So Corey Burton reprising his Brainiac chracter on a recent Legion of Super-Heroes was kind of laughable.
He had like 3 lines.
3 lines!!!
He's A-list voice acting talent so I'd love to know how much one gets paid for 3 lines?
I mean, the C-listers who they had to have do Transformers this past summer barely had 10 lines among them all. It really never mattered who did any of the voices other than Optimus and even then I didn't really give a shit. (I'd love some more Neil Kaplan in Transformers.)
I burst out laughing the other day when I read this post at Tformers about Darius McCary reprising Jazz or some such thing.
He add oh so much to that awesomely written film character. I think he said something about "nice planet bitches" and then something right before he died.
Yes. Very important to have just the right actor for that!
What's even funnier about that post is the succeeding comments that ensue about it.
I can't even imagine what actual forum boards are like.
Anyway, I was talking about Brainiac here wasn't it?
So I've been a fan of Brainiac since the 1983 revamp as the metallic robot skeleton with the huge skull ship.
The Silver Age planet shrinking pink and white wearing human-looking bot's time had come.It was one of the best revamps ever, turning him from the green-skinned Coluan creation into an emotionless robot that viewed himself almost in religious terms with Superman as his prophecized destroyer.
Plus... let's face it... his skeletal revamp appearance by the great Gil Kane kicked major ass!
Unfortunately, it only lasted a few years.
The Superman reboot of 1986 wiped the awesome Brainiac from continuity and gave up a really lame new one that never quite did much of anything. Hell, he started out as an Alan Moore-looking circus mentalist possessed by a living Coluan named Brainiac and it kind of all went down hill through the 90s. This modern incarnation has always been pretty lame.
And then, like they've done so many times before, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm created a version of Brainiac closer to his original self, but even more different by tying him into Krypton in Superman: The Animated Series.
And this is where Corey Burton comes in.
Burton provided the most phenomenal cold and cruel emotionless voice for this new Brainiac.
For me, the voice has completely become the character!
This new version of Brainiac was fantastic! Super-mega-balls fantastic!
They thankfully brought him back in Justice League Unlimited and paired in with Clancy Brown's most excellent Lex Luthor in one of the best Brainiac-Luthor team-ups ever!
Anyway, where was I going with this?
Oh. Yeah.
So for Legion of Super-Heroes they've changed the character yet again. He's not tied to Krypton anymore. He's back to being the shinker of the city Kandor, and he's Brainiac 1.0, essentially an earlier model of the Legion's boy-robot Brainiac 5.
It works with the cartoon's continuity and definitely is easier to explain Brainiac 5's existence than the original real Brainiac 5's history.
More on Brainiac here on Wikipedia. Brainiac 5 here.
Yes. Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis made everything so much clearer. *gag*