ABED wrote:Gaffer, I do think a distinction should be drawn between Goku as a kid and Goku as an adult. For Adult Goku, from 99 onward, adult Goku is always going to be played by Schemmel. It's the norm to have males at different ages voiced by different people. Nozawa and Tanaka are exceptions.
Your list is confusing, you don't indicate which voices you are referring to on it.
Goku and Bardock are completely different characters, it's not even like he's an evil mirror of his son, so having someone else voice him wouldn't have been a bad idea. I'm not suggesting Nozawa shouldn't have, but it's not a bad idea either.
This post again makes me think you're confused as to what we're actually talking about here. Or at least as to what I'm actually talking about here. So to recap to get you to where I am, the topic was as to whether or not it made sense for Nozawa to play Bardock.
At some point, Mike came up with a list of all the characters Nozawa played and listed justifications for each of those choices. I chimed in to add that I personally thought a very compelling reason was that that voice given to the protagonist helped establish the connection to Dragon Ball in a work that was almost completely removed from anything familiar. Up to this point, Goku had always been the protagonist, and he had always had the same voice. Now, in this completely separate work, we have a protagonist who looks and sounds like Goku, and I reasoned that, separate characters though they were, it helped connect the special back to Goku and thus Dragon Ball.
I went on to say that my speculation seems to continue to play out all the way to the present day. Because, while Dragon Ball has had multiple people in the protagonist role, whatever character it is is ALWAYS played by Nozawa, no matter who it is. The only thing that even comes close to an exception is the Trunks special, but it still has Gohan as a secondary protagonist.
My list did not give any names of characters because that's not what's important or even relevant. The only thing I'm trying to show is that, no matter who the protagonist is, Nozawa is there. Kid Goku, adult Goku, adult Gohan, Bardock, Goku, Jr. (main character in the GT TV special, which I have not seen, so I didn't include it before). She's always the lead actress playing the lead character. Even if it's a totally different character, it's always her in the lead role. For the dub, that's not the case. For each of those characters in protagonist roles, there is at least one distinct voice actor, often more. Goku has four. Gohan has two (only counting his voices where he is in the role of the lead protagonist). But even in the cases where it's only one actor per character, it's still ALWAYS a different actor in the lead role whenever the protagonist switches out.
And, again, that's not a criticism. I'm not arguing whether it's better to have Nozawa in the role of Bardock or someone else, nor am I arguing the merits or disadvantages of a character being or not being recast due to age of the character. It's simply an observation as to what expectations the Japanese fanbase has as opposed to the American fanbase due to the practices of their respective versions. So, again, telling me that Schemmel has consistently voiced adult Goku for 15 years is completely irrelevant to what I'm trying to say because adult Goku is not always the protagonist of Dragon Ball.