One of the great joys of writing about people who did voice acting in the ‘80s is finding their work in shows I’d either forgotten existed or didn’t know about in the first place. In this case, in addition to the fond nostalgia of “Oh, I’d forgotten about Rose Petal Place” and the bewilderment of “there’s a thing called The Adventures of Ronald McDonald: McTreasure Island?” there is the joy of once again discovering someone who was involved in Wildfire, a cartoon I loved that apparently no one else has ever heard of, much less seen. I watched that show faithfully for all thirteen episodes in 1986, and Susan Blu played a friend of the title character—a magic horse. What can I say; I was nine.
Really, if you were watching cartoons in the ‘80s, you heard the voice of Susan Blu. Oh, sure, she did some live action acting; she did an episode of St. Elsewhere, even, and therefore is in the Tommy Westphall Universe. But her most notable role is that of Stormer on Jem and the Holograms. And now every Gen-X woman who reads this column has said, “Oh!” as they heard her voice in their head, because Stormer was one of the Misfits, and believe me I could go on at great length about Jem lore. Perhaps another time.
I was trying to explain who she is to my partner, and he is less familiar with Jem than I am and unaware of Wildfire entirely. (Well, so is everyone else.) And the fact is, she did a ton of shows where she was one character on an episode, or three characters on three different episodes, or a handful of characters on fewer episodes than she did characters. As far as her actual work goes, she just has that sort of career. There are multiple episodes of the ‘80s Transformers cartoon where she was more than one character, and she did twenty episodes of My Little Pony ‘n Friends, doing at least two voices for probably a dozen of them.
In 1989, there was a show called Tugs. I haven’t seen it, but it seems to be “what if Thomas the Tank Engine but boats?” Blu did one episode as “Sally Seaplane,” but more importantly, that was the first show where she took on voice directing. At least if IMDb can be trusted [insert grumble about incompleteness of IMDb here]. There has been considerable overlap between the two jobs; she’s frequently on at least one episode of the shows she’s directing. But through the ‘90s and into more recent years, she’s got over a hundred voice directing credits.
Look, I’m never going to sing the praises of Special Agent Oso, one of the shows she’s worked on, but the voice direction is not the worst part of it. It’s perfectly passable Children’s Educational Cartoon voice directing. And Jenny Nicholson could certainly tell you more than I about her work on the Land Before Time movies. Still, she’s working behind the scenes in an important job, doing work that doesn’t get noticed, and that’s what we’re all about around here. Reminding you that people like that exist and celebrating their work.
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