Sled dogs took me down a rabbit hole

Recently and very randomly I've been thinking about the movie Balto at work (when you're not having fun, what else is there to do but replay movies in your head, lol?). Such a good movie -- James Horner's beautiful score, animation, vocal performances, just about everything. 

I was also thinking about the characters, including three certain ones -- Nikki, Kaltag, and Star. They're my favorite characters, although I like everybody mostly (with two certain exceptions). Even though they gave Balto a lot of crap, their saving grace was 1) actually being funny, and 2) having their own thing going on between the three of them. They're like the movie's Greek chorus. Like in the scene where Balto and Steele are fighting, or rather, Steele is just manhandling Balto, I'm not laughing at what Balto's going through as much as I am Nikki and Kaltag's cold commentary on everything (before they realize both Steele's sanity and competence are highly questionable). I'm finding that I tend to be more forgiving of bully/antagonist type characters if they're actually funny and that humor isn't solely based around them making fun of another character (there's at least one other character I feel falls into this category that I'm probably going to be talking about in the future. I have a feeling it's gonna be a somewhat controversial post). The trio's other saving grace was that they put the job ahead of themselves, unlike Steele, and they started really respecting and rooting for Balto after the "fight" scene.

That snowballed into my going on YouTube and watching couple of videos about the movie. Then I decided to see if I could possibly find any voice acting compilations (something I enjoy doing because it's fun -- I've always been interested in voice actors, and even as a kid would get excited if I recognized voice actors in the shows I watched) for Jack Angel, who voiced Nikki (the gold/cream-colored member of the trio). This led my discovering that he apparently died all the way back in 2021. 😞 This was the only thing my search turned up. It's... not very extensive:

 

There's also a lot of Transformers related stuff for him as well. I'm wondering if it's because many of the series and movies he was in aren't available online/or maybe they're copyrighted by whoever owns the rights and they don't want people posting clips? 

Whatever it is, it sucks. I dunno, feels like a lot of older voice actors from the early nineties and before that time don't get their dues these days. Also, I miss it when animated movies and shows would use professional voice actors alongside celebrity voices (and quite a few shows predominantly used professional VAs). Now just about all you see are celebrity voices. Did we really need Rosie Perez to speak only one or two lines of dialogue for a character that only ever showed up one time in Elena Of Avalor?

Well, here's to you, Mr. Angel. And dear reader(s), if you've never seen Balto before, go watch it.