"Hey, how you doing, Phil?".

It's like, "Good, good, how are you?".

It's like, "All right, here we go."

"It's raining sideways."

"Okay, one more, angrier."

"It's raining sideways."

"Cool, thank you."

- You will not best me this day, vile henchman of Aku.

- I wasn't cut out to be a bureaucrat any way.

- You know Blue, no, this is Coco.

- It's gon rain.

- I am confident you will make the right choice.

- Hi, I'm Phil Lamarr.

I'm a voice actor.

I'm known for the voice of Samurai Jack,

characters on Futurama, Family Guy,

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Mad TV,

Justice League, or anything else you watched 15 years ago.

And today, we're gonna be doing a little cartoon breakdown.

♪ When I was born it was a hurricane in Kingston Town ♪

♪ With a foot and half of water ♪

On the show, Futurama, which is set in the year 3000,

every company will have a certified bureaucrat.

And my character, Hermes Conrad,

is the certified bureaucrat of Planet Express.

- Wow, you look happy.

Is someone fired?

- Better.

The Central Bureaucracy is conducting

an inspection tomorrow.

- I first got involved with Futurama just auditioning.

I think I was still working on Mad TV at Fox.

Came in along with hundreds of other people

to audition for the guy who created The Simpsons.

It was a little intimidating.

It was tough trying to figure out

where the character might be

'cause it was a brand new show.

We knew it wasn't The Simpsons, but that's all we knew.

And I'm looking at the character,

and they're telling me he's, you know,

a bureaucrat, an accountant.

So I think I was doing just sort of a,

you know, this kind of voice.

Ah, yes, Fry, Professor, I'd like you to meet someone.

This is Doctor Zoidberg.

Then about three episodes in,

the writers sort of realized that the Hermes character

was fine, but they didn't really have anything

that was working, working.

And I remember Matt Groening coming up to me

in the hallway, and said,

"Well, we just wanna try something with Hermes.

"Can you do a Jamaican accent?"

I said sure, I can do that.

I auditioned for Cool Runnings

just like every other Black man in 1980 whatever.

Adding the accent gave the character

another dimension, added depth.

'Cause all of a sudden instead of just writing

accountant jokes, they were writing Jamaican jokes.

And then laying accountant stuff on top of 'em.

Like okay, so what if he's sort of laid back

but not laid back at all.

I think actually, had Matt not suggested that,

I probably wouldn't be sitting here.

I probably wouldn't have made it past episode four.

- This isn't supposed to be fun.

We've got a job to do,

and we will do it better without distractions.

Understood?

- This was really a powerful, special moment for me

'cause I grew up as a comic book fan.

It was wild to be The Green Lantern.

I'd seen Bruce Timm's work on Batman Beyond

and knew the character designs and all that.

And in terms of finding the voice,

that was sort of easy to do.

Because the way he draws men,

they've got these little tiny legs

and these great big chests.

So you feel like everybody's gotta have a deep voice.

They talked about the character.

It was like, well, he was a Marine.

He was from Detroit.

And I'm like oh well my dad's from Detroit.

So I added a little bit of a level,

sort of an homage to my dad, because my dad

was like a, you know, sort of this smoky voice,

so I wanted to put a little of that in there.

So it wasn't just, you know, I'm big hero.

It was also a little bit of this, you know.

The guy has, he's been somewhere.

He's done some things, you know.

My name is John Stewart, Green Lantern of sector 2814.

- And now here's Ollie Williams

with the Black-u-Weather forecast.

Ollie?

- It's gon rain.

- I also play the part of Ollie Williams,

the Black-u-Weather forecast weather man on Family Guy.

That's about the easiest job in show business.

'Cause he's got one line.

It's gon rain.

That's it.

I would come in to record,

and Seth would be directing.

And it would basically be a 30 second work day.

We'd walk in, Seth would go, "Hey, how you doing, Phil?"

It's like, "Good, good, how are you?"

It's like, "All right, here we go."

"It's raining sideways."

"Okay, one more, angrier."

"It's raining sideways."

"Cool, thank you."

- Let's go live to Ollie Williams

with the Black-u-weather report.

- It's raining sideways.

- Sounds rough, Ollie.

- There have been a few times

where you stretch it out a little bit.

The time that they cut to Ollie, and he was high.

[laughs]

- How's the weather look, Ollie?

- Not too bad.

- But generally speaking,

it's a very nicely self-contained joke.

- Aku!

I've been really lucky to work with some of

the most creative people of the last 20 years.

Seth MacFarlane, Bruce Timm, Quentin Tarantino.

- I don't remember asking you a goddamn thing.

- And Genndy Tartakovsky is definitely among that pantheon.

He did something with that cartoon

that had never been seen in American animation.

The first episode has nine and a half minutes of silence.

[intriguing music]

Which was unheard of in children's animation

on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, all those shows.

Everything was [gibbers].

No, he said, I want a show that has action.

[gong rings]

- No, it cannot be.

- It also tells a story with everything at our disposal.

Not just words.

Music, sound, color.

And it was also I think groundbreaking

in that the characters had no black outlines,

which at the time nobody did.

We sat down in the booth and Genndy was there

and just sort of you work back and forth

with the creator to try to find the voice

that he's hearing in his head.

The only reason he had an accent

was to tie him to his roots

and to honor that he was coming from ancient japan.

And it was interesting because a few years before

I was part of a comedy group that was

predominately Japanese called Cold Tofu.

Lot of the folks in the group were, you know,

first or second generation Japanese-Americans

who had grown up hearing Japanese.

And I noticed that they had, not an accent so much as

just a way of speaking, which is like

oh this is how you speak English

if you're hearing Japanese

at the same time you're hearing English.

So instead we had a little bit of the accent.

There were simply words that he would say

in a way that he had heard something

differently growing up than you had.

[gasps]

- I'm home.

I'm alive.

- Virgil was a 14 year old boy in city of Dakota

who accidentally gets superpowers

and then becomes a hero.

But at the same time, he's also a 14 year old boy.

So he's gotta go to school,

he's gotta finish his homework.

He's gotta deal with his annoying sister.

- Since when does your narrow behind play football at all?

- Who asked you, Miss Nosy?

- And fight for what's right.

That was actually my very first show

where I was the main character.

And it was the first time that a teenage

African-American superhero was the star

of his own cartoon.

As a comic book person growing up,

reading mostly stories that didn't reflect my life,

it was so amazing to actually be part of something

that did, and Denys Cowan and Alan Burnett

and Dwayne McDuffie, all of the creators

were so great about making it good stories first.

And also dealing with things that actually mattered.

The show won a Humanitas Award

for an episode we did about guns in school.

They did these great stories that were fun

and exciting, but somehow grounded in something

that felt real.

So it wasn't like, "This is a very special episode."

No, it was just Virgil dealing with the stuff in his life.

You know, 'cause, you know, I'm a city kid,

and this is sort of things that happen.

But he had electrical powers.

- Please welcome Bolbi Stroganovsky.

- Hello fellow learners.

Call me Bolbi.

- I also did the voice of Bolbi Stroganovsky

on the Jimmy Neutron cartoon,

which is weird beyond weird.

It's a great show,

and they had been going for a while

before they brought me in to play that character.

And I think I played maybe a couple other characters.

But that's the one that people still remember to this day.

Bolbi is just strange and weird.

And that's all, that's really it.

♪ Slap slap slap ♪

♪ Clap clap clap ♪

♪ Slap slap slap ♪

♪ Clap clap clap ♪

Basically my whole point was to try to make

Jet and the producers on the other side of the glass

crack up 'cause all they knew was just like

well, he's just, he's the weird kid at the school.

And he's from like a weird foreign country.

Oh, you mean that Bolbi is from a country

where they worship giant space rats?

I just went as goofy and as crazy as I could.

And it worked.

[laughs]

- And many Atlanteans were injured.

But I could have been far worse.

- In playing the part of Aquaman on Young Justice,

that was a really sort of interesting path.

Because originally I auditioned for Aqualad.

'Cause that was one of the main heroes in Young Justice.

And didn't get it.

Then of course, I heard what my buddy Khary Payton did,

and I was like oh dang.

No that's it.

If I had heard mine and his,

I would have fired me and hired him.

Greg Weisman, the creator threw me a bone.

Said, "Okay, we're gonna make you Aquaman."

I'm lik, "Oh, I get to be Black Aquaman!"

Nope, nope.

Regular Aquaman.

Oh, oh, okay.

[speaks foreign language]

- On Young Justice, they managed to do something

that nobody had been able to do for 40 years.

[speaks foreign language]

Which was make Aquaman cool.

He was always the afterthought.

Until this.

They sort of recast him as regal.