About 18 years ago, I ran a brief column here on the site called “From the Past Friday” — over its three entries, I shared:

• Voice samples from an April 2001 poll by FUNimation with four different choices for a Shuu/Shao voice in the company’s re-dub and subsequent continuation of the Dragon Ball television series
• Voice samples from another poll by FUNimation that same month with four different choices for a Pilaf voice in the company’s re-dub and subsequent continuation of the Dragon Ball television series
• Voice samples from a 1999 prank we pulled on Daizenshuu EX (one of the predecessors to this website) with a friend doing an impersonation of Saffron Henderson’s Gohan, claiming that she was returning for the English dub (which, in a roundabout way, later actually happened)

At the time, I lamented the loss of (or, at least, the inability to dig up) the voice samples from one other critical poll that FUNimation ran before all these in March 2001: that of a new choice for a “little” Goku voice for productions of that same era.

I know those files are still kicking around on an ancient hard drive or CD-R somewhere, but as I was doing additional research and digging for the (very cool!) “Dragon Ball American Release Chronology” page on our wiki, I came across a semi-functional archived link to the Goku voice poll! To my dismay, none of the voice samples actually appeared to be archived… except for the WMA links, which did work!

So here we go, dug up from the depths of old web pages that largely no longer function even on their Wayback Machine versions due to the amount of Flash used and dynamic database calls (as was the style at the time), it’s the two Goku voice choices (which, if it wasn’t clear from the filenames of “gokustep” and “gokucecil” were indeed Stephanie Nadolny and Ceyli Delgadillo):

Goku Potential Voice #1 (Stephanie Nadolny)

Goku Potential Voice #2 (Ceyli Delgadillo)

The lines directed at Tao Paipai, and in particular “Wow… I just knocked his block off, and he’s still standing!” from the first voice sample here directed at Metallic, are also spoken during flashback footage in the English dub of Dragon Ball Z episode 128 (at the time episode “113” from the editing number) as the Turtle Hermit describes Goku’s past encounter with the Red Ribbon Army — Nadolny had already played this exact line during that episode’s broadcast just half a year earlier.

Incidentally, this same flashback scene was dubbed by adult Goku voice actor Peter Kelamis in the Westwood/alternate English dub primarily produced for the European market (with the occasional Canadian broadcast, as well).

The poll only seemed to run for about two weeks (an old Planet Namek post mentions its existence on March 20th; unfortunately, the majority of our own update records from 2001 are largely lost to time and server moves). The winner announcement posted by FUNimation on the 30th read:

The envelope please…and the winner is voice #1. Stephanie Nadolny, voice #1, will be the voice of Goku in Dragon Ball. FUNimation would like to thank everyone that participated in this, the first ever voice vote. We appreciate your help in making this an overwhelming success (Give yourselves a big pat on the back). We want you as fans to enjoy Dragon Ball and any show that FUNimation produces as much as possible.

Thanks again and stay plugged in here for more chances to vote on the upcoming characters.

Nadolny had of course already been playing Gohan as the in-house Texas cast version of the character since 1999, while Delgadillo had previously played Goku in the 1998 VHS release of the second Dragon Ball movie (“Sleeping Princess in Devil’s Castle”) as well as the 2000 VHS and 2001 DVD release of the third Dragon Ball movie (“Mystical Adventure”). Nadolny was replaced for various Gohan and Goku roles circa the Dragon Ball (Z) Kai English dub release in 2014, though she recently returned for the English dub of the Dragon Ball Daima series.