Tom Kane must have been a tough kid to sit next to in the sixth grade. Loud, boisterous, bouncing off the walls. Once, a teacher tied him to his desk chair with jump ropes.
"Today if I was a kid in grade school, they'd have me on Ritalin up to my eyeballs," the 47-year-old Kane says.
Luckily for Kane, no one tried to put him on mood stabilizers. More than 30 years later, he gets paid for the same things that drove his teachers crazy. Capital-P Paid.
Just turn on your television and wait 10 minutes or so until an ad for the new animated movie 9 pops up. That's when you'll hear a bit of Kane's voice.
Aside from voicing a character named Dictator in the new, Tim Burton-produced film, Kane has played Yoda (in the Clone Wars series and movie) and about a million other characters over the years. I first wrote about him a few weeks ago, when the new Batman video game came out. The Overland Park resident voiced Commissioner Gordon.
At age 15, Kane was still doing the type of things that made his teachers want to strap him down. When his family went grocery stopping, he ad-libbed a commercial for every product, mimicking the voices and parroting the slogans. Pestering his family wasn't enough, though -- Kane needed new people to annoy. So he started calling local advertisers and asking for work.
"I called all the ones that had bad local voiceovers," he explains. "I'd say, 'I heard your commercials, and they sucked, and I'll do it better.' One day I called the American Cancer Society because I'd heard a PSA that was particularly bad. I guess they thought I was a real voiceover guy or disc jockey. Half an hour later, I got a call from an agency, and they assumed I was an adult, a professional voiceover guy who was willing to donate his services. They said they were doing a voiceover Thursday, and I had to have my dad drive me down because I didn't have a driver's license yet."
When they arrived at the studio, the PSA producers assumed Kane's father was the pro. After some awkward explanations, they decided to go ahead with Kane anyway; they'd already paid for the studio. An hour later, Kane had cut the commercial in the vocal style of a Pepperidge Farms cookie commercial. His career was underway.
By the time he got out of college, he'd done hundreds of commercials. Then he moved to Chicago, where he could get some national gigs.
His most steady work is playing Yoda now that Frank Oz is finished with Star Wars.
"I never really auditioned for it," Kane says. "It was sort of an accident. Twenty years ago, I was working on a Lucas video game ... and like all voiceover people, we were sitting around at a mic reading other characters and doing voices to kill time. One day the director heard me do Yoda. He played it for George Lucas, and he said, 'Yeah, that guy will do.' Now that Frank Oz is done, George has told them, 'Just use Tom.' "
See 9 this weekend if you get a chance. It's cool knowing that a major character's voice was recorded in a guy's home recording studio a short drive from the theater.
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