Argentine Animation: The Voices. Interview with “Pelusa” Suero

Note: This chapter in the series on advertising animation in Argentina could not have been made without the contribution of Jorge Finkielman.

---

In our previous entries on Argentine animation after the arrival of TV, we touched in passing on a point that was the possible cause that the best exponents of this genre did not follow the fate of experiences like “Upa en Apuros”; that is to say, technically correct curiosities without visible sequels. The problem of creatures populating an abstract “cartoonland” was to be overcome by a factor to which little attention had been paid up to that point: the voices.

It is remarkable that the author of the first animated feature film, Quirino Cristiani, already understood the importance of the subject. For his short film El Mono Relojero (1938) Cristiani summoned one of the most famous comic actors of the time to be in charge of all the voices of the film, an adaptation of the children’s book by the popular Constancio Vigil. Everyone agrees that the result (a first attempt by Cristiani to stick to the usual cel technique) did not work very well. The least enthusiastic of all turned out to be Mr. Vigil, and the failure of the project ended Cristiani’s career in animation, except for a couple of isolated experiments. Examining the film, it can be noted that one of its problems may have been precisely the pervading voice of the star, Pepe Iglesias, nullifying any possibility of a personality that does not refer directly to Mr. Iglesias. In any case, it is clear that his voice was intended as a final addition less than a possible generator of characters or situations.

“El mono relojero” (1938) por Quirino Cristiani.

With the arrival of television advertising in the 50’s, a new sound fauna emerged in Argentina. Most of them came from the radio. They were called announcers or speakers (locutores), and, although a good part of them had distinctive voices that functioned as sound signatures (usually associated to a certain brand or station), they did not always have the necessary flexibility to interpret something other than a rubric. Others, on the other hand, were able to take on acting responsibilities. Some of them were Eduardo Avakián, Pedro Aníbal Mansilla, Guillermo Lázaro, Eduardo Jimeno, Ricardo Jurado, Leopoldo Costa, Susana Sisto or María Isabel Ramírez (Maisabé). But the key figure among them all -let me avoid the easy label of calling him the Argentine Mel Blanc- came from the world of the music and his name is Pedro Domingo Suero (b.1938), although we know him as “Pelusa”.

---

This interview to “Pelusa” Suero was made in July, 2024.

-You became famous in a very new field in Argentina: cartoon voices. I imagine that the radio must have been a great trigger…

On the radio there were comedians like Pepe Iglesias, or others who did weird voices and that had caught my attention, but until then, I didn’t take those things into account… Actually the most important influence I had were my mother and my aunt, both piano players. In my house there were always professional musicians coming to play and I became interested in music. I was fundamentally a singer. From the age of 14 I had a vocal quartet with “Picho” Sciammarella (note: son of Rodolfo Sciammarella Sr., author of countless tangos, novelty songs, film music and advertising jingles) with whom we sang the songs of the moment and we shone at parties, for the girls’ benefit. Then Picho’s father discovered that we could sing jingles. For the first time I had to go into a recording studio, with those big microphones that used to be there.

I became friends with the technicians and asked permission to go to witness recordings and see how the whole thing was, because the microphone was placed in a different way for a violin or for a guitar or for a piano or for the singers, let’s say, and that marked differences in the sound… I learned all that thoroughly. It was useful to me later: it did helped me to know how to use microphones and how to discriminate voice colors.

The cinema was also important because that’s where I started watching cartoons, and I heard the voices. Although I didn’t know who they were, I realized that they were actors who did those special voices that were applied to the characters, their faces and their personalities.

-Apart from the Sciammarellas, you worked with Santos Lipesker (who directed several orchestras of different genres) and with Mariano Mores (famous director of the largest tango orchestra of the time)…

At that time there was only one television channel, Channel 7, so radio was more important and much more varied. By then Mariano Mores called us. We became a vocal quintet, and we played around three years on Radio Belgrano, with an orchestra of 80 members, the biggest that Mores had. They were all professional musicians. It was a luxury for me to be in the front, singing for a huge audience. Even though it was radio, we had to wear tuxedos. The applause was real, not recorded. In that season we recorded all the songs of Mores for the Odeon label. This led me to Santos Lipesker. Santos was musical director of an important label (Phonogram). And he made recordings of different kinds, using several pseudonyms, like the “Tururú Serenaders”, for example, which was a comic orchestra; but he was also a serious musician. I was part of his regular staff.

Note: Santos Lipesker also worked with the most important Argentine cartoonists of the time. His “Tururú Serenaders” were a joint creation with the cartoonist Landrú (Juan Carlos Colombres). For the famous humorist Divito, he composed the “Divito Boogie”.

With Lipesker we recorded all kinds of things. And he ended up conducting the orchestra that played on Radio Splendid when the radio show “La Revista Dislocada” was on, a very famous comedy hour, which was aired on Sunday noon. Accompanying him, I got in touch with the comedians and therefore I began to understand the difference between the normal voices and the comic voices that they used. Then, to my condition of singer I added naturally that possibility. Then, the producer, Délfor, gave me a character to do: a man from Corrientes (an Argentinian province surrounded by rivers) who transmitted alligator races.

-To what extent did your work with voices involve writing scripts, or creating characters?

I have written some things, but for that particular job I was always a performer. I had the pleasure of working with the best screenwriters of the moment. I never wrote, but I was involved in the creation of characters: when the scripts came to me, nobody told me how I should sound. I had to create the character from the vocal point of view. I proposed different colors of voices, different forms, different styles of saying… a work of complementation of what was written.

-How did you go from radio to animation?

At the time when I was working in radio, TV channels 9, 11 and 13 appeared. And with them, film advertising, something that Channel 7 could not do. Channel 7 did not have a little device called telecine and Channel 13 did. And the telecine made it possible to show movies clearly. Or filmed advertising. By then, I had an enormous experience in recording commercials and singing jingles. I teamed up with Miguel Loubet, with whom we had a group with which we sang in night clubs. We produced full jingles. First we wrote the scripts, and then, in order to make the necessary sketches for the clients, I had to do the voice-over, the singing or cartoon voices. At that time Carlos Ceretti, the creative director of Lowe, an advertising company, joined us; he gave newsreels to the Theater owners for free in exchange for exhibiting his advertising. We produced seven to fifteen jingles per week for Lowe. We worked on Saturdays or Sundays, everything had to be done against the clock from sketch to final recording, and that kept us totally busy. That was the reason why I left the radio.

Different TV ad animation with Pelusa’s voice (with Pedro Aníbal Mansilla in the first one, and Susana Sisto in the second one):

-I have a recording of yours made under your alter ego “Napoleón Puppy”: “El trisagio del soltero” and “Ellos me quieren llevar”. In the first one it is interesting to note a predecessor of the famous character Larguirucho.

I used to record for a lot of labels, especially CBS Columbia. One of their producers told me he had received something from a Venezuelan comedian (note: probably “Los Polivoces”), called “El trisagio del soltero” (“The bachelor’s trisagium”), written in a very localistic way. So I reworked the lyrics to make it understandable for Argentines and we recorded it: it was a terrible success. I used the pseudonym Napoleón Puppy, because on the B side of the single I recorded something else, “Ellos me quieren llevar”, written by an American artist called Napoleon XVI (“They’re Coming to Take me Away, Ha-Haaa” by Jerry Samuels, a.k.a Napoleon XVI). “El trisagio del soltero” was a smash hit, we sold 450,000 records in three months, so I suddenly became a performer that CBS paid attention to. And I also recorded other things but Columbia didn’t know how to deal with someone who did comic stuff, because the diffusion they usually had was either on the radio or in nightclubs. My output was not purely musical so it was not very well understood by them.

If you notice a predecessor of Larguirucho, it is because that was a central voice of mine, which I used for different things. I used to work with a lot of producers who called me, so I had no obligation not to repeat some voices. If they were useful, I used them. But when we fixed it on a particular character, it didn’t make sense for me to keep using it for other jobs.

-How did you start working with García Ferré?

I worked with GF for about 40 years, until his death. Marion Aramburu, a friend and singer with whom we also did a lot of jingles, one day suggested me to work with him in his TV strip “Anteojito y Antifaz”. Anteojito was Marion’s voice. She was a woman, but she was the voice of a boy, Anteojito. And a third character was needed, besides Antifaz, who was played by a Peruvian announcer, Pedro Aníbal Mansilla; a guy who later became an announcer for the BBC in London.

The show came about as an invention of GF: the jingle-omnibus, which allowed brands that did not have the capacity to have an exclusive jingle on television to be part of a collective that was named within the program. The problem was that the advertising agencies that represented each of the brands changed the texts five minutes before recording and that drove GF crazy, until he decided to drop it and started making Hijitus instead (one-minute short films shown daily on TV).

In “Hijitus” he first asked me to do Larguirucho, Pucho and Professor Neurus characters… because the Hijitus strip was about the typical fight of good against evil: Hijitus, the good, and the evil, Professor Neurus, who was bad but stupid. But Neurus was not individual enough. He needed some helpers, and there Larguirucho stood out. Larguirucho had to be bad because he was hired as bad guy, but he was intrinsically good, therefore he made friends with Hijitus. He lived going between good and evil because he was not a very brighten boy. That voice, which was very complex, stood out to the point that I think that in the people’s choice, Larguirucho was much more important than Hijitus.

-In fact, one of the keys to the success of “Hijitus” were the voices. The characters were anchored to Argentina, to their territorial particularities or even some social aspects. Larguirucho was a good-natured villain, far more interesting than the hero, because he could be both a good and a bad guy. It seems that in many cases the characters were created from the voices. How was the creative process with Ferré? Did they present you with a drawn character and tell you more or less what kind of voice they were looking for, or was there a collective participation in that process? How were developed the scripts?

GF had the habit of generating many characters, because he was a perspicacious guy who realized that Larguirucho, for example, had stood out, and so he kept creating characters to test them with the audience. I ended up making something like sixteen different characters: Larguirucho, Pucho, Serrucho, Professor Neurus, Cachavacha’s Owl, the director of the museum…

At that time, Néstor D’Alessandro, a fully creative guy, was Ferré’s sole scriptwriter. I had met him as a pianist when I was about 17 years old, when we worked together in night clubs… First he started as a musician with GF and then he took writing; until his death he wrote everything Ferré produced; he really gave an enormous impulse to his enterprise. (Note: D’Alessandro was also the voice of Hijitus -through some speed up voice- and of other characters of the show, such as the Cachavacha Witch).

I would say that 80% of that “Porteño” or Argentine mischievousness, which the Hijitus strip had, was a mixture of what Néstor D’Alessandro and I did, and not necessarily GF, who was very Spanish in his humor. But he realized that the audience liked that. And as he was a very shrewd businessman he went ahead.
You say that it seemed that the characters were created from the voices? Actually, it may have been something like that, because naturally GF, D’Alessandro and I had many meetings, we had lunch, we told anecdotes of our lives in the neighborhood. GF took many things from that and put it in the scripts. For example, I told you about a character from Corrientes who related alligator races, from my radio days. Well, I told GF about it and he put him in, as the Sheriff of Trulalá (the town where his characters lived). He used him very well.

Playing sixteen characters, I went crazy changing from one voice to the other. I never fully knew what was going on in the show, because they gave me the page of Larguirucho’s texts, let’s say, and I recorded only him. As the one who directed was Néstor D’Alessandro, if in the three first variants I was right, he accepted it; but if not, he gave me some story background in order to get the correct intonation. I never understood what the plot was, but after the editing it magically came together because the scriptwriter was the one who directed me.

“Las aventuras de Hijitus: Peligro en el volcán” (1969).

So we worked at a brutal speed because we had to broadcast on Channel 13 one minute a day. We had to record from Monday to Friday. With practice, we ended up recording on Friday every day of the week, and then the thing was so well thought out that the whole layout made up a 20-minute program.

About the process of generating a character’s voice: I was given a text and I started to think about how to create the voice that corresponded. I realized that I had to do very high or low pitch voices so they didn’t sound like they were coming from the same throat, because there were dialogues when all the characters were speaking almost at the same time. I took great care to make distinctive voices that were well distanced and well thought out so that they did not resemble each other. Participation was absolutely collective. At the beginning, with García Ferré as creative head, and in the last years, he already had so much confidence in us that he let us work alone, and he took care of the commercial issue, which was really great.

-Years later you did the voice of Clemente, an animated strip based on the character of the humorist Caloi. Caloi said that defining the voice of his creature was a very long process, because he couldn’t “find” the character. How do you remember that search?

When I met Caloi, he didn’t know me at all. I mean, everybody thinks that the people who does characters voices are more clownish than creative types… he wasn’t very clear about the capacity I could have. I was not a terrible soccer fan so he said, “Oh, then you’re no good for my character”. After several tests with some other people he came to me, “we can’t figure it out”. So I said to him, “but do you know what Clemente’s voice is like?” and he said, “Of course”. “Well, let’s do something, I don’t like to imitate, but if you record it, I’ll imitate you”. So he got into the microphone, recorded, and when he heard himself, he said, “no, I have it in my head, but I can’t get it. You’re the professional, tell me what Clemente’s voice is like” and then I did the voice and I’m going to do it now so you can understand it better (with Clemente’s voice): I did a voice that was aphonic or dysphonic because in fact he had lost his vocal cords shouting the national team’s goals.

TV ad with Clemente.

But also Clemente lived in a “clementine” world, where its inhabitants were variations that spoke like him. I had to do a lot of those characters. For example, a Jacques Costeau-Clemente, who had a boat and sailed in the rotten water of the street curbs. So how did this Jacques Costeau-Clemente differ from the real Clemente? He had the same voice, but he spoke in a French-mock accent, because the guy had to differ from the original Clemente. He was as dysphonic as Clemente, but he was Jacques Costeau.

It was a very nice experience and I also regret that after Caloi’s death, whoever inherited it didn’t know what to do with it, and that’s when Clemente died. And this also happened with GF creations. They let it fade away. Only people 40 or 30 years old or older know more or less how Ferré’s or Caloi’s things were. And I can’t use what I created, otherwise they will say “he’s repeating those characters”.

-Another central figure in the history of voices for animation in Argentina is Maisabé, your wife. You worked together for many years, I think even before you were married…

Maisabé is my current wife. I worked with her for about 20 years, but she was married to her husband and I was married to my wife. We had a professional, friendly relationship, but it hadn’t even crossed our minds that we could become a couple. When both her husband died and I divorced my first wife, we met again four years ago…

I did characters and she did normal voices. She is a wonderful dubbing artist who can put herself in the psychology of whoever she is dubbing and people don’t realize that the face is of one person and the voice was of another. She had a fantastic ability. She has it, of course, but at our ages we are no longer called upon for that.

Shelltox Ad, dueto with the voices of Pelusa and Maisabé.

I worked for 70 years, from the age of 14 until the pandemic, which made things change in such a way that young people don’t know everything I did… at most, if they find out that I did Larguirucho, they pat me in the back and tell me “what a nice voice”. But they don’t know the flexibility of voices that I had. And the same happens with Maisabé.