You mean that's the same guy?

Now and then I will be watching the telly or a film and recognize on some level, the face or voice of a person without being able to clearly identify who they are. These instances used to haunt me (not in a spooky, startling sense, but in the troublesome way as when you forget the tune or lyrics of a song you know you know.) Thanks to IMDB, it doesn’t take long at all to track down answers. And it blows my mind when I trace the portfolio there.

For me, this more readily occurs with voice actors. Voice actors with distinct voices (such as Jim Cummings, Charlie Adler, Tress MacNeille, and Cree Summer) are easy to distinguish, but some have such a breadth of voices that I’m often scratching my head at how two characters can possibly be the same person. How can Tomokazu Sugita possibly voice both Kyon from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Graham Specter from Baccano!?

Range isn’t the only thing to trip me up. I never would have guessed that Michael Keaton dubbed the titular character of Porco Rosso or that the same woman, Lea Salonga, leant her singing voice to both Princess Jasmine and Mulan.

This has also occurred often when my first introduction to a performer’s body of work spans from when they are very young to when they are much older. I knew that Ephram Brown (portrayed by Gregory Smith) from Everwood looked familiar but had no idea that he was Sport from Harriet the Spy until I looked it up. I was deeply amused when I discovered that the little boy playing an arcade game in Back to the Future Part II is none other than Elijah Wood.

The show Freaks and Geeks is host to several actors I only began to follow after they had grown—such as a very young Shia LaBeouf (Even Stevens and Transformers), Alexander Gould (the voice of Nemo and a star on Weeds), and Rashida Jones (The Office and Parks and Recreations.) There are also plenty of actors I recognized by sight (such as Ben Stiller and Jason Schwartzman), but it took some convincing before I accepted that that was Joel Hodgson in 70s get-up or Chauncey Leopardi playing Alan White (whom I knew far better as Squints from The Sandlot.)

Have you ever had what I propose should be called a Scotty Smalls Moment when you didn’t realize that a performer (or any professional for that matter) was someone you were already familiar with?