Many characters’ voices develop and mutate over time, like Homer Simpson, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or Popeye or whomever. Very few characters wind up with the voice they start out with, unless it’s an actor doing his own voice. If it’s a voice actor doing a character’s voice, I would say that 99 percent of the time, if you’re lucky enough to have your character last for a couple years, the voice changes. I would venture to guess that a lot of it is unconscious. You kind of find the sweet spot of the personality. Part of it, I think, is that the nature of the scripts and the stories you’re doing have a tendency to change a little bit, too, just like the Simpsons is a different show than it was 20 years ago. I was just watching season 1, and even the feel of the show and the stories is markedly different. Daffy and Bugs were much less nuanced characters in the beginning than they ended up.
I hear the change. I hear it. It’s mostly a question of pitch. I’ve read that the reason is because a new guy is doing the voice, because Tom Kenny has throat cancer, you know how the Web is. SpongeBob went from sort of a low-key character, reacting to things around him to being this super-exuberant character with all of his emotions on 11, and everything’s wild and over the top, and his personality got a little more extreme, and I guess I unconsciously mirrored that. It’s ironic, because the voice I’m doing now is harder on me, so I actually made my job a little more difficult.
It’s unconscious on my part. I don’t wake up and think, “Hmm, I’m going to change SpongeBob’s voice today, just for the hell of it.” It’s like erosion: a very slow process. As time goes on, you need to bring him to different places and more places, the more stories and scripts you do. The character’s psyche gets more defined, too, and you wind up going to many more different places within the character’s realm of experience. It’s such a gradual change that, not only do I not register it consciously, but nobody else on the show registers it, either. Nobody at Nickelodeon is going, “Hey, his voice is getting higher.” Steve Hillenburg isn’t saying, “Hey, his voice is changing pitch a little.” When you contrast season 1 shows with season 7 shows, there’s a bit of a change, but I don’t think it’s that extreme at all.
