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Show - j 0 ST STUFF by jnn 4 You've heard of people who can throw their voice I've decided that voices can throw people. When we talk to someone often on the telephone, whom we have never met, we tend to get a pre-conceived idea of how that person looks, according ac-cording to how their voice sounds. And, if you're like me, nine times out of ten you're 100-percent wrong, and when you finally meet that person, you wonder "how on earth" that body can go with that voice. The same thing happens with looks. If there is someone you have seen several times, yet you have never heard them speak, you tend to create an image of how their voice should sound. We do both when it comes to literary .characters or cartoon folk. We create visual images with our invagination of how the characters look and sound. From the pages of the book, through your mind, the characters come alive. If you read the "Thorn Birds" before you saw it on TV, did you picture Father deBricissart at all like Richard Chamberlain? How did you picture Moses before Cecil B. DeMille came out with his Ten Commandments? I'll bet it wasn't with Charleston Heston. But after you've seen the movie, after you've been told how the character looks and sounds, it is embedded in your mind. We all know how Maria in "The Sound of Music" should look and sound, Like Julie Andrews running around Austria with a guitar. If you were to make your way through Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind," naturally, ; you'd still picture Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as her dashing Rhett Butler. So what happens if we read the book firstj H we have a character created in our mind and reality sets in? They get a TV show, and, according ac-cording to our expectations, the character is wrong? We're out of luck, that's all there is to it. We set ourselves up. for . dissappointment. Which is just what I did. ' I have long been a fan of Garfield the Cat, that fat, friendly, furry feline who loves lasagna, naps and sunshine. The other night I waited with great anticipation to see my first Garfield TV show. Garfield was great. He was the same portly pet I had learned to love and laugh at through the pages of the Sunday comics. It was the comic strip come alive . . . until Garfield opened his mouth. The sound that came out was not Garfield's voice, at least not the voice I thought Garfield should have. Instead of the smooth, sophisticated yet slobable sound that I had created, Garfield on TV had a sort of dumb, blah-zay, hum-" hum-" drum, dull voice. We know how Mickey Mouse should sound, we've heard him talk since he was created. We're all aware of the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang. We're used to their voices. We didn't have a chance to create our own idea of how we thought they should sound. We were told how they sounded. But Garfield's voice was all wrong. I'm afraid the voice has also ruined the character of that lazy, loveable, lunk of a cat. I'm now doomed to stick with the comic strips of the Sunday paper, or watch the TV with the sound turned down! |