Frank Welker is the voice you have heard most often and never noticed: the monkey, the tiger, the growl under the machine. He has made half a century of work out of sounds that do not read as acting, and they are.
Fi1m perspective
In Aladdin (1992) the Genie gets the laughs and the monkey gets the reactions. Abu has no lines. He has a rising chatter of complaint, a swallowed squeal when he is caught with something in his hands, and a sulk that arrives as a single grumble. Frank Welker also does Rajah, the tiger, and the Cave of Wonders, which speaks in a voice that seems to come up through the sand. Nobody in the cinema thought about who was doing any of it, which is the job.
He has been doing the job since 1969, when he was cast as Fred Jones in the first Scooby-Doo series, a human part, which is the odd thing. The career that followed ran the other way. Somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred credits, a great many of them animals and creatures, a great many of them uncredited, across animation, live action and games. In the animated Transformers feature of 1986 he was Megatron and Soundwave, opposite Peter Cullen. From 2006 he was Curious George, a lead who never says a word. He has voiced Scooby himself since 2002 and Garfield since 2007, and has gone on reprising Fred and Scooby and the Transformers into the 2020s. That is a working life with hardly a gap in it.
What he does is not mimicry. He has said he has "this peculiar ability to be able to anticipate mouth movements on screen and fill them with words or sound", and that is the craft: the sound lands exactly where the drawing opens its mouth, so the drawing seems to have made it. We found ourselves, last time through Aladdin, watching Abu whenever Robin Williams was off screen, and being told everything the monkey thought about the boy's plans by a noise no longer than a cough. It is a performance, and it is timed, and we had never once given it credit. In Futurama (from 1999) Nibbler is the same trick in a different key, a purr and a gulp that make a small pet feel like an animal in a room full of drawn people.
The reservation, if it is one, is of his own making. Most of this work is uncredited, and so cannot be judged, because you cannot know it was him. He is in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the credits do not say so. That is the shape of the career, and he seems content with it. It also means a Welker performance is hard to recommend in the way we would recommend an actor's, since what we are recommending is a sound you have already heard.
Start with Aladdin, then, and listen to the monkey. Then go back to Scooby-Doo and notice that Fred, the one with the words, is the least interesting thing he does.
Biography
Frank Welker is an American actor and voice artist. He was born on 12 March 1946 in Denver, Colorado. He began his career in the late 1960s and has accumulated hundreds of film, television and video game credits.
Welker is known for voicing Fred Jones in the Scooby-Doo franchise from 1969 and Scooby-Doo himself from 2002. His other roles include Megatron and Soundwave in the Transformers series, Garfield from 2007, and Nibbler in Futurama. He provided voices for Abu, the Cave of Wonders and Rajah in the 1992 film Aladdin, as well as numerous animal vocal effects in other productions.
In 2016 he received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award.
