SilverHawks · 1986
Voice cast
Sixty-five episodes, a galaxy of heroes and a mob of villains, and seven people in a New York recording booth doing all of it between them. Rankin/Bass ran a repertory company rather than a cast, and once you know that, the show sounds different.
7 actors · 20 named roles · 3 of them worked all three Rankin/Bass shows
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3 shows
Larry Kenney
- Bluegrass
- Poker-Face
- Timestopper
- Moon Stryker
The cowboy pilot with the sonic guitar, and three of the Mob besides. Kenney was Lion-O on ThunderCats and worked all three Rankin/Bass shows, and he is the only one of the seven who had to sing on this one, in character, over a guitar that doubles as a weapon.
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3 shows
Peter Newman
- Quicksilver
- Mumbo-Jumbo
- Flashback
Quicksilver leads the squadron and Mumbo-Jumbo swings for it, and both of them are Newman. He took twenty-five characters across ThunderCats and SilverHawks, often hero and villain in the same session. Nobody treated that as a stunt, because it was how the booth was run: a small company, a fast schedule, and an actor expected to answer himself across a scene.
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3 shows
Earl Hammond
- Mon*Star
One credit on this show and it is the one everybody can still do from memory. Hammond was Mumm-Ra on ThunderCats. The same voice calls down the Moon*Star of Limbo here and the ancient spirits of evil over on the other show, a fortnight apart and in the same room, and both of them land!
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Bob McFadden
- Commander Stargazer
- Steelwill
- Yes-Man
- Buzz-Saw
- Hardware
- Condor
Six roles here and forty across both shows, more than anyone else in the stable. He is the commanding officer, one of the Hart twins, and three of the villains they are sent to arrest. A good deal of any given episode is therefore McFadden arguing with McFadden, and the surprise is how rarely you notice, because Stargazer and Buzz-Saw share nothing but a larynx.
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Maggie Wheeler
- Steelheart
- Melodia
Credited in 1986 under her own name, Maggie Jakobson. She carries every female role in the series, hero and villain both: Steelheart holding the team together, and Melodia trying to take it apart with a keytar. Later, and to a much larger audience, Janice on Friends.
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Doug Preis
- Mo-Lec-U-Lar
- Windhammer
- Hotwing
The shapeshifter, the weather terrorist, and the magician sent in to replace the team they had just captured. Preis worked across both Rankin/Bass shows and tends to get the characters whose gimmick is that they are never quite what they appear to be.
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Pete Cannarozzi
- The Copper Kidd
The Copper Kidd speaks in whistles and tones and nothing else, which makes this the strangest credit on the show and the hardest to fake. Cannarozzi was a musician and sound designer on the Rankin/Bass shows before he was the Kidd, and it shows: the performance is played rather than spoken.
One stable, three skies
One thing to know before you read the role lists. Rankin/Bass credited this cast as a block. The end-credit card reads "Voice Characterizations" and then the names, with no roles attached to any of them, and no official per-character casting for SilverHawks has ever been published. Every attribution below, here and everywhere else on the internet, is fan consensus reached by ear. Most of it is agreed by several independent sources and is very probably right. It is not documentary, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise.
Rankin/Bass made ThunderCats, SilverHawks and TigerSharks out of the same small New York booth, and three of the people above worked all three: Larry Kenney, Peter Newman and Earl Hammond. The economics of syndicated animation in 1986 explain why a studio would do that. What the economics do not explain is how well it works, because a viewer who grew up on both shows is carrying an association the writers never wrote down, and Mon*Star inherits some of his menace from Mumm-Ra whether anyone meant him to or not.
The overlap is not total, and the exceptions are worth naming. Lynne Lipton and Gerrianne Raphael, who carried the female roles on ThunderCats, did not cross over; Maggie Wheeler took every one of them here instead. So the two shows sound like siblings in the male roles and like strangers in the female ones. The odder piece of casting history is that one, and it is not the one anybody remembers, because a shared villain is a better story than a quietly separate half of the ensemble.