Chapter 18: Voices in the Darkness

T-35 days, 5 hours, 6 minutes and 30 seconds (May 8, 3:53 PM PDT).

"Alright, I'm still not happy with the busboy scene."

So said the woman's voice coming out of the speakers. It was a little recording studio located somewhere in the vast suburbs of Los Angeles, and this was a recording session for a cartoon show. Normally, that would mean that each voice actor would record all of their lines in isolation, but this particular episode's recording had been lost at the last minute, forcing a rare meeting of the entire seven-member cast, five men and two women. A somewhat large cast for this series, but this episode was set in the 1930's and required plenty of celebrity impersonators. The group stood in a semicircle, wearing headphones to help them concentrate. Before each actor was a music stand holding their scripts, and behind each of those was a microphone.

"Err, is that before or after the attack of the paparazzi?" asked Moe L. March, star of the cartoon series Pinky and the Brain. He played The Brain, a mouse that continually plotted to take over the world. Physically, March didn't resemble his character at all, being a tall, slightly overweight man with a thick head of black hair and wearing a large pair of glasses.

"After," replied the disembodied voice.

March flipped a couple of pages in the script on the podium before him. "Got it."

Jay Cummins, the voice actor playing the guest role of the Busboy, gave a thumbs up to the one-way glass that separated the cast from the director and the recording engineers. Cummin's hair was long and black with a fair amount of gray, and totally unmanageable. It was matched by a thick mustache and a small goatee. The man seemed to have a permanent twinkle in his eye.

"We only have five minutes left in the session," announced the voice of the director, "so I'm going to risk doing the whole scene at once. Don't make me have to buy another session! This is Pinky and the Brain, episode 347A: 'Whatever Happened to Baby Brain', Scene 7, Lines 11 through 18, Take 5. And...action!"

"Back, back you animals!" proclaimed March as the character of the Brain.

"These people are savages!" commented Cummins as the Busboy, using a voice virtually identical to Brain's.

"Yes," agreed "the Brain", "cannibals gorging themselves on the red meat of celebrity."

"Bloodthirsty hounds scavenging the field of battle," soliloquized "the Busboy".

"Yes!"

Together they proclaimed, "things will be different when I take over the world!"

The Busboy introduced himself. "Welles, Orson."

"Brain, The."

"Cut!"

The actors waited while the director and the engineers reviewed the take.

"Perfect!" the director finally announced. "That's a wrap, people!"


The group of voice actors made their way out of the studio. After following a maze of hallways and staircases, they ended up in the atrium, a large round room surrounded by one-way glass. March got ahead of the group and addressed them.

"You know," he suggested, somewhat sheepishly, "Rob and I were thinking that now would be a perfect opportunity for a lunch date, to celebrate the completion of the recording session."

"And..." prompted Rob Polson, voice of Brain's brainless sidekick Pinky. Polson was short and skinny, with thin brown hair. He tended to be the "class clown" in any group he found himself in.

"Oh, and the end of the war," March remembered.

"With the Danaans taken care of," Polson remarked, "maybe the Emperor will finally have time to tackle the cloud problem. Just once I'd like to get a tan on a beach, like folks in the 1920's used to do."

Pam Haydn, one of the guest stars for the episode, and Jeffery Burnet, a regular on the show, declined the lunch date, as they had prior engagements.

The same went for the best-known member of the group, Gary Elway, live-action star of The Princess Bride, Hot Shots!, and many more films. The three of them exited the building.

"Sure, you talked me into it. Didn't have anything better to do this afternoon." This was Tress McNell, a woman with wavy reddish-brown hair.

Polson turned to the last holdout. "Please say you can come, Jay. I desperately need somebody who hasn't heard all my jokes yet."

Cummins took a look out the window. "Maybe you'd better go without me," he said, regretfully, "it looks like I have a little work to do first."

Waiting outside the front door of the studio complex was a group of about two-dozen excited people, aged from 8 to 38. Based on their clothes and signs, they were all fans of Jay Cummins's work as the character Winnie the Pooh.

"That's OK," said March. "We'll wait."

"Thanks."

The crowd erupted into cheers when Cummins emerged to greet them, recite some lines in character, and sign autographs.

McNell blanched at the sight of the crowd. "What are they doing here?" she asked.

"Disney probably told them where he was recording today," guessed Polson.

"They can do that?" asked McNell.

"It's Disney," Polson replied. "You might need to check your contract with a high-powered microscope to find that clause, but it's definitely there."

"Well if you ask me, that seems like a terrible invasion of privacy."

"We all know your feelings on the subject, Tress," Polson said, for once with a straight face, "but the fans aren't all bad. Just a couple of months ago I ran into a couple of Rescue Ranger fans at a convention. Nicest, most polite kids I ever met. I think I have their business card."

He pulled out his wallet and searched a bit before retrieving the card to pass around. On the left side was a stick figure of a girl next to a younger boy, the two of them in front of a complex bank of audiovisual equipment. The right side proclaimed the company's name as "Jane and Michael...Banks".

"Cute," commented March. "So, did they want to hire you to play the part of Lassie, or Ben Turner?"

"Not Lassie's Rescue Rangers! The Rescue Rangers was a 1989 series by the Rockwell Studio."

"Aren't they the guys that made Mystery Mantis and the Clew Crew Review?" March interrupted.

"Don't forget Intergalactic Battle of the Network Stars," McNell added.

"Or Three's a Crowd," said Polson. "As close as you can get to an animated rip-off of Three's Company without calling in the lawyers! Now with Don Knotts!" That got a chuckle out of the others. "Yeah, Rockwell made nearly every cartoon stinker imaginable in the 1970's and '80's, but sometime after Weeble Wobbles: The Animated Series, they finally turned their act around and made Darkwing Duck."

"Rockwell made Darkwing Duck?" asked March in amazement. "That was like the number one cartoon in the late '80's."

"They followed that up with Rescue Rangers, which in my opinion was even better, although since it never went into syndication, is largely forgotten nowadays. Anyway, Rescue Rangers was about two chipmunks, a couple of mice, and a fly, that solve the cases the human police overlook. Miss McNell here played Chip, the fearless chipmunk leader, and Gadget, the brilliant and beautiful inventor mouse miss. Personally, I think Gadget was one of your best parts, Tress."

"Thanks," the actress addressed replied. "It's certainly in my top five."

"Let's see," Polson continued, "Jay played burley-mouse Monterey Jack (half of the time-it gets complicated), and Corey Button played the rest of the regulars. I did a lot of bit parts for the show, while Jay also voiced both of the main villains in the show: Fat Cat and a certain Professor Norton Nimnul."

March's bushy eyebrows shot up at the mention of that last name.

"Yes, interesting coincidence, don't you think?" remarked Polson wryly. "Anyway, with only 43 episodes in the can, The Rescue Rangers met an untimely end when Mr. Rockwell was arrested for tax evasion in 1990."

Tress shook her head. "Correction: the warrant went out, but The Company never caught Rockwell. He's still at large."

"The Company?" asked March. "I didn't think taxes were in their jurisdiction."

"Neither did I," replied Polson. "Although, given the current imperial situation, it's beginning to make sense. Like they say, if it's weird, you know The Company's involved somehow. Anyway, to return to the plot, the lawyers made sure that The Rescue Rangers never aired again. Nevertheless, a fairly respectable fandom has emerged, trading black-market fifth-generation videotapes in back alleys at three in the morning, I imagine. Even more incredibly, this group has managed to contact the show's head writer and got him to put onto the Wired all twenty-five of the scripts to the episodes that had never been completed. Seeing that nobody owned the characters anymore, the group decided that between them they had the technical expertise to make the missing episodes themselves."

"Really?" asked an incredulous March.

"Well, not to the level of the original episodes. The Navis today are pretty advanced, but they still can't replace cell animation."

"Alright then," March summarized, "the A/V branch of this Rescue Rangers fan group wanted to hire you to do some voices for them."

"No, they plan to do all the voices themselves. I checked out their website, and either through natural talent or electronic trickery, they have come up with pretty good matches for all of the regulars. All Jane and Michael Banks wanted was to ask me how I would do a Hawaiian surfer character in one of the episodes. I read a couple of lines into their tape recorder for their guy to imitate, and that was it."

McNell took another look at the business card. "You know, I think this same pair may have approached my agent. Something about voicing a witch character. I still remember one of the lines: 'It's an ill wind that blows no one any good!'" She delivered the line using the voice she intended to use. It sounded remarkably familiar. "He turned them down, of course. I wonder if..."

"I hate to interrupt, Tress, but I think you better see this."

McNell joined the two men at the one-way glass window. Outside, they could see that a black limousine had pulled up to the curb. A large bear of a man dressed in a black suit had emerged from the limousine and was now talking in hushed tones with Jay Cummins. Flanking the two and keeping the Winnie the Pooh fans at a distance were two more men in black with dark sunglasses obscuring their eyes. The more paranoid of the two kept checking over his shoulder, as if he were expecting a team of rivals to swoop in at any moment.

"Is...is that The Company?" McNell asked.

"Sure looks like it," replied Polson.

As they watched, Cummins turned to address his fans, which replied by groaning loudly and dispersing. He then joined the three men in the limousine. It appeared that he had done this freely, but this was The Company, so you never could be sure. The limo pulled away from the curb and quickly made its way out of sight.

"Wow," said March.

"I wonder if Jay paid his taxes," joked Polson.

McNell replied to this remark by bonking Polson on the head.