Unicron - a rather bizarre choice

[Hudson]

Does anybody know just why Orson preformed the voice of Unicron in "Transformers: The Movie"?

[Harvey Chartrand]

Welles was old, sick (dying, actually), broke. He couldn't sit back and have an easy retirement. He desperately needed the cash from voicework in crappy cartoons like The Transformers. Elia Kazan said in an interview in the 80s that people had forgotten how towering a figure Welles was in the 1930s and that it was sad to see the Great One doing commercials 50 years later. Kazan speculated that Welles' financial situation was such that he desperately needed the money from those Paul Masson wine commercials. Then Welles was deemed to be too fat for the image that Paul Masson wanted to convey and was replaced by John Gielgud.

[Store Hadji]

Ouch! We've had this debate before. The memory of Americans just isn't longer than fifteen minutes. The French do beat us there.

Anyway, Little Orson Annie also did the voice for a sparrow in an anime called The Enchanted Journey towards his latter days.

I liked that old Chuck Jones cartoon he did, though it's been more than fifteen minutes since I've seen it.

[Harvey Chartrand]

According to one unkind critic (David Thomson?), Welles' gluttony and girth made him the ideal choice to provide the voice for Unicron, a planet-devouring demon. But Welles' charm, wit and resilience allowed him to rise above the necessity of hamming it up in other people's bad pictures or doing voicework for banal cartoons — although I would have liked his career to end on a higher note than The Transformers: The Movie and Henry Jaglon's atrocious Someone to Love (one of the worst films of all time).

[Jeff Wilson]

I had the misfortune of watching the Transformers movie a couple years ago with a friend who had the movie out of childhood nostalgia, and Welles' voice is almost unrecognizble due to electronic filtering. Also, he isn't featured much, and he speaks in a monotone, so it's hardly an acting job at all. The film is otherwise best avoided, unless you want to hear the vocal work of Leonard Nimoy, Judd Nelson, and Scatman Crothers, among others.

[Store Hadji]

I have a pet mental project of editing together all of Orson's appearances from the bad films and voice overs and TV interviews and commercials and so on - it'd make for a silly romp, and with just a little editing skill might be surprising.

Here's my current favourite quote, from Billy Joel: "I'm not a genius, it's only the fact that I live in an age of incompetence that makes me seem exceptional."

[jaime marzol]

great quote.

that quote made my day

[maxrael]

Quote (Harvey Chartrand @ Oct. 17 2002,15:03)...although I would have liked his career to end on a higher note than The Transformers: The Movie and Henry Jaglon's atrocious Someone to Love (one of the worst films of all time).[/quote]

yeah Someone To Love is awful, indulgent stuff...

though i must admit i loved the ending!

atb,
max!