For the crux of my stance, I stand by the game and anime examples, and my Superman comment. As for live action actors and their non-look-alike kid alter egos in flicks... I do enjoy it when they go the extra step and find kids with a resemblance. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I felt, did a particlarly good job at that for Voldemart (with the youngest version even being played by Ralph Fiennes' nephew).
It is a perfectly valid point. I mentioned Hebert, and Nadolny most certainly predated his Gohan. Nadolny herself was the replacement for Saffron Henderson, the first Gohan. And Henderson initially did young Goku before they skipped to Z and Ian Corlett picked it up. Henderson then voiced young Gohan. So it makes perfect sense that Nadolny would then go on to replace Henderson as young Goku as well.OutlawTorn wrote:That would be a perfectly valid point except Nadolny didn't do any voice work as Goku (her voicing of Gohan doesn't count when it comes to Goku's voice) until after Sean Schemmel had been voicing adult Goku.Onikage725 wrote:It flows a lot more naturally than his (or Gohan's) kid/post-puberty vocal shifts, as neither Schemmel nor Hebert sound ANYTHING like Nadolny in the slightest.
That was also the point of my theory- if your idea of Goku starts at his childhood, you'll approach the series chronologically (making arguments of which actor voiced which era first fairly moot). When you get to the last DB saga, if you're watching in English, you're in for a major change. The same happens for Gohan in the Buu Saga. If you are watching in Japanese, you get the same voice you're used to, but deeper in pitch.
If your concept of Goku starts at Z, then you won't really care about his younger voice, and will likely prefer the deeper English dub actors for the adult character you're used to.
Noone's questioning that voices get deeper. Listen to Pilaf Saga Goku and Buu Saga Goku. His voice is quite a bit deeper in pitch. I'm saying, it is a nice touch to have the consistency of the same actor in a situation that can support it. I mean, Harrison Ford sounds different now than his Hans Solo days, but he still sounds like Harrison Ford.Listen to Jim Ross' WCW commentary and then his most recent WWE commentary. There is a distinct difference and that's just with calling the action. The characters in Dragon Ball/Z/GT are usually screaming like crazy so it's only natural that their voices would deepen significantly over time.
The fact that male voices have a habit of deepening from childhood into adulthood is one of the reasons women are chosen to voice young boys in animation, particularly long-running animation where the characters don't tend to age.
EDIT: Wow, yeah, this did go horribly off topic. I'll try to fall back into the framework, though loosely. About a year ago, Central Park Media went bankrupt and put its license's up for sale. CPM handled the Yu Yu Hakusho movie. The OVA was done by MediaBlasters, who is still around. CPM's licenses are up for grabs, with ADV having picked up a number of them already. It isn't unfeasible that FUNimation may grab the Yu Yu Hakusho movie and release it to go along with their season sets. What does this have to do with THIS topic? Well, I think the end result of the DB movie and how it is handled will give us a precedent for how future scattered releases with their own dubs may come out.
One note though. I read that CPM retains the rights to the aspects of their dubs that they produced (meaning, dub tracks, packaging, etc). I know FUNimation was involved in the first dub of the movie (at least I think so), but are there any legal issues with Lions Gate regarding using it? There's a lot of speculation about whether the original dub will be on here. That'd just be odd, if it did happen. I mean, they didn't use the dub tracks for the first 3 DBZ films.