Frank Welker

Frank Welker’s Six Decades at the Heart of American Animation

Stand-up comedy was the starting point. Growing up in Denver, Colorado, Frank Welker made his first professional moves in 1967, touring the country as an opening act for names like Sonny and Cher and Diana Ross before the world of voice acting quietly pulled him in another direction. A producer’s girlfriend suggested he audition at Hanna-Barbera. He showed up, tried out for Scooby-Doo and Shaggy Rogers, and walked away with Fred Jones instead. That was 1969. The franchise is still running, and Welker has been there for nearly all of it.

Fred Jones, Scooby-Doo, and the Franchise That Defined an Era

When Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! launched in 1969, Welker locked in as Fred Jones – the square-jawed leader of Mystery Inc. – and held that role across more than a dozen separate series and countless specials. In 2002, following the retirement of original Scooby voice Don Messick, Welker took over the title character as well, becoming the sole carrier of both leads. After Casey Kasem’s passing in 2014, he became the last surviving original cast member still working the franchise. In 2020’s Scoob!, he was the only voice actor from the original series in the entire production.

Megatron, Soundwave, and the Transformers Legacy

When Hasbro and Sunbow launched The Transformers in 1984, Welker stepped into a role that would follow him for decades: Megatron, commander of the Decepticons. He also populated the show with Soundwave, Skywarp, Rumble, Frenzy, Ravage, Buzzsaw, and others – voicing eight of the original fourteen Decepticons alone. After the 1986 animated film passed Galvatron to Leonard Nimoy, Welker eventually inherited that character too in the post-film seasons. He returned to Megatron for Transformers: Prime, Transformers: The Last Knight, and the video game Transformers: Devastation, cementing a run with the character that now spans four decades.

Creature Sounds, Animal Voices, and an Uncredited Résumé

A large portion of Welker’s career exists in the gaps between credits. He provided Stripe and the Mogwai ensemble in Gremlins, the capuchin monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Abu and the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin, demonic vocal effects in The Witches of Eastwick, and animal sounds in productions too numerous to catalog. This category of work – unnamed, unsung, and often uncredited – runs through decades of North American cinema and television. He voiced Dr. Claw in Inspector Gadget, Slimer in The Real Ghostbusters, Baby Kermit in Muppet Babies, and Curious George in the Emmy-winning animated series of the same name.

Garfield, Futurama, and Later-Career Milestones

Taking over as the voice of Garfield in 2007 following the death of Lorenzo Music, Welker brought the lasagna-loving cat into The Garfield Show and subsequent productions, maintaining the character’s sardonic drawl without disrupting audience familiarity. On Futurama, he supplied Nibbler and various creature vocalizations across the show’s multiple runs. On The Simpsons, he voiced the family pets Santa’s Little Helper and Snowball II. Each of these represented a different facet of what he does best – character voices that sit inside a performance rather than announcing themselves.

The Numbers Behind the Name

By 2021, Welker’s credit count had passed 860 across film, television, and video games. The cumulative box office gross of films he has appeared in reached $17.4 billion, placing him among the highest-grossing performers in Hollywood history by that metric. In 2016, the Television Academy honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award – a recognition of a body of work that most audiences experienced without ever connecting it to a face. He was nominated again for a Children’s and Family Emmy for Outstanding Voice Performance in an Animated Program in 2022.