Dee Bradley Baker has squawked, snarled and squeaked his way through so many jobs that he relies on his Internet Movie Database page to keep track of them.
Even that’s not always right, since his career spans hundreds of movies, TV series and video games over the last three decades.
“I was never involved with the live-action ‘Last Airbender’ movie, and I was never involved with ‘Frankenweenie,’ ” Baker said as he scanned, at The Denver Post’s request, some of his credited roles. “But it looks like most of the rest seems to be accurate.”
It’s hard to be sure. Since 1995, an average of a dozen new projects each year have been released featuring his vocal talents. In some years, it’s more than 30, from well-known shows such as “American Dad!” (for which he received a 2017 Emmy nomination) and “Family Guy” to kids’ fare like “Muppet Babies,” “Steven Universe,” SpongeBob SquarePants” and “The Lion Guard.”
The 58-year-old voice actor, who has become a favorite of Hollywood animation directors, could have ed as his career slipped away during a pandemic that shuttered the rest of show business. Instead, he adapted and is busier than ever, with projects on the horizon including a “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” spin-off, “The Bad Batch,” for Disney+.
With a daughter in high school in the metro area, Baker now splits his time between Los Angeles and Littleton, working with directors through Zoom and recording his voice parts in a makeshift booth in his Colorado house.
“It’s just a bunch of cheap PVC pipe that I cut up and pieced together, then threw some audio blankets over,” he said. “I put a little (sound) rig inside with a Mac computer and a $250 mic. I’m making it work.”
Not only that, he’s teaching other voice actors how to do the same. His website, iwanttobeavoiceactor.com, is packed with advice for people looking to break into the voiceover world, from building a home sound booth to audition tips. Categories include “Agents,” “VO Myths,” “Your Demo” and “Killing Your Career” (sample posts: “Phoning in That ‘Favor’ ” and “Family vs. Acting”).
“I’m very lucky,” Baker said over the phone from his Littleton home last week. “Animation is a uniquely collaborative art form, and by sheer luck, it can be done remotely without a hiccup. … Voiceover’s always been done face-to-face in the past. With big projects like ‘SpongeBob’ or ‘The Clone Wars,’ they’ll even have all the actors together in the room. But we’ve got to adapt.”
Even if he stopped working tomorrow, Baker would continue to projects he contributed to months ago, or up to a year ago, hit the market at a rapid clip. The latest is “Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe,” a Disney+ animated original that will debut on that streaming service Aug. 28.
Baker admits he’s barely in it, though that’s not uncommon for his projects. He doesn’t typically voice main characters — those are often left for recognizable names, or people who make their career playing leads — but rather the supporting ones, from friends and pets to vicious vampires and demons (but also chickens, talking pastries and robots).
“I remember when the (“Phineas and Ferb” creators) brought me in for an audition for Perry the Platypus, and I just made these three weird little sounds,” Baker said of his role on the show. “They go, ‘We’ll pick one of those, thanks,’ and they reprint that thing in every single episode. I’m always embarrassed by that, but that’s the gag they use — kind of like the Wilhelm Scream. I’m such a small sprinkling of seasoning on that wonderful show.”
Perhaps, but it’s how Baker has built his career — a few minutes of dialogue here, a few seconds of non-verbal grunting and choking sounds there. Due to his reliability and range, Baker’s résumé grew fast after his first big shows, nabbing projects such as 1996’s ”Space Jam” (in which he voiced Daffy Duck) and various Disney and Marvel properties long before the latter two were intertwined.
“It gets pretty emphatic,” Baker said of his acting process. “You don’t tear up the room because there’s a sweet spot for the microphones, and you can’t deviate very far from that or else the engineer gets mad. You have to act with your whole body, but keep it right in the zone.”
Baker was born in Bloomington, Ind., in 1962, but grew up in Greeley, where he got into stage performing. He devoured sci-fi shows such as “Star Trek” but also books about dinosaurs and early video games. He fondly remembers playing the 1970s gaming frontrunner Pong on the University of Northern Colorado library’s “ancient” computers.
“As a boy in Colorado, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but that didn’t panic me,” Baker said. “What served me well was pursuing things I was curious about and liked.”
Those included plays, musicals, opera, stand-up and children’s theater. After Baker finished at Greeley’s University High School in 1981, he received a Boettcher Scholarship and attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy. His passion for performing brought him to Orlando, Fla., in 1989 to work at Disney’s Epcot Center (specifically, in a sketch comedy group inside the Wonders of Life pavilion).
His first big TV role arrived when he provided the booming voice for the “giant talking rock-god” Olmec on Nickelodeon’s “Legends of the Hidden Temple” game show, which lasted a whopping 120 episodes over three seasons. With that and other major studio projects under his belt, he left for Los Angeles in 1994.
His career since then reads like a shortlist of the most influential and beloved animated series of the modern age, including multiple roles in “The Wild Thornberrys,” “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “The Powerpuff Girls,” “Johnny Bravo,” “Justice League Unlimited,” “Dora the Explorer,” “Teen Titans,” “Ben 10,” “Batman: The Brave & the Bold,” “Scooby-Doo,” “The Legend of Korra,” “Curious George,” “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Robot Chicken” and dozens more.
And those represent just one-third of the work he’s done.
Baker also has acted in dozens of feature films (“Happy Feet,” “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” “The SpongeBob Movie”) and iconic video game franchises that have collectively earned billions of dollars worldwide, such as Halo, Spider-Man, Call of Duty, Metal Gear, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Doom, Minecraft, Destiny, Over and nearly every Star Wars game that has been released since 2003 (including the Lego Star Wars games).
Dipping into the Star Wars universe, in fact, has been one of his favorite pastimes, with major roles in the “Star Wars Rebels” and “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” — the latter as fan-favorite characters such as Captain Rex and Commander Cody.
He’ll likely be returning as those characters for “The Bad Batch,” a “Clone Wars” spinoff that’s slated to hit Disney+ next year. But, as is usually the case with anything Star Wars, he can’t really say.
“I’m not sure at what liberty I am to discuss it, since it’s still so secret,” Baker said. “But I’m very much involved and very excited about it. As typically happens with Lucasfilm projects, we’d been working on it for a long time before anything official dropped about it.”
Baker will again work with Dave Filoni, the Emmy-winning “Clone Wars” director who parlayed that success into co-creating “The Mandalorian” with Jon Favreau — among other Star Wars projects that Baker has also contributed to (“Rebels,” “Forces of Destiny,” etc.)
“Dave was really George Lucas’ right-hand man during the creation of ‘Clone Wars,’ and the only person who could say ‘no’ to Dave Filono was George Lucas,” Baker said. “It’s a wonderful and shocking thing to be a part of, especially for a kid who dressed up as a Jawa in 1977 when Episode 4 (a.k.a. the original ‘Star Wars’) came out.”
Still, Baker is not limitless. He gets a workout performing fighting monsters and vampire sounds, “really violent screaming and that kind of stuff,” and the many, many animal noises he has mastered. He only has so much gas in the tank before he needs to give his voice a rest, he said.
“It’s not too far off from being a musician,” he said. “You’re not going to jump right into the solo when you start recording, so you pace yourself and go with the mood of the song or story. You don’t want to blow out all the drama you’re building toward for the payoff.”