I have decided to start up a little feature here to keep us all entertained, and will be calling it “From The Past Friday”. Why is that? Well, I am going to be sharing some digital gold from the past each Friday for the next couple of weeks!

Let us go back to the year 2000 (insert “In the year two-thousaaaaand!” joke here). FUNimation had been going strong with seasons three and four of the Dragon Ball Z TV series on Cartoon Network, and decided it was time to go back to the original Dragon Ball TV series, which they abandoned in 1995 after a mere 13 episodes.

Their plan was to re-dub those 13 episodes and go onwards from there, hopefully completing the entire series. Needless to say, they managed to do so. The big deal at the time was, of course, voice replacements. Any dub fans at the time were certainly used to the original Ocean Studios cast, both for DB and for DBZ (remember that DBZ season three only had just started up in late 1999). Not only had they replaced the DBZ TV cast, but it was time to replace the DB TV cast. Sure, some voices would carry over from the new in-house cast (Yamcha, Bulma, etc.) but there were some that would not. Who would go back and do Pilaf? Who would go back and do Goku?

What FUNimation did was pretty interesting — they threw up some MP3 voice samples on their website and actually asked the fans what they wanted! For the next couple weeks, I will be sharing some of these voice samples with you. Even though I have watched literally perhaps two minutes of dubbed DB (and these samples are not exactly convincing me to do otherwise), it is certainly interesting to take a listen to these and see where they may have taken the characters.

First up this week will be Shuu (or “Shao”). I am presenting the MP3s exactly as they were — no additional tagging has been made, no re-encoding has been done, etc.

Shuu/Shao Potential Voice #1 (309 KB)

Shuu/Shao Potential Voice #2 (327 KB)

Shuu/Shao Potential Voice #3 (295 KB)

Shuu/Shao Potential Voice #4 (301 KB)

Interesting stuff, huh? Next week we will listen in to the potential Pilaf voices! Unfortunately, I do not seem to have the Goku voice files saved anywhere. If any other digital kleptos from back-in-the-day happen to have them saved, I would love to share them. Obviously there were both Stephanie Nadolny and Ceyli Delgadillo in the mix, but I do not remember if the other two were actually other voice actresses, or just alternate character voices by them (like you will hear with Shuu and Pilaf).