🐢Ninja Turtle Power Hour 🍕

It remains to this day one of the most delightfully batsh*t animated sequences I’ve ever voiced, and in honor of my friend and colleague Eric Bauza, I’d like to share it now. A little backstory: for five seasons, Eric and I worked together on the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (he as “Tiger Claw”, and I as “Fishface”), and we reunited on “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” several years later, playing brothers… he as the skeletal “Señor Hueso” (Mr. Bone), and I as “Capitán Piel” (Captain Skin), a mutant pirate made entirely of loose skin. By then Eric and I had also both been serving as official voice doubles for Antonio Banderas for over a decade… alternating on various projects including Puss in Boots, whom he voiced for the Netflix series, while I provided Puss’s voice and motion capture performance for the DreamWorksTV series “Epic Cat Battles with Puss in Boots”, among many other projects. So as an inside industry joke, the TMNT characters of “Señor Hueso” and “Capitán Piel” were written specifically for Eric and me as “dueling Banderases”, both speaking in the similar Banderas-esque accents that Eric and I were well known for. At the end of the episode, the two estranged brothers reunite (quite literally) into one human entity… the impossibly sexy “Don Suave”… whose voice was created by literally melding my voice with Eric’s into one hybrid performance. Like I said, delightfully batsh*t. The sequence was voice-directed by our dear friend Rob Paulsen, with the wonderful Lena Heady (Game of Thrones) as “Big Mama” and Ben Schwartz as “Leo”. Greatness all around. So here it is, one of the wildest animation sessions Eric and I ever recorded together, written just for us. So grateful we got to do this. I’ll always miss you, bud 💚 #EricBauza #TMNT