TheBlackPaladin wrote:On top of that, when a kid's voice gets too deep, they have to be re-cast, meaning that FUNimation would likely have to keep perpetually re-casting Gohan if they went the route of casting an actual kid.
I would venture a guess at that being the main reason they didn't and probably never would use an actual kid for the role, more so than anything else. With FMA, at the time of the first series when they cast Dismuke, there was really no reason to think that we would ever get anything else beyond that and it's follow-up movie. So using Dismuke, an actual child, was actually a really neat idea at the time, and man did it work. But then when Brotherhood came along, followed by another movie of it's own, that showed that FMA very well could come back again if the time and money was right, so when they had to re-cast Alphonse, they chose a woman (who happens to sound a LOT like Dismuke, ironically) this time instead of using another actual little boy.
Now you go over to DBZ, pretty much the most evergreen of titles imaginable, which is almost always getting some new video game coming out at least. Honestly, they'd be spending way too much money having to find a new kid every time they did a new movie (something the Land Before Time franchise ran into a lot from what I understand), so I can see why they probably never even considered it.
(Hope that doesn't come off like I'm lambasting you for it, cuz I agree, it's a really cool thing to consider how it may have turned out if they had done it that way. I was just going more in-depth as to why they probably would never even think of such a thing for DBZ, even though they've done it in the past for many of Dismuke's early roles. ^_^; )