#darwin thornberry

[artbyjasonleung]

Darwin from The Wild Thornberrys 🙈

[theanimationalley]

[hitchell-mope]

Fun show. Fun ending.

[yen-sids-tournament]

Darwin v Binyah Binyah v Cerberus

Darwin

Animal: Chimpanzee

Person: Eliza Thornberry

Media: The Wild Thornberrys

Binyah Binyah

Animal: Frog

Person: The Alston Family

Media: Gullah Gullah Island

Cerberus

Animal: Hellhound

Person: Hades/Zagreus

Media: Hades

[teenageoaffireknight]

tom kane

april 15, 1962

4/15/62

magento-wolverine and the x-men

yoda-the clone wars

darwin-the wild thornberrys

[incorrect90snicktoonquotes]

Darwin: We can't do it. Eliza: We can do it, we will do it, and we are doing it. Does that answer your question?

[fuzzychildchopshop]

Nick Trios 5 by AfroOtaku917

[the-badger-mole]

This isn't me trying to defend Aang this is me trying to continue the conversation, one thing that comes to mind as heroic/altruistic was The Great Divide episode where Aang came up with that story that ended a generations long feud between those two tribes

See, The Great Divide is one of the episodes that made me really not like Aang. To me, it wasn't him being anything other than lazy. Here's the thing, the show sets Aang up as this wise-beyond-his-years hero who's going to lead the world on into peace, but all it showed me was that he's a bad leader. He sucks at conflict resolution. His one job. That "peace" he left those two groups in absolutely did not last because, petty as they were, they had generations' long issues with each other, and those types of prejudices don't just go away because someone comes by with a cute story.

It's been a while, but I've said it before that this could have been Aang's moment to shine. In fact, another Nickelodeon show had done something similar a couple of years earlier. Only when Eliza was faced with the same situation on The Wild Thornberrys, she actually did come up with a wise solution to prove that their prejudices were baseless. She took away the means that the monkeys used to discriminate one another, and showed them that they weren't that different after all. She and Darwin went through a similar arc as Katara and Sokka where they took sides and it came between them, but they remembered that they cared about each other and came up with a solution together.

The writers of ATLA had a chance to do something similar, and to prove that Aang was actually wise, instead of just telling us he is. OR they had the chance to have Aang acknowledge his failure, and give him a motive to grow and listen to smarter people, and learn to be the leader he's "destined to be". Instead they proved that he is only willing to help as far as it doesn't inconvenience him too much. That he's not above lying to get his way. That he doesn't care to understand the deeper issues between groups.

All of this is totally forgivable in an IRL child. That's a lot to put on a kid IRL. The problem is Aang isn't a child. He's the protagonist of a story where he is meant to be the messiah of that world. A story where people keep talking about how smart and wise and kind he is, but we never actually see him be any of those things. I for one refuse to give him credit just because the story says I should. Not when the rest of the team is right there being the heroes that world really needed.

[evermorehqs]

CATCHING MY BREATH, STARING OUT AN OPEN WINDOW

Morgan Neuer is based on Morph from Treasure Planet. She is a 29 year old shapeshifter, podcaster, and uses she/they pronouns. They have the power of shifting. Morgan is portrayed by Megan Stalter and she is taken.

CATCHING MY DEATH, AND I COULDN’T BE SURE

There are times in life when people feel like they're being molded and formed into whatever the people around them want them to be - for Morgan, that was quite literal. An amorphous blob for more time than she'd care to admit, Morgan spent a lot of her time stirring up trouble and getting away with it because she could. It was easy to infiltrate conversations or situations and run away without having to worry about the consequences. Until she met John Silver. There was something about him that felt right, something that made her feel like they belonged (for better or for worse). He was a troublemaker at heart, just like them, and he let her get away with whatever she wanted just as long as she always listened to him. It was a nice existence until she got wise to the fact that he wasn't exactly what she thought he was. A wake up call. Morgan might have liked causing trouble and getting into things she shouldn't, but at their core, she had a good heart. Hurting people wasn't something she signed up for. It was hard after so many years, enough that they'd lost track of the exact amount, for her to stand up to her boss and confidant, but it had to happen. Adventuring with Jim came naturally, it was a breath of fresh air. They got into all kinds of mischief but even Morgan didn't see Evermore coming. By the time they were wise to the weird vibe of the town, it was too late! Trapped once again and this time, well, this time something even more bizarre happened. Morgan was no longer a blob but stuck as a human - they didn't love that but it did make it easy to fit in! Now that she couldn't wander the stars and create cute and fun chaos, she had to settle for creating harmless trouble in Evermore. She could still shift, thankfully, but nothing as insane as she used to get away with, and she used that to help Jim out in trying to get out of this place. The two were constantly on the job and when she wasn't trying to find a way out, she was behind a microphone stirring up trouble in whatever (legal) way she could. Where was the harm in spreading some gossip or posing hypotheticals that might shake things up? At the end of the day, Morgan wants to have fun and all the little tricks and pranks are harmless...probably.

I HAD A FEELING SO PECULIAR

❀ Mona Aguilar: Podcasting has become a great way for Morgan to get her mischief out there and she likes seeing what other podcasters are doing - specifically Mona ❀ Darwin Thornberry: Darwin has always been someone Morgan finds to be rather stuck-up and put together, which means they find particular joy out of trying to rile him up ❀ Tyler Toivonen: Outside of Jim, Tyler is easily the person Morgan has the most fun with. He's got energy for days and never says no to getting into some trouble

THAT THIS PAIN WOULD BE FOR EVERMORE

[crossover-enthusiast]

Jerry sounds like Spike from that one The thornberries/rugrats movie

I actually loved that movie as a kid, hah

I vaguely can recollect what he sounds like- did he have an accent or am I thinking of Darwin

[thirst2]

I've got polls‽

[hitchell-mope]

Oh lord.

[clonewarsarchives]

VOICE OF THE FORCE (#110, JUL 2009)

Yoda—the ultimate Jedi Master, a character known and loved throughout the world, whose voice was created by one of the most legendary puppeteers and voice actors of all time. You’d think that taking over the character from Frank Oz would be such a daunting and difficult assignment that it would be all one performer could handle.

But not when that performer is Tom Kane, one of the top voice-over artists working today, and the man who has given voice to some of the most memorable and iconic animated characters of the last dozen years. In fact, Yoda is merely the most prominent of a seemingly endless stream of Star Wars roles Kane continues to tackle. A born mimic, Kane even admitted he dedicated no time to preparing for the powerful role—other than the years he’d spent as a devoted Star Wars fan.

“The Yoda thing just kind of happened,” Kane tells Star Wars Insider, explaining that he was already in a recording studio playing another character for a LucasArts video game. “I’m a Star Wars nerd,” he says, “so I would sit there looking through the script, and I would try to do my best Grand Moff Tarkin or Boba Fett or whoever. I was goofing around one day, and saw some Yoda lines, so of course I was trying to do my very best Yoda, and the producer looked up and said, ‘Can you do that again?’

“What I didn’t know,” he continues, “was that Frank Oz was very busy at that point because he had become a very successful director. So they played my Yoda for George Lucas and got approval, and suddenly I found myself doing Yoda for videogames, and that led to toys and commercials. When it came time to do Star Wars: The Clone Wars, somebody up north said, ‘We’re just going to use Tom.’”

CAST OF CHARACTERS

By that point, of course, George Lucas and his team had good reason to be confident in Kane’s formidable abilities. He’d already played Yoda in several LucasArts games, such as Jedi Power Battles, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, Super Bombad Racing, Jedi Starfighter, Star Wars: Battlefront I and II, and videogame adaptation of Revenge of the Sith, among many others. Most memorably of all, Kane voiced the sage Jedi Master in The Clone Wars micro-series that ran on Cartoon Network from 2003 to 2005.

Kane’s Yoda voice—confident, resonant, and true to Oz’s original vision—is the culmination of a saga that began with Kane’s work on the early LucasArts title, The Dig. That success led to Kane’s entry into the Star Wars universe, where he has provided voices for nearly every videogame the company has ever created. Kane started out playing random stormtroopers and Imperial officers before going on to tackle more familiar characters like Lobot, Admiral Ackbar, C-3PO, Nien Nunb, Bib Fortuna, and even those three characters he used to impersonate during his goof-off breaks: Boba Fett, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Yoda.

Indeed, it was Kane’s success in the videogame world that led to the next step, about which he’d always dreamed: animation. That dream has come true many times over, with Kane having voiced unforgettable characters like Professor Utonium and the villainous Him on The Powerpuff Girls, Darwin the chimpanzee of The Wild Thornberrys, Mr. Herriman on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Lord Monkey Fist of Kim Possible, and Magneto on Wolverine and the X-Men. He also lent his many voices to such ’toons as Duck Dodgers, Shrek the Third, and late 1990s animated series starring Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the Incredible Hulk—not to mention his continued videogame voice work, which has included Gandalf for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Commissioner Gordon in the Batman game, Arkham Asylum.

PHONING IT IN!

Yet the scope of Kane’s work is so wide that all of those famous characters are just a small slice of it.

In fact, if you’ve turned on your TV or radio today, chances are you’ve already heard him. Kane works every day—which is virtually unheard of among voice performers —and the vast majority of his work is as an announcer, voicing everything from promotional spots for TV crime dramas to the trailers for Monsters vs. Aliens. He’s been the official voice of the Academy Awards a few times, and he’s done so many commercials and movie trailers, he’s lost count. On the day Star Wars Insider caught up with him, Kane was between recording sessions, one as an announcer for CBS promos and the other for a character on Adult Swim’s The Boondocks.

He does it nearly all from a home studio in Kansas City, his hometown that he returned to in 2005 with his wife and six children after 20 years in Los Angeles. Kane is now so in-demand that he can literally “phone it in,” recording his voice over a high-bandwidth ISDN line that connects him to the Los Angeles studios where the directors sit. “I grew up here, and my wife and I met at the University of Kansas,” Kane says. “Our families are here on both sides, and we wanted to let the kids get to know their grandparents.”

Growing up just outside of Kansas City, where he was born in 1962, Kane never expected to be working on major Hollywood projects, but he did have a talent for mimicry and voices from an early age, a skill he started to develop in the local media.

“My mom tells me that when I was three years of age, my grandfather would be watching the football game and cussing at the television in German, and I would just repeat what Grandpa said. He would laugh and say, ‘Ya, the kid’s got a pretty good German accent.’ I used to embarrass the heck out of my sister in the grocery store, because we’d be in the cereal aisle and I’d go, ‘Frosted Flakes, they’re grrrrrrreat!’” [It should be noted that Kane said that last part in a perfect Tony the Tiger voice.]

Young Tom soon discovered he could do almost any voice he heard—and he loved doing it. By the time he was 15, he was confident enough to start cold-calling local advertisers, offering his services as an announcer.

“The local commercials were horrendously bad,” he recalls, “and I just thought it would be fun to hear myself on TV. It didn’t occur to me that anybody got paid for it. Most turned me away, but I got a call back from the American Cancer Society’s ad agency. I had called, basically saying, ‘Your Public Service Announcement sounds like you put the microphone in front of the receptionist.’ I was a teenager and had no tact, but it turns out that’s exactly what had happened. They called me up and said, ‘We understand you’re willing to donate your time.’

“I was 15 years old, but I sounded like an adult on the phone,” he continues. “I had to have my dad drive me to the studio, and of course, they walked up to him. He said, “No,” and pointed at this pimply-faced teenager. The poor producer had to explain to his boss that this 15-year-old kid was the one he hired!”

The producers were even more skeptical when the “pimply teen” offered to read the script, “like the old man from the Pepperidge Farms commercials,” he said, but their attitudes changed when the young upstart delivered a perfect, Wilford Brimley-esque performance in one take. “I wasn’t trying to show off,” he confesses. “I just thought it would be fun.” Three days later, the same ad agency hired him to voice a cowboy in five more TV ads.

“By the time I went to college, I’d done probably a hundred commercials,” Kane said, “and by the time I got out of college, I’d done several hundred. But I always wanted to do cartoons, and there’s only one place those exist, and that’s Los Angeles. So we made our way out there around 1985, and I was tremendously successful in every other aspect of voice-over work very quickly. But I couldn’t get arrested when it came to cartoons. I auditioned and auditioned, and I think I was there for six years before I started landing anything. I’d really almost given up.”

A LIFE CHANGING MOVIE!

It turned out that Kane’s break came out of another passion from his formative years in Kansas—his love of Star Wars. “It was the last day of school in the ninth grade when Star Wars came out in 1977,” he recalls, “and the world changed for me that day. Within 10 seconds, when that Star Destroyer came overhead, I just sat there with my mouth hanging open, going, ‘Whoa!’ I think I saw the movie 12 times. I took my mom, and then I took my grandmother. She said, ‘Oh honey, I don’t watch those types of movies,’ and I said, ‘Grandma, you will love this,’ and she did. When the other movies came out over the next several years, she went and saw them.”

So Kane was thrilled when he finally got a job doing character voices for LucasArts. “Then the first time they hired me to do something for Star Wars,” he said, “I sat there sort of just shaking my head, because to be a fan and find myself sitting in front of a script with the words Star Wars on it, and characters that I knew and loved, and here I am working for a guy that had an office up at Lucasfilm ... I’m sitting there thinking, ‘How did this happen?”

It happened because Kane could seemingly do any voice in the Star Wars universe, as he proved over the course of the last dozen years doing voices for videogames, from classic voices heard in the Star Wars movies to brand new characters. Some of those new characters were still familiar, posing an even greater challenge. Kane had to come up with the first-ever voice for previously-silent Lando-sidekick Lobot, as well as the sound of Vandar Tokare, one of only two other known members of Yoda’s species, who soon returns in a new multi-player online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

“We had to come up with a voice for him,” Kane says. “So we ended up basically doing Yoda but then I changed it slightly, and the thing we did to make it completely different is that he doesn’t speak in ‘Yodese,’ he doesn’t flop his words.”

As time went by, Kane became entrusted with more major roles, such as filling in for Anthony Daniels as C-3PO for some games. “It’s his voice,” Kane insists. “I’m just caretaking it occasionally when he doesn’t want to do the job or isn’t available.”

In contrast, Kane has pretty much inherited Yoda from Frank Oz, who originated the part in the Star Wars feature films but hasn’t performed it since Episode III. Those are not small shoes to fill. Oz, who began his career as a puppeteer with Jim Henson’s Muppets, has created and performed the voices for some of the most treasured characters in our culture, including Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, Grover, and Bert, and The Muppet Show’s Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Animal, among many others. Oz’s Yoda captured the world’s imagination since his first appearance in The Empire Strikes Back, could any actor even come close to that standard?

YODA THE ICON!

Kane admits that even though he had George Lucas’ full confidence, the magnitude of the character can be a little intimidating.

“I look at it not just as a cool gig, which it is,” he said, “but it is such an honor to be entrusted with something that iconic, with a voice that’s known to the world. James Arnold Taylor, who is [the voice of] Obi-Wan, is now Fred Flintstone, and something we talk about is how honored we are to be caretaking these characters and their voices. It’s not something we created, so even though it may become ours, it’s on loan. I may be Yoda for another couple years or another 20 years, it’s up to George, but for as long as it lasts, I’m just trying to do it the justice that it warrants and hope everyone’s happy with it.”

So far, so good. Kane not only continues to play Yoda, but is expanding his Star Wars repertoire with still more characters. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Kane also voices Admiral Wullf Yularen and provides the opening narration at the start of each episode.

Still, there is one Star Wars character Kane has said he could never play. “I would love to do Darth Vader, but he’s so hard to do,” the actor admits. ‘There is a quality to James Earl Jones’ voice that is just impossible to duplicate. My Vader is OK for a line or two, but it’s not going to fly for any length of time.”

YODA IS NUMBER ONE!

No worries, since there’s no shortage of work for Tom Kane, both inside and out of the Star Wars universe. “I like Professor Utonium,” he says of his Powerpuff Girls alter ego. “He’s one of the favorite characters that I’ve done because he’s a dad and I’m a dad, so I got to put a bit of myself into that role. I think cartoons are always going to be nearest and dearest to my heart, because they’re fun to do, and they mean something to my kids.”

Still, Kane makes it clear that, “Yoda has to be number one. Anytime it’s a character who was important in the films, that would just add a little extra weight to me emotionally, because as soon as I hear the words and hear the voice—even if it’s me doing it—it brings back the joy at seeing the movies.”

Perhaps one day, some voice-over actor of the future will be taking over the role of Professor Utonium, or Darwin, or even Yoda—and when that day comes, we will all be wondering and hoping: Can this guy really do justice to the voice mastery of the one and only Tom Kane?

FROM ACKBAR TO YULAREN TOM KANE’S 11 GREATEST STAR WARS VOICES

Admiral Ackbar (Star Wars: Battlefront)

Bib Fortuna (Star Wars: Demolition)

Boba Fett (Star Wars: Demolition, Galactic Battleground and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy)

Leebo (Shadows of the Empire)

Lobot (Star Wars: Demolition)

General Madine (Rogue Squadron series)

Narrator (Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

Nien Nunb (Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance)

Vandar Tokare (Knights of the Old Republic)

Yoda (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the movie and animated series; Star Wars: Clone Wars, the micro-series; and various games and toys)

Wullf Yularen (Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

BEYOND STAR WARS TOM KANE’S ANIMATION AND VOICE-OVER LEGACY

These are just a few selected characters from Tom Kann extensive voice-ograhy:

H.O.M.E.R., Iron Man (1995-96)

Dr. Doom, Spider-Man (1997)

Dante, Team Knight Rider (1997-98)

Berry, Johnny Bravo (1997-2000)

Professor Utonium/Him, The Powerpuff Girls (1998-2005)

Darwin, The Wild Thornberrys (1998-2002)

Greco, Heavy Gear: The Animated Series (2001)

Gandalf, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (videogame) (2002)

Lord Monkey Fist, Kim Possible (2002-2007)

Various Characters, Duck Dodgers (2003-2005)

Dean Cain, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius (2005)

Ultimos, Ben 10 (2006)

Guard, Shrek The Third (2007)

Mr. Herriman, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (2004-2008)

Magneto, Wolverine and the X-Men (2008-2009)

Commissioner Gordon, Batman: Arkham Asylum (videogame) (2009)

[highly-important]

Completely stupid and useless conspiracy theory about Wild Thornberrys

Dr Doolittle is from a series of books from the 1920s to 1950s. A physician who can speak to animals. It is the template for characters who speak to animals.

The photo is Eddie Murphy as the title character in the 1998 Dr Doolittle movie which I think is the version of the people are more familiar with. In the books, Doolittle becomes a naturalist, and in the ‘98 movie, Doolittle starts off as someone who dislikes animals but being able to speak to them changes him.

Eliza Doolittle from the play “My Fair Lady”, here portrayed by Audrey Hepburn in the 1964 film.

Eliza is a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from Henry Higgins, a phonetician, who is trying to pass her off as a duchess. A major theme is how manners of speech determine class and standing as well as economic opportunity. Hierarchal societies believe that there is an innate and intrinsic difference between people of different classes, and the experiment in the story attempts to show these differences are learned behaviors.

Eliza Thornberry from the Wild Thornberrys. She talks to animals, so she can’t escape being a reference to Dr. Doolittle.

But I think she’s also named after Eliza Doolittle?

Which doesn’t really make sense. Maybe it’s just word association, maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe the curtains are just blue. The only real commonality is name Doolittle. But I think the choice is intentional, I’m going to make the argument that there is a connection between the three.

There is a belief in western cultures that humans are innately different from animals. If humans are separate from animals it means that humans can claim moral respect that animals don’t deserve. Humans see themselves as immortal beings created in the image of God, while animals are just physical organisms, no internality just instincts. Animals are seen as living meaninglessly and dying purposelessly. This connects to how we treat animals, as well as the larger environment. If we are separate from nature we don’t owe nature anything, and nature is there for us to consume.

And this connects to class as well, and the way society dehumanizes minoritized people. Making distinctions between humans and animals can then be used to make connections between different humans. White supremacy holds the idea that some humans are self-conscious and rational, while others are driven by animal desires. This pseudoscientific justification is used to treat other humans as less than because of a perceived or imagined proximity to animals. “Brutes,” “beasts,” “savages”, and the entire myth of racism, all used to separate us from animals, us from one another, and then us from ourselves.

This is a still from Disney’s 1943 short, “Reason and Emotion.”

Within this culture, our purpose is believed to be constraining our desires with rationality and purifying ourselves of animality. This flows into our scientific understanding as well, like Freud’s separation of id and ego, or the neurological distinction between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Both attempts to separate the human self from the animal self.

Wild Thornberrys explores these themes with the characters of Donnie and Darwin. Donnie had educated parents, but after their deaths was raised by animals. He is socialized as an animal. (I think this also challenges some supremacist ideas about whiteness and it’s proximity from animals.) Darwin the chimpanzee speaks with a refined upper-class British accent, and would prefer to live in the human world than the wild. In this case, the behaviors of the upper-class Anglo culture are employed to try and separate oneself from one’s own animal biology. These characters question the rationalities we use to justify separating humans from animals.

So anyway, If Eliza can talk to animals, it means animals have sentience and internality and aren’t simply mindless organisms acting on instinct. This challenges the cultural assumption we have that humans are above and separate from animals. Much like My Fair Lady, this is about breaking down hierarchal class distinctions and raising difficult questions about how society treats lower class individuals. We use these distinctions to justify our treatments of animals, the environment, and how we treat minoritized or lower-class individuals. Communication gives way to empathy and appreciation.

I am not trying to argue that this was a conscious or intentional decision, I don’t have the information to make the argument. It’s just something to think about.