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Frank Welker
"Heroes? Frank Welker, Frank Welker and Frank Welker. He is hands down my most giant hero in the animation VO community. He is an amazingly gifted genius. He can create every sound that you might hear in a jungle: the drip of the raindrops, the wind rustling in the trees, and all of the inhabitants that you might encounter there. I love animals. I mean I love animals and Frank's great ability is that not only can he make the sounds of the animals; he can give them a true voice. I've done episodes of cartoons that had an environmental bent focusing on things like ivory poaching, global warming. He portrayed a mother elephant being torn from her baby by ivory poachers for her tusks. The mother's cry and the baby's anguish were all there in Frank's voice. Captain Planet did a show centering on puppy mills and what he did in that show... there wasn't a dry eye in the house. I've heard him do dozens of sensitive performances through the years and he always, always delivers something so special and unique and moving."
— Kath Soucie

Franklin Wendell Welker (born March 12, 1946) is an American voice actor. He is responsible for a broad spectrum of character voices, and other vocal effects that have appeared over the last 40 years in American television and motion pictures.

Welker is listed as the number one "All Time Top 100 Stars at the Box Office," not as a box office draw, but in terms of the total revenue generated by the films in which he has participated, for the sheer number of voices he has done — over 1,200 — ranging from his work on Scooby-Doo to the present day. (In fact, besides The Movie and the 1988-91 series A Pup Named Scooby Doo where Carl Stevens did the voice, he has been the only voice of Freddy since the beginning.) Go look him up on IMDB. Depending on your monitor resolution and DPI settings, his resume is anywhere from 50-60 pages long. It'd be easier to list the works where he hasn't performed...

As it should be, Welker's reputation is astounding and alongside Mel Blanc is likely the most famous voice actor in the world, he is revered as a voice acting god. Frank's ability goes beyond creating human voices and is often cast as animals and used for animal vocals, where he has has an uncanny talent at imitation. If the movie or show has any sort of budget and it has a regular animal character, he probably does the voices for it.

Welker hasn't been entirely on animated shows, either. Animal sounds or otherwise "beastly" characters in live action work also keeps him in high demand. As an interesting side-note, he provided the voice of a screaming Spock in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, while Leonard Nimoy took on the role of Galvatron (an altered Megatron) in The Transformers animated movie. He also recently cameoed in The Informant as Matt Damon's character's father.

Largely because of the demand of his animal voice work, Welker more often plays a side-character instead of being the Hero. His most famous high profile work has been Scooby-Doo as Freddy (and Scooby since Don Messick's death), Transformers as Megatron and Soundwave, and more recently has provided the voice (both speaking and non-speaking) of Nibbler in Futurama.

One interesting little story about Welker is that he was nearly included in some cartoon's credits for voice work, until the guys remembered that no, they'd used an actual horse. He's just that ubiquitous. In terms of voice acting, he's a bit of a Memetic Badass.

Frank Welker has provided voices for:

And many, many more. Frank Welker is a Man of a Thousand Voices (probably even more than Mel Blanc, with whom he worked over 20 times).
Emma WatsonVoice ActorsCathy Weseluck
Rachel WeiszActorsPeter Weller
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