Graeme McKenna voiced four different agents, none of them a villain, and the one he is most associated with is a robot whose voice was found, by his account, in an adolescent crack. He is the member of this cast we know least about from independent sources, so most of what follows is his own telling.
T-Bob and the break in the voice
Graeme says the director Stu Rosen helped him find the pitch for T-Bob and the adolescent break in it that became the voice’s signature, and he credits Rosen with saving his job early on. That is his account of the sessions and we have not seen another source that names Rosen, nor one that names a voice director at all. Brennan Thicke, who played Scott Trakker, remembered working only with a woman named Marsha Goodman, the director of Dennis the Menace, so the two cast members describe two different people guiding them and we cannot say who ran the booth [1][5].
Brad Turner was his favorite and the voice closest to his own at the time; he says he completely identified with the role. Calhoun Burns was the hardest, because he kept losing the accent and had to keep the pitch distinct from Brad’s [1].
How a Canadian ended up in a Los Angeles booth
Graeme is Canadian, did stage work and some film and television there, and started acting professionally at around fourteen, with voice-over work as a child. He moved to Los Angeles and was working as a stand-in on films when a neighbor’s roofer, a former Czechoslovakian actor, mentioned that his manager had asked whether he knew any Canadians, because DIC was casting a cartoon in the city. He auditioned two days later [1].
That story rhymes with Brendan McKane’s recollection that the producers wanted Canadian actors, and it is the second independent hint that nationality was part of how the cast was put together, though neither of them quotes a producer.
What the sessions were like
By his recollection sessions ran two or three hours and often covered several episodes at once, though he is unsure of the details. Brendan McKane and Doug Stone each put a session at about four hours, and Doug says union rules capped it there, so the cast’s memories of the length differ and we print all of them rather than pick. Graeme adds that the cast ran through each show before recording and adjusted lines that did not work, sometimes recording two versions of a line to be safe, while Brendan says actors were not allowed to change the script. Both can be true if the changes were made in the read-through before anyone was recording, but we are guessing at that [1][2][3].
He says cast members competed for the incidental parts, that Sharon Noble often got the female roles, that Doug Stone and Brennan Thicke got the most parts overall, and that Mark Halloran’s impressions were a highlight.
Afterwards
He moved from performing to production and runs a performance venue in upstate New York, stays involved in the regional indie film community, writes screenplays, and has a small walk-on in an indie horror film as a gypsy fortune teller. He has never done a convention or an autograph signing because he does not consider himself famous enough. He enjoyed the Robot Chicken parody of the show and thinks a revival would need a darker edge, and he would like to reprise his roles. He kept a cel of his character after the first series and believes it is still in his attic [1].
Notes
- Matt-Trakker.com page dated April 2020; the interview date is not given.
- Brendan McKane and Doug Stone interviews on Matt-Trakker.com.
- Doug Stone’s interview carries an interview date of 7 September 2010.
- IMDb has a page for Graeme McKenna but the site disallows automated reading, so we could not check his credits there.
- Brennan Thicke interview on Matt-Trakker.com, interview date 20 August 2006.