Sharon Noble is the best documented voice actor in the cast, and the reason is that she gave the fans more of her time than anyone else, in an interview on Matt-Trakker.com, another reprinted on MASKFORCE and a podcast conversation with her husband, Brendan McKane. Her account is also the one that most changes how the series sounds, since she says she played the female and child characters other than Scott Trakker, and the animals as well.
Three named voices and a long tail
The credited roles are Gloria Baker, who drives for M.A.S.K., Vanessa Warfield for V.E.N.O.M., and the M.A.S.K. computer. Vanessa was her favorite, and she said she built the voice from the depth of Lauren Bacall mixed with the gruffness of Miles Mayhem, the V.E.N.O.M. leader her husband played. Gloria came from the teenage voice on her demo tape, and the computer used a voice she chose before her audition rather than a processed one [2].
Past those she lists a cat, a panda, a cuckoo clock, a Japanese tour guide and a Thai boy, naming the last two as favorites. The MASKFORCE credit pages bear her out on the humbler parts: she is credited in individual episodes as the Race Announcer, Mrs. MacDonald, Sarah and Professor Stevens, none of whom is on Wikipedia’s list [2][5].
Two of her castmates describe the same arrangement in different strengths. Brendan McKane said she was the only woman in the cast and voiced all the female roles, while Graeme McKenna put it more loosely, saying she often got the female roles. The credit pages we opened show her against every female part we checked and no second actress, which supports the stronger version for the episodes we looked at and proves nothing about the ones we did not [3].
How it was made
She said the voices came from storyboards and animation cels sent by the production from Japan, and that she “tried to keep my natural voice out of the show altogether.” The cast met twice a week for about four hours at a time, with each episode taking about four hours, and stayed longer if a segment needed finishing. She recalled the cast having strong creative input early in the recording, and “Magma Mole” was her favorite episode for that reason. It is The Magma Mole on this site, though we did not check her name against its credits [1].
She and Brendan found the job through a stranger on the Santa Monica beach who said DIC Enterprises was casting. Her count is that “We just recorded 75 episodes of a series that we loved,” which is the figure DIC’s lists give [1].
Her other work
Beyond the cartoon she mentions Gina on Dennis the Menace for a year, Pancake Popple on The Popples, a Cajun girl on The Real Ghostbusters, English dubbing of animated series, a singing alligator for an insurance company, and telephone, GPS and motivational-tape voices. She has also worked in Canadian radio drama for the CBC in Toronto and Winnipeg [1][2].
She writes romance novels under her own name, Autumn Desire and Velvet and Topaz among them, and narrates audiobooks for AudioLark under a pseudonym, Melinda Howard. By 2014 she was teaching a romance-writing workshop and English as a second language. She sings, and considers it useful for keeping her voice flexible. If the show returned, she said she would want the original cast, and that a live-action film would work badly because fans know the characters’ voices [1][2].
Notes
- Matt-Trakker.com, interview date 7 September 2010 (the page itself was posted in 2020).
- MASKFORCE page reprinting an EpicToyBox interview of 7 February 2014.
- Brendan McKane interview, Matt-Trakker.com; Graeme McKenna interview, Matt-Trakker.com.
- Her husband’s death in December 2020 is recorded on the Brendan McKane page.
- Wikipedia lists no Professor Stevens, Sarah, Mrs. MacDonald or Race Announcer credit for her. Those come from MASKFORCE only.