The new Cartoon Network take on ThunderCats premiered last Friday and already seems to have made quite an impact. A new episode airs tonight at 8:30, and taking the voice of Lion-O for this series is actor Will Friedle.
If the name seems familiar, it’s with good reason: If you’re like me and grew up watching TV in the 1980’s and 1990’s you’d remember Friedle as “Eric,” the older brother to Cory Matthews on the ABC TGIF sitcom Boy Meets World. If you’re a fan of some of animation’s best cartoons of the past two decades, you probably know him best as the voice of Terry McGinnis on Batman Beyond. Friedle also played another superheroic role, the Blue Beetle, on the Batman cartoon The Brave and the Bold.
We spoke with Friedle on Wednesday afternoon about taking on such an iconic role. Enjoy the interview, and don’t forget to watch tonight’s new episode! A gallery of images from tonight’s show can be found here.
Questions to Mr. Friedle are posted in bold; answers are not. Please do not reproduce this interview onto other websites; instead, just place a link to KSiteTV!
I’m sure you’ve gotten this question with every interview you’ve done for the show, but I still have to ask: Is ThunderCats something you grew up watching?
I was and am a huge fan of the original show. I was eight years old when the show came out, so I always tell people that I feel like this show was made for me. I had my Sword of Omens, and I tell this to everybody as well… I knew exactly where to put the cushions on my couch to make my ThunderTank. So, yeah. I was a huge fan, running home to see it, and running throughout the house saying “ThunderCats Ho!” I think most like 8 or 9 year old boys at the time. So, yeah. Enormous fan of the original series, which is why getting the opportunity to play Lion-O is personally a very huge thing for me.
Did you feel any kind of pressure to get the “ThunderCats Ho!” just right, or did you have that all set up when you were 8?
In my head, I had it set up when I was 8, but that doesn’t matter.
I felt huge pressure. This was, I think, the most nervous I’ve ever been, doing anything. Whether it’s on camera, or even when I was told I was told I was going to be playing Batman, it wasn’t as nerve-wracking because I wasn’t playing Bruce Wayne. Whereas stepping into the shoes of Lion-O, I was very, very nervous. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin this iconic character, especially one that had been so important to me. So, yeah. Very, very, very nerve-wracking, but also just so exciting. It was one of those things where I was trying to contain my excitement, and I’m sure I’ve ruined a take or two by having to suppress a giggle halfway through some of the lines I was saying, because I just realized how lucky I was to just be sitting in the room and playing a role. So, yeah. Nervous, but excited.
Did you have any recording sessions with Larry Kenney (the original voice of Lion-O, who now voices Claudus)?
I didn’t. I never met Larry. He records out of New York, and he and I have talked over phone patch and have become e-mail buddies, but we have yet to actually meet, and we’re trying to set up a time where he’s in Los Angeles, where we can actually go out and grab a drink or something, because I certainly want to sit down and talk with the man and shake the man’s hand.
He’s been just very nice in everything he’s said about the show, and very complimentary towards me. It’s very sweet. I can’t wait to meet him, frankly. It’s one of the things we talk about in the recording sessions quite often.
When you’re recording the battle cry, do you ever find yourself motioning as if there’s a sword in your hand?
[Laughs] You know, it’s kind of difficult to do in the room where we sit, because you’re pretty close to the other actors. I think the first time I did it, I was so nervous that I wasn’t thinking about anything else, frankly. That’s one of those calls that you really don’t want to screw up.
Again, when there’s people around and I’m doing it, there’s no sword movement. Now, that’s not to say I might not have practiced the movements in my house. [Laughs] But that’s just between you, and me, and whoever’s reading. So you’ll never know.
What do you think works about this take on ThunderCats? The reaction seems to be very positive.
It has been very positive. We’re ecstatic about that, first and foremost, because we love to get the new audience in, but we’re also really happy that the old audience seems to have embraced the show. I think one of the things is the time. It’s been 20, 25 years since the show was originally on. It hasn’t been done in four different ways and now here’s a new ThunderCats coming out. This is the first attempt since the original show. I think the time is right. I think after Batman: The Animated Series in ’89-’90, people were more willing to accept a little bit of a darker version of the show, with the acting a little more real, the stories a little more drawn out. So I think it just is that, coupled with the new animation, which just looks beautiful. I think it really lent itself well to taking these iconic characters, looking at them from a slightly different angle, but at the same time, staying true to who the characters are, which is very important… to make sure that the original fans can instantly recognize who they’re looking at.
I know a lot of people had problems, originally, when they heard “Oh, Tygra and Lion-O are brothers? How does that work?” And then when they saw what we were doing and saw how that’ll add a whole new dynamic between the two characters, I think people were excited to learn a little bit more about these characters. You’re going to get a lot of backstory in this first season. And I think people are going to be really excited. Because again, we’re trying to pay homage to the original show, so we didn’t want to go and create all-new characters. We wanted to show who these characters really were, and so far, people seem to dig it, which is great.
Some of the changes, like what you mentioned about Tygra, made the character mean a lot more.
I think so too. It gave a little more depth, and Matty Mercer’s voice, I think, works perfectly. There’s going to be some very cool stuff about his character, and some very cool stuff going on with the relationship between the two. So, I think if people loved the pilot, it’s really only going to get better.
How far ahead are you on recording?
We’re done. We’re finished with the first season; we’re still ADR-ing the vast majority of the episodes.
We record it, and then they send it away to be animated, and then it comes back, usually about 8 months later, and we will then go in and do ADR, which is a clean-up process, where then we’re actually watching a giant screen with the animation. It might be a fight scene where we didn’t record what we calls the “oofs” and “ughs.” So, now Lion-O is hitting the ground, you have to do a “oof” kind of thing, and you’re doing that right to picture.
It’s fun, because it’s a double whammy. You get to record the episode, and then again, seven, eight months later, it comes back, and you get to re-watch what you did. You kinda go “Oh. Wow. Okay, I see what they’re doing here, and this works really well.”
As for the initial recording, we’ve finished the whole first season.
What is coming up on the show that you’re allowed to talk about? You’ve hinted at a few things.
I am going to continue to hint. There are some pretty incredible things. I don’t want to give anything away. Let’s just say you get to learn a whole lot about the history of Thundera and a whole lot about the backstory of some of these characters, and it’s done in some pretty incredible ways. So not wanting to give anything away, if you are a fan of the original series and now are a fan of the new show, I think you’re really going to like learning about the history of some of these characters. There’s some stuff that happens that, as a fan, and not even as the actor but as a fan of the show, it’s jaw-dropping when I read it. So I can’t wait to see the fans’ reaction to some of the stuff that’s going on.
There’s something about your voice work thaT I’ve wondered about for several years. There was an episode of Boy Meets World where the guys are being honest with their girlfriends and in the tag scene, Eric says to his girlfriend “I’m Batman.” Was that an intentional inside joke?
That was intentional. I was recording Batman at the time, and the producers were fans of the show, and they wrote that in. I don’t think Michael Jacobs [executive producer] knew it. The other producers did. I went up to Michael and I said “I’m going to do it in the Batman voice.”
He said “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, I’m doing Batman Beyond.” “Oh, okay.” So I got to kind of throw that in a little bit. The actual writer of the show, I think, that was kind of an homage, a little bit, to Beyond.
Is there anything you can tease about tonight’s episode?
You’re going to get to fully meet some characters that you only got a glimpse of in the first episodes. So you’re really going to get into some new people that we kind of pointed to a bit in the first one, but really are going to get a chance to learn a little bit more about.
ThunderCats is new tonight at 8:30 on the Cartoon Network. Our thanks to Will Friedle for taking the time to do this interview. (“Darth Vader” says thanks as well)
