Danica Lee, the 10-year old, twice Emmy-nominated cast member of Nickelodeon’s Wonder Pets talks with The Ashbury Park Press about getting to meet Kevin Clash (voice and performer of Elmo) and what it’s like being the voice of Ming-Ming on Wonder Pets.
Ming-Ming follows in the footsteps of Tweety Bird, another yellow bird with an unorthodox speech pattern. Ming-Ming’s lisp is played for laughs, as the duckling speaks lines too sophisticated for her years. “I never had a lisp; they actually wanted her to have a lisp,” said Danica of the show’s creators. “After a while, it became natural, so now I can speak in two voices, and that’s kind of cool. It’s also funny because Ming-Ming is supposed to be 3 years old and how would a 3-year-old know all those words, the vocabulary that I’m saying?”
It can be startling to hear Ming-Ming’s perky voice emerge from Danica Lee, especially for preschoolers who might think Ming-Ming is a real duckling.
Upon request during the interview, Danica tried out her Ming-Ming voice on a 4-year-old fan.
“This is sewious!” Danica cried. “We need to save the baby animals wight now!”
Her young fan seemed unnerved, and she couldn’t really grasp the concept of a “voice actor.”
“Oh, don’t ruin it for her,” [Danica’s mother] Lisa Lee said. “Let her enjoy the magic of it.”
Danica herself has been enjoying every bit of magic on “The Wonder Pets!”
“I get to do so many things I love,” she said, petting a plush Ming-Ming doll. “It’s so much fun.”
Click here to read the complete interview.