Why did Sean Schemmel seem so off in OG Dragon Ball?

[WittyUsername]

I’m aware that Schemmel is a polarizing figure on this website, both for his performance as Goku, and for his sometimes unprofessional behavior. Nevertheless, one thing that we all can agree on is that regardless of what you think of him as Goku or as a person, his performance did evolve over time, just like everyone else who’s part of the OG FUNimation cast. His biggest leap forward came about in Kai, but he had a steady progression before that point as well. His performance in the Cell arc was a step up from his performance in 1999, and his performance in the Buu arc was a step up from that. With that being said, did anyone else notice that his performance as Goku in the dub of OG Dragon Ball sounded off?

Schemmel’s lines for Goku in the original anime were recorded around 2002/2003, which means that they were done around the time that they wrapped up the Buu arc, yet for some reason, Schemmel’s performance in the former seemed like a step down. A lot of his line delivery sounded like it was done on the first take. Say what you will about his performance in the Bud arc, but he felt much more consistent there than he did in the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai arc. What exactly was the reason for that?

[ShadowBardock89]

I’m aware that Schemmel is a polarizing figure on this website, both for his performance as Goku, and for his sometimes unprofessional behavior. Nevertheless, one thing that we all can agree on is that regardless of what you think of him as Goku or as a person, his performance did evolve over time, just like everyone else who’s part of the OG FUNimation cast. His biggest leap forward came about in Kai, but he had a steady progression before that point as well. His performance in the Cell arc was a step up from his performance in 1999, and his performance in the Buu arc was a step up from that. With that being said, did anyone else notice that his performance as Goku in the dub of OG Dragon Ball sounded off?

Schemmel’s lines for Goku in the original anime were recorded around 2002/2003, which means that they were done around the time that they wrapped up the Buu arc, yet for some reason, Schemmel’s performance in the former seemed like a step down. A lot of his line delivery sounded like it was done on the first take. Say what you will about his performance in the Bud arc, but he felt much more consistent there than he did in the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai arc. What exactly was the reason for that?

I think he was trying to go for a younger Goku. Ultimately, whoever was the voice director is the one who approved of the delivery and the finished product.

[ABED]

I don't know about it sounding anything like his performance were taken from early takes, not sure why that would matter, but he was clearly pitching his voice up to sound younger.

[MasenkoHA]

From what I remember he sounded better than he did in the Buu saga?

[KBABZ]

I agree, in the final Dragon Ball arc he sounds like he's got a cold and never delivers any of his lines all that well. It's the main reason why I'd like to see an OG-DB Kai, just so that we can have Schemmel have another crack at Goku at that time in his life. It's a shame because Sonny Straight is a straight-up natural at performing Krillin for that arc.

[sintzu]

I noticed that as well and I think it had something to do with the scrip and voice director as both didn't seem to get the most out of him for certain moments.

[lancerman]

I think he was just trying to channel his earlier performance because technically he was portraying a Goku closer to early Z.

[JohnnyCashKami]

Schemmel on the Dragon Ball dub was in his early days so he was still grasping at it. Eventually, he nailed the role after Kai came along.

[The Patrolman]

He was probably trying portray Goku in that point of age

[jjgp1112]

Schemmel on the Dragon Ball dub was in his early days so he was still grasping at it. Eventually, he nailed the role after Kai came along.

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

[Kunzait_83]

Schemmel on the Dragon Ball dub was in his early days so he was still grasping at it. Eventually, he nailed the role after Kai came along.

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

Not only that, but by the time he started dubbing Kai it was 2010: and he started voicing the role what, in 1999? That's over ten or eleven straight years voicing this same character. Across hundreds of TV episodes, dozens of movies, and countless video games. Never mind that I personally disagree and think that Schemmel has been uniformly, universally awful as Goku for the most part from beginning to now: lets say for the sake of argument that I did agree and that he eventually "nailed" the role by the time Kai came along. When it takes you over a decade of performing the same part (throughout ungodly amounts of content) before you finally even start to get the hang of the character properly... that doesn't speak too well of one's acting chops overall.

The excuses that fans keep coming up with to continually let the FUNimcation cast off the hook is always remarkable: "Well sure they sucked at first, but eventually they got it right at THIS point in time down the line, after X video game or Y anime reboot", usually many, many long years and years later after they first started. I don't know of any other fanbase for any other group of performers who are so absurdly lenient and forgiving that they'll wait around for over a decade for the actor in question to finally get the proper hang of a given role. That's just NOT a thing ANYWHERE else that I'm aware of except for FUNimation's DBZ fanbase, who'll claim lifelong fealty to them even though by some estimates, some of them didn't truly come into their own in these roles until the early 2010s.

[ekrolo2]

The excuses that fans keep coming up with to continually let the FUNimcation cast off the hook is always remarkable: "Well sure they sucked at first, but eventually they got it right at THIS point in time down the line, after X video game or Y anime reboot", usually many, many long years and years later after they first started. I don't know of any other fanbase for any other group of performers who are so absurdly lenient and forgiving that they'll wait around for over a decade for the actor in question to finally get the proper hang of a given role. That's just NOT a thing ANYWHERE else that I'm aware of except for FUNimation's DBZ fanbase, who'll claim lifelong fealty to them even though by some estimates, some of them didn't truly come into their own in these roles until the early 2010s.

Absurd apologism (is that a word?) is a problem I'd cite with the larger community myself. If any other franchise did HALF the crap Dragon Ball pulled, it'd get burned an effigy for all time. How the fuck does Han & Greedo thing cause people's blood to boil but Vegeta decade+ long destruction thanks to the Kanzenban ending get ignored or outright defended?

[Mosaic]

Funny, I'm not a Schemmel fan, but I actually really liked him in Dragon Ball. It's been years since I've watched it dubbed, but I remember really enjoying his performance. Was never big on him in the Z or GT dubs.

[MasenkoHA]

Schemmel on the Dragon Ball dub was in his early days so he was still grasping at it. Eventually, he nailed the role after Kai came along.

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

Not only that, but by the time he started dubbing Kai it was 2010: and he started voicing the role what, in 1999? That's over ten or eleven straight years voicing this same character. Across hundreds of TV episodes, dozens of movies, and countless video games. Never mind that I personally disagree and think that Schemmel has been uniformly, universally awful as Goku for the most part from beginning to now: lets say for the sake of argument that I did agree and that he eventually "nailed" the role by the time Kai came along. When it takes you over a decade of performing the same part (throughout ungodly amounts of content) before you finally even start to get the hang of the character properly... that doesn't speak too well of one's acting chops overall.

The excuses that fans keep coming up with to continually let the FUNimcation cast off the hook is always remarkable: "Well sure they sucked at first, but eventually they got it right at THIS point in time down the line, after X video game or Y anime reboot", usually many, many long years and years later after they first started. I don't know of any other fanbase for any other group of performers who are so absurdly lenient and forgiving that they'll wait around for over a decade for the actor in question to finally get the proper hang of a given role. That's just NOT a thing ANYWHERE else that I'm aware of except for FUNimation's DBZ fanbase, who'll claim lifelong fealty to them even though by some estimates, some of them didn't truly come into their own in these roles until the early 2010s.

I’d argue that Schemmel seemed to have got the role down by the 2005 redub. Still six years too long to not totally suck. Then you had actors like Nadolny and Vollmer and Young who needed to be cut because they were never going to not suck.

Schemmel is still ridiculously overrated though

[jjgp1112]

Schemmel on the Dragon Ball dub was in his early days so he was still grasping at it. Eventually, he nailed the role after Kai came along.

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

Not only that, but by the time he started dubbing Kai it was 2010: and he started voicing the role what, in 1999? That's over ten or eleven straight years voicing this same character. Across hundreds of TV episodes, dozens of movies, and countless video games. Never mind that I personally disagree and think that Schemmel has been uniformly, universally awful as Goku for the most part from beginning to now: lets say for the sake of argument that I did agree and that he eventually "nailed" the role by the time Kai came along. When it takes you over a decade of performing the same part (throughout ungodly amounts of content) before you finally even start to get the hang of the character properly... that doesn't speak too well of one's acting chops overall.

The excuses that fans keep coming up with to continually let the FUNimcation cast off the hook is always remarkable: "Well sure they sucked at first, but eventually they got it right at THIS point in time down the line, after X video game or Y anime reboot", usually many, many long years and years later after they first started. I don't know of any other fanbase for any other group of performers who are so absurdly lenient and forgiving that they'll wait around for over a decade for the actor in question to finally get the proper hang of a given role. That's just NOT a thing ANYWHERE else that I'm aware of except for FUNimation's DBZ fanbase, who'll claim lifelong fealty to them even though by some estimates, some of them didn't truly come into their own in these roles until the early 2010s.

Well I mean I wasn't trying to say whether Schemmel was good or not by that point (I'd say he more or less nailed it by 2001), just correcting the inaccuracy.

[Robo4900]

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

Well, somewhere between two and four, actually. Dragon Ball episode 133 had its USA debut on the 23rd of October 2003, apparently, while edited Z episode 54 aired on the 13th of September 1999. So, four years' gap between the airings of those. But, the Ginyu Assault tape was released back in April '99, and the Funimation DVD containing DB episode 133 was released in July '03. So, the timelines are a little fuzzy. Really, Schemmel's lines for it could have been recorded any time from 2001, when this dub first started airing, to 2003, when they were getting to airing this arc. I generally assume it was 2002-ish, but it's hard to know.

Schemmel on the Dragon Ball dub was in his early days so he was still grasping at it. Eventually, he nailed the role after Kai came along.

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

Not only that, but by the time he started dubbing Kai it was 2010: and he started voicing the role what, in 1999? That's over ten or eleven straight years voicing this same character. Across hundreds of TV episodes, dozens of movies, and countless video games. Never mind that I personally disagree and think that Schemmel has been uniformly, universally awful as Goku for the most part from beginning to now: lets say for the sake of argument that I did agree and that he eventually "nailed" the role by the time Kai came along. When it takes you over a decade of performing the same part (throughout ungodly amounts of content) before you finally even start to get the hang of the character properly... that doesn't speak too well of one's acting chops overall.

The excuses that fans keep coming up with to continually let the FUNimcation cast off the hook is always remarkable: "Well sure they sucked at first, but eventually they got it right at THIS point in time down the line, after X video game or Y anime reboot", usually many, many long years and years later after they first started. I don't know of any other fanbase for any other group of performers who are so absurdly lenient and forgiving that they'll wait around for over a decade for the actor in question to finally get the proper hang of a given role. That's just NOT a thing ANYWHERE else that I'm aware of except for FUNimation's DBZ fanbase, who'll claim lifelong fealty to them even though by some estimates, some of them didn't truly come into their own in these roles until the early 2010s.

Indeed. Many of the castings are still pretty meh at best, and even though Kai exists to somewhat atone for the sins of the original Z dub, DB and GT remain with the shockingly bad work Funimation did on them, for all to see.

Absurd apologism (is that a word?) is a problem I'd cite with the larger community myself. If any other franchise did HALF the crap Dragon Ball pulled, it'd get burned an effigy for all time. How the fuck does Han & Greedo thing cause people's blood to boil but Vegeta decade+ long destruction thanks to the Kanzenban ending get ignored or outright defended?

Abso-goddamn-lutely. In no other fandom would fans so aggressively defend the worst home media releases of all time. Same goes for the really aggressive defensiveness people have about the constant changes in Funimation's dubbing scripts that continue into the modern day... It did get better with Kai, and in fact Kai's scripts overall were pretty decent... But TFC and Super have been a massive step down in that regard, and people continuing to defend the ridiculous changes that riddle these scripts is just mind-boggling.

I’d argue that Schemmel seemed to have got the role down by the 2005 redub. Still six years too long to not totally suck. Then you had actors like Nadolny and Vollmer and Young who needed to be cut because they were never going to not suck.

I mostly agree(I'd shift it further up, to Kai, since IMO the directing of the 2005 redub was crappy), though that is a problem with a lot of people in the Funi cast... And the ones this doesn't apply to, really never settled in properly, and really should have been recast. Recasting Nadolny, Vollmer, and Young was a godsend, but we're still saddled with a lot of poor castings. Granted, basically all of them now are a case of just being decent but not great(See: Piccolo, #16, Shen Long, Oolong, Yamucha, Puar, God/Kami, Babidi, Raditz, Nappa, Super Boo... They're not bad by any means, but I have a hard time believing these are the best possible castings for these characters in Funi's now rather huge casting pool...), but Funi had an opportunity to really do something great from Kai onwards... If they'd stuck to their guns on the scripting style early on(Including the attack names), fixed up some pronunciations, and been more aggressive with the recastings, these modern dubs would be truly great dubs. As it is... They do the job, but it's pretty messy dubbing work; some castings are great, others aren't, some parts are perfect adaptations of the original that flow great, others are jarring, clunky nonsense exclusive to this dubbing team's efforts.

On one hand, you have basically every word spoken by Freeza in Kai, on the other hand you have the whole "Strong boy" thing, "Dude, my truck!!", or of course, "I forgot my tractor", a line that unlike most Funi additions/changes which try to add or change the vibe of the scene, basically tries to play into the existing joke... And ends up just ruining the original joke. >_<
The thing that really bugs me about all this is that if it was just a few isolated incidents, it wouldn't matter, but it's been every damn episode since at least the start of Super...
I realise I'm getting more into the scripting problems than the casting problems, but it's all the same issue -- Funi are trying to move forward with a more accurate style of dubbing, but at the same time also trying to dub in the same way they did back in 1999, and these two approaches are totally at odds with each-other... You end up with something that managed to be neither, and overall is just kind of a compromised mess... You have Chris Ayres playing a basically perfect English version of Freeza, with dialogue perfectly suiting this, and then you have Sean Schemmel playing a Kaio lacking any gravitas, wisdom, or anything other than the sense of humour that the original character had...

[KBABZ]

I'd rather the cast improves than they didn't, for whatever that means in this thread anymore.

[MasenkoHA]

No, it wasn't. He'd already been voicing Goku for five years by the time he started dubbing Dragon Ball. It was simply a different approach from his normal Goku performance.

Well, somewhere between two and four, actually. Dragon Ball episode 133 had its USA debut on the 23rd of October 2003, apparently, while edited Z episode 54 aired on the 13th of September 1999. So, four years' gap between the airings of those. But, the Ginyu Assault tape was released back in April '99, and the Funimation DVD containing DB episode 133 was released in July '03. So, the timelines are a little fuzzy. Really, Schemmel's lines for it could have been recorded any time from 2001, when this dub first started airing, to 2003, when they were getting to airing this arc. I generally assume it was 2002-ish, but it's hard to know.

Either way it was enough time for him to not suck.

Indeed. Many of the castings are still pretty meh at best, and even though Kai exists to somewhat atone for the sins of the original Z dub, DB and GT remain with the shockingly bad work Funimation did on them, for all to see.

Unfortunately we’ll never get that Dragon Ball redub even if we did Colleen would be miscast imho

.

I mostly agree(I'd shift it further up, to Kai, since IMO the directing of the 2005 redub was crappy),

Meh the 2005 was the best of the Funi Pre-Kai Z dub stuff despite some huge flaws (lazily recycling the 1996 scripts) and we know why it exist was to replace the Ocean cast under the pretense of the hardcore definitive uncut version. So I kind of dislike it on principle and it ultimately becomes a useless product (if you don’t bother having Schemmel rerecord his season 3 lines and only remove a handful of the dumber lines what good is any of it?) But the Nathan Johnson score is infinitely superior to the Faulconer crap (and I even like it better than Wasserman) Like Uncut Z dub gets a C. Season 3 gets an F (broadcast or “remastered” take your pick) Android/Cell saga gets a D- and the Buu saga gets a D+

[GreatSaiyaJeff]

Season 3 (The Freeza saga) and the first half of season 4 (The trunks/androids saga) was him getting into the groove of things and was trying his best. It wasn't until season 5 (The start of the buu arc) that he got into the character and he did really well. GT, Re dub of season 1 and 2, Kai and Super, he was pretty much Goku or at least to me.

[Robo4900]

Unfortunately we’ll never get that Dragon Ball redub even if we did Colleen would be miscast imho

In terms of DB probably never being redubbed... Yes, I agree. And that sucks so much.

I don't think Colleen is bad, I think as a kid Goku she'd fit into the meh category. Not bad, but not great either. At the very least, an improvement on Nadolny.
If they did redub OG DB sometime, kid Goku should get a casting that isn't just "lets use whoever's playing gohan".

Meh the 2005 was the best of the Funi Pre-Kai Z dub stuff despite some huge flaws (lazily recycling the 1996 scripts) and we know why it exist was to replace the Ocean cast under the pretense of the hardcore definitive uncut version. So I kind of dislike it on principle and it ultimately becomes a useless product (if you don’t bother having Schemmel rerecord his season 3 lines and only remove a handful of the dumber lines what good is any of it?) But the Nathan Johnson score is infinitely superior to the Faulconer crap (and I even like it better than Wasserman) Like Uncut Z dub gets a C. Season 3 gets an F (broadcast or “remastered” take your pick) Android/Cell saga gets a D- and the Buu saga gets a D+

The 2005 redub was better, but better is not good. Far from it, I consider UUE to be in the same category of crap as all of Funi's other pre-Kai in-house series dubs; it has all the same issues, they'd just improved as a cast a lot in the years since "Season 3" started, and the scripts, music, and overall approach weren't as ruinous and abhorrent as they were in GT.