How Good were the old Ocean Cast?

[Cursed Lemon]

Scott McNeil's Piccolo is one of the better dubbing performances in history.

[Vhanos]

From an acting standpoint across the Saban dub, Pioneer dub, and for those who've actually seen significant amounts the post Freeza Ocean dub, how good were the actor's performances?
I wasn't alive during the 90's so they weren't my first exposure to the franchise, so I have no nostalgic connection to them. Years later after I got over the childish reaction of being mad because they're "not the Funimation cast" (even though they were technically the first Funimation cast) I watched all three Pioneer movie dubs to try and be semi objective on their performances. I think there's some charm there, but overall the Pioneer dubs to me are still held back by miscast voices that were carried over from the TV dub. (As well as the use of Hanna Barbara replacement sound effects in places.) The Z Kai Blu-ray review on this website mentioned a similar sentiment about the Texas cast. That even with good direction and better acting ability a miscast is still a miscast. It also didn't help the Ocean cast that I'd seen the Japanese version by this point.
As for the Suban dub I haven't watched a full episode, but I've seen clips of it and it's very much a product of its time, and not in a good way. It feels very inline with the silly cartoon casting of the toy commerical shows of the 80's like He-man or transformers. Considering that by 1996 both Batman and Gargoyles had released the quality expected of voice acting for cartoons had been raised significantly. I'm aware that the limitations of ADR (especially in the VHS editing days) held back the dub, but they could've done better.
How do you feel about the Ocean cast's ability and general casting.

I liked them better than the guys who came after them.

[SHINOBI-03]

Outside Dragon Ball I'm more used to the Canadian cast in cartoon shows ranging from the 80s to early 2000s and they just hit differently from the Texas, LA or New York voice actors. Their vocal performance always seemed more natural and less stilted but it could all be from their background coming as actors or performers over going to anime voice acting from the start or in other cases how non-Japanese animation would allow voice actors to perform more naturally and then animate later rather than the voice actors dubbing over existing pre-made footage and limit what they can do based on it.

[Bloodthroe]

Does anyone else feel like the Ocean voice actors took a dive in quality after the Namek saga? At this point, Funimation's in-house actors already took over the voice acting roles for the U.S. airing, but Ocean would eventually record the rest of the series for the Canadian airing. I get the feeling like maybe they were in a rush to record lines for so many episodes that maybe they weren't given good direction, or, didn't have many opportunities to redo a line for a better take.

[JulieYBM]

Does anyone else feel like the Ocean voice actors took a dive in quality after the Namek saga? At this point, Funimation's in-house actors already took over the voice acting roles for the U.S. airing, but Ocean would eventually record the rest of the series for the Canadian airing. I get the feeling like maybe they were in a rush to record lines for so many episodes that maybe they weren't given good direction, or, didn't have many opportunities to redo a line for a better take.

I'm pretty sure that is exactly the issue: they were recording as quickly as possible. Good art typically takes time to craft.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Does anyone else feel like the Ocean voice actors took a dive in quality after the Namek saga? At this point, Funimation's in-house actors already took over the voice acting roles for the U.S. airing, but Ocean would eventually record the rest of the series for the Canadian airing. I get the feeling like maybe they were in a rush to record lines for so many episodes that maybe they weren't given good direction, or, didn't have many opportunities to redo a line for a better take.

That is a common criticism of the Westwood dub, although I'd argue that it was still a solid production in spite of the circumstances, and it wasn't recorded in as short a time span as many fans think.

Ocean were undoubtedly under pressure, as word spread at the time producers in Canada and other countries hated Funimation's "Season 3" with the inhouse cast, so they had to get a dub underway to compete in whatever international territories an alternate dub could be sold to.

We know from certain actors like Brian Drummond and the late Doc Harris some recording was done in May and October 2000 respectively, and Don Brown said the final four episodes were recorded prior to Christmas 2002, so that was over 2 years the Ocean cast had to record 168 episodes, possibly as much as 2 and a half years.

Funimation's inhouse dub began airing on YTV in Canada by early 2000. Of course we know the first 60 episodes of the Westwood dub, despite being produced in Canada never aired there, so YTV likely already purchased the corresponding episodes from Funimation. Luckily around this time Dragon Ball Z was having massive success on Cartoon Network UK with many marathons, its own rerun block and evidently the market was there for new episodes with the Ocean cast, which first premiered January 2001 in Holland and April of that year in the UK and Ireland.

Scott McNeil said there was 4-5 directors, and evidently Ocean's main studio was very busy and most episodes were recorded at Airwave Sound Design. Ocean were dubbing a lot of cartoons and video games from countries other than Japan, so they may have not had time to schedule additional recording sessions for the actors whereas with Funimation Dragon Ball Z was their bread and butter.

In any case as Corey Fischer (employee of Ocean) said a few years after the Westwood dub was completed "Airwaves' physical studios and their voice director were used for voice recording only" we can probably assume whoever was the voice director at Airwaves at the time was the main director in charge of the Westwood dub, as Karl Willems has seemingly been Ocean's inhouse director for the last 30 years, and he didn't recall directing any Dragon Ball Z at Airwaves when I asked during one of the Anime Time Machine livestreams.

[jjgp1112]

Wasnt the Westwood dub also a product of some weird Canadian broadcasting regulations that required shows to have "Canadian content," be it actors or subject material?

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Wasnt the Westwood dub also a product of some weird Canadian broadcasting regulations that required shows to have "Canadian content," be it actors or subject material?

That has also been widely speculated but I haven't seen any evidence to prove it. For the vast majority of Dragon Ball Z's run on Canadian TV (which was Saban episodes 1-53, Funi inhouse episodes 54-167 and Westwood episodes 168-276) YTV was receiving the American dub. Ocean did create their own cut of Funimation's dub with different music placement, alternate lines and added SFX, but video editing does not count towards Canadian content requirements.

It may be possible that Canadian content quotas was a consideration for GT and original Dragon Ball because they exclusively aired with the locally produced Blue Water dubs, although I recall reading YTV had already met their quota for native content, so equally it may have not had anything to do with it at all.

And then of course there's the elusive Ocean dub of Kai, which from what we heard may have been produced with a TV deal in mind but that ultimately fell through. In that case whatever channels it was pitched to may have been looking to fill their quota, but for whatever reason a Canadian dub of a hot new anime wasn't needed at the time.