Bob Donohue recording Tony Walker as he does Pa Fossil’s voice.
That's me on the left. On the right is Tony Walker. He and I became best friends when we were two years old living next door to each other on April Lane in Long Island, NY. We saw Star Wars together when we were little kids, and like most guys our age, grew up playing with the action fiigures. (Now my son is watching the movies and getting the action figures!)
Perhaps unlike most guys of our generation, we also used to spend a lot of time writing different scripts (usually Star Wars related, but other stuff too), and acting them out into our Panasonic tape recorder. Remember those? It was big and clunky and would eat about a quarter of the tapes we'd put in it. I really wish we still had those tapes.
We used to act out various parts, recording in one take, and make all the corresponding sound effects like blaster shots and explosions with our mouths. P-chooo!
Who would have thought that years later, we'd be in my basement as adults doing the same exact thing?
As kids, we do the exact things we dream about doing with our lives because nobody tells you it's a waste of time. It's cute because you're a kid. But if you think back to the things you spent most of your childhood doing, they are probably very similar to the things you wish you were doing as an adult now.
For me, it was always creative in some form or another: drawing, music, writing and play-acting. It's all we did besides baseball and running bases.
Somewhere along the lines I decided never to grow up. Thank God! Because now I am doing all those same things on a top of the line MacBook Pro. Writing scripts, acting them out with a great team including my lifelong friend, and turning them into a groundbreaking educational tv show.
The new episode is about sea turtle rescue. We have the animated script and voiceovers completed, and I'm about to begin the animation process. We got much more ambitious with this script, and the animation required will be a bit more complex than the first 3 episodes. Luckily, I got lots of practice doing this kind of stuff as a kid.
Photo by April Keough, who was also there doing the voices of T-Bone, Wishbone, Marrow and Miss Leading
Login
