"— and we sat there listening to fourteen very good men do a truck, and not one of them was the truck," one Los Angeles casting veteran said on Friday, still visibly shaken.
Sources close to the situation say the search for a successor to Peter Cullen has been shelved. Cullen, who died this week aged 85, spent four decades supplying the industry with two registers nobody else could reach: a leader you would follow into a war, and a donkey you would follow into a nap.
Insiders describe the audition tapes as technically flawless and spiritually hollow. Several actors reportedly nailed the gravel. None managed the kindness underneath it, which is apparently the part that sold the toys.
"You can teach gravel. You cannot teach a donkey who has made peace with the weather."
The Montreal-born actor also voiced KARR in Knight Rider and the creature in Predator, a range that industry watchers have long found faintly unreasonable in one throat.
