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Prior to his lucrative, star-making stint on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” actor and comedian Brad Garrett spent 15 solid years paying his dues. Garrett was bitten by the stand-up comedy bug when he was young, and started touring local Southern California comedy clubs in the 1980s when he was in his 20s. In 1984, Garrett won an impressive $100,000 on the talent show competition “Star Search,” the first comedian to win the prize. That led directly to a night on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” which, in turn, got Garrett a long string of gigs opening for some of the hottest musical acts, performers, and lounge singers of the day; he opened for Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Liza Minnelli, and David Copperfield.<\/p>\n
To supplement his income, the deep-voice Garrett also took on a lot of voice roles for various animated shows<\/a>. He played the robot Trypticon on the 1986 series “Transformers,” but made his professional voice acting debut with a rather high-profile role, playing the legendarily weird Hulk Hogan<\/a> in the bizarre animated series “Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling.”<\/p>\n It’s important to remember that the World Wrestling Federation (later, World Wrestling Entertainment) was huge in the mid-1980s, and had grown into a legitimate entertainment empire. The very first Wrestlemania event debuted in 1985, and over 19,000 people gathered at Madison Square Garden to witness it. It featured star wrestlers of the day like Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, King Kong Bundy, Big John Studd, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, and, of course, Andre the Giant. The main event was Hulk Hogan vs. Mr. T, an event for the ages. Hulk Hogan was more or less the “main character” of the WWF.<\/p>\n “Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling” debuted the following September. It was a hit.<\/p>\n