Thoughts on Colleen Clinkenbeard?

[majinwarman]

Her Gohan took the longest to get used too out of all the recasts but now I really love it. Her #18 is really good too dare I say even slightly better than McCoy... Her Goku I see potential, if she had a full swing at it I think she would do well.

I agree with your statements.

[KBABZ]

I just wish Coleen would do a better Nadolny impression. She has a far large emotional range with her performances than Nadolny does, but I just can't get over how different it is from what I'm used to.

[WittyUsername]

I’m fine with her Gohan, although I’ll admit that it did take some getting used to. I’m still generally not a fan of the practice of getting women to voice male characters, though (Masako Nozawa is an exception), but her voice is fine, although as far as Goku is concerned, I would say that I prefer Nadolny in the role, even if I’d much rather have actual kids voicing these characters.

As far as her voice for #18 is concerned, it’s okay. It’s not that it’s an unfitting voice, but it seems a little too much like a generic girly girl voice. I frankly prefer McCoy in the role, and I’m glad she’s back, the same way I’m glad that Brad Jackson is back as Oolong.

[Kataphrut]

She's a really good actor, and I think it's interesting that she seems to be their go-to for replacing kids and female characters. Would Future Mai be the first character she played that didn't previously belong to another actor? Gohan, Goku, 18, and *technically* present Mai are all roles that belonged to someone else, but with the exception of 18 she's the default for all of them now.

I'm fine with it. Stephany Nadolny's Gohan is right up there with Linda Young Freeza and Bruce Falconer as things from The Bad Dub that I'm glad are gone. And I grew up with Nadolny Gohan. I watched her do the Super Saiyan 2 transformation like everybody else. And yet, the first time I heard Colleen as Gohan (in Xenoverse, Incidentally) I just thought "Oh, they've got someone who sounds like an actual kid playing Gohan now. Cool." There was no nostalgia for it, I was just instantly ok with the change. Now I cringe whenever I hear the old Gohan.

I can see an argument for preferring Nadolny's Goku, but Colleen's is fine. It feels like a placeholder having her voice him since Kid Goku doesn't feature in anything outside the video games these days.

Her 18's a weird one; she's not bad but it's different from what we're used to and jarring since all the other modern DB stuff has McCoy. I'm surprised it's not more popular with sub fans incidentally, it feels much closer to the Japanese voice than McCoy's butch soccer mom take.

[WittyUsername]

I wouldn’t describe McCoy’s 18 voice as butch. It sounds like a fairly feminine voice in its own right, just one that happens to place more emphasis on her somewhat deadpan personality.

[TheGreatness25]

I'm pretty sure that I like her Gohan more than Nadolny's, but overall, I find her portrayal of Gohan to be really whiny. Maybe I just have one particular scene stuck in my head, but every time I think of her Gohan, I just picture this really whiny tone. Maybe it's not fair and I need to watch more.

Call me blinded by nostalgia, but I wholeheartedly believe that Saffron Henderson set the bar really high and is the perfect, definitive English-speaking kid Gohan (much like I feel about most of the original Ocean casting). Funimation has come so far, leaps and bounds. Everyone, from the OGs to the recasts, have fine-tuned their skills over the years to deliver some very good work. But with that being said, I feel that they still sound like they're doing voice acting. Something about the Ocean cast felt very natural. If I closed my eyes and heard a line delivered by Henderson's Gohan, I'd think to myself, "Wow, that sounds like a kid!" If I close my eyes and hear Nadolny or Clickenbeard deliver a line, I'd say, "Oh, this must be an anime." It's hard to describe, but there's a certain formula (I guess) that voice actors use when voicing anime where it's obvious that it's anime. I feel that the Ocean cast -- even when they were obviously forcing voices -- sounded more natural. Yes, Drummond was obviously forcing his voice into sounding like Vegeta, but it sounded like it just came out of him naturally instead of being so forced like Sabat's, for example.

Anyway, before I lose focus, I'd say that I would probably list Clickenbeard above Nadolny (especially for Gohan, as that was when she was still finding her groove, while Goku is when she found it), but if we're talking about the best kid Gohan, it'll always be Henderson.

Honorable mention to Jillian Michaels (Saffron Henderson's replacement in the Cell arc of the Ocean dub). I wasn't a fan of how she delivered the lines, but she sounded pretty good. I would definitely place her above Nadolny as well. And that's not nostalgia, as I was first exposed to her work as Gohan like a year ago.

[KBABZ]

I'm pretty sure that I like her Gohan more than Nadolny's, but overall, I find her portrayal of Gohan to be really whiny. Maybe I just have one particular scene stuck in my head, but every time I think of her Gohan, I just picture this really whiny tone. Maybe it's not fair and I need to watch more.

Personally I'd recommend jumping in at the Android arc, maybe even at the point where Gohan emerges from the RoSaT. One of my favourite aspects about Colleen's performance as Kid Gohan is the vocal evolution, going from high-pitched at Kame House to lower and more determined in the Cell Games, and I didn't even notice for a large amount of episodes.

[Forte224]

I'm pretty sure that I like her Gohan more than Nadolny's, but overall, I find her portrayal of Gohan to be really whiny. Maybe I just have one particular scene stuck in my head, but every time I think of her Gohan, I just picture this really whiny tone. Maybe it's not fair and I need to watch more.

Personally I'd recommend jumping in at the Android arc, maybe even at the point where Gohan emerges from the RoSaT. One of my favourite aspects about Colleen's performance as Kid Gohan is the vocal evolution, going from high-pitched at Kame House to lower and more determined in the Cell Games, and I didn't even notice for a large amount of episodes.

This is my favorite part of Clinkenbeard. Everyone says she doesn't sound any older after the RoSaT but those people clearly aren't paying enough attention. It's one of the more natural sounding shifts in a performance to indicate an age difference I've heard. For a dub anyway.

[TheGreatness25]

By total coincidence, I just heard her performance from the first episode of Kai, and she sounds like a very good 4 year old Gohan. Maybe I'm thinking of her later performance (Namek, cyborgs)? I know for a fact there's one portion of the series where I can't stand her performance.

[KBABZ]

I'm pretty sure that I like her Gohan more than Nadolny's, but overall, I find her portrayal of Gohan to be really whiny. Maybe I just have one particular scene stuck in my head, but every time I think of her Gohan, I just picture this really whiny tone. Maybe it's not fair and I need to watch more.

Personally I'd recommend jumping in at the Android arc, maybe even at the point where Gohan emerges from the RoSaT. One of my favourite aspects about Colleen's performance as Kid Gohan is the vocal evolution, going from high-pitched at Kame House to lower and more determined in the Cell Games, and I didn't even notice for a large amount of episodes.

This is my favorite part of Clinkenbeard. Everyone says she doesn't sound any older after the RoSaT but those people clearly aren't paying enough attention. It's one of the more natural sounding shifts in a performance to indicate an age difference I've heard. For a dub anyway.

Hear hear! Although I guess apparently Japan does it far better on a more regular basis?

[Forte224]

Personally I'd recommend jumping in at the Android arc, maybe even at the point where Gohan emerges from the RoSaT. One of my favourite aspects about Colleen's performance as Kid Gohan is the vocal evolution, going from high-pitched at Kame House to lower and more determined in the Cell Games, and I didn't even notice for a large amount of episodes.

This is my favorite part of Clinkenbeard. Everyone says she doesn't sound any older after the RoSaT but those people clearly aren't paying enough attention. It's one of the more natural sounding shifts in a performance to indicate an age difference I've heard. For a dub anyway.

Hear hear! Although I guess apparently Japan does it far better on a more regular basis?

Generally yeah. At least that's how I feel. Nozawa's differences in particular between Goku, Gohan, and Goten's different ages all feel very distinct to me.

[KBABZ]

Generally yeah. At least that's how I feel. Nozawa's differences in particular between Goku, Gohan, and Goten's different ages all feel very distinct to me.

If Funimation found an equivalent VO for their dub, would such an extensive family voiced by one person work for western audiences?

[Forte224]

Generally yeah. At least that's how I feel. Nozawa's differences in particular between Goku, Gohan, and Goten's different ages all feel very distinct to me.

If Funimation found an equivalent VO for their dub, would such an extensive family voiced by one person work for western audiences?

Hmmmm...no I don't think so. I don't think western audiences would be accepting of it, honestly. Granted, I'm also of the mindset that Goku, Gohan, Goten, Bardock, etc. didn't need to all be voiced by Nozawa. It became a tradition, and she did great with them of course, but I don't think it was absolutely necessary for her to voice them all. Only Goku I think would've been fine.

[TheGreatness25]

I'm glad that the Son family is not voiced by the same voice actor, to be honest. It is just a bit unrealistic for a person, his son, and his two grandkids to sound the same -- maybe not exactly the same, but still the same. I think that Nozawa does a great job, but I wouldn't really care for that.

I was actually happy when I realized that Funimation wasn't going down the route of having Schemmel voicing the Son family. The first hint was with Bardock, but I was still nervous about grown up Gohan until the episode where future Trunks was fighting Cell and we got a glimpse of Trunks's future. I was actually glad that the roles got spread around between different actors. It was a little weird that future Gohan in Trunks's timeline ended up sounding different to what he would sound like in the "real" timeline, but I was still okay with it.

[WittyUsername]

If I’m going to be honest, as iconic as Nozawa is, I have always found it to be somewhat iffy that she voices every one of Goku’s male relatives family who isn’t Raditz. She generally does a decent job of setting them apart (although I can’t recall anything unique about her voice for adult Goten), but I don’t know if it should be considered lazy on Toei’s part to do that. At the very least, I think they could’ve afforded to find a different voice for Gohan when he became a teen. Still, it’s not a huge deal or anything, although I’m glad they didn’t go that route for any of the English dubs.