Dragon Ball Daima - English Dub: Stephanie Nadolny Returns

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Unlike Harmony Gold and BLT, the Saban dub actually did have a huge impact and was seen by countless fans.

It was, in fact the Saban dub was the first dub of the Saiyan and early Namek arcs the vast majority of territories that Dragon Ball Z was aired in English got back in the 90s and early to mid-2000s. The only exception I can think of is the Philippines as the Creative Corp Product dub predates it, but like the Harmony Gold dub it was only seen by a minority.

The BLT dub probably could have had a wider audience if it was given better timeslots and was distributed outside North America. YTV got it at one point, but it would have been nice if the UK, Ireland, Singapore and South Africa got the series a few years earlier than they did as the BLT dub was probably seen as redundant by the late 90s.

There's also the question of whether or not the Frontier Enterprises dub existed, as Richard Nieskens is the only person to have claimed it was recorded, as if it did there would have been an English kid Goku before Barbara Goodson, but fans like us are probably pedantic enough about these things .

[BootyCheeksJohnson]

I have no horse in the Nadolny vs Clinkenbeard race since neither is my ideal actor for Kid Goku, but to play devil's advocate I think that a truly great director can get a good performance out of anyone. Sabat's far from a great director, he's no Andrea Romano, but he's competent so we might as well see what the final product looks like.
At most I'll probably just watch a few dub clips on YouTube to compare to the Japanese version and ignore the rest like I did with Super and the last movie.

[MasenkoHA]

Nadolny may not be the actual first English Kid Goku, but she was the first to actually voice him for a significant length of time.

The Harmony Gold and BLT dubs both existed for such a brief time, and covered such a miniscule portion of the story, that it's understandable why 99% of people don't acknowledge them. The same can be said of the DB Movie 2 dub, which is ultimately just a 45 minute movie that many fans never saw.

Nadolny went the distance with Goku for the entirety of DB and GT, and also voiced Gohan in Z and several of its movies and video games.

While calling her "the OG Kid Goku" may not be technically correct, I can understand why people say it.

Gohan is a slightly different story though, as Saffron Henderson did voice the character for 53 episodes and 3 movies prior to Nadolny taking over. Unlike Harmony Gold and BLT, the Saban dub actually did have a huge impact and was seen by countless fans.

I sort of get and agree with what you're saying, but at the same time I don't think the BLT dub was as obscure as you think it is. Sure, it didn't get that Toonami exposure and likely had a much less successful syndicated run than Z but it still had a home video release to piggyback off Dragon Ball Z's success. Until 2009 it was the ONLY way someone living in the U.S could legally own the first 13 episodes. Even the World of Dragon Ball Z special that got attached to History of Trunks and Bardock Father of Goku used clips from it (the in-house dub didn't exist yet) and I don't think Lionsgate would have held the home video rights hostage for as long as they did if people weren't buying the Saga of Goku VHS/DVD

100 percent agree Harmony Gold doesn't really count. The dub only aired in like parts of Michigan and Philadelphia a couple times in 1990 and had no public home video release

TL:DR: The BLT dub had enough exposure from 1995-2009 to qualify Saffron Henderson as "the og Kid Goku"

[BootyCheeksJohnson]

Something I just discovered was this conversation between Nadolny and Joshua Seth (the English voice of Taichi from Digimon) https://youtu.be/zFtobDW-hKk

If she's to be believed then Nadolny was never asked to mimic Saffron Henderson by Barry Watson, or given a voice sample of her's to review. She was just asked to give a generic "little boy" voice (don't know how different it sounded) and Watson specifically asked her to redo her audition with "more raspiness". So if you don't like that aspect of her Gohan and Goku voices you can blame Barry Watson.

[JulieYBM]

That is none-too-surprising. Watson was not a paragon of creative vision lol

[MasenkoHA]

Something I just discovered was this conversation between Nadolny and Joshua Seth (the English voice of Taichi from Digimon) https://youtu.be/zFtobDW-hKk

If she's to be believed then Nadolny was never asked to mimic Saffron Henderson by Barry Watson, or given a voice sample of her's to review. She was just asked to give a generic "little boy" voice (don't know how different it sounded) and Watson specifically asked her to redo her audition with "more raspiness". So if you don't like that aspect of her Gohan and Goku voices you can blame Barry Watson.

Idk, she sounded pretty damn close to Saffron Henderson in those Ginyu episodes before transitioning to the rasp around Frieza. I suppose it's entirely possible she just happened to come up with a boy voice that sounded like Henderson without meaning to. Laurie Steele and Sonny Strait developed their Krillin voices independently and it just happened to work that Steele's Krillin actually sounds like a younger version of Strait's Krillin.

And yeah Nadolny was also directed by Watson or Sabat to make Gohan sound like "Clint Eastwood" which is an unbelievably bad take on the character. It definitely got better when she dropped the rasp early on for Goku and then applied it to her Gohan voice for everything dubbed from Cooler onwards.

[BootyCheeksJohnson]

Something I just discovered was this conversation between Nadolny and Joshua Seth (the English voice of Taichi from Digimon) https://youtu.be/zFtobDW-hKk

If she's to be believed then Nadolny was never asked to mimic Saffron Henderson by Barry Watson, or given a voice sample of her's to review. She was just asked to give a generic "little boy" voice (don't know how different it sounded) and Watson specifically asked her to redo her audition with "more raspiness". So if you don't like that aspect of her Gohan and Goku voices you can blame Barry Watson.

Idk, she sounded pretty damn close to Saffron Henderson in those Ginyu episodes before transitioning to the rasp around Frieza. I suppose it's entirely possible she just happened to come up with a boy voice that sounded like Henderson without meaning to. Laurie Steele and Sonny Strait developed their Krillin voices independently and it just happened to work that Steele's Krillin actually sounds like a younger version of Strait's Krillin.

And yeah Nadolny was also directed by Watson or Sabat to make Gohan sound like "Clint Eastwood" which is an unbelievably bad take on the character. It definitely got better when she dropped the rasp early on for Goku and then applied it to her Gohan voice for everything dubbed from Cooler onwards.

It's possible that she wasn't given a reference, but Watson's direction lead her to mimicking the voice without her realizing it. Also I forgot her name, but Steele's voice for Kuririn sounded exactly like what a child version of Strait's character voice would.

[jjgp1112]

Something I just discovered was this conversation between Nadolny and Joshua Seth (the English voice of Taichi from Digimon) https://youtu.be/zFtobDW-hKk

If she's to be believed then Nadolny was never asked to mimic Saffron Henderson by Barry Watson, or given a voice sample of her's to review. She was just asked to give a generic "little boy" voice (don't know how different it sounded) and Watson specifically asked her to redo her audition with "more raspiness". So if you don't like that aspect of her Gohan and Goku voices you can blame Barry Watson.

Idk, she sounded pretty damn close to Saffron Henderson in those Ginyu episodes before transitioning to the rasp around Frieza. I suppose it's entirely possible she just happened to come up with a boy voice that sounded like Henderson without meaning to. Laurie Steele and Sonny Strait developed their Krillin voices independently and it just happened to work that Steele's Krillin actually sounds like a younger version of Strait's Krillin.

And yeah Nadolny was also directed by Watson or Sabat to make Gohan sound like "Clint Eastwood" which is an unbelievably bad take on the character. It definitely got better when she dropped the rasp early on for Goku and then applied it to her Gohan voice for everything dubbed from Cooler onwards.

It's possible that she wasn't given a reference, but Watson's direction lead her to mimicking the voice without her realizing it. Also I forgot her name, but Steele's voice for Kuririn sounded exactly like what a child version of Strait's character voice would.

I think the serendipity with Steele and Strait is that Steele was likely instructed to sound like a younger version Terry Klassen's Krillin, and with Strait being brought on to straight up imitate Klassen, the approach worked out. I'd say of all the Funi dub voices, Strait's Krillin is the one that still sounds the most like an Ocean dub impression, but his acting improved a lot by the Android saga.

[Scsigs]

Wrote most of this before reading certain later replies, so sorry for any redundancies.

Even if the OG voice for Bulma can't come back too, they should at least replace/terminate Monica Rial from their dub team. It'd be a start to issues, but the best one to begin with.
Regardless, this series should do great.
Now I'm curious who's gonna voice other characters, since the trailer confirmed voices will change to better match their age.
If Piccolo gets that dumb voice from OG DB, it'll be hilarious to see other's reactions.

Tiffant Vollmer retired from voice acting years ago when she moved to New Orleans & is now working outside the entertainment industry. What is so wrong with Monica Rial voicing Bulma? It seems like you have a hate boner for her.

So I watched the new trailer with the Crunchyroll English dub voices. I think the English dub voice of Mini Goku sounds like Nadolny's Goku and she sounds okay to me, but I can’t tell if it’s actually Nadolny. The rest of the voices sound fine by me.

I wouldn't be shocked if they just dubbed the trailer and haven't actually gotten started on recording the show yet. Sean Schemmel mentioned when the Super: Broly trailer dropped that they dubbed the trailer before receiving any other materials for the film. (For context he said this in an interview taken a day or 2 after that initial trailer dropped.) I think it was just so they could start the advertising cycle for the international release. I think they also used archived Broly screams or a different actor for the trailer to avoid working with Mignogna, but I could be wrong about that part.

No, I don't think that's the case with Daima. Toei seems wanting to do a simuldub of it & it was confirmed a while ago that animation of a bunch of the episodes was done last year & they were clearly working on the show for its eventual premiere to make sure the animation didn't suffer the same production problems as Super did.
The Super: Broly movie trailer was dubbed before Toei gave FUNimation the finished movie to dub. I imagine they had to make sure to plan everything around dubbing Super & their other shows at the time that some of the actors were also dubbing at the time. Hell, they confirmed at some point that the person voicing Broly in that trailer wasn't even Vic. My assumption is that Toei just wanted the trailer dubbed so English-speaking fans who don't watch the sub would be able to get hyped.

I remember the Super Broly trailer had Sean Schemmel as Goku saying "He's getting stronger", which didn't end up in the movie, so presumably Funimation just scripted the scenes they received for the trailer and came up with a few extra lines to get people excited that didn't make sense in context when they had the full film and could write a complete script for it.

Trailers to movies will sometimes have lines added in or different from the canon ones from the finished films. Look at Marvel, who use scenes shot for trailers, alternate takes of canon scenes, & even alternate CGI for trailers to hide the real scenes until the films come out. And then there are lines added just to make sure you can get the context of what's going on in the scenes being shown with not a lot of visuals, which I think is what that line was supposed to be for. Someone else pointed out that it's in the Japanese trailer as well, so...

To be fair, I have doubts about how Nozawa will perform as well. Her most recent performance as a younger Goku was the DLC for Kakarot (haven't heard enough of her young Goku in Sparking) and that sounded incredibly strained.
I would not be surprised if the fact that a young Goku voice got harder to perform in the past few years would be a reason for less Goten appearances in Super.

I'm very thankful for all of her work as Goku but I would not mind a recast so she can gracefully bow out. That being said, I believe that quitting a role due to strain or age is quite rare in Dragon Ball.

Just look at Yanami in the beginning of Super. His voices for Kaio/Babidi/Narrator truly elevated the shows in the past but to me it was hard to enjoy the performance of an actor that was clearly feeling unwell. My focus shifted from listening to the character to a concern for the performer. It feels odd to say that since he was clearly passionate to reprise his role and that is commendable.

I've heard from some people here that in the videos games & Kai that the JP cast basically don't put nearly as much effort into their lines as the English cast does, so it may be that. On the other hand, Masako Nozawa is 87 years old. Her voice & energy levels have held up considerably well over the last almost 40 years, but she's no spring chicken. There's only so much she'll be able to still do as she continues to age. I assume at some point, she may start training an understudy so they can do the voice when she eventually gets too old to continue playing the characters. And, I know it's morbid, but she's more than likely going to die at some point in the next 5-10 years. As with Toriyama's death, that's going to hit the fandom like a truck & Toei's gonna have to scramble to replace her if they don't start planning for it now. It's not like the franchise hasn't seen that before. Both sides of the Pacific have. Chris Ayres died back in 2021 & Daman Mills has been filling in for him since even before that because he wasn't able to continue playing Freeza passed Broly, for instance. It's only going to continue to happen until all of them are replaced, sadly.

Monical Rial is Crunchyroll's first voice actress for Blooma, what are you talking about her 'OG' actress? The first actress to voice Blooma in an official English dub is Wendee Lee from when Harmony Gold was producing a dub of Dragon Ball (1986).

Why should Crunchyroll terminate Monica Rial? She's doing no worse than, say, Sean Schemmel as Son Gokuu, or any other member of their voice casts for the English dubs that they produce.

Julie, they meant Tiffany Vollmer, not Wendee Lee. I don't see how that's confusing.

Yeah, I won't lie, I was originally going to go with Lindbjerg as my example, but then I was like, "Something-something, time is a flat circle" or however the heck the phrase goes.

Like, dang, I hate to be that girl, but as someone who started out on the first FUNimation dub of the Namek arc, I just think it's weird that we say things like 'OG' for a franchise that's 1) dubbed across the entire world across multiple decades 2) already had multiple English voice actors.

Again, I don't have a horse in this race—I can't stand English dub voice acting and there's really no reason for me to listen to it when I don't exactly watch muh American cartoons in The Original Japanese—but I—and my nearly thirty (30) years of fandom—just find it really funny that we (general, fandom) have this notion of 'going back'...and it's not even, like, pretending to be about returning to 'the original English dub voice actress'.

I also just think that it's funny that people want to go back to actresses who don't even do acting as Their Main Thing or whatever. Our society makes artists—performing or otherwise—go to inhumane lengths to support themselves before They Make It Big and it's honestly disheartening. The sands of time have taught me the important lesson that even if I think someone's work sucks, they still deserve to be able to live without worrying about their bills.

That all being said, it's clear that dubbing some cartoons is no longer the primary focus for a lot of actors who worked on FUNimation cartoon dubs in the 2000s, so I don't really get the fervor to Go Back when...clearly, people have moved on.

I also just don't see the logic in not hiring back Rial when she continually does no worse than Vollmer and is hardly a bad person. It's not like she's Mic Vignogna.

Dub discussions like these get weird because it literally relies on several things. The knowledge of the people talking about it, what specifically is being talked about, & the minutiae of the conversation.
As a result of only the FUNimation Texas dub being what you can get on home media, they have become the de facto, default English dub cast for everything Dragon Ball related. It doesn't matter that there were other actors who came before them. Those dubs are looked on by people who didn't watch them as trivia & Easter eggs. And to point this out, the Ocean dub specifically was only on for a relatively short amount of time in the US. It was produced in the mid-90s, then found a home on Toonami, which then prompted Cartoon Network to fund FUNimation to pick up & continue dubbing the series from where they left off. Even though the actors they got had to initially imitate the Canadian actors as best they could, they were eventually allowed to evolve the voices into their own takes on them & then Chris Sabat had some of the actors from later DB materials redub either their initial performances to get better acted recordings, or to maintain consistency with either later-dubbed stuff, or the video games. Then they also had to redub stuff uncut as well with the Texas cast. Then you have the reverse with the Canadian cast where even though the actors that were brought back & stayed were allowed to keep doing the voices they originally did, there were instances of the Canadian actors having to imitate the Texas voices for new characters. It's really screwy. The only people who really even care about those old dubs anymore are the older millennials who grew up with them. That may sting to hear, but that's the truth of it.
And then you have the younger fans who got into DB later who only know the FUNimation dubs & the Texas cast. Most of them don't give a shit about any other dubs & it's not like you can readily watch those either, so they just don't care. It's easier to buy a DVD or Blu-Ray that FUNimation or Crunchyroll put out, pop the disc in, & watch the episodes or movies dubbed than it is to track down a hopefully good torrent of VHS, DVD, or whatever rips of the Ocean dub or Harmony Gold's, especially since Harmony Gold's is partly considered lost media since it ran in limited syndication in the late 80s & not a lot of people recorded it back then. Hell, I think the latest find was someone's VHS rip of 1 of the movie dubs they did & that was a few years ago. So, the younger fans don't have to care either. Take me for instance, I grew up slightly after the Ocean cast was phased out in favor of the Texas cast. I don't have an attachment to the Canadian actors, even if they're the progenitors to some of the voices the Texas cast use to this day (though, I still contend that the Ocean dub of DBZ's later episodes is much easier to watch even with the badly-translated scripts because the actors could actually act), so I don't really care outside of dub discussions. Although I'd actually like to see Ocean's Kai dub surface online at some point for us all to see how they did, I also don't expect it to just magically poof out of nowhere & be available & I can be ok with that because I don't have much of an attachment to the Ocean voices & the absolute hatred for FUNi's voices that some fans here seem to possess.

I...hope I made my point clear there. Got kinda rambly.

As always, people way over exaggerate this "issue" and it's always people who never really watched the Japanese version anyways.

Like Abed said the voice she uses for young Gohan is way different than adult Goku. Even if you only saw one episode or movie it's quite easy to distinguish because her Gohan voice is much more cutesy and babyish where she uses a more standard young boy voice for Goku

I'd have prefer Shigeru Chiba voiced Burdock but I understand the logic to have Nozawa voice him and he and Goku hardly interact so it's a non-issue.

The only time it even kind of becomes a problem is when she's voicing both adult Goku and teen/adult Gohan in Boo/Super

Let me correct this because I don't want there to be any confusion. I'm talking about when they're all adults. When 1's a kid & the other's an adult, it's fine because there's a degree of separation. When they're all adults, it's the same exact voice tone with the only real differences being things you'd only really pick up if you pay very close attention. It gets worse if they have scenes together as adults, as it gets hard to distinguish between them if you don't pay attention. And I'm not the only one who's pointed this out either.

I don't really mind Nozawa playing Bardock, tbh. It's dumb, but it's fine. Bardock exists in media without Goku as an adult that's set before all that. She's also, as MistareFusion put it when he did his retrospective on the Bardock special years ago, a link back to the Dragon Ball we're all familiar with. Now, I wouldn't want Sean Schemmel to voice Bardock in English as I don't know if he'd be able to really differentiate the Goku "hero" voice enough to play Bardock & I think Sonny Strait does a great job when he gets the proper direction, animation (Xenoverse 2's devs/Bandai Namco not giving the English dub team the cutscenes to work off of for the dub can eat my ass, since it really let down a lot of the dub cast's performances in places), & scripts to work off of.

Idk seems like a pretty big mix of negative, positive, neutral, and indifferent to me. The news isn't getting as much overwhelming excitement here as it is literally everywhere else but I don't think the people happy that Nadolny is back are a minority here.

For my part, I'll stay neutral until I see a full episode. I have reservations since A. Her acting was always sub par at best and B. She hasn't done any voice acting since 2013 but I was always fine with her Goku voice, so a competent voice director might be able to get a good performance out her?

I'll point this out. The dubs of DB in the late 90s to the 2000s...weren't that great, all things considered. I'd even go as far to say that Dragon Ball's anime dubs didn't really get good per se until Kai when everyone stepped up a level to produce a great product. Sabat was still kinda amateurish at voice directing (remember, he's directed basically every dub for DB outside of GT), the mainstay actors had subpar to passable acting the majority of the time, even in the rerecordings, & the scripts weren't exactly the best either. However, the dubs we've gotten since 2010 with Kai give me faith that Sabat was able to better direct Nadolny & get a great performance out of her. We still need to actually see it, but I think she'll do fine. A good director can make all the difference for if acting is good or not & Sabat's direction has come very far in the last 14 years. Gotta remember as well that Nadolny was primarily doing video game work, which just required short words, phrases, battle foley, etc, with some longer dialogue here & there for story modes. Her last proper anime dubs were, what, GT & the Z movies? Anime dubbing has come a long way since then.

The discussion about Monical Rial and Bulma feels like a complete and utterly non-sequitur. Rial has played Bulma in every Dragon Ball property she's appeared in for 15 years now. Kid Goku has only existed as a video game character in modern Dragon Ball content and, as we've seen with Sabat still doing side roles that he's given up to other actors in the actual series since Kai, the video games just go with whatever actor is most easily available at the time. It stands to reason that when given the opportunity and alignment of the stars, they'd bring back the actress that played Kid Goku for the vast majority of material he's in.

Kid Gokus voice was never set in stone because he was hardly even a thing since Stephanie Nadolny got recasted. Bulma's voice has been pretty firmly been what it is, her original Funi voice probably doesn't have much nostalgic sentiment anyway since Bulma isn't nearly significant (she's arguably been more prominent in the series in all the material that Monica Rial has done) and the only hate Rial's performance really gets is from Vic cultists that Funi has no interest in placating.

What exactly would prompt a recasting for Bulma in this specific instance anyway? Shes getting poofed into a kid and otherwise appears to be a satellite character. On the other hand, this is the first appearance of Kid Goku in a mainline Dragon Ball property since GT. The Perfect occasion for a nostalgic casting.

We don't need to entertain every thought that comes to our head.

This. All of this. I genuinely don't understand any hate towards Monica Rial as the voice of Bulma. The only hate I've seen her get is from the Vic controversy & that shit was fucking dumb.

Speaking of, I'm glad that Nadolny's being brought back because it puts the claims Chuck Huber put in his affidavit defending Vic to rest for good that Sabat let her go because she wouldn't provide him sexual favors. I looked into those claims earlier this year & found that nothing supports them whatsoever & Nadolny herself didn't actually know why she was let go. I'm so glad there doesn't seem to be any bad blood between her & Sabat. It can finally tell the Vic supporters to go kick rocks because they blindly believed that shit & that screenshot of her apparently DMing a fan about it (which was badly Photoshopped, btw, as I found out myself) is 100% fake. I'm so tired of that shit. This news is good for more reasons than nostalgic English dub fans getting excited for the series, trust me.

All in all, I think we're in a good place with the newer DB dubs. It's actually funny that Nadolny's such a relic of those old dubs that she actually feels kind of alien to the newer dubs, but I'm glad she's back. Barry Watson is far away & removed from FUNimation/Crunchyroll & his shitty, stupid decisions no longer affect the dubs of DB material. We'll ultimately see what becomes of Nadolny's performance, but I'm more hyped now than I was beforehand. If only Geekdom didn't spoil that reveal, but it is what it is, sadly.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Then you have the reverse with the Canadian cast where even though the actors that were brought back & stayed were allowed to keep doing the voices they originally did, there were instances of the Canadian actors having to imitate the Texas voices for new characters.

Can you provide examples of this? The claim the Canadian cast copied the Texas cast has been going around for decades but there has never been any evidence for it. None of the cast said they were shown the Funimation dub and asked to mimic it, and to my knowledge none of the directors from the Westwood dub have ever said they directed the cast as such. Hell we don't even know the names of the Westwood dub directors and Karl Willems' memory is spotty (it's been said Willems directed some of it, but I asked and he couldn't confirm one way or the other).

And then you have the younger fans who got into DB later who only know the FUNimation dubs & the Texas cast. Most of them don't give a shit about any other dubs & it's not like you can readily watch those either, so they just don't care. It's easier to buy a DVD or Blu-Ray that FUNimation or Crunchyroll put out, pop the disc in, & watch the episodes or movies dubbed than it is to track down a hopefully good torrent of VHS, DVD, or whatever rips of the Ocean dub or Harmony Gold's

I say this as a physical media enthusiast myself, Zoomers probably aren't going out buying DVDs and Blu-Rays and popping them into a player, perhaps a minority are, but most of them just use streaming services, which became the new DVD, the enthusiasts market is moving towards 4K and to a lesser extent Blu-Ray for the budget collectors.

It's also never been easier to find good quality torrents of the Canadian dubs. All anyone needs to do is seek out the Seed of Might release for Westwood Z, and Blue Water Dragon Ball is coming. Ditto the Harmony Gold, KBABZ's reconstruction is the only version you will ever need. I'm obviously not going to provide links or say where to find them here, but they are out there and thankfully no longer only being circulated amongst the hoarders.

especially since Harmony Gold's is partly considered lost media since it ran in limited syndication in the late 80s & not a lot of people recorded it back then. Hell, I think the latest find was someone's VHS rip of 1 of the movie dubs they did & that was a few years ago.

It's not, the 5 episodes were found years ago, and as I mentioned KBABZ restored the dub and made it as presentable as it would have been on a commercial DVD release.

Although I'd actually like to see Ocean's Kai dub surface online at some point

Saffron Henderson said in one of the Anime Time Machine livestreams there is basically no chance of this happening because Ocean are very protective of their materials and are very conscious that Dragon Ball is not their property so it can't be distributed in any manner other than what is agreed with TOEI.

So if Netflix wants to work out a deal with Ocean to stream their Kai dub? That's fair game. Randomly surfacing online? Not a hope.

For what it's worth I just emailed Diana Gage of Ocean, and I forwarded both the email I received from an Irish TV executive and POP UK, both of whom said they would look into acquiring Kai. She said she will talk to the higher-ups and get back to me. So no promises but fingers crossed. I sent on contacts from both companies in the hopes Ocean can reach out to them.

[VegettoEX]

I'm going to look into breaking out specific posts here into a thread specifically about Nadolny and the English dub casting, since we've gone far beyond the intended scope of this thread. That may take some time, so please be patient and otherwise try to stay on-topic as much as possible in the meantime to make that an easier process.

That said:

Can you provide examples of this?

As usual, it's true, not true, and somewhere in between all at the same time.

In an old interview with Sean Schemmel on a prior incarnation of this website with a former staff member, he stated that he went in aiming for Ginyu by matching the old voice:

I then stopped working for him to kind of go off on my own do my own thing, while my wife Melody had seen an ad in the paper wanting voice actors for a national cartoon, and so I followed up on the ad and set up an appointment with Christopher Sabat at FUNimation. I actually still have that newspaper clipping with my chicken scratches on it that say "Call Chris Sabat!" So I called, set up the appointment and auditioned for Chris at the studio. I really thought that I'd gotten Captain Ginyu, because I thought that I'd nailed the previous voice from season two pretty dead on. I really had no idea who Gokuu was at the time even though I'd prepared for the role by watching episodes of Dragonball Z's dub on Cartoon Network for two weeks prior to auditioning. The problem was that the episodes were mainly about Gohan, and stuff between Gohan and Piccolo or Gohan and Krillin, so I really had no idea who I was auditioning for because the episodes were mainly smaller characters with high voices, so I was like "I don't know what's gonna happen." Anyway, they called back and I was kinda sad that I'd got Gokuu, because I'd really wanted to be Captain Ginyu, and I really think I had his old voice down. However, when I got to work the first day people were like "Oh, you're Gokuu," and I saw all these pictures of Gokuu everywhere, and once I figured out he was the main character,

In a similar setup, Sonny Strait noted (and note his eventual usage of the actual word "mimic" here solidifying it):

FUNimation had open auditions and I auditioned for all the parts. According to Chris I was the runner up for most of the main parts. You know it's funny but I remember Chris also saying at that time that some guy from Denton nailed most of the other parts. I just realized he must have been talking about himself!! (laughing) I love that guy.

Anyway, for the auditions we were giving character description sheets for all the parts and then we were placed in a private booth with a mic, headphones, a remote and tv/vcr with excerpts of the different characters saying lines from the past season. However Krillin's sheet was not in the folder they gave me so for some reason I just assumed that he must have already been cast. I guess I thought that because I came into the auditions pretty late. Anyway I didn't pay attention to Krillin at all in the booth. I then went into another room, stood behind a mic with Barry Watson and Chris Sabat across from me sitting at a table. They would sat the name of a character and told me to read the script as that character. All was going well and then they said,

"OK, now do Krillin."

I got a little nervous and said, "Oh, that character wasn't in my folder so I didn't even pay attention to him in the booth."

They said, "That's ok, just do your best."

I said, "Look, I don't even have a clue."

Barry then told me, "kind of high pitched and nasally"

... so I did something.. I have no idea what I did.. I think they still have the tapes from that audition.. I'd love to hear it. Anyway, a few days later Chris called me and said that I was up for Krillin but it was between me and another guy. Chris said, "That guy sounded more like Krillin but you are a much better actor." I asked if I could come in early and hear Krillin's voice again. Chris said that would be fine. Then I knew I had it because I'm a good enough mimic to pull off a voice I just heard. So, I went in and nailed it. And I haven't done the same voice since. (laughs)

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

As usual, it's true, not true, and somewhere in between all at the same time.

You missed the point I was making. I was asking for examples of the Canadian cast imitating the Texas cast, as in taking cues from the FUNimation cast when Ocean brought back Peter Kelamis, Brian Drummond, Scott McNeil, etc for the dub that was produced for Europe and later Canada.

We all know the FUNimation cast were hired to sound like the Vancouver actors, but fans have often criticized the later Ocean dub for various reasons, including rushed schedule, poor direction, recycled inaccurate scripts with only slight revisions, but also that the Ocean actors had to copy FUNimation's work.

No one has ever given any evidence for the reverse, and why would it be the case? No offence to the FUNimation cast, but they were amateurs when the 1999-2003 English dub of Dragon Ball Z was recorded. The Ocean cast were not, and it would be insulting to ask them to copy what another cast had done when that cast were hired to sound like them in the first place.

We also have to keep in mind FUNimation and Ocean's dubs had near identical scripts, and the cast would have been directed according to how the characters were written (Karl Willems even said he goes for a character match over a voice match). I get Scsigs specified new characters, so he's not saying Brian Drummond copied Chris Sabat's new Vegeta or anything like that, but there's no evidence for the new characters either.

The artificial humans sound appropriately robotic, Dale Wilson's Cell didn't imitate Daemon Clarke. If anything Wilson likely gave Clarke pointers as they were friends, but he was the more experienced actor. Fat Boo sounded like an overgrown infant, Super Boo sounded like a generic Cell clone, Kid Boo like a mindless imp, etc.

[VegettoEX]

Oooooooh boy, my bad! Totally misread that. Well, still good to have on record for that, and still good to break out the the thread separately!

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

I think it's such a surprise that they've brought Nadolny back to voice Goku again in this new series, given whatever had apparently went down back in 2009/2010 between her and the higher ups at FUNimation that led to her not being the voice of young Goku and Gohan any longer from Kai (and video games after Revenge of King Piccolo) onward once they recasted both roles to Colleen Clinkenbeard going forward. Even if there still hasn't been a clear concrete reason given for that whole controversy aside from the speculation that's been going around for years, i guess something changed as of late that has allowed for her to return after 14 years.

[MasenkoHA]

I think it's such a surprise that they've brought Nadolny back to voice Goku again in this new series, given whatever had apparently went down back in 2009/2010 between her and the higher ups at FUNimation that led to her not being the voice of young Goku and Gohan any longer from Kai (and video games after Revenge of King Piccolo) onward once they recasted both roles to Colleen Clinkenbeard going forward. Even if there still hasn't been a clear concrete reason given for that whole controversy aside from the speculation that's been going around for years, i guess something changed as of late that has allowed for her to return after 14 years.

As much as people want to believe there was some behind the scenes drama it was probably as simple as "She was recast as Gohan for Kai because Sabat and company didn't like her performance as Gohan and got invited back to play Goku because Crunchyroll/Funimation saw how well loved she was in that role"

Honestly if Toei would allow it I wouldn't even bat an eye if Crunchyroll hired Mike Smith to do a replacement score for a future Dragon Ball project and advertise it as "From the man who brought you the American Broadcast score for Dragon Ball Z"

[TechExpert2021]

Honestly if Toei would allow it I wouldn't even bat an eye if Crunchyroll hired Mike Smith to do a replacement score for a future Dragon Ball project and advertise it as "From the man who brought you the American Broadcast score for Dragon Ball Z"

Funimation doesn't utilize replacement scores for their anime dubs anymore. IIRC the last time they used a replacement score in an anime dub was their DBZ UUE dub from 2005.

[ABED]

I wonder what it is that people prefer Nadolny's Goku to her Gohan. Goku brings out the worst in Nadolny. She is trying way too hard to sound goofy, and ends up sounding like Goofy. She tries way too hard to sound wild and silly and energetic. At least with Gohan, as bad as it is, she brings it down a lot, if that makes sense.

Changing subjects, does anyone know the episode count or is it undecided?

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

I think it's such a surprise that they've brought Nadolny back to voice Goku again in this new series, given whatever had apparently went down back in 2009/2010 between her and the higher ups at FUNimation that led to her not being the voice of young Goku and Gohan any longer from Kai (and video games after Revenge of King Piccolo) onward once they recasted both roles to Colleen Clinkenbeard going forward. Even if there still hasn't been a clear concrete reason given for that whole controversy aside from the speculation that's been going around for years, i guess something changed as of late that has allowed for her to return after 14 years.

As much as people want to believe there was some behind the scenes drama it was probably as simple as "She was recast as Gohan for Kai because Sabat and company didn't like her performance as Gohan and got invited back to play Goku because Crunchyroll/Funimation saw how well loved she was in that role"

Honestly if Toei would allow it I wouldn't even bat an eye if Crunchyroll hired Mike Smith to do a replacement score for a future Dragon Ball project and advertise it as "From the man who brought you the American Broadcast score for Dragon Ball Z"

Hmm, then again maybe i was putting too much stock in the alleged controversy and it really was that simple in terms of why they recasted Gohan to Clinkenbeard for Kai and Goku in the COTBR redub and video games . Also as to the score thing, i wouldn't count on that because they haven't done score replacements in years since back in like the mid 2000's.

[TechExpert2021]

Changing subjects, does anyone know the episode count or is it undecided?

The episode count for the series hasn't been officially decided yet, but I would suspect DB Daima having approximately 24-26 episodes (2 cours).

[MasenkoHA]

I wonder what it is that people prefer Nadolny's Goku to her Gohan. Goku brings out the worst in Nadolny. She is trying way too hard to sound goofy, and ends up sounding like Goofy. She tries way too hard to sound wild and silly and energetic. At least with Gohan, as bad as it is, she brings it down a lot, if that makes sense.

Changing subjects, does anyone know the episode count or is it undecided?

For me at least the voice actually suits Goku. I still think the performance is pretty bad and passable at best on a good day. If she learned to act I'd have no issue with her Goku voice. Her Gohan voice doesn't fit the character at all and tries way too hard to make him sound like a tough badass (which is already the complete wrong approach to Gohan) and ends up sounding like the love child of Bobby Hill and PattyNSelma