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Creator / Steve Blum

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/blum.jpg
He is the solution.

"When you're in a room with Steve Blum, you often think you're on a Shakespearian stage."
— Peter Cullen in an interview at Comic-Con 2012

*SNIKT!!!*

Steven Jay Blum (born April 29, 1960 in Santa Monica, California; pronounced "Bloom") is well known for his incredibly versatile range. He can play just about any role from heroes, to villains, even to the just plain weird. One of his most famous roles is Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop. He is also known for working with Wendee Lee and Nolan North. He's equally known for having a ludicrous number of roles in the same work at times, with some video games having him voice so many extras that it seems as if you have stepped into some bizarre world populated almost entirely with Steve Blums. Despite this, he is probably most well known for his extremely deep and instantly recognizable normal voice.

He officially holds the Guinness World Record for being the most prolific video game voice actor, having 261 credited appearances as of May 10, 2012. A few of the characters he has voiced are found here. Notably he played a few characters in Warcraft III, and later played 3 of The Horde player races, as well as multiple NPCs, in World of Warcraft. note 

He has a Twitter account. In April and May of 2012, he used it to lead the charge to bring Toonami back on the air, which was announced as successful on May 16, 2012.

Steve has also previously voiced under pseudonyms such as David Lucas, Andrew Watton, and Daniel Andrews. However, due to union bylaws, he has stopped doing non-union voice work since 2005, but still continues to do union voice work in anime occasionally.

Steve has three boys and he mentioned in a 2015 interview that one of them is doing voiceover work. He was married for a while, but has since divorced (though it was an amicable breakup) and is now in a relationship with—and, married to—Mary Elizabeth McGlynn.

No relation to Mark Blum or Jason Blum.

Roles from Steve Blum:

Anime

Comic Books

Film

Video Games

Web Animation

Western Animation

Other

Tropes relating to Steve Blum's work:

  • Crossdressing Voices: Played with. In Batman: The Telltale Series, he provides the voice of Lady Arkham when she is wearing her voice-modulating mask.
  • Doing It for the Art: The reason he still does anime dubbing, even though it pays nothing compared to doing video games and western animation. Despite being a union-only member, anime is how he entered the voice acting business (as opposed to his other fellow union-only voice actors like James Arnold Taylor and Nolan North who entered the voice acting businesses other than anime).
  • Evil Laugh: When he does a villain, it can range from sinister to magnificent.
  • Fake Brit: As Zeb Orrelios.
  • Guttural Growler: What got him a lot of attention and popularity. He also talks like this in Real Life. Taken to its limit in Saints Row: The Third, where the Zombie voice option is just him making Tazmanian Devil-like noises.
    • His role as General Romeski in Battlezone (1998) is higher pitched than what you expect from Steven but he still maintains the same growl though it could also be the high-pass filter of the radio.
  • Irony as She Is Cast: A twisted example as Blum is Jewish — and one of his Marvel roles was the Red Skull, an actual Nazi.
  • Large Ham: Some of his roles qualify and some of them mix it, such as Amon, who's often vocally subdued, but when he needs to, he commands a powerful presence with both his voice and motions.
  • Man of a Thousand Voices: Has a wide vocal range, as he's capable of pulling off a higher-pitched voice (like Leeron) or an accent (like Garcia Hotspur and Red Skull) whenever it's needed.
  • Old Shame:
  • Playing Against Type:
    • Leeron and Guilmon would be the best examples; a flaming gay engineer and a tiny cute creature are as far away from growling villains as you can get.
    • Also, he's nearly unrecognizable as Grunt and the Shadow Broker due to his voice being modulated, though if you listen closely enough to the former, you can tell it's him.
    • Orochimaru, Green Goblin and Starscream require use of his higher register, higher than most of his roles.
    • Played with in the Ultimate Spider-Man episode "Freaky". For a large portion of the episode, he's voicing Spider-Man trapped in Wolverine's body.
    • He voiced the titular character of the Crash Bandicoot franchise in Crash Nitro Kart, who is practically the polar opposite of most of his roles.
    • Ben 10: Omniverse has him, in addition to returning as Vilgax, playing Hobble, a weak, cowardly, Butt-Monkey Plumber who's the antithesis of Vilgax.
    • In Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, he voices not only many of the Orcs encountered, but Big Bad Sauron as well. This includes Sauron's elven self, Annatar, whose voice is much more gentle and dulcet than Sauron or the Orcs.
    • In the Dragon Quest film adapting the fifth game, he voices a Slime.
    • In Megas XLR he voices Jamie, a cowardly skirt-chasing slacker who contributes next to nothing to his friends' adventures beyond snark.
    • His role as Corporal Buzz in Battlezone (1998) could count, being a part of Mission Control for the good guys with a tone similar to the above Jamie and is rather excitable if prone to panicked outbursts.
  • Promoted Fanboy: He often talks about hanging out at his uncle's comic book shop and reading the comics. He's voiced numerous comic book characters, such as Wolverine.
    • He grew up a fan of monster movies including the Critters series and worked as a production assistant on Newline Cinema, he later provided the voices of the Crites for Critters Attack!.
  • Rated M for Manly: A lot of his roles are uber manly paragons such as Wolverine, Ares and Batman.
  • Star-Making Role: Spike Spiegel.
  • The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: According to him in an interview, should all the characters he voiced ever engage in a free-for-all, the winner would be Leeron since he would creep everyone else out.
  • What Could Have Been: For Gurren Lagann, he originally intended to audition for Kamina. Then he saw a picture of Leeron and decided to try out for him instead. The rest is history.
Bang.

Alternative Title(s): David Lucas, Steven Jay Blum

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