Maurice LaMarche
Maurice LaMarche (born March 30, 1958) is a Emmy Award-winning Canadian voice actor and former stand up comedian who is famous for his iconic role as The Brain from Pinky and the Brain, as well as Morbo, King Lrr, Kif Kroker, and many additional voices in Futurama, Dizzy Devil in Tiny Toon Adventures, Hovis the Butler in Catscratch, Magneto in Marvel: Super hero Squad, The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight in The Tick, Mortimer Mouse in Disney's House of Mouse, Verminous Skumm and Duke Nukem in Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Big Bob Pataki in Hey Arnold!, Doctor Doom in Ultimate Spider-Man, Toucan Sam in the Fruit Loops commercials, Egon Spengler in The Real Ghostbusters, Calendar Man and Mr. Freeze in Batman: Arkham City, Father in Codename: Kids Next Door, the current voices of Inspector Gadget, and Yosemite Sam, among others.
Voice roles
Generation 1
Transformers: Rescue Bots
Notes
LaMarche was only in one episode of Transformers, when he played Six-Gun in the episode “Thief in the Night”. In an interview with Quick Stop Entertainment, he describes the recording session for this episode as "the longest session of [his] life", due to Wally Burr's "unusual directing style":
- He line read you 72 times on each line. He just made you parrot back what he did into the microphone. And you always… in fact, that director is the reason there is now a four hour recording session rule in the SAG basic contract for animation. Because it used to be 8 hours. Now, nobody was there 8 hours, but that was the allowed minimum. [sic] Until this guy came along and started directing Transformers, and all of a sudden, you were there 8 hours. And the way voice actors make their money is volume. As my friend Rob Paulsen is fond of saying, “Volume baby. Volume.” So even though you’re booked for four hours, if they know you’ve got a 2:00 and you’re in there at noon, they’ll get you out for 2:00 because they know you want to get on and make another session fee. The one thing that you’ll find in our business is most of us work for scale. The idea is how many times a day do you work for scale. But this one director...would just keep you there.[1]
- The one episode Maurice worked on was the one that Casey Kasem walked out on, so situations may have been unusually hurried and tense on that day.
- He is famous for his almost-flawless Orson Welles impression.
