“The Juice” is a column where we give Black creators in film and television their flowers while they can still smell them. It’s a corrective to the idea that the only season or reason to write a piece like this is because we’re in that month that’s 28 (well, sometimes 29) days long. We celebrate Black artists all year round here. You got “The Juice” now, Cree Summer.
We like to think we know what booked, blessed and highly favored is, but unless you’re thinking of Cree Summer as a prime example, you don’t really know what it means. Summer’s IMDb lists more than 350 acting credits that run the gamut of television, film, commercials and video games, but her electric smile isn’t featured in the majority of her roles: Summer’s a notable voice actor who’s had that business in a chokehold since she was just a teenager. While she has lent her voice to animated adult shows including Lazor Wulf, Robot Chicken, Drawn Together and Netflix’s Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.), the bulk of her work is in animated children’s programming. So naturally, since Summer’s been at this for four decades, there’s a high likelihood that she’s probably touched your childhood in some way, shape or form, whether you realize it or not.
Cree Summers voices Scizzi (far left) in “Create-A-Crittles” from Saturday Morning All-Star Hits!
Summer began voice acting in 1983 when she was 14. Her dad, Don Francks, was a successful voice actor too, bringing life to characters in Heavy Metal and animated versions of Star Wars and X-Men. During an audition for Inspector Gadget, Francks asked a producer if his daughter could read for the role of Penny. She got the part, and the chip off the ol’ block became one of the most prolific working voice actors today. She’s so ubiquitous that Saturday Morning All-Star Hits!,a parody of Saturday-morning cartoon programming in the late ’80s and early ’90s, wouldn’t have felt right without her voice. It’s partly a meta in-joke, but she’s legitimately one of the best voice actors of all time. How could Summer not get a call? Parody or playing it straight, that programming block was her turf.
Among her hundreds of voice-acting roles in kids’ shows are characters in Rugrats, Sonic the Hedgehog, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Codename: Kids Next Door, Danny Phantom, Tiny Toon Adventures, As Told by Ginger, The Care Bears Family, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Animaniacs, Pepper Ann and the Spongebob Squarepants spin-off The Patrick Star Show. Her commitment to acting in a field dominated by children’s programming since 1983 means that she’s helped cultivate a sense of wonder and adventure in the minds of children for generations and will continue to do so. Everybody from sitting United States senators to the greatest rappers alive to TikTokers to the kids who don’t know what it’s like to go to school when you aren’t in a pandemic has been charmed by the timbre of her voice. Though a recording booth is her home base, she’s most celebrated for her role as cheerful, free-spirited activist Freddie Brooks in NBC’s sitcom based on a fictional historically Black college, A Different World.
When Lisa Bonet and Marissa Tomei left the Hillman campus after the show’s first season, there was a huge void thanks to the departure of those burgeoning talents. The remaining ensemble cast with actors like Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison was strong but needed some fresh faces and big personalities to take it to another level. Summer, Kimberly Reese, Glynn Turman and Lou Meyers were added to the show in its second season. These new actors — along with Darryl M. Bell and Sinbad, who were promoted from recurring guests to principal cast members — shepherded the show into a resounding success. Under showrunner Debbie Allen’s stewardship, the sitcom transformed from a milquetoast spin-off into an excellent half hour that followed young adults at a historically Black college as they struggled with life and love. It touched on serious issues including global politics, racism in America and rape culture on college campuses. Freddie Brooks, as the outspoken yet gregarious flower child, was often the conduit for these weighty and serious topics. While A Different World does contain one of pop culture’s most dramatic will-they-won’t-they couples in Dwayne Wayne and Whitley Gilbert, the element provided by Freddie Brooks is one of many that make the show so iconic.
By the time A Different World ended its six-year run in 1993, it had cemented itself as television canon by treating the lives of young Black men and women with importance, putting on display the myth of a monolith of the Black experience. A Different World wasn’t just a fine sitcom with a killer ensemble; it inspired Black students to attend HBCUs and drove home the point that there are many different shades of Black.
(L–R) Kadeem Hardison, Jasmine Guy and Cree Summer in A Different World, 1987.
The cultural impact A Different World has and Summer’s role in it are significant, but the magnitude of a particular facet of her work as a voice actor cannot go unnoticed. Summer can convincingly portray any species in kingdom Animalia. And sometimes even junk food, too — these qualities are a must for any voice actor who aims to achieve greatness, but her status as one of the few Black women to consistently voice Black characters is perhaps her most weighty achievement.
(L): Cree Summer attends Paramount +’s all-new Rugrats series premiere drive-in event on May 22, 2021, in Los Angeles.
Historically, white actors have often voiced Black characters in animation. This demonstration of white privilege, and a distant relative of blackface, has afflicted adored shows like Bob’s Burgers and Netflix’s Big Mouth (the role of Missy has since been recast with Ayo Edebiri). While representation alone will not save us, it can save a person here or there — a little girl who can see someone who looks, thinks and talks like her, fully realized on the screen. This is no minuscule action. It’s good for the soul.
