- September 23rd, 2011, 12:59 pm#346939I read an interview with Maurice LaMarche where they brought up the irony of Murray getting Music fired as Venkman because they didn't sound alike, and then later Murray being hired as the 'perfect' celebrity voice for Garfield. MLM said he planned to discuss that with Murray himself if he ever got the chance.
My son has been watching my RGB DVD's, he's 9. When it's an earlier season show with Lorenzo, Arsenio, etc. I will sit and watch with him and the years just slip away. When it's Coulier, who I actually LIKED on Nickelodeon's "Out of Control" and in the movie Detroit Comedy Jam prior to him landing the GB gig, I just have to leave the room.
For those of you who never saw OOC, Coulier did his best to come up with a catch-phrase on the show, accompanied with a gesture for each word: "Cut. It. Out!" I swear he tried to sneak it into RGB a couple of times, with the same pause after each word even though we couldn't see him make the scissor motion, the point, and the thumb-hike.
Lorenzo Music, whether as Venkman or as Garfield, was recognizable to me and therefore comfortable-feeling from his role as Carlton the Doorman from Rhoda, a show I believe he also produced? But the gimmick was, you never saw his face. Even if Carlton actually showed up in the apartment, as he did once in an episode that was a wild party, his entire head was obscured by some giant Mardi-Gras-style mask. But that's a very vague memory.
After Coulier took over the role, one late night on cable, I realized that a bit player in some movie was Lorenzo Music. The face was nothing like I'd ever have imagined! Pudgy, balding, moustached... I jammed a tape in the VCR and recorded the rest of the scene, just because I wanted proof of what he looked like, but I've no idea what I ever did with it. It was a shock and a letdown. He looked more like Venkman's Dad than Pete.
Coulier's Venkman is all surface, it's all 'technical acting' but technically, I hesitate to call it acting at all. He's got no grasp of the internal of the character. Music crawled inside the guy's head, knew him backwards and forwards, and what we heard was a PERFORMANCE, not an impression. A unique but valid approach to a character rather than an imitation of the 'real guy' which ironically will always fall flat simply because it is an attempt to copy someone else's work.
Maurice LaMarche, by the way, was doing a Harold Ramis impression, yes, I will grant you that. In fact, it's what got him the part. But the thing that's ironic there is that AFTER being told at the auditions "don't imitate the movie actors", he did his Ramis impression anyway, and that bit of boldness is what got him the role.
Coulier, similarly, said once on the Tonight Show (was it still Johnny back then?) that he had gone to an audition to 'loop' a Richard Pryor movie for TV, and he was the only white guy there. But his Pryor was so good, he still got the gig. So maybe his career prior to RGB had taught him that sounding alike was the best approach.
Still, there's something so insincere, so disconnected about his Venkman, even all these years later we're still discussing why we revile it. Would Coulier have made a perfectly acceptable Venkman from day one, if Music had never been hired? Perhaps. It's possible that with no other interpretation in our minds, we'd have thought he was fine.
Mind you, we'd have lost that little moment in the episode where they go to see the movie of their life story screened at the end, and Music criticizes Bll Murray's lack of resemblance with perfect sardonic irony.
I wouldn't have been quite as upset with the switch if they hadn't gone back and redubbed some of the earlier Music episodes with Coulier. That little bit of revisionism really annoyed me as a teenager. I kept a log of what all episodes aired locally in what order, and put an asterisk beside the ones that got redubbed. Wonder what happened to that? I was kinda glad they didn't include those atrocities on the DVD set, though the completist in me now thinks it could have been fun to toggle audio mid-line and see how truly unequal the performances are.
Speaking of my episode log, I began referring to the original voice cast episodes as the "Music Hall" episodes, which I thought was a nice pun. [Likewise, when former RGB voice-turned-talk-show-host Arsenio had Sigourney Weaver on his show one night as a guest, I marked the tape simply "Weaver Hall", as an intentional nod to the fictitious university building at the beginning of GB1.]
Back to Coulier, I had a bad Alanis Morrissette joke here, but I am exercising restraint.
Oh, and the changes to Winston and Janine were slightly irksome to me as well, just not as big a loss as Lorenzo. With Janine, there is at least the episode where they discover that her looks have been changing-- can't recall if they acknowledge the voice too?-- so there's a handy retcon for it. If there had been episodes where they explained the vocal and personality differences to Venkman, I wonder what the explanation would have been? Long-term exposure to ectoplasm?
The trend continues, though. I recently heard that Coulier had taken over voicing duties as Bob McKenzie when Rick Moranis declined to reprise the role. So he's STILL getting jobs because he sounds like the cast of Ghostbusters.
Alex
What a knockabout of pure fun that was!