John Ratzenberger

The mail carrier who wasn't expecting anyone

John Ratzenberger walked into the audition room for Cheers in 1982, hoping to land the role of Norm Peterson. He didn't get it. But before leaving, he turned around and asked the producers if they planned to include the typical know-it-all who hangs out in every Boston bar.

He improvised an absurd theory on the origin of neckties right there, and the show's creators were mesmerized. That's how Cliff Clavin was born. The character was only supposed to appear in seven episodes, but he stayed for eleven full seasons.

That one bright idea changed his bank account forever.

Ratzenberger was never a traditional method actor. Before landing on television, he worked as a carpenter at the Woodstock festival in 1969. He also lived in London for almost a decade, where he formed an experimental theater duo. There he learned that comedic timing depends more on silence than on the punchline.

During his British period, he picked up small parts in big Hollywood productions looking to cut costs in England. In 1980, he played Mayor Derlin in The Empire Strikes Back. A year earlier, he had a brief appearance in Superman as a missile controller. They were paycheck roles that allowed him to keep doing guerrilla theater across Europe.

The voice behind the billion-dollar blockbusters

In 1995, he voiced Hamm the piggy bank in Toy Story. It marked the start of an unprecedented working relationship in the animation industry. Pixar's directors began to see him as their good luck charm, because every film he worked on ended up dominating the box office.

Ratzenberger voiced characters in the studio's first 22 films without interruption. His ability to sound both authoritative and funny allowed him to play everything from a delivery truck in Cars to a circus auctioneer in A Bug's Life.

But success in animation didn't pull him away from his working-class roots. Outside the spotlight, he devoted much of his time to promoting vocational schools across the United States. In 2004, he produced and hosted Made in America, showing how everyday products were made in the country's factories.

The good luck charm had broken.

The end of the Pixar winning streak

His voice's tradition in every Pixar project came to an abrupt halt in 2020 with the release of Soul. In that film, he had only a visual cameo with no dialogue lines. In later productions such as Luca in 2021 or Turning Red in 2022, his name no longer appeared in the voice credits.

Many fans of the studio looked for mystical explanations for this departure. The reality is that the change in executives and the arrival of new creators ended the momentum of the old days. In 2024, the release of Inside Out 2 definitively confirmed that Ratzenberger's era as the studio's regular voice had come to an end.

Despite this distance, his financial legacy is undeniable. The films he has appeared in have grossed more than six billion dollars worldwide. He is one of the highest-grossing actors in history without ever having headlined a movie poster on his own.

In 2021, he reprised his role as Yeti in the series Monsters at Work for Disney+. It was one of his last recording sessions tied to the franchise that kept him at the top for three decades. He currently lives in Connecticut and runs a company that makes eco-friendly packaging from cornstarch.