Floyd: Alright, welcome to episode eight of the Dengus and Dengus podcast. I'm Floyd. And we have a super special guest for the two month episode, ⁓ Victor Corolle, who ⁓ you might not recognize his face, and you may recognize his name, but you'll definitely recognize his voice.
Matt: I'm Matt.
Victor Caroli: It is the year 2005. ⁓
Floyd: that. You know what's funny is that I say that all the time when I get new tech in the house or we got an RV and there's like a little monitor in it like a computer monitor thing, and I pushed the buttons on my wife's like, Well, that's really high tech. And I said, It's the 2005. So that still sounds like a super futuristic time to me in my mind, but 2005 was quite a while ago now.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people that were walking around weren't born in 2005.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Floyd: That's true, that's true. So, can...
Victor Caroli: You can actually drink now, as you were born.
Floyd: Yeah, if you're born in 2005, you can go to the bar tonight. But yeah, so, know, Matt and I, we grew up on shows like Transformers and GI Joe and Thundercats and all that kind of stuff and, you know, all these action adventure things. And then again, with Transformers, the movie, and, you know, when Transformers was on, it was a different time. like you mentioned, in 2005, you know, we say that year because people that aren't familiar maybe in Transformers, that movie took place in the year 2005. was nowhere near 2005 when that film came out.
Victor Caroli: We made it in 1986, yeah.
Matt: 1986.
Floyd: But so when that was done, TV was not like it is now. So now you can stream episodes of things and download it, watch whenever you want. But in Transformers, ⁓ it would cut to commercial. And you would always hear Vic's voice saying, we'll return to the Transformers. And that was your time to go get something out of the kitchen or hit the bathroom. And then you'd hear his voice again. And you'd come running back to the TV to not miss anything. So your voice is ingrained in our brains.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, people tell me that. I've been to a couple of conventions. the thing that's remarkable. First of all, the evolution of this whole thing started in probably about 1982. There was an audition at an advertising agency in New York. Griffin McCall. It was an audition for a toy. So I went to the audition, and I won the audition. And it turned out to be one of these transforming toys. And several weeks later, my agent called me and said, that toy is selling pretty well, and they want to do more commercials for that toy. Okay, so I went and did more commercials for the Joy and the Joy was selling really well. Now, I'm not sure what came first, the movie or the cartoon show, but whichever one it was, they called me and they said, would you like to do the... And I didn't think anything about it. It was just, it was a job. It's what I did for a living. did commercials. I did discovery talent narrations. I did medical films. That's what we all did. That was our job. All of us, those who did the voices for the characters as well. And back then there was no internet. There was no Google. was no advanced stuff. So we just did it. And then when Google came, many years later, course first thing you do is you Google your name. Especially if you weren't around when there wasn't Google. First thing you do is you Google your name. And I thought well maybe some arcane Italian astrophysicist would come up and write it. Instead, up comes all this stuff. The incredible narrator Victor Karelian going through all the mentioning products that I'd forgotten that I had done. Why did you do it?
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: And I came to realize that it was a cult, like the Trekkies, the Star Trek. We didn't know that when we were doing this. It was like a great surprise. It was like my 15 minutes of fame, I guess. So I went to the convention in Orlando a few years back. Then I went to one in Toronto. And I'm going to one at this bot con in Chicago. And it's wonderful to know that people still, people who are like 17 years old know who I am. And obviously we're all old. mean, you won't find any of us who are like 40 because we were not 40, we did it. ⁓ It's just a wonder to me that it's still around. All the things that I did.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Cool. Yeah.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: all the commercials, all the character voices and things that I did for other outfits. This one became Transformers.
Floyd: So.
Matt: That's always been big in my life. So I mean you just look at the room behind me. It's full of transformers
Victor Caroli: You know, I went to a, you ever heard of these Lifeline screenings? You go for your health and go through these Lifeline screenings. So I went to one of these and you go from station to station to station. And I walked into the last station and there was a guy in there, a woman, man and a woman. And the guy said, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: didn't know what she looked like. I heard that voice out there and he said, I knew that voice. The voice was part of my life, part of my childhood growing up. The guy, he was about 49 years old and that's the age group, know, that was in their early 50s. And I was just, I was flabbergasted. He wanted to take a picture with me, you know, and it just, it's just amazing to me because I was like, are alive, you know.
Floyd: Yeah. Did he let you put your regular clothes on first or is it in the hospital gown?
Victor Caroli: It just blows my mind that people were affected by the sound of my voice because I'm just a guy. ⁓ It just happened that my job entailed doing Transformers. I did Breck Shampoo, did Covergirl makeup, did United Airlines.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Floyd: Just a guy, So.
Victor Caroli: I did ultra bright toothpaste. I did all kinds of stuff. But I also did transformers. And that's the one that lived forever.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Now were you doing the the like all those other product commercials was that in the same era of the transform like in the 80s
Victor Caroli: Well, you know, I was in the business from about 1969, ⁓ late 68, really 69, through I probably quit doing it around 2010, 2012. then phased out and said, I don't want to do it anymore. I just rather enjoy the good life down in Florida and travel and enjoy myself. So I did it for mainly, I guess, 70s, 80s, early to mid 90s through there. I was working a lot. It was anywhere between four and 10 or 12 sessions, recording sessions, every single day. And then trying to work in auditions at the same time. I worked a lot. I did, gosh, literally tens of thousands of commercials. of of scientists.
Floyd: Wow, so in that time.
Victor Caroli: and just happened to be one toy commercial. It could have been another guy. Or maybe I had a conflict and I couldn't go to that audition and someone else had gone to other guys had gone to that audition and they picked someone else and he would have been the guy who was the narrator of As One of Separation One. It's you know, serendipity. That's it. That's how it works.
Floyd: Yeah. So in your time from doing voice acting and voice performance from when you started till now, what have you seen ⁓ change in the tech?
Victor Caroli: Oh, it's changed enormously. Of course, the CGI has just gone crazy. There was virtually no CGI when I started out. There was none whatsoever. The recording, first of all, you couldn't work out of your house. And the later part of my career, I had to work out of my pet pen. I have it actually in the studio back here, right behind me. It's really not much. say, oh, you have a studio in house. Let me see it. And I show it to them. That's it. That's nothing there. See that long, it's right there, that's the microphone. ⁓ okay. And because now it's all MP3, you know, and all that. We didn't have that. And ⁓ if you look at the original Transformers movie now, and then you look at the latest Transformers movie, I mean, the difference is astronomical. It's huge. The original was basically a cartoon. But it was, it was state of the art.
Floyd: You
Victor Caroli: at the time, 1986. And now, with all this stuff with AI and all this stuff, they can create entire worlds on the screen that they couldn't do back in 1986. It's just changed. incrementally, it was exponentially over the years and probably will continue to change. the visual experience is much better now than it was back then.
Floyd: Yeah. So speaking of AI, how do you feel about AI voices for things like by doing the voice work itself or with ⁓ voice cloning? So like an actor would clone their own voice so that they could use it for ⁓ voice performances. How do you feel about that kind of tech?
Victor Caroli: Yeah, I'm really, for one thing, I'm glad in a way now that I'm the age I am and that I was in the business when I was in the business. A couple reasons. First of all, I was in the business, celebrities pooh-poohed voiceovers. They were, they didn't want anything to do with voiceovers. So we, what I call, peasant voiceover people. That's us peasants. We got all the big stuff. mean, in 1976, baseball also, I had two network spots running throughout that game. Now, we did all the cars, and we did all the beers, and we did all the airlines, we did all the big, major ⁓ products. Now, as one of my agents put it back in the, I guess, late 80s, early 90s maybe, she said, you know what, here's how it works. Now, when a major product, like an automobile, a phone company, changes advertising agencies, that advertising agency comes to me, she was head of the commercial department, and they say to me, well, Rachel, which one of your celebrity voices do you think would best fit this product? She said, that's where they start. They start with.
Matt: Hmm.
Floyd: Bye.
Victor Caroli: which celebrity voice. And they would have an audition. We would go to the audition for this thing. But all they're looking for, and we figured this out after a while, we would go to the audition. And it was for a huge major time product. And we'd read it. And then they'd say, could you, that was a great read, a great read. We loved it. Could you like, quite like a half second off the read? And after a while, we started saying, you know what? No, we will not cut after. Because what you're going to do is you're going to take my perfect read to exact timing, and you're going to take that to the client as a demo. But I'm not going to get it. George Clooney is going to get it. But you're going to show, but Clooney's not going to do a demo. He's not going to come in from his villa in Lake Como.
Floyd: Yeah, like a target. you
Victor Caroli: down and do the demo. So we stopped doing that. We stopped doing it to time. We wouldn't do it to time anymore because we knew what they were doing. And so we would do the demo. Sometimes we'd get paid to do the demo, which was half the union rate, which it was a whole lot back then. And then the celebrities started to creep in and they were doing all the big stuff. So now I really feel bad for young voiceover people. coming in, they might get what's called a campaign. A campaign is you'll get, like this guy who's doing all the liberty insurance, the limo guy, know, Doug. Yeah, he'll do those. That's a campaign. Well, Liberty Mutual decides they want to move on and do something different, Dougie goes by the board and says he's not on anymore. I did all the cover.
Floyd: Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: 12 years. I did all the promotion for ABC Monday Night Football for 15 years. Then when they moved to ESPN Channel, then they wanted to change it. But as long as it was at ABC Sports, which was for a long time, I did it for 15 years. That's not a campaign. That's what we called an account.
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: you don't get accounts anymore. You might get a campaign. There are four commercials. There were one, three, or four, five years. But you won't get an account anymore unless you're a celebrity. And that's how the business has changed for us. So I'm glad that I was in it when I was in it, because you could make a pretty good buck back then. And it's really hard now for young people getting into the business to make the kind of money that we were able to make.
Matt: Mm, okay.
Floyd: Wow. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: When we were doing all the big union stuff, ⁓ it's changed tremendously. And this cloning stuff, now that's coming, you ask me about that. And I'm, I mean, there's really no stopping it. So there's no, there's no use complaining about it because it ain't gonna stop. But I think it's terrible because they could actually go back now and go back to some of my old commercials and some of my old narrations and sample my voice. and they could make entire commercials, entire narrations. as Cody said, you know, there was this guy back in the 90s and 80s with this fabulous voice. I used to do a lot of what's called voice imaging for rock stations. You'd be listening to a rock station and somebody would come on and say, if it's too loud, you're too old, Kiss, 95, that boy. I did a of radio stations for this. So somebody might want to say, I remember this guy.
Floyd: ⁓ You
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: and they'd a couple of audio files and somehow make some cloning stuff out of it and make some new commercials using my actual voice. You can't copyright it. I looked into it, can't do it. And they could make commercials and promos using my voice for their station and I wouldn't be able to a damn thing about it.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: And it's shame, you know, but as I say, there's no way you can do anything about it. So I just feel bad for the younger people trying to get into it now because they can just create stuff out of thin air.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I do. I do think I do think it's lacking something like there is always a human factor to having a human do their voice and.
Victor Caroli: Now there is, but they're getting better better at it now. They're getting better at it. They're getting better at it. used to be those voices were very, very robotic. And now they're a lot less robotic than they were before.
Matt: That's true. I guess. That's that's true. I mean, I'm I'm an artist, so I'm looking at it from the art perspective. And I see a lot of the, you see a lot of the art and. There's a lot of tells that say this is definitely done by AI and stuff. I see uses for some people like my wife will use it for kid crafts and that sort of thing. And I think that's great. That's fine. But like. I don't think.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: Yeah.
Matt: like Floyd and I have talked about it, it's still going to take someone who knows how art is supposed to look to make it look better, to make it look right.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, I think so. They're going to need consultants to do that. I think it would work great for things like that. In the medical field, there's going to be, I think, tremendous help. It's going to speed itself tremendously. We're going to find cures for diseases much more quickly than we would without it. There are other fields where it's going to work really, well. But in the arts, it's really kind of cute. My wife is an advertising copywriter. Was, but she's an advertising copywriter. And it's really scary what they can do with writing now. Because they can just, you just give them a couple of bullet points of the kind of thing that you want to do, whether it's a college essay or a voiceover for a commercial copy, and bang, instantaneously will come up with something that's...
Matt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Victor Caroli: Probably near the nuclear right.
Floyd: Yeah. Yeah. So do you have any suggestions for somebody that's starting out now in the year 2026 that wants to be a voice actor? ⁓ Like what's a good pet? Like, do you suggest, you know, get into theater or try to do radio or?
Victor Caroli: I started out as a professional stage actor. I made enough money to live on. I did get a pension from the actors equity. But that was back then. I don't know how you do it now unless you do it on Broadway where they actually pay real money. I don't know what they pay in the regional theaters anymore. That's where I did most of my work back then. But when you work on the stage, you don't do it for the money. You do it for the love. There was something I did when I was doing it for a living. I wasn't getting rich, but I was making a living at it. I put that buck right through in the bank every once in while. Certainly was not getting rich. And I never thought about it. I never thought about making a lot of money when I was working on the stage because that's what I wanted to do. So that's really not an option. But to get into the voiceover racket, I don't know. I suppose you can go into radio.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: and get a start there and try to ⁓ move that somehow into ⁓ the voice area. If you have really a very unusual style of speaking voice. help you but the art of reading copy people used to say I have a really great voice people tell me I do a voice and I would say great that the human voice is kind of instrument. I well, yeah. I said, well, do you play the piano? Well, if I put a 13-foot Steinway concert grand in your living room tomorrow, you would have this fantastic instrument. you? Can you play it? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, the reason you're so successful is because you have this great voice. It's in the hole. Having a great voice is the icing on the cake. But it ain't the cake. The cake is being able to use it, being able to interpret the content.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: being able to understand how to present these words to an audience. Know who you're talking to. Know how to present it. You don't sell perfume. You tires. You have to be able to move your voice around and make it do what it has to do. Having a really nice sound around that presentation is the icing on the cake. people don't understand it because there are a lot of very successful guys that I worked with back in the day. People do stop me sometimes. Sometimes even in the stores and what they say, I heard you talking to that guy. He had a really nice voice. says, thank you.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: Well, a lot of the guys that I worked with who were very, very successful and made a lot of money back in 70s, 80s, and 90s, were not guys you would stop and say, gee, you have a really nice voice, because they didn't. They didn't have a really beautiful speaking voice. They didn't say, wow, that's a great voice. But they could read, copy, they could interpret the words that they were given in such a way that it made your hair stand up. That was the secret. And that will always be the secret. Now whether AI can do that or not, I don't know. ⁓ I haven't really paid much attention to ⁓ commercials or narrations to listen to see if it's AI or whether it's a person. Unfortunately, a lot of the big narrations are going to the celebrities. Just a little quick story if you've got time. ⁓ We're going to be ⁓ one of these specialists. on, it was a nature special. And I love these nature specials, especially the ones that have great underwater photography. I was really looking forward to this. was going to be on the International Geographic channel, or Discovery. And I turned it on, comes on, and there's this female narrator. Nothing against that, because there are some incredible female narrators. But this one, I thought, the heck in audition? this woman. Why? She's terrible. She's bringing nothing to the table. She doesn't even care about what's going on on the screen. I actually, after about five minutes, as beautiful as photography was, I turned it off. But at five minutes to the hour, I turned it back on because that's when the credits were going to come on. And I had to find out who the hell this horrible, horrible narrator was. It was Sigourney Weaver.
Matt: Ha ha ha
Floyd: Ha ha ha.
Victor Caroli: Well, Sigourney Weaver is a fine film actor. I love her film. She's terrific film actress. But just because you're a good film actor doesn't mean you can play shortstop for the Yankees. Doing voice work, doing narration is a whole different ability. She doesn't have it. So I called my agent, Steven. Now all voiceover agents have two rosters. They have the peasant roster that I'm on. And they all have a story. So I called Stephen. said, Stephen, I got this. I was watching Stephen. And I told him whole story. And the narrator turned out to be Sir Goining Well, ⁓ Sigourney is one of my...
Floyd: hahahaha
Victor Caroli: So, you know, I mean, if I had been hired to do that discovery, and I had done, I guess, I've done about four, maybe five discoveries. And they paid me maybe, I don't know, $20. Sigourney Weaver is going to get considerably more than $25,000 to do a narration. And for Steven, 10 % of what Sigourney is going to get is a lot more than 10 % of what Nandini is. So he has no problem with her being horrible. It doesn't matter to him. He's making points. There you have it. They don't care. They don't care that she's off. They just don't care. Robert Woodford had a
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: they can advertise the name on there and get more people to...
Victor Caroli: Robert Redford has done a number of narrations. He was, again, a fine film actor, but an awful narrator. Now, some of them are good narrators. Both Donald and Keefer were excellent narrators. Burgess Meredith was a terrific narrator. Some of the stories are terrible. Yeah. So that's what the young people are up against now. They're up against the celebrities.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: you his voice.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ And it's going to be tough to beat them because they get all the big stuff. Now you can go into a ⁓ big market like LA, Chicago, New York and get some of the local stuff, the local pizza place, the local car lot guy, like that. But even then, guy down here, I live in Nichols Road, a guy called, here you do boys.
Floyd: They're celebrities,
Victor Caroli: commercial is ⁓ I said, well, I probably maybe in the neighborhood of $500 to do each one. said, how long would they run? Because normally you do them for a year, and then if you want to do them repeatedly, you have to wait until next year. I said, well, how long would they run? And here's what he said. He said, forever. In a local market, a small local market like Naples.
Floyd: Hahaha
Matt: Hahaha!
Victor Caroli: I mean, I've been here for 21 years and there are commercials that are running down here that have been running for 21 years. ⁓
Floyd: Yeah. Well, there's some nationwide ones too, like the Empire flooring. At the end of that, you hear the guy say, Empire today. They changed the commercial, they changed the visuals, but it's always that exact same line read. The guy probably did it 40 years ago. Yeah.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ Yeah, yeah But at least like Morgan & Morgan advertisers like crazy, but at least they change the ads But down here some of the local local places they'll just run the ad for 10 years 15 years Until we go out of business. Yeah, so it's really hard. ⁓ I Just don't know what and I get calls all the time young guys I do a lot of work with the Naples players down there, is probably the premier community theater in the entire country. They just did a $21 million renovation of a community theater. It's amazing. And a lot of the kids that work there, they know that I did voiceover. went, well, how do I get in? How do I get in? And I don't know what to tell them. Because look, when I got into it back in the dark ages, it was tape. We actually mailed out tapes.
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: No.
Floyd: We're going see one of the tapes maybe.
Victor Caroli: Well.
Matt: I remember when I first got into the gaming industry and that was in 98 and I was mailing out video tapes of my of my portfolio
Floyd: Yeah, yeah, I used to FedEx people my demo reels 14 bucks every time I sent a real somebody
Matt: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: The one that has my name on it, think, but this is... National Geographic Yellowstone, Realm of the Coyote. ⁓ this is one of my, this is a National Geographic. And it's actually a five inch, it's a five inch videotape reel. I mean a tape reel. And my demo tape was one of these, where, you know, I had my picture on.
Floyd: So that would just be a reel to reel kind of through machine, yeah?
Victor Caroli: Yeah, it's a real real. It's just ordinary old felt tape.
Floyd: ⁓ wow.
Matt: That's cool.
Victor Caroli: And this is what we used. And the very first, the way I got into the business, I was already a professional equity stage actor. And I was in a play in Chicago. And I happened to act, I got my equity card through the back door as a stage manager. And then I started acting. And one day I was in a play, I was in a play and one night I was home on a night where we were dark. And I saw one of the guys that was in a play with me. commercial. thought, wow, how do do that? So I got back to the theater the next night and I said, hey Joe, I saw this brand commercial. Yeah, yeah, it just started running. great. You know, how do you get into that? Well, some of the guys in the people in the cast started introducing me to their agents. And this one agent said, said to me, young man, I was 26 at the time, she said, young man, have you ever done a voiceover? And I actually said, what's that? Because in 1960, nobody knew what voiceover was. I didn't even, I was a professional stage actor, I didn't know what it was. Now everybody knows what was. So she said, she told me what it was, and she said, do you think you could do that? I said, I don't know. So she handed me a piece of copy. She'll read this out loud to me. So I read it out loud her. She said, typical or no, said yeah, had this little three inch reel. She said go home and read some ads out of a magazine for me and bring me the tape. So I did, I went home that night, got a magazine, the Witzman's, it to me. She started taking that tape around to advertising agencies in Chicago and in three months I was making a living as a
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: could just do it. I could just do
Matt: You said that was in 1964? 1968.
Floyd: you
Victor Caroli: 1968. That's the fall of 1968. And I could, I just started doing it. The next year, 1969, and I was 27, dating myself, I turned 84 two days before my birthday. Thank you. The reason that my mental age is 27 is because in 1969, I was 27.
Floyd: ⁓ happy birthday.
Victor Caroli: And that year was the year that I made a living as a professional actor. And that was, that had always been my dream. I was going to be a professional actor. That was what I wanted to do. And I made a living. was working on the stage as a professional actor. was doing commercials and I was, and I wasn't, I didn't have to wait tables. I didn't have to be a security guard. And that was the first year. Every year after that, I retired, I made a living. And so that's why my mental age is 27. And that lady is the one who's responsible for it. I know she's no longer with us because she was probably in her 50s back then. But she heard my voice and she thought, I wonder if this kid can read. And it turned out that kid could read. So they're.
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: Thereby hangs the tail.
Matt: I absolutely love that story. Just watching you tell it, you could see that sparkle in your eye of that 27 year old. That is awesome.
Victor Caroli: It was just, I used to sometimes just sit in a chair and just look at my equity card. Just look at it. You do it. You son of a bitch.
Matt: Hahaha!
Floyd: I'm
Victor Caroli: You were 12 years old, you wanted to be an actor and you did it. know, was so damn proud of myself. Another thing I tell... ⁓
Matt: That's awesome.
Floyd: So.
Victor Caroli: you want to be there. You're young, you're 20, 21, whatever. You have no wife, no kids, no mortgage. You have nothing. If you're going to do it, if you want to do it, this is the time to do it. Don't wait until you're married, you got a couple of kids, you got a mortgage on a house. You can't do it for them. You can't do it. Then you're going to have, then you have responsibility. Right now you have no responsibilities at all. All you got to do is put food in your mouth, somehow.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: You can go full-on crime. You can always get some kind of a job and do it. So I went to New York when I graduated from college in 1964. And I went to New York. I got a job at the World's Fair in 1964, making fraud. people could watch us make the fudge on. They're used to that. Wisconsin's airline fudge, they put the fudge on. Then the girls sold it in front. And the sign and the place said fudge theater. And I this is hilarious. I came to New York with an actor and worked in the theater, in a fudge theater.
Matt: You
Floyd: Hahaha
Victor Caroli: But then the fair closed, and thought, you know, I gotta have a job. I went down, I put on a shirt and tie, and I walked down Fifth Avenue, store after store after store after, do need any help? Do you need any help? Do you need any help? Do you need any help? I landed in a double-A bookstore, and they needed somebody to answer phones downstairs, because the season is coming up, and they needed somebody to answer phones and take book orders. Okay, I'll do that. And you know, that's what you do if you really want to do something. I tell young people, find something you want to do. find somebody who will take you to that. Because if you don't, you're going to wind up doing something you really don't want to do. And that's not how you want to live your life, doing something you don't want to do. You want to live your life doing something good. You want to wake up in the morning and say, I'm to work. You don't want to wake up in the morning and say, oh, shit, to do that.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: It's a decision that make. You gotta make it what you've done, if you don't. whether it's voiceover or theater or salvage driving or driving a moving truck, whatever the hell it is, if you want to do it, better start doing it young or you can do it. And with me, it just happened to be acting and then I started out as a stage actor and that led me into the voiceover business and that led me to Transformers and that led me to you guys.
Matt: You Here we go. And I thank you for your work.
Floyd: the time to do this. ⁓ and on short notice, too. I mean, I just emailed you on Monday and it's Wednesday and here we sit. that's that's great.
Victor Caroli: Well. Well, I'm going to Canada next Monday. My wife ⁓ is the co-author of a play that they actually performed down there. It was Players. And it got picked up by this community theater up in Canada in a little town called Port Burwell. It's a town of 1,000 people, and they have a community theater. And somehow, they got wind of this play. because it's really, really good. It's called Laugh, Cry, Pee, Whippings. And it's about the lives of women of a certain age, as they always say, trials and tribulations that women of that age go through. And it's absolutely hilarious. My wife is one of people to read that. And when they did it here, as the clinical center, she was in it. So these people picked it up and they're going to do it up there in So the three women that wrote it are going up there. And so I'm going up. So we're leaving on Monday. I'm glad that we got this in before we went up there. Otherwise we would have had to wait until after the 24th of May. So this was good to get.
Floyd: ⁓ wow. Right, and you're gonna be in person at BotCon in Chicago July 10th to the 12th, is that correct?
Victor Caroli: Yeah, this fellow that I met at which convention, it might have been the Orlando convention, got in touch with me, Derek. And said, I live in Chicago, and we're doing fine. there. the other team. And so this one. Yeah, sure, we'd love to come out and the new PQ range. It's a great, great to fly. I might to get out, put us out and all that. And so we're going to go out and do that. That should be fun. And we're going out there on July 10th, July 10th, 3-12. And I'm going to go out there. It's fun.
Floyd: Great. So people can come down there and meet you and get you to sign some stuff maybe or?
Victor Caroli: Sure, there's sign autographs and big pictures. I don't know ⁓ if any of other transformer people in Europe, but this is not purely transformer. So I have to do it. I'm a spinoff. I think it'll be fun.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Floyd: Very cool.
Victor Caroli: people who do that. are usually pretty interesting people to get because their minds are wider than the narrow
Matt: Yeah. You're going to get asked so many questions of stuff that you did. And how did you feel on this day? And you'll be like, dude, that was in the 80s. ⁓
Floyd: you
Victor Caroli: That was before your dad was born. Really, 17 year old kids come up to me and they know who I am. And really, I did this stuff literally before their father was born. I think it was was long time ago. Were you even around in 1986, you guys?
Matt: Hahaha! ⁓
Floyd: Hahaha
Matt: Hahaha ⁓ gosh. ⁓ yes. I was about, let's see, 84. I was about 11 years old when Transformers came out. So, yeah.
Floyd: ⁓ yeah. Yeah, it was like nine, I think, or 10. Yeah.
Matt: I have a daughter who's 28. So yeah.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, there you go. And she could easily have a kid. You could easily be a grandfather. Yeah. ⁓ congratulations. Congratulations. Does everyone have a light?
Matt: Yeah, very soon I think. ⁓
Floyd: Working on it. They're working on it. Give them a chance.
Matt: Yeah. ⁓ TBD. TBD. So, she and her husband would very much like to. We'll put it that way. So, yeah.
Victor Caroli: or...or... Okay. Okay. Okay, well that's good. You're only, know, owe me a plea.
Matt: Yeah, 53.
Victor Caroli: Why not to be my kid? That's my life. So, if your kid would be my grandkid, that's frightening because I don't have to buy toys. I'm not childless, I'm child free.
Matt: Great! Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: We decided to come and it's little scary sometimes because if you have kids, you're constantly reminded of how old you are because, well, I have kids. ⁓ you don't have kids. There's that void there. then you're scared. There's this major upheaval.
Matt: Yes. Yeah, you can always stay 27. My mother hates it when I tell her I'm 53. She's like, no, no,
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: You're probably younger than that.
Matt: A little bit.
Floyd: you
Victor Caroli: So anyway, it's been a pleasure guys, it's been a of Enjoy, enjoy talking.
Matt: It's been a pleasure to meet you.
Floyd: Yeah, thanks so much for doing this. everybody go down to BotCon in Chicago, July 10th to the 12th, and meet Vic and bring your stuff to get some things signed and some pictures and all that good stuff.
Victor Caroli: Yeah. Now what you guys want? Now? Where are you by the way?
Floyd: I am in Seattle, Washington.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ wow.
Matt: I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Not that far, so I should drive over.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ we're not that far away, man. Come on. No.
Floyd: Maybe I'll come out to your place, Matt. We'll drive over to Chicago and go to BotCon. Take Vic out to dinner. Yeah.
Matt: Hey, there we go. That would be cool.
Victor Caroli: Hey, I'm always up for a good dinner, guys. Always.
Matt: Hahaha!
Floyd: Let me see if I can work it out. The 10th and 12th July. Maybe.
Victor Caroli: And not ever a problem. Beginners are never found a problem.
Floyd: Whatever you want on the dollar menu at McDonald's, it's all yours. Well, it's a $7 menu. Cool. All right. Well, thanks for watching, everybody. And thank you again, Vic, for your time. any last thoughts or comments or anything?
Victor Caroli: Okay.
Matt: They don't even have a collar menu anymore.
Victor Caroli: We're throwing it right.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: Now it's just been a pleasure guys, been a lot of fun. It's been lot of fun being here with you.
Matt: Thank you so much.
Floyd: All right, thank you. Bye.
Matt: I'm Matt.
Victor Caroli: It is the year 2005. ⁓
Floyd: that. You know what's funny is that I say that all the time when I get new tech in the house or we got an RV and there's like a little monitor in it like a computer monitor thing, and I pushed the buttons on my wife's like, Well, that's really high tech. And I said, It's the 2005. So that still sounds like a super futuristic time to me in my mind, but 2005 was quite a while ago now.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people that were walking around weren't born in 2005.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Floyd: That's true, that's true. So, can...
Victor Caroli: You can actually drink now, as you were born.
Floyd: Yeah, if you're born in 2005, you can go to the bar tonight. But yeah, so, know, Matt and I, we grew up on shows like Transformers and GI Joe and Thundercats and all that kind of stuff and, you know, all these action adventure things. And then again, with Transformers, the movie, and, you know, when Transformers was on, it was a different time. like you mentioned, in 2005, you know, we say that year because people that aren't familiar maybe in Transformers, that movie took place in the year 2005. was nowhere near 2005 when that film came out.
Victor Caroli: We made it in 1986, yeah.
Matt: 1986.
Floyd: But so when that was done, TV was not like it is now. So now you can stream episodes of things and download it, watch whenever you want. But in Transformers, ⁓ it would cut to commercial. And you would always hear Vic's voice saying, we'll return to the Transformers. And that was your time to go get something out of the kitchen or hit the bathroom. And then you'd hear his voice again. And you'd come running back to the TV to not miss anything. So your voice is ingrained in our brains.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, people tell me that. I've been to a couple of conventions. the thing that's remarkable. First of all, the evolution of this whole thing started in probably about 1982. There was an audition at an advertising agency in New York. Griffin McCall. It was an audition for a toy. So I went to the audition, and I won the audition. And it turned out to be one of these transforming toys. And several weeks later, my agent called me and said, that toy is selling pretty well, and they want to do more commercials for that toy. Okay, so I went and did more commercials for the Joy and the Joy was selling really well. Now, I'm not sure what came first, the movie or the cartoon show, but whichever one it was, they called me and they said, would you like to do the... And I didn't think anything about it. It was just, it was a job. It's what I did for a living. did commercials. I did discovery talent narrations. I did medical films. That's what we all did. That was our job. All of us, those who did the voices for the characters as well. And back then there was no internet. There was no Google. was no advanced stuff. So we just did it. And then when Google came, many years later, course first thing you do is you Google your name. Especially if you weren't around when there wasn't Google. First thing you do is you Google your name. And I thought well maybe some arcane Italian astrophysicist would come up and write it. Instead, up comes all this stuff. The incredible narrator Victor Karelian going through all the mentioning products that I'd forgotten that I had done. Why did you do it?
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: And I came to realize that it was a cult, like the Trekkies, the Star Trek. We didn't know that when we were doing this. It was like a great surprise. It was like my 15 minutes of fame, I guess. So I went to the convention in Orlando a few years back. Then I went to one in Toronto. And I'm going to one at this bot con in Chicago. And it's wonderful to know that people still, people who are like 17 years old know who I am. And obviously we're all old. mean, you won't find any of us who are like 40 because we were not 40, we did it. ⁓ It's just a wonder to me that it's still around. All the things that I did.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Cool. Yeah.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: all the commercials, all the character voices and things that I did for other outfits. This one became Transformers.
Floyd: So.
Matt: That's always been big in my life. So I mean you just look at the room behind me. It's full of transformers
Victor Caroli: You know, I went to a, you ever heard of these Lifeline screenings? You go for your health and go through these Lifeline screenings. So I went to one of these and you go from station to station to station. And I walked into the last station and there was a guy in there, a woman, man and a woman. And the guy said, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: didn't know what she looked like. I heard that voice out there and he said, I knew that voice. The voice was part of my life, part of my childhood growing up. The guy, he was about 49 years old and that's the age group, know, that was in their early 50s. And I was just, I was flabbergasted. He wanted to take a picture with me, you know, and it just, it's just amazing to me because I was like, are alive, you know.
Floyd: Yeah. Did he let you put your regular clothes on first or is it in the hospital gown?
Victor Caroli: It just blows my mind that people were affected by the sound of my voice because I'm just a guy. ⁓ It just happened that my job entailed doing Transformers. I did Breck Shampoo, did Covergirl makeup, did United Airlines.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Floyd: Just a guy, So.
Victor Caroli: I did ultra bright toothpaste. I did all kinds of stuff. But I also did transformers. And that's the one that lived forever.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Now were you doing the the like all those other product commercials was that in the same era of the transform like in the 80s
Victor Caroli: Well, you know, I was in the business from about 1969, ⁓ late 68, really 69, through I probably quit doing it around 2010, 2012. then phased out and said, I don't want to do it anymore. I just rather enjoy the good life down in Florida and travel and enjoy myself. So I did it for mainly, I guess, 70s, 80s, early to mid 90s through there. I was working a lot. It was anywhere between four and 10 or 12 sessions, recording sessions, every single day. And then trying to work in auditions at the same time. I worked a lot. I did, gosh, literally tens of thousands of commercials. of of scientists.
Floyd: Wow, so in that time.
Victor Caroli: and just happened to be one toy commercial. It could have been another guy. Or maybe I had a conflict and I couldn't go to that audition and someone else had gone to other guys had gone to that audition and they picked someone else and he would have been the guy who was the narrator of As One of Separation One. It's you know, serendipity. That's it. That's how it works.
Floyd: Yeah. So in your time from doing voice acting and voice performance from when you started till now, what have you seen ⁓ change in the tech?
Victor Caroli: Oh, it's changed enormously. Of course, the CGI has just gone crazy. There was virtually no CGI when I started out. There was none whatsoever. The recording, first of all, you couldn't work out of your house. And the later part of my career, I had to work out of my pet pen. I have it actually in the studio back here, right behind me. It's really not much. say, oh, you have a studio in house. Let me see it. And I show it to them. That's it. That's nothing there. See that long, it's right there, that's the microphone. ⁓ okay. And because now it's all MP3, you know, and all that. We didn't have that. And ⁓ if you look at the original Transformers movie now, and then you look at the latest Transformers movie, I mean, the difference is astronomical. It's huge. The original was basically a cartoon. But it was, it was state of the art.
Floyd: You
Victor Caroli: at the time, 1986. And now, with all this stuff with AI and all this stuff, they can create entire worlds on the screen that they couldn't do back in 1986. It's just changed. incrementally, it was exponentially over the years and probably will continue to change. the visual experience is much better now than it was back then.
Floyd: Yeah. So speaking of AI, how do you feel about AI voices for things like by doing the voice work itself or with ⁓ voice cloning? So like an actor would clone their own voice so that they could use it for ⁓ voice performances. How do you feel about that kind of tech?
Victor Caroli: Yeah, I'm really, for one thing, I'm glad in a way now that I'm the age I am and that I was in the business when I was in the business. A couple reasons. First of all, I was in the business, celebrities pooh-poohed voiceovers. They were, they didn't want anything to do with voiceovers. So we, what I call, peasant voiceover people. That's us peasants. We got all the big stuff. mean, in 1976, baseball also, I had two network spots running throughout that game. Now, we did all the cars, and we did all the beers, and we did all the airlines, we did all the big, major ⁓ products. Now, as one of my agents put it back in the, I guess, late 80s, early 90s maybe, she said, you know what, here's how it works. Now, when a major product, like an automobile, a phone company, changes advertising agencies, that advertising agency comes to me, she was head of the commercial department, and they say to me, well, Rachel, which one of your celebrity voices do you think would best fit this product? She said, that's where they start. They start with.
Matt: Hmm.
Floyd: Bye.
Victor Caroli: which celebrity voice. And they would have an audition. We would go to the audition for this thing. But all they're looking for, and we figured this out after a while, we would go to the audition. And it was for a huge major time product. And we'd read it. And then they'd say, could you, that was a great read, a great read. We loved it. Could you like, quite like a half second off the read? And after a while, we started saying, you know what? No, we will not cut after. Because what you're going to do is you're going to take my perfect read to exact timing, and you're going to take that to the client as a demo. But I'm not going to get it. George Clooney is going to get it. But you're going to show, but Clooney's not going to do a demo. He's not going to come in from his villa in Lake Como.
Floyd: Yeah, like a target. you
Victor Caroli: down and do the demo. So we stopped doing that. We stopped doing it to time. We wouldn't do it to time anymore because we knew what they were doing. And so we would do the demo. Sometimes we'd get paid to do the demo, which was half the union rate, which it was a whole lot back then. And then the celebrities started to creep in and they were doing all the big stuff. So now I really feel bad for young voiceover people. coming in, they might get what's called a campaign. A campaign is you'll get, like this guy who's doing all the liberty insurance, the limo guy, know, Doug. Yeah, he'll do those. That's a campaign. Well, Liberty Mutual decides they want to move on and do something different, Dougie goes by the board and says he's not on anymore. I did all the cover.
Floyd: Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: 12 years. I did all the promotion for ABC Monday Night Football for 15 years. Then when they moved to ESPN Channel, then they wanted to change it. But as long as it was at ABC Sports, which was for a long time, I did it for 15 years. That's not a campaign. That's what we called an account.
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: you don't get accounts anymore. You might get a campaign. There are four commercials. There were one, three, or four, five years. But you won't get an account anymore unless you're a celebrity. And that's how the business has changed for us. So I'm glad that I was in it when I was in it, because you could make a pretty good buck back then. And it's really hard now for young people getting into the business to make the kind of money that we were able to make.
Matt: Mm, okay.
Floyd: Wow. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: When we were doing all the big union stuff, ⁓ it's changed tremendously. And this cloning stuff, now that's coming, you ask me about that. And I'm, I mean, there's really no stopping it. So there's no, there's no use complaining about it because it ain't gonna stop. But I think it's terrible because they could actually go back now and go back to some of my old commercials and some of my old narrations and sample my voice. and they could make entire commercials, entire narrations. as Cody said, you know, there was this guy back in the 90s and 80s with this fabulous voice. I used to do a lot of what's called voice imaging for rock stations. You'd be listening to a rock station and somebody would come on and say, if it's too loud, you're too old, Kiss, 95, that boy. I did a of radio stations for this. So somebody might want to say, I remember this guy.
Floyd: ⁓ You
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: and they'd a couple of audio files and somehow make some cloning stuff out of it and make some new commercials using my actual voice. You can't copyright it. I looked into it, can't do it. And they could make commercials and promos using my voice for their station and I wouldn't be able to a damn thing about it.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: And it's shame, you know, but as I say, there's no way you can do anything about it. So I just feel bad for the younger people trying to get into it now because they can just create stuff out of thin air.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, I do. I do think I do think it's lacking something like there is always a human factor to having a human do their voice and.
Victor Caroli: Now there is, but they're getting better better at it now. They're getting better at it. They're getting better at it. used to be those voices were very, very robotic. And now they're a lot less robotic than they were before.
Matt: That's true. I guess. That's that's true. I mean, I'm I'm an artist, so I'm looking at it from the art perspective. And I see a lot of the, you see a lot of the art and. There's a lot of tells that say this is definitely done by AI and stuff. I see uses for some people like my wife will use it for kid crafts and that sort of thing. And I think that's great. That's fine. But like. I don't think.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: Yeah.
Matt: like Floyd and I have talked about it, it's still going to take someone who knows how art is supposed to look to make it look better, to make it look right.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, I think so. They're going to need consultants to do that. I think it would work great for things like that. In the medical field, there's going to be, I think, tremendous help. It's going to speed itself tremendously. We're going to find cures for diseases much more quickly than we would without it. There are other fields where it's going to work really, well. But in the arts, it's really kind of cute. My wife is an advertising copywriter. Was, but she's an advertising copywriter. And it's really scary what they can do with writing now. Because they can just, you just give them a couple of bullet points of the kind of thing that you want to do, whether it's a college essay or a voiceover for a commercial copy, and bang, instantaneously will come up with something that's...
Matt: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Victor Caroli: Probably near the nuclear right.
Floyd: Yeah. Yeah. So do you have any suggestions for somebody that's starting out now in the year 2026 that wants to be a voice actor? ⁓ Like what's a good pet? Like, do you suggest, you know, get into theater or try to do radio or?
Victor Caroli: I started out as a professional stage actor. I made enough money to live on. I did get a pension from the actors equity. But that was back then. I don't know how you do it now unless you do it on Broadway where they actually pay real money. I don't know what they pay in the regional theaters anymore. That's where I did most of my work back then. But when you work on the stage, you don't do it for the money. You do it for the love. There was something I did when I was doing it for a living. I wasn't getting rich, but I was making a living at it. I put that buck right through in the bank every once in while. Certainly was not getting rich. And I never thought about it. I never thought about making a lot of money when I was working on the stage because that's what I wanted to do. So that's really not an option. But to get into the voiceover racket, I don't know. I suppose you can go into radio.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: and get a start there and try to ⁓ move that somehow into ⁓ the voice area. If you have really a very unusual style of speaking voice. help you but the art of reading copy people used to say I have a really great voice people tell me I do a voice and I would say great that the human voice is kind of instrument. I well, yeah. I said, well, do you play the piano? Well, if I put a 13-foot Steinway concert grand in your living room tomorrow, you would have this fantastic instrument. you? Can you play it? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, the reason you're so successful is because you have this great voice. It's in the hole. Having a great voice is the icing on the cake. But it ain't the cake. The cake is being able to use it, being able to interpret the content.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: being able to understand how to present these words to an audience. Know who you're talking to. Know how to present it. You don't sell perfume. You tires. You have to be able to move your voice around and make it do what it has to do. Having a really nice sound around that presentation is the icing on the cake. people don't understand it because there are a lot of very successful guys that I worked with back in the day. People do stop me sometimes. Sometimes even in the stores and what they say, I heard you talking to that guy. He had a really nice voice. says, thank you.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: Well, a lot of the guys that I worked with who were very, very successful and made a lot of money back in 70s, 80s, and 90s, were not guys you would stop and say, gee, you have a really nice voice, because they didn't. They didn't have a really beautiful speaking voice. They didn't say, wow, that's a great voice. But they could read, copy, they could interpret the words that they were given in such a way that it made your hair stand up. That was the secret. And that will always be the secret. Now whether AI can do that or not, I don't know. ⁓ I haven't really paid much attention to ⁓ commercials or narrations to listen to see if it's AI or whether it's a person. Unfortunately, a lot of the big narrations are going to the celebrities. Just a little quick story if you've got time. ⁓ We're going to be ⁓ one of these specialists. on, it was a nature special. And I love these nature specials, especially the ones that have great underwater photography. I was really looking forward to this. was going to be on the International Geographic channel, or Discovery. And I turned it on, comes on, and there's this female narrator. Nothing against that, because there are some incredible female narrators. But this one, I thought, the heck in audition? this woman. Why? She's terrible. She's bringing nothing to the table. She doesn't even care about what's going on on the screen. I actually, after about five minutes, as beautiful as photography was, I turned it off. But at five minutes to the hour, I turned it back on because that's when the credits were going to come on. And I had to find out who the hell this horrible, horrible narrator was. It was Sigourney Weaver.
Matt: Ha ha ha
Floyd: Ha ha ha.
Victor Caroli: Well, Sigourney Weaver is a fine film actor. I love her film. She's terrific film actress. But just because you're a good film actor doesn't mean you can play shortstop for the Yankees. Doing voice work, doing narration is a whole different ability. She doesn't have it. So I called my agent, Steven. Now all voiceover agents have two rosters. They have the peasant roster that I'm on. And they all have a story. So I called Stephen. said, Stephen, I got this. I was watching Stephen. And I told him whole story. And the narrator turned out to be Sir Goining Well, ⁓ Sigourney is one of my...
Floyd: hahahaha
Victor Caroli: So, you know, I mean, if I had been hired to do that discovery, and I had done, I guess, I've done about four, maybe five discoveries. And they paid me maybe, I don't know, $20. Sigourney Weaver is going to get considerably more than $25,000 to do a narration. And for Steven, 10 % of what Sigourney is going to get is a lot more than 10 % of what Nandini is. So he has no problem with her being horrible. It doesn't matter to him. He's making points. There you have it. They don't care. They don't care that she's off. They just don't care. Robert Woodford had a
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: they can advertise the name on there and get more people to...
Victor Caroli: Robert Redford has done a number of narrations. He was, again, a fine film actor, but an awful narrator. Now, some of them are good narrators. Both Donald and Keefer were excellent narrators. Burgess Meredith was a terrific narrator. Some of the stories are terrible. Yeah. So that's what the young people are up against now. They're up against the celebrities.
Floyd: Yeah.
Matt: you his voice.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ And it's going to be tough to beat them because they get all the big stuff. Now you can go into a ⁓ big market like LA, Chicago, New York and get some of the local stuff, the local pizza place, the local car lot guy, like that. But even then, guy down here, I live in Nichols Road, a guy called, here you do boys.
Floyd: They're celebrities,
Victor Caroli: commercial is ⁓ I said, well, I probably maybe in the neighborhood of $500 to do each one. said, how long would they run? Because normally you do them for a year, and then if you want to do them repeatedly, you have to wait until next year. I said, well, how long would they run? And here's what he said. He said, forever. In a local market, a small local market like Naples.
Floyd: Hahaha
Matt: Hahaha!
Victor Caroli: I mean, I've been here for 21 years and there are commercials that are running down here that have been running for 21 years. ⁓
Floyd: Yeah. Well, there's some nationwide ones too, like the Empire flooring. At the end of that, you hear the guy say, Empire today. They changed the commercial, they changed the visuals, but it's always that exact same line read. The guy probably did it 40 years ago. Yeah.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ Yeah, yeah But at least like Morgan & Morgan advertisers like crazy, but at least they change the ads But down here some of the local local places they'll just run the ad for 10 years 15 years Until we go out of business. Yeah, so it's really hard. ⁓ I Just don't know what and I get calls all the time young guys I do a lot of work with the Naples players down there, is probably the premier community theater in the entire country. They just did a $21 million renovation of a community theater. It's amazing. And a lot of the kids that work there, they know that I did voiceover. went, well, how do I get in? How do I get in? And I don't know what to tell them. Because look, when I got into it back in the dark ages, it was tape. We actually mailed out tapes.
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: No.
Floyd: We're going see one of the tapes maybe.
Victor Caroli: Well.
Matt: I remember when I first got into the gaming industry and that was in 98 and I was mailing out video tapes of my of my portfolio
Floyd: Yeah, yeah, I used to FedEx people my demo reels 14 bucks every time I sent a real somebody
Matt: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: The one that has my name on it, think, but this is... National Geographic Yellowstone, Realm of the Coyote. ⁓ this is one of my, this is a National Geographic. And it's actually a five inch, it's a five inch videotape reel. I mean a tape reel. And my demo tape was one of these, where, you know, I had my picture on.
Floyd: So that would just be a reel to reel kind of through machine, yeah?
Victor Caroli: Yeah, it's a real real. It's just ordinary old felt tape.
Floyd: ⁓ wow.
Matt: That's cool.
Victor Caroli: And this is what we used. And the very first, the way I got into the business, I was already a professional equity stage actor. And I was in a play in Chicago. And I happened to act, I got my equity card through the back door as a stage manager. And then I started acting. And one day I was in a play, I was in a play and one night I was home on a night where we were dark. And I saw one of the guys that was in a play with me. commercial. thought, wow, how do do that? So I got back to the theater the next night and I said, hey Joe, I saw this brand commercial. Yeah, yeah, it just started running. great. You know, how do you get into that? Well, some of the guys in the people in the cast started introducing me to their agents. And this one agent said, said to me, young man, I was 26 at the time, she said, young man, have you ever done a voiceover? And I actually said, what's that? Because in 1960, nobody knew what voiceover was. I didn't even, I was a professional stage actor, I didn't know what it was. Now everybody knows what was. So she said, she told me what it was, and she said, do you think you could do that? I said, I don't know. So she handed me a piece of copy. She'll read this out loud to me. So I read it out loud her. She said, typical or no, said yeah, had this little three inch reel. She said go home and read some ads out of a magazine for me and bring me the tape. So I did, I went home that night, got a magazine, the Witzman's, it to me. She started taking that tape around to advertising agencies in Chicago and in three months I was making a living as a
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: could just do it. I could just do
Matt: You said that was in 1964? 1968.
Floyd: you
Victor Caroli: 1968. That's the fall of 1968. And I could, I just started doing it. The next year, 1969, and I was 27, dating myself, I turned 84 two days before my birthday. Thank you. The reason that my mental age is 27 is because in 1969, I was 27.
Floyd: ⁓ happy birthday.
Victor Caroli: And that year was the year that I made a living as a professional actor. And that was, that had always been my dream. I was going to be a professional actor. That was what I wanted to do. And I made a living. was working on the stage as a professional actor. was doing commercials and I was, and I wasn't, I didn't have to wait tables. I didn't have to be a security guard. And that was the first year. Every year after that, I retired, I made a living. And so that's why my mental age is 27. And that lady is the one who's responsible for it. I know she's no longer with us because she was probably in her 50s back then. But she heard my voice and she thought, I wonder if this kid can read. And it turned out that kid could read. So they're.
Floyd: Wow.
Victor Caroli: Thereby hangs the tail.
Matt: I absolutely love that story. Just watching you tell it, you could see that sparkle in your eye of that 27 year old. That is awesome.
Victor Caroli: It was just, I used to sometimes just sit in a chair and just look at my equity card. Just look at it. You do it. You son of a bitch.
Matt: Hahaha!
Floyd: I'm
Victor Caroli: You were 12 years old, you wanted to be an actor and you did it. know, was so damn proud of myself. Another thing I tell... ⁓
Matt: That's awesome.
Floyd: So.
Victor Caroli: you want to be there. You're young, you're 20, 21, whatever. You have no wife, no kids, no mortgage. You have nothing. If you're going to do it, if you want to do it, this is the time to do it. Don't wait until you're married, you got a couple of kids, you got a mortgage on a house. You can't do it for them. You can't do it. Then you're going to have, then you have responsibility. Right now you have no responsibilities at all. All you got to do is put food in your mouth, somehow.
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: You can go full-on crime. You can always get some kind of a job and do it. So I went to New York when I graduated from college in 1964. And I went to New York. I got a job at the World's Fair in 1964, making fraud. people could watch us make the fudge on. They're used to that. Wisconsin's airline fudge, they put the fudge on. Then the girls sold it in front. And the sign and the place said fudge theater. And I this is hilarious. I came to New York with an actor and worked in the theater, in a fudge theater.
Matt: You
Floyd: Hahaha
Victor Caroli: But then the fair closed, and thought, you know, I gotta have a job. I went down, I put on a shirt and tie, and I walked down Fifth Avenue, store after store after store after, do need any help? Do you need any help? Do you need any help? Do you need any help? I landed in a double-A bookstore, and they needed somebody to answer phones downstairs, because the season is coming up, and they needed somebody to answer phones and take book orders. Okay, I'll do that. And you know, that's what you do if you really want to do something. I tell young people, find something you want to do. find somebody who will take you to that. Because if you don't, you're going to wind up doing something you really don't want to do. And that's not how you want to live your life, doing something you don't want to do. You want to live your life doing something good. You want to wake up in the morning and say, I'm to work. You don't want to wake up in the morning and say, oh, shit, to do that.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: It's a decision that make. You gotta make it what you've done, if you don't. whether it's voiceover or theater or salvage driving or driving a moving truck, whatever the hell it is, if you want to do it, better start doing it young or you can do it. And with me, it just happened to be acting and then I started out as a stage actor and that led me into the voiceover business and that led me to Transformers and that led me to you guys.
Matt: You Here we go. And I thank you for your work.
Floyd: the time to do this. ⁓ and on short notice, too. I mean, I just emailed you on Monday and it's Wednesday and here we sit. that's that's great.
Victor Caroli: Well. Well, I'm going to Canada next Monday. My wife ⁓ is the co-author of a play that they actually performed down there. It was Players. And it got picked up by this community theater up in Canada in a little town called Port Burwell. It's a town of 1,000 people, and they have a community theater. And somehow, they got wind of this play. because it's really, really good. It's called Laugh, Cry, Pee, Whippings. And it's about the lives of women of a certain age, as they always say, trials and tribulations that women of that age go through. And it's absolutely hilarious. My wife is one of people to read that. And when they did it here, as the clinical center, she was in it. So these people picked it up and they're going to do it up there in So the three women that wrote it are going up there. And so I'm going up. So we're leaving on Monday. I'm glad that we got this in before we went up there. Otherwise we would have had to wait until after the 24th of May. So this was good to get.
Floyd: ⁓ wow. Right, and you're gonna be in person at BotCon in Chicago July 10th to the 12th, is that correct?
Victor Caroli: Yeah, this fellow that I met at which convention, it might have been the Orlando convention, got in touch with me, Derek. And said, I live in Chicago, and we're doing fine. there. the other team. And so this one. Yeah, sure, we'd love to come out and the new PQ range. It's a great, great to fly. I might to get out, put us out and all that. And so we're going to go out and do that. That should be fun. And we're going out there on July 10th, July 10th, 3-12. And I'm going to go out there. It's fun.
Floyd: Great. So people can come down there and meet you and get you to sign some stuff maybe or?
Victor Caroli: Sure, there's sign autographs and big pictures. I don't know ⁓ if any of other transformer people in Europe, but this is not purely transformer. So I have to do it. I'm a spinoff. I think it'll be fun.
Matt: Mm-hmm.
Floyd: Very cool.
Victor Caroli: people who do that. are usually pretty interesting people to get because their minds are wider than the narrow
Matt: Yeah. You're going to get asked so many questions of stuff that you did. And how did you feel on this day? And you'll be like, dude, that was in the 80s. ⁓
Floyd: you
Victor Caroli: That was before your dad was born. Really, 17 year old kids come up to me and they know who I am. And really, I did this stuff literally before their father was born. I think it was was long time ago. Were you even around in 1986, you guys?
Matt: Hahaha! ⁓
Floyd: Hahaha
Matt: Hahaha ⁓ gosh. ⁓ yes. I was about, let's see, 84. I was about 11 years old when Transformers came out. So, yeah.
Floyd: ⁓ yeah. Yeah, it was like nine, I think, or 10. Yeah.
Matt: I have a daughter who's 28. So yeah.
Victor Caroli: Yeah, there you go. And she could easily have a kid. You could easily be a grandfather. Yeah. ⁓ congratulations. Congratulations. Does everyone have a light?
Matt: Yeah, very soon I think. ⁓
Floyd: Working on it. They're working on it. Give them a chance.
Matt: Yeah. ⁓ TBD. TBD. So, she and her husband would very much like to. We'll put it that way. So, yeah.
Victor Caroli: or...or... Okay. Okay. Okay, well that's good. You're only, know, owe me a plea.
Matt: Yeah, 53.
Victor Caroli: Why not to be my kid? That's my life. So, if your kid would be my grandkid, that's frightening because I don't have to buy toys. I'm not childless, I'm child free.
Matt: Great! Mm-hmm.
Victor Caroli: We decided to come and it's little scary sometimes because if you have kids, you're constantly reminded of how old you are because, well, I have kids. ⁓ you don't have kids. There's that void there. then you're scared. There's this major upheaval.
Matt: Yes. Yeah, you can always stay 27. My mother hates it when I tell her I'm 53. She's like, no, no,
Floyd: Yeah.
Victor Caroli: You're probably younger than that.
Matt: A little bit.
Floyd: you
Victor Caroli: So anyway, it's been a pleasure guys, it's been a of Enjoy, enjoy talking.
Matt: It's been a pleasure to meet you.
Floyd: Yeah, thanks so much for doing this. everybody go down to BotCon in Chicago, July 10th to the 12th, and meet Vic and bring your stuff to get some things signed and some pictures and all that good stuff.
Victor Caroli: Yeah. Now what you guys want? Now? Where are you by the way?
Floyd: I am in Seattle, Washington.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ wow.
Matt: I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Not that far, so I should drive over.
Victor Caroli: ⁓ we're not that far away, man. Come on. No.
Floyd: Maybe I'll come out to your place, Matt. We'll drive over to Chicago and go to BotCon. Take Vic out to dinner. Yeah.
Matt: Hey, there we go. That would be cool.
Victor Caroli: Hey, I'm always up for a good dinner, guys. Always.
Matt: Hahaha!
Floyd: Let me see if I can work it out. The 10th and 12th July. Maybe.
Victor Caroli: And not ever a problem. Beginners are never found a problem.
Floyd: Whatever you want on the dollar menu at McDonald's, it's all yours. Well, it's a $7 menu. Cool. All right. Well, thanks for watching, everybody. And thank you again, Vic, for your time. any last thoughts or comments or anything?
Victor Caroli: Okay.
Matt: They don't even have a collar menu anymore.
Victor Caroli: We're throwing it right.
Matt: You
Victor Caroli: Now it's just been a pleasure guys, been a lot of fun. It's been lot of fun being here with you.
Matt: Thank you so much.
Floyd: All right, thank you. Bye.
