"There's No Money In That", part 2

I continue with the tale:

This probably needs a little background, doesn’t it?

With my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s, I was growing in the infancy of the phenomenon known as cable television. Pay channels like HBO were a brand new concept. Not that we had it, of course; it was far more expensive than its local competitor, Prism. But the idea of programming that was accessible beyond the antenna was as awe-inspiring as I imagine watching the Apollo 11 landing had to be for my parents’ generation. The birth of Nickelodeon and MTV, CNN and ESPN… I don’t have to “Love the 80s” on VH1 because I lived it.

My favorites were the cartoons. You know the ones -- those that were based around marketing the toys. GI Joe (yes, with the kung-fu grip), the mighty Transformers and their rather stunted cousins the Go-Bots, He-Man, Voltron… I watched them all. I noticed after some time that I was getting more interested in the credits at the end than the episodes themselves. So I started making a study of who was actually supplying the voices for these heroes and robots in disguise and the gang in the Mystery Machine. Day after day, I mentally tally the names and make notes to myself in one of those legendary marbled composition books you can still get for a dollar even today. I stopped after a month of this for three reasons. Firstly, I had the data I needed for my study. Secondly, I had become concerned that my love for my favorites shows would diminish if I kept going on this path of obsessive over-analyzing. And lastly, my mother told me to, most likely out of concern that a 7-year-old would undertake such a task like a would-be conspiracy theorist.

The results fascinated me. It appeared that only about 12 people were providing the voices for about 85-90% of all the cartoon characters out there. The names of talented people like Jack Angel, Michael Bell, and Casey Kasem danced across my crayon-crafted spreadsheets like the spinning wheels of a slot machine, taunting me with the promise of some big jackpot but never delivering. And then when it seemed I had spent for-EVER trying to make sense of this, the truth hit me: I want their jobs. To be able to work on so much at once must mean that what they do is really, really easy! Low risk, high reward… that’s the life for me.

My grandmother (Grammy, as we knew her) had cooked another fabulous meal for dinner that night. We all parked ourselves in the dining room (yes, we washed our hands, Mom) awaiting the repast comprised of some new way she had discovered to serve chicken. And lo, it was good. And as I polished off a piece of her amazingly gooey chocolate cake for dessert, she turned to me with a bemused smile on her wrinkled face and asked me, “Did you find what you were looking for, Brian?”

“Yep,” I replied triumphantly, “and I even figured out what I want to be when I grow up.”

“And what is that?” Grammy prodded. My mother looked on as she sipped her coffee, curious herself at the answer.

“I’m gonna be an actor,” I declared, my face beaming.