In a rural and remote corner of Felucia, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka form an uneasy alliance with four deadly bounty hunters to protect a local village from Hondo Ohnaka and his band of pirates. But Hondo – always the opportunist and never willing to play fair – has plans of his own in “Bounty Hunters,” an all-new episode of STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS airing at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT Friday, April 2 on Cartoon Network.

Though he may be unprincipled, corrupt, self-serving and deceitful, Hondo represents a return to classic Star Wars archetypes – including rogues and scoundrels such as Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. These intergalactic icons forged their reputations – within that galaxy far, far away as well as among fans – by playing by their own rules and distorting perceptions of right and wrong.

“People want to be seduced. People like a rascal. People like pirates…sort of, as long as they’re not totally pillaging and wreaking havoc,” says Jim Cummings, the voice of Hondo in The Clone Wars. “There’s a certain fascination we have with these bad guys – bikers, pirates, scoundrels, all the Robin Hoods of the world. And Hondo’s so much fun; I really dig him. He’s not a master villain, but he won’t be growing a halo anytime soon, either. The lovable rogue, the lovable rascal. You don’t mind inviting him over for dinner, but you’d better count the silverware after he leaves.”

Though he tends to cause problems for the Jedi Knights and the heroes of the Republic, Hondo is nonetheless a relatively sympathetic baddie – despite his penchant for double-crossing, cheating, back-stabbing and outright wickedness. Besides, that’s all just part of his charm.

“Hondo’s P.T. Barnum. He’s got a little Charles Bronson in him. He’s Harry Mudd, always glad-handing – and the next thing you know, you’ve lost your watch. He’s a conjurer and a maneuverer, and he gets the job done. If he has to a do a little heavy lifting now and then, so be it – but rather than go the way of the bicep, he prefers to develop a little craft. At the end of the day, when everyone counts their stacks, his will be a little bigger than yours – and you won’t even know how it happened. He’s an opportunist, but if there’s a nickel holding up a dime, he’ll move on. He weighs his results against the effort it takes to get them; if one outweighs the other…NEXT!”

Cummings – whose voice-acting credits run the gamut from Winnie the Pooh (and Tigger, too) to Robot Chicken and comic book superheroes – found himself reveling in the Clone Wars production process, which has allowed him to fully articulate, expand and embellish what might otherwise have remained a mere supporting role in the Star Wars galaxy.

“The process in Clone Wars is so great; I just love it. It’s unique, because there aren’t too many productions that put the whole cast in the room. It’s so rare. Sometimes there’s a production assistant, but they’re just reading the lines off the page – like a robot. But when you have other actors in the room and you’re really working it, you can bounce back and forth. It makes the process what it should be and what it is – which is a live, organic thing. If you can come up with something within the story, which contributes to the story, that’s always welcome. This is gumbo where everyone gets to put in an ingredient. Coming from the theater especially, coming from a million plays – well, it’d be tough to do Okalahoma standing on the stage alone. This is simply so much more rewarding.”

As for honing in on Hondo’s signature voice – that cool and confident combination of snake-oil salesman and hardened mercenary – Cummings looked to the icons of his childhood for inspiration.

“There are indistinct accents that are familiar, to an extent, but still sound foreign – like when Roman centurions have British accents in gladiator movies. It lets the audience know that this is an Other, and yet we can still identify. It’s relatable,” he says. “Coming up with Hondo’s voice, I looked to one guy who had always fascinated me: Yul Brynner. As a kid, I’d think, ‘Where the HECK is this guy from?’ But you could buy him as the King of Siam, or as a cowboy in The Magnificent Seven, or as a robot in Westworld. I don’t do a great impression of Yul Brynner – but if you do a bad impression of someone, it becomes a new voice, a new character. So I just poured a lot of sand on my bad Yul Brynner – for texture – and that’s Hondo. But I don’t try to think about it too much; I always say that instincts are the best-stincts.”

Q: I had the pleasure of interviewing Ray’s animator Mike Surrey a few months back. He said Jim Cummings made his job easy. What made you choose him for Ray? 

John Musker: Jim Cummings was a riot to work with. We have worked with him in the past but what we didn’t know was that he had spent years in New Orleans where he worked alongside Cajuns whose speech patterns he picked up.

Q: Being a Louisiana native, it’s eerie and extremely entertaining how well you got the Cajun character down. Was there a lot of research involved in Raymond and the film as a whole?

John Musker: We wanted to do right by Louisiana and the culture there including the great Cajun populace. John Lasseter really wanted authenticity, so we took several trips down there. We met with a number of people including a man named Reggie who was our bayou tour guide. We noted his speech patterns, and picked up more phrases at jazz Fest. We also did research where we read stories written in a “Cajun” voice and found Cajun glossaries online. Best of all though, we cast Jim Cummings as our firefly. When he auditioned, he did a great Cajun accent and we learned he had a home there for several years and had worked with Cajuns in the Merchant marines. He was able to improvise in his Cajun speak, so he added a lot of flavor to our gumbo.

Long time readers will recognize this video from the article about Jim Cummings selling his house a while back but since Ventura County Star repeated this video with their newest article I figured I would repeat it here in turn. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it the first time, it’s a great interview with Jim doing multiple voices.

“This year I’m going with either Vanessa or Amy,” Cummings said, summing up his competition. “I think folks go down the line and go: ‘Jim Cummings? I don’t really know who that is. Oh, Joan Rivers, Vanessa Williams, I love her; let’s vote for her.’ You can’t fight that. I understand why they do it.” [SOURCE]

This interview delves into his work as Pooh and Tigger touching on the transition from Paul Winchell:

His real breakthrough into lead work came in 1988, when he did his first job as Pooh in Winnie The Pooh Friend-ship: Tigger-ific Tales. As intimated before, Holloway was long gone from this planet, but Paul Winchell was still Tigger at that time. Cummings would first step into the role of Tigger in 1996 with a Pooh Halloween special entitled Boo To You, Too. Things started to get interesting after that.

“I absolutely did know Paul,” says Cummings. “I knew him well during the last years of his life, when he was going back and forth from South Africa, doing research. He was really like Da Vinci. He designed one of the prototypes for one of the first artificial hearts. He was also going back and forth to Africa to try and solve some of the hunger problems there. In fact, how I got the role of Tigger is initially when he would go I would pinch hit for him.”

Indeed. In 1998, on A Winnie The Pooh Thanksgiving special, both Cummings and Winchell are credited on the role of the terrific tiger. By 1999, it was handed over completely to Cummings with The Tigger Movie. From that point on, Cummings would voice both Pooh and Tigger. There’s some controversy over the transition. Rumors said Winchell didn’t take losing the job too well, apparently. Cummings has his own point of view.

“What actually happened is they decided to recast the entire cast,” he says. “They then did some tests and I came in first as Pooh and second on Tigger. Now when Paul was around, he was certainly Tigger. Then in 1999 he apparently decided to retire and I’ve been the voices of Tigger and Pooh since then, full time.”

You can read the article in full here. As always, when the site takes the article down, we’ve kept a copy in our archives.

Some highlights:

On being a little bitter about not being in the Pooh loop:

“You know what? I don’t know what’s in there. They never tell me anything. Honestly, I love Disney, but get a load of this…Winnie the Pooh had his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and they didn’t tell me. I’ve been doing the voice of Winnie the Pooh since 1987 and Disney doesn’t call! As much as you love them, its not like they want to make you the star—they want the character to be the star, which is cool. I understand that. [And] who knows? Maybe they’re afraid I’ll ask for a raise. [Laughs]“

On his favorite characters:

“Pooh, Tigger, Darkwing Duck, Don Karnage from TaleSpin, and there was a great little guy called Mr. Bumpy on an ABC series called Bump in the Night. It’s the stuff that used to get me kicked out of class, now the joke’s on them.”

As always, you can find the whole article in our News archive after the original site takes the story down.

He talks about doing dolphin sounds in the back of his catholic school classroom, his Emmy nomination, having to say about 25,000 names for My Interactive Pooh and his only regret, missing the auditions for The Simpsons because he was sick.

You can find the article in it’s entirety in our archives.

You can read the article in it’s entirety online here. I’ve also moved a copy of the article into the News Archive.

It is a great time to be a JC fan right now as his people do a huge marketing push in advance of the Emmys so expect plenty more where this came from.

One of the local papers in Youngstown, Ohio did a two features on Jim Cummings on Sunday. Youngstown is his hometown, so while there is nothing all that new and earth-shattering in the articles, there are some very nice local touches and pre-fame tidbits.

If you wish to read the articles in their entirety, I have added both to the press section of the site.

• The voice of Tigger and Pooh (the interview)
• JIM CUMMINGS At a glance (a brief biography)

The writing of the articles are a little. . . I don’t want to be too harsh because it doesn’t say if it the author is a local student or something but there are a lot of typos, mistakes and other oddities that you wouldn’t normally see in a more professional piece but it is nice to see him in the news in any form. There are some really nice bits in it so if you can overlook the choppy writing, it is worth a read. 

The best part of the interview?

[Jim Cummings] recalled a shopping trip during which he picked up a Winnie the Pooh greeting card in a store, and went into character for his children. A nearby clerk heard him and squealed, “Oooh, you sound just like him!”

On Wednesday, 24th, June 2009, Jim Cummings was a guest on The Catholics Next Door on Sirus radio.

There is a small clip of him doing station identification on the show’s homepage here.

As always, if I do managed to get any info about what the interview was about or a clip from it, I will post accordingly. If anyone managed to catch the show, please give us an overview in the comments. It would be most appreciated.

If you visit the Cult of Cummings website (for those of you reading in a feed reader), the random quote sidebar spot has been updated to include some of the great quotes from this interview.

One part of the interview I wanted to specifically call your attention to, though, is this part. When asked if he had a favorite character, Jim replied:

I have a brand new favorite for a Disney animated feature coming out next Christmas called The Princess and the Frog. I’m Ray the singing Cajun firefly. New Orleans is my second hometown. I was a deckhand on a riverboat there when I was 18, so I have that Cajun accent down pat. Ray is a lovesick firefly who’s near-sighted and falls in love with the Evening Star. Of course, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger will always be favorites of mine too.

So I think its interesting to note that however large the controversy about The Princess and the Frog‘s firefly may be, Jim Cummings himself is either unaware of it or doesn’t care and still cites the character as a favorite. I think its interesting as well that he says he has the accent down pat when that is what most people were focusing on as being racist. Just confirms my idea that it’s not racist if the name grew up there!

There are also some great little tidbits on how Jim creates a character and about meeting Mark Hamill and working on Comic Book the movie which is worth a look. Overall a great interview, better than most so thanks goes out to the Star Wars team for it!

Honestly, the only time I’ve ever been nervous was while doing
animation. My first time I was in a room with Jim Cummings, Rob Paulsen
and Charlie Adler. I knew I could do the character that I was hired to
do but when the director started asking things like “who can do the
parrot voice, the scientist and the French Chef” I about crapped my
pants. The last thing I wanted was to be in a “voice-off” with these
legends of the animation world. The funny thing is I’m now friends with
those guys (their incredible talents still scare the crap out of me).