Rob Paulsen

• 1. Introduction

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  Rob Paulsen's most famous moment may have happened before most people knew his name. In 1993, a radio announcer asks a desperate question about Alexander Hamilton's duel, fumbles for the answer, and cannot call because his mouth is full of peanut butter. That single commercial launched the Got Milk? campaign into a cultural institution, and the voice behind it belonged to a kid from Grand Blanc, Michigan, who had once dreamed of playing in the National Hockey League.

  Robert Frederick Paulsen III was born in Detroit on the 11th of March, 1956. He grew up idolizing Gordie Howe, not cartoon characters. Acting and singing were backup plans. Yet by the time Paulsen moved to Los Angeles in 1978, he would spend the next four decades becoming one of the most prolific voice actors in American animation, eventually winning a Daytime Emmy Award and three Annie Awards, and lending his voice to two different Ninja Turtles across two different eras of the franchise.

• 2. From Detroit to Hollywood

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  Grand Blanc High School graduated Rob Paulsen in 1974, and for several years after that, the future of his career remained genuinely uncertain. He briefly attended the University of Michigan-Flint, but dropped out and moved to Los Angeles in 1978, a decision his father, a doctor, openly disapproved of. His father wanted him in a more conventional field.

  Paulsen's earliest professional work was as a musician before he pivoted fully to voice acting. His first voice role came in 1983 with the animated mini-series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, where he played Snow Job and Tripwire. That same year, he also appeared in his first live-action film, Eyes of Fire. For much of the 1980s, Paulsen moved between worlds: he appeared in Body Double, Stewardess School, Warlock, and Mutant on the Bounty, and turned up on television in MacGyver and St. Elsewhere.

  But the voice work kept growing. By the mid-1980s he was adding Corky on The Snorks, Marco Smurf on The Smurfs, Boober in Fraggle Rock, and Hadji in The New Adventures of Jonny Quest to his credits. The advertising world was pulling at him too. He became the announcer for the sitcom Cheers, then moved into commercial spots for Honda, Buffalo Dick's Radio Ranch, and Lucky Stores, a West Coast grocery chain later acquired by Albertsons in 1998.

• 3. A Turtle Named Raphael

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  From 1987 to 1995, Paulsen voiced Raphael in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, a show that started as a five-part mini-series and ran for ten seasons and 193 episodes. Paulsen has said that Raphael's voice is very similar to his natural speaking voice, which made the role feel less like a performance and more like a conversation he was having with himself.

  The franchise would define Paulsen's career in ways that extended well past that original run. When Nickelodeon launched a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series on the 29th of September, 2012, Paulsen returned, this time as Donatello rather than Raphael. That series ran for five seasons and 124 episodes, concluding on the 12th of November, 2017. During the crossover episodes that brought the two eras together, Paulsen voiced the 1987 version of Raphael alongside his current role as Donatello. He later served as voice director for the subsequent series, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which premiered in July 2018.

• 4. Animaniacs and the Annie Years

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  In 1993, Paulsen took on the role of Yakko Warner in Animaniacs, the Warner Bros. animated series that became a defining work of that decade's television animation. He also voiced Pinky, the good-natured but dim-witted lab mouse from the companion series Pinky and the Brain. Performing both characters in the same franchise required him to hold two very different vocal registers simultaneously in the recording booth.

  The awards followed. Paulsen was nominated for an Annie Award for his role as Pinky for four consecutive years, winning in 1996, 1997, and 1999. In that same year of 1999, he also won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program for voicing Pinky. A nomination in 2004 came for his role as the Troubadour in Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, and another in 2005 for The Happy Elf. At the 2nd Children's and Family Emmy Awards in 2023, he received a nomination for Outstanding Voice Performance in an Animated Program for his return to Animaniacs.

  That revival ran for three seasons on Hulu from 2020 to 2023, with Paulsen reprising Yakko and Pinky across all three. At convention appearances, audiences frequently ask him to perform Yakko's World, the number in which Paulsen, using Yakko's voice, sings the names of every nation on earth at speed, without rehearsing.

• 5. Advertising and the Got Milk Question

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  Long before he had a Daytime Emmy on the shelf, Paulsen was making his living partly through commercial voice work. He had been the announcer for Cheers during the 1980s and built steady work as a spokesman and character voice across radio and television advertising.

  The role that changed things came in 1993 with the first commercial in the Got Milk? campaign. The spot posed the question: who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel? The punch line was a man who knows the answer but cannot speak clearly because his mouth is packed with peanut butter. Paulsen played the voice in that radio spot, and the campaign went on to become one of the most recognized in American advertising history.

  He later provided the voice of Dog in Taco Bell kids meal commercials from 1996 to mid-1997, working alongside Eddie Deezen, who played the cat named Nacho. The Honda character Mr. Opportunity, heard on television and radio, was another long-running Paulsen role. He can currently be heard as the voice of a singing Mr. Mini-Wheat in Mini-Wheats commercials in Canada.

• 6. Video Games and Broader Range

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  Paulsen's voice work extended well beyond Saturday morning animation. In video games, he played Gray Fox in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and reprised the role as an Assist Trophy in both Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. He voiced a floating skull named Morte in the role-playing game Planescape: Torment and Anomen Delryn in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn.

  He also played the lead character in Ghosthunter, a PS2 game where he voiced a character named Lazarus Jones. His character list in video games alone spans dozens of titles, from Doom 3 to Final Fantasy X-2, where he voiced Tobli and Lian Ronso in the English version, to God of War, where he provided the voices of Greek soldiers in what he acknowledged as an extremely minor role.

  In Disney's Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, developed with Square Enix, he voiced Jaq and the Grand Duke from the Cinderella world. For The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, he played Alfredo Fettuccini, Bob the Ghost Pirate, and the Lookout, roles he later reprised in the sequel Return to Monkey Island.

• 7. Personal Life and Cancer

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  Paulsen married his first wife, Carol Anne Schnarr, on the 23rd of June, 1979. They divorced in 1982. The following year, he married his second wife, photographer Parrish Todd. They have a son together and live in Agoura Hills, California.

  In February 2016, Paulsen was diagnosed with stage III throat cancer, a diagnosis with particular weight for a man whose entire livelihood depends on his voice. He underwent treatment and his cancer went into remission. After recovering, he wrote a memoir called Voice Lessons: How a Couple of Ninja Turtles, Pinky, and an Animaniac Saved My Life, describing what the experience meant to him.

  Paulsen has long supported charitable causes, including GOALmodels, a program aimed at adolescents, and Camp Will-A-Way, a camp for children with developmental disabilities. He donates funds from autograph signings to both the Wounded Warrior Project and Operation Smith. His Talkin' Toons with Rob Paulsen podcast, which he launched in May 2011 with web producer Chris Pope, recorded episodes before live audiences at The Improv in Hollywood and later at the Nerdist Showroom. The podcast's final episode before going on indefinite hiatus aired on the 23rd of March, 2019, with Dante Basco as the guest.