When most fans think of the X-Men's Wolverine, the first name that comes to mind is actor Hugh Jackman. The Australian thespian played Logan for 17 years, establishing himself as the face of the character for an entire generation of fans. Even now, it's impossible for the audience to imagine anyone else as the infamous Weapon X.
While Jackman is proudly Australian, he remained true to Logan's Canadian roots, portraying the character with a Canadian accent. In a case of truth being stranger than fiction, however, in the first two animated versions of Wolverine, he was adapted to be Australian.
In the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends episode titled "A Firestar Is Born," which aired in 1982, the X-Men (including Wolvie) made a guest appearance on the show. Voice actor William Callaway had the prestigious honor of being the first person to voice the iconic berserker in this one-time appearance. Despite Callaway not being Australian, he adopted the accent for this interpretation of the character.
Seven years later, history repeated itself in the TV pilot X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men. American-born actor Patrick Pinney also put on an Australian accent to voice Wolverine. He even laid it on thick, referring to Toad as a "dingo" at one point in the pilot episode.
Considering that both voice actors weren't from the land down under -- and neither was Wolverine in the comics -- it seemed like a peculiar choice to suddenly make him Australian in the animated shows. As it turns out, it had more to do with the cultural zeitgeist at the time than anything else.
In the '80s, Australian culture received a massive boost in the United States due to the success of the Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max film series. There was an infatuation with all things Australian, especially the accent, and America decided to create more "Australized" content.
Wolverine wasn't spared from this wave either, as revealed by storyboard artist Rick Holberg, who worked on both Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Pryde of the X-Men. "I ended up being the voice director on the show, and I was forced to use the Australian version of Wolverine, because all of this Australian stuff was popular at the time," Holberg disclosed in the book X-Men: The Characters and Their Universe. "It was going to turn out [in the comics] that Wolverine was an expatriated Australian."
Much like any trend, though, America's fascination with Australia faded away. In fact, the next person to voice the character after Callaway and Pinney was Irish-Canadian actor Cal Dodd in X-Men: The Animated Series. Wolverine remained Canadian in the comics, as well as in his future outings on the small and big screen. Still, it's rather humorous how the animated series inadvertently foreshadowed the casting of Jackman as the Ol' Canucklehead -- and that's a true story, bub.