Brendan McKane played the villain at the head of V.E.N.O.M. and also the Englishman who runs the computers on Matt Trakker’s Rhino, so the head of the enemy organisation and one of Trakker’s own team came out of the same throat. Brendan died on 29 December 2020, according to IMDb, and this page was written with that in mind.
Miles, the hardest voice
Brendan called Miles Mayhem the hardest voice he had to perform, and the reason is physical: he had to push his voice deeper into his throat to get the heavy, gravelly sound, and he says his natural voice is neither gravelly nor especially big. Miles was also his favorite, which he put down to Miles being the classic bad guy. Alex Sector was the other end of the range, an English character with a droll, smooth, relaxed voice, and Brendan said he loved playing him and would choose Alex if he could have a real-life vehicle from the show [1]. A session meant switching between voices like these line by line, and he said it strained his voice.
Why the cast was Canadian
Brendan and his wife, Sharon Noble, who is also in this cast, moved from Canada in the winter of 1984. He told the interviewer that they heard at a Santa Monica beach that the producers were looking for Canadian actors, partly for cost, since Canadian union rates were lower, and that they auditioned several times over a few weeks before being hired. That is his recollection of what the producers wanted and we have no producer statement to set beside it. He also recalled that they “had little idea that a ‘series’ meant some 80 episodes.” The show has 75 episodes on the DIC lists we use, so his figure is a round recollection and Sharon’s number is the closer one [1][4].
The career around it
By his own count Brendan worked as a professional actor for more than thirty years, in dozens of plays and television series, naming Hunter and Star Trek. IMDb fills this in with Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Littlest Hobo, Tropical Heat and an uncredited Deputy Chief O’Malley in The Real Ghostbusters, where his wife also appeared as a voice [2].
Later he went to law school and was preparing for the California Bar when the interview was posted, which is also what the 2015 Agents of M.A.S.K. podcast interview with the couple says he was moving towards. He still auditioned for commercials. He listed golf, studying law, poetry and coffee houses as his free time, said he had never been asked to a convention, and said he would love to be involved in a revival [1][3].
Notes
- Matt-Trakker.com page dated April 2020. The page does not give the interview date, and Brendan is described there in the present tense; he died the same year, so we have treated his statements as made before then.
- IMDb gives a different year in two fields for several of the older credits, so we do not print years for them.
- The Agents of M.A.S.K. page also shows a sidebar link to a January 2021 post about his death. We have not read that post.
- MASKFORCE’s Sharon Noble page notes in passing that her husband was fighting mesothelioma, which agrees with the IMDb cause of death.