To me, Cree Summer is voice acting royalty. Originally appearing as Penny in Inspector Gadget, she has lent her voice talents to hundreds of cartoons and video games. While I grew up hearing her voice everywhere, it wasn’t until the 90s when I became aware of the person behind the voice.
Cree followed in the footsteps of her father, Don Francks, an on-screen actor who did some voice work in the 80s, including appearing in Inspector Gadget, the Care Bears, and Garbage Pail Kids with her. While he would go back and forth between appearing on camera and recording voice-over, Cree mainly stayed in the studio, with one major exception being in the Cosby Show spin-off series A Different World. Cree is also an accomplished singer, releasing an album called Street Faerie in 1999 and performing a lot of musical numbers in shows like Drawn Together and Codename: Kids Next Door.
In the 90s I learned who she was because of a couple prominent voice roles, and no, Rugrats wasn’t one of them, though I recognized her voice there immediately. The first was Mummies Alive, a cartoon centered on 12-year-old Presley, the reincarnation of Egyptian Prince Rapses XII in the modern time, and his mummy bodyguards who protect him from the evil sorcerer Scarab. Cree Played Nefertina, the only female mummy and a proficient chariot (and later dragster) driver. In the past, she had to hide the fact that she was female from the rest of the mummies, but they discovered the truth in the present. Cree gave her a strong, confident presence, easily able to stand up to her male comrades and stand up for her charge, Presley.
She also had a starring role in a short-lived series called Project G.e.e.K.e.R. as Lady MacBeth, a warrior woman in the future that possesses a cybernetic arm, a huge blonde ponytail on her otherwise bald head, and a ton of purple eyeshadow. Having stolen the artificial being GKR from Moloch Industries with the help of intelligent and ball cap-wearing T Rex Noah, she finds herself stuck taking care of a powerful living weapon with the brain of a child. Lady MacBeth was a bad-ass who didn’t take any crap, with the exception of GeeKeR who did nothing but give it to her with his immature antics.
One thing I loved about Cree was how she could easily play a wide range of heroes and then switch to a psychotic villain, which she did with Gargoyles. Playing Hyena, arguably one of the craziest characters in the entire cartoon, showing up her sadistic brother, Jackal, with her wanton desire for death and destruction. After her cybernetic augmentation, her crazy got even more enjoyable to watch. Her screams and laughs were genuinely freaky in the show and I always got the sense Cree was enjoying her time lashing out as that character. In a show where every voice role was flawlessly cast and performed, she was still a standout.
Of course, I can’t talk about her work without mentioning what is possibly her biggest role. In the Disney movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire from 2003, Cree played Princess Kidagakash, or Kida, opposite Michael J. Fox’s Milo. She’s fiercely loyal to her father and her people, but irresistibly curious about the outsiders visiting her city. She and Milo form a bond sharing about their respective cultures, as she hopes he can find the secret to saving her civilization. Cree’s voice work is top-notch here, perfectly presenting Kida as caring, inquisitive, and willing to do everything to save her people, even if it means sacrificing herself like her mother had done before (also played by Cree in the opening scene of the movie). Cree also had to learn the Atlantean language created for the movie and is arguably the largest speaker of it out of the whole cast, and she made it sound as natural as any other language, while convincingly making her English sound as if she’s just learning it.
Since then, Cree’s been in practically everything, including Transformers: Animated as Blackarachnia and Witch Haggar in Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender. Whenever I watch a new cartoon, hers is one voice I immediately recognize, and her performance is always something that elevates a show, in my opinion. Now, I think I’m going to go back and watch Atlantis for the millionth time. Do you have a favorite voice actor? Whose voice can you always pick out whenever you hear it?
If you love cartoons as much as I do, check out my books Old School Evil and Old School Evil: The Rejects on Amazon, or go to my site www.oldschoolevil.com.
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