iconic little character." So you just never know. I'm just happy that anything I did is remembered and remembered fondly, even if it's me calling somebody a bitch.
I sign almost as much Scary Terry stuff as I do of any of my other major characters, like Wakko or Crash Bandicoot or the Transformers or whatever. One episode, like 10 lines, and that was it, and it's turned into all this.
One of the reasons we're speaking today, I'm sure, is due to the upcoming Animaniacs revival. Being that you're such an integral part of capturing the spirit of the original series, did you have more creative control? How was that behind-the-scenes experience different for you?
How do I put this? We, as voiceover actors, don't necessarily have a ton of creative control, but there's a common denominator that I have found over years and years and whatever -- how many thousands of credits there are -- I have found that the clever producers and writers do one thing in common, and that's that when they get good people in there, they trust them.
So in other words, they'll usually say, "Give me three." They'll do the scene three times, or if you're working solo, they'll say, "Give me three of that line." What I just sort of routinely do is I give them the first two exactly as they're written, and then on the third one, I may or may not say anything that was written or I may say part of it and go off on a tangent and do something completely different. Well, the smartest people that I've worked with always are open to that, it seems like. They'll be like, "You know what? That was great. We're going to use that. That was really funny. You made it better," whether they're saying that to me or one of my comrades in arms or whatever. They will appreciate when you take what's already good and make it better.
There have been sessions where you do that a couple of times and they go, "You know what, man? Would you mind sticking to the page?" and I immediately -- man, I am there to work for them. I want to make them happy. So even if I see a line coming up that, in my humble opinion, I'm like, "You know what? This would be a lot funnier," I won't say it, because they want it the way that they want it. Like the Backstreet Boys, they want it that way. They want to have it the way that they envisioned it, so I will give it to them like that.
But with Animaniacs, what is really funny, and this is an interesting parallel, I remember -- it was about a year or so ago -- in one day, I had two sessions, and one of them was for a little cartoon that has a small audience, and I don't even think it's on the air anymore. I think it did one season, and I was doing a guest role. I went in there, and you know, God bless everybody -- love them all -- but it was very, very nitpicky and it was kind of an arduous thing and they got take after take after take and they were tweaking things and going back and forth and just squeezing this thing dry. I had -- I don't know -- let's say I had 20 lines, and I was in there for about an hour and a half.
Now, at this point, if I can't knock out 20 lines in about 20 minutes, I'd like to think I'm not doing my job as well as I should be, but in this case, there was a lot going on. Went over to Animaniacs. You can't find a higher profile animated series than Animaniacs. I mean, maybe The Simpsons or something, but it's as high profile as it gets, right? I go in there, I had more lines, and I was out in less than a half an hour, because they're just like, "Oh, cool, man! That was great. Yeah, great, awesome. You know what, let's change that." The direction was sort of minimal, A. because I know the character really well and B. because they were just chill about it. You can overthink things and make them harder than they need to be, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be better at the end of the day.
What was it like to be reunited with Rob Paulsen and Tress MacNeille and the rest?
I'll definitely answer that question, but I'll prelude it with this. There's this popular thing that people do, where they'll talk about a film set or a TV series or whatever and they'll say, "We really were like a family." And maybe they really were! I hope they really were. Or maybe it's just a PR sort of spin that they're putting on something, because people like to hear that.
In the case of Animaniacs, I can absolutely tell you 100% honestly that we have all stayed extremely connected through all these years. There hasn't been more than a few months that have gone by that we haven't touched base with each other. We've been to each other's weddings and kids being born and birthday parties and comforting each other when there was bad times and held each other up when there were good times. We've always remained really, really good friends.
Plus, of course, in the 21st century, there's this proliferation of Comic Cons and personal appearances, and we've done so many of those. We're always together. You know, Tress doesn't come out as often as Rob and I do, but sometimes she's there too, and so we're always throwing the voices out, and people are happy, and it's beautiful. So they were never far away.
But where things became different was when we went back to record the show again. You go to a studio, and they have fresh cookies waiting for you, and you go sit down on these little stools in this room behind the glass -- back in the day when people could actually be in a room together, which was great. You start reading this dialogue with headphones on, and I remember I had this moment the first day. Mo was in the control room, waiting to come in and do the Brain, but me and Rob and Tress were doing the first Yakko/Wakko/Dot stuff, and I shut my eyes and I just had this beautiful kind of time machine moment where it felt like nothing has changed and it's 24 years ago and we're sitting together. It sounds the same. It feels the same. The new scripts are funny. I'm with my friends. And man, this is pretty awesome and God's a good guy.
Animaniacs has always been a political show that's tapped into current events, but was there anything in the reboot where you were like, "Oh my god, I can't believe we're doing that!"?
You know, I had that experience the most I've ever had in my life with this show called Drawn Together that I did for Comedy Central like 15 years ago. Every time we did a table read of that show, I'd be like, "There's no way that's gonna go to air" and it went to air!
With Animaniacs, I think it was a little different, because I think I would have been more surprised if I'd gone in there and there hadn't been that, you know what I mean? I was fully expecting those "Wow, really?!" moments, and we got them, and we got them well.
The interesting thing is that, as opposed to like a Comedy Central show or even an Adult Swim show, the humor is -- I don't know, there's a line between edgy and mean, right? And the humor in Animaniacs is never afraid to be edgy, but it's rarely mean. Some of the other stuff, it was maybe a little bit mean, and that's why I was surprised they got away with it, but we're not afraid to tackle on the big issues head-on.
The amazing thing about it is that they tackle these issues in a way that eight year olds are going to understand it and that just blows my mind, you know? Because me and you, I mean, you're an educated person and obviously very bright, you're gonna watch this stuff and go, "Oh my gosh! Bun control is gun control and everything they're saying about bunnies applies to guns!" But the kids are just going to hear the bunnies!
So it's amazing, the balance that they were able to strike and maintain between being relatable and entertaining, and at the same time, saying something with a social conscience and that's sort of the beauty of Animaniacs. I think, in a lot of ways, that's Animaniacs exclusively, because even the shows that do kind of satirize current events and circumstances, they don't generally do with a whole lot of singing and dancing, and we do!
How much singing will we see you do this time around?
Oh, there is plenty! I don't really like keep count of stuff, in terms of like how much did I do or whatever, but I know that the stuff I did was really cool. I know that there were some things in particular that I think people are really going to dig, and what I always think too is, by nature, Yakko is the talker. He's the one who says the most. Wakko is the crazy one, and that's fine.
Even in my love of the Marx Brothers from all their old movies, I identified always with Harpo and Harpo didn't talk at all. But when I see the footage that I have seen, Wakko always ends up doing the coolest stuff. He gets to do the craziest stuff, and so that makes me happy, because I know I love that kind of free-spiritedness and I love the fact that kids dig it too. So I know we did a lot of singing! As far as how many solo songs I had, I honestly don't remember. I know that Rob had a bunch, and that's as it should be, because, you know, he yacks.
When you talk about singing, my whole background was originally as a singer. It's kind of crazy, because I've sang hundreds and hundreds of commercials and jingles and songs for movies and films and stuff like that, even before I got into doing voiceover, and I still do that.
Several years ago, I came up with an idea for a mashup band -- a live mashup band with my best friend -- and I said, "You know what would be really funny? If an 80s hair metal band like Poison or Def Leppard got shipwrecked on a desert island at the end of the 80s and all they had to listen to for 20 years was pop records, and they got brainwashed into thinking that metal was pop and pop was metal." And he said, "Well, how would that work?" And I said, "Oh, I don't know! Like the band could play 'Enter Sandman' by Metallica and I could sing 'Don't Stop Believing' by Journey over Metallica!" and we started putting it together. Then I said, "We could do AC/DC and sing Madonna over that."
Well, we did this thing, and it became a band called Rock Sugar. It went viral. We had millions of hits. We even got sued by a vocalist who thought my impression of him was a little too good. He thought it was him singing! We had to go to court to prove that it wasn't him. We've opened up for AC/DC and Aerosmith and Def Leppard and Linkin Park and all these huge, huge bands in front of 20,000/40,000/60,000 people.
We're just now putting the finishing touches on the new album by Rock Sugar. You can see all the old clips on YouTube. You can't buy it, because that singer got an injunction, so we can't sell the record, which is really funny, but you can check them all out on YouTube. The new one is coming out, and in the new one, we're mashing 80s metal with today's pop. So we got your Motley Crew with your Katy Perry, you know what I mean? So it's definitely something different. It's something cool.
If people want to check that out, they can go to YouTube and they can also visit a website, because now the new idea behind it is that now we've been kidnapped and we're being held in a basement and we need people's help to get out. So we're launching a website called SaveRockSugar.com.
Which aspect of Wakko's character do you relate to the most and why?
The one that I relate to, by far, is that he's happy. He's just a happy little dude, and when challenges arise, he might get bummed out for a second and even go, "I don't want to do this!" But the next minute, he's doing it, and he's back on top again. He's irrepressible, and he's got a great spirit, and he's fun, and he's wacko. I like to be all of those things, you know?
What do you hope viewers take away from the Animaniacs reboot?
My single biggest hope is that they will be -- I want them to be as entertained as they were with the original series, and hallelujah, I think we did that. But even more so, the thing that really just warms my heart and makes me light up like ET when you put your finger to his heart is thinking about moms and dads who grew up watching this show 25 years ago sitting down on the couch and watching the new episodes with their little ones, so the kids can discover it for the first time and the adults can rediscover it, and they can all do it together. To me, that's awesome, because if we ever needed stuff like that and times like that and feelings like that, it's right now in 2020.
If you could choose any one superhero to play, who would it be and why?
Well, in real life, I'd want to be Superman, because he can fly. Let's face it: the guy who flies wins. But as far as animation work I have always wanted to -- and I think it will happen someday, because good things seem to have a way of happening if you wait long enough and you never give up -- I would love to play Batman on something.
I think that I could bring something to it. I used to be a Batman freak I was a little boy. I read all the comics. I had Batman stuff. I've gotten to be Adam West's voice match, which is about as close as I've come to playing Batman, but I've done his voice match for a bunch of stuff. But one day, I would love to play Batman, hopefully in an animated project and if not, maybe a video game. Stay tuned, because hopefully it'll happen!
[Adam West impression] "Meagan, it's your old pal Adam West, old chum, And I've got dark news! Robin and I have been trapped in the Batcave by the nefarious Catwoman!" See, I love doing that. Yeah, he was such a nice guy.
I gotta tell you a bit. When I first worked with him for the first time -- what a sweet man, by the way -- we worked on a show called Spy Dogs. He came in and we were all so excited, because, you know, he's the once and forever Batman! Adam West was sitting there, and he was just as nice as he could be.
As we were leaving, it was just me and him at the elevator. He pressed the button, and he nodded at me, and I said, "Hey, Mr. West, I just gotta say something. I gotta say thank you, man." I go, "Thanks for not being a jerk, because you would have really screwed up my whole childhood." And he put out his hand to me and he said, "Jess, this was the best time I ever had!" And it was the Batman moment, man! So he was what you would have wanted him to be, and that was pretty cool.
Animaniacs stars Jess Harnell, Maurice LaMarche, Tress MacNeille and Rob Paulsen. Season 1 of the revival arrives on Hulu Nov. 20.