Initial Reaction to Nozawa as Goku

The Monkey King · Post by **The Monkey King** » Sat Mar 29, 2014 5:31 pm

Me as a kid: 'Why does Goku sound like an old woman?'
This upset me so much that I refused to watch the Broly film my older bro and cousin were watching.

Dogasu · Post by **Dogasu** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 12:12 am

I never got the whole "Nozawa makes Son Goku sound like an old woman" thing. Mainly because Goku doesn't sound like any old woman I've ever heard before, Japanese or otherwise.

Bullza · Post by **Bullza** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 4:32 am

Some guys have high voices. The voice suits his personality, and sounds very fitting around the 23rd Budokai.

Mike Tyson has a high voice and that's been mocked many times because of it and even then he still doesn't sound like a old woman.

The voice suited Goku perfectly as a kid and somewhat as a teenager but as a adult, a full grown man with huge muscles that kicks people through mountains, powers up and makes the earth shake then sounding like a old woman is ridiculous.

Could you imagine Superman voiced by an old lady and it not sounding ridiculous?

Dogasu · Post by **Dogasu** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 4:50 am

Bullza wrote:Mike Tyson has a high voice and that's been mocked many times because of it and even then he still doesn't sound like a old woman.

Neither does Son Goku.

ABED · Post by **ABED** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 7:43 am

Bullza wrote:
Some guys have high voices. The voice suits his personality, and sounds very fitting around the 23rd Budokai.
Mike Tyson has a high voice and that's been mocked many times because of it and even then he still doesn't sound like a old woman.

The voice suited Goku perfectly as a kid and somewhat as a teenager but as a adult, a full grown man with huge muscles that kicks people through mountains, powers up and makes the earth shake then sounding like a old woman is ridiculous.

Could you imagine Superman voiced by an old lady and it not sounding ridiculous?

Goku's not Superman, and he was a teenager at the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai.

Pantalones · Post by **Pantalones** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 12:35 pm

The first time I heard Goku's Japanese voice was in some of the video games. My reaction was basically "huh, Goku sounds really squeaky in Japanese. Weird."

I never thought he sounded like a girl or anything though... Nozawa's Goku voice is not exactly a female-sounding voice so much as just a really high, squeaky, kind of strange voice. (Mike Tyson is probably a fairly good comparison, now that I think about it.)

I actually don't mind it so much in the video games, but it's kind of bizarre to watch actual episodes/movies in Japanese. Especially when you have adult Goku and adult Gohan both talking. I mean, it's not unbearable or anything, but the squeakiness stands out as strange a lot more when he's just standing around talking than it does when he's in the middle of a fight where most of what's being said is just grunts or battle cries or calling out the names of attacks.

RocktheDragon · Post by **RocktheDragon** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 3:12 pm

Bullza wrote:
RocktheDragon wrote:
Bullza wrote:I wondered why Goku a muscle bound tough fighter and strongest being in the universe had the voice of an old lady.

Worked when he was a kid, laughable once he was an adult.
If anything, the deep muscle bound voices of the Funimation dub with their limited range and lack of depth in their acting, is what is laughable. But that's just me.
Well muscle bound tough fighters normally have deep muscle bound voices.... They don't usually sound like old women.

Last I checked George Foreman didn't sound like Betty White.

She could have ten times the talent as the Sean and it'd still sound laughable to hear him speak.

I don't really understand the aversion towards Nozawa's pitch and performance as Goku. I guess within an American context we've been taught that heroes need to have deep and testosterone filled voices (Batman, Superman, i.e. a majority of major comic book heroes or action stars) but even then, why can't people be open minded enough to appreciate a different experience?

Nozawa's performance is leaps and bounds above Schemmel's. It doesn't mean that I can't enjoy Schemmel's work at times, but comparing the two in terms of voice performance is...not something I would even think of doing. You have every prerogative to think the way you do, and no one can change that, but you are missing out on the original rendition of Goku just because you can't get over some silly notion of what kind of voice should suit who. Which I think, at the end of the day, is a real shame.

RocktheDragon · Post by **RocktheDragon** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 3:15 pm

ABED wrote:
If anything, the deep muscle bound voices of the Funimation dub with their limited range and lack of depth in their acting, is what is laughable. But that's just me.
They've grown over the years, and fit their characters.

Certainly they've grown over the years. But in my opinion, the quality of the performances cannot measure up to the original, though that is to be expected.

Which is to say I do appreciate the original DBZ dub for what it is, along with the Kai dub, but calling an original performance laughable because it doesn't meet your preconception of what a voice should sound like seems like overkill to me.

TheGmGoken · Post by **TheGmGoken** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 3:16 pm

Brock Lesnar is muscle bond yet his screams and voice sounds like a 10 year old fat boy. Listen to this scream
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RTRDLTrqbc

Rocketman · Post by **Rocketman** » Sun Mar 30, 2014 10:21 pm

Does Superman really have that deep of a voice? I mean, in comparison to Gokatoo, sure, but I don't think Reeve's Superman is all that heavy on the bass.

Also Mike Tyson doesn't really count, because he's crazy as shit. If Gokatoo was walking around screaming "I'll fuck you til you love me, faggot" and biting peoples' ears off, I wouldn't say anything about his voice.

TheBlackPaladin · Post by **TheBlackPaladin** » Mon Mar 31, 2014 12:43 am

RocktheDragon wrote:
Bullza wrote:
RocktheDragon wrote:
If anything, the deep muscle bound voices of the Funimation dub with their limited range and lack of depth in their acting, is what is laughable. But that's just me.
Well muscle bound tough fighters normally have deep muscle bound voices.... They don't usually sound like old women.

Last I checked George Foreman didn't sound like Betty White.

She could have ten times the talent as the Sean and it'd still sound laughable to hear him speak.
I don't really understand the aversion towards Nozawa's pitch and performance as Goku. I guess within an American context we've been taught that heroes need to have deep and testosterone filled voices (Batman, Superman, i.e. a majority of major comic book heroes or action stars) but even then, why can't people be open minded enough to appreciate a different experience?

I don't believe it's an American aversion to high-voiced heroes, I believe it's a general (but not universal) global disbelief over characters who appear to be grown adult men sounding like women. I say global because every international dub that I'm aware of, not just the English ones, recast Goku with an adult male voice actor once he came of age.

The only people I've ever heard think that Nozawa's adult Goku sounded like a man are people whose thoughts I've read on Kanzenshuu. Which is not to invalidate their thoughts at all, but it is to demonstrate how rare it is. Everybody else that I've encountered in every other medium--in person, or online--recognized immediately that adult Goku was being played by a woman in Japanese.

It doesn't really have anything to do with pitch so much as it has to do with the voice being identifiably male. Mike Tyson is a high-pitched guy, yes, but no one would confuse him for a woman. Heck, in terms of Dragon Ball, Peter Kelamis had a really high-pitched voice, but no one would confuse him for a woman. That's why many people have a hard time accepting Nozawa as adult Goku--the voice she uses is, to many, identifiably female, and it's a strange voice to use when attached to a character who is very identifiably male in appearance. The way I got myself to like it was to stop trying to trick myself into thinking it was a male voice. I couldn't. Rather, I learned to like Nozawa's voice for adult Goku because I accepted how strange it was, and now regard it as a likeable quirk that fits with an equally strange but likeable character.

Sshadow5001 · Post by **Sshadow5001** » Mon Mar 31, 2014 11:58 am

DoomieDoomie911 wrote: Oh okay, I misunderstood. I thought you meant that's what you thought now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

To be fair there wasn't a lot of info to go off on my statement

don't worry about it.

ABED · Post by **ABED** » Mon Mar 31, 2014 2:29 pm

I don't think Reeve's Superman is all that heavy on the bass.

1. there have been more Supermans than Reeve, and Reeve does have a manly voice. It's not as deep as James Earl Jones, but it's definitely a deep masculine voice.

Brock Lesnar doesn't sound like a pre-pubescent. That's just a scream. Shigeru Chiba, who plays Kuwabara, Pilaf, and Raditz, can get his voice pretty high despite having a deep speaking voice.

the performances cannot measure up to the original, though that is to be expected.

Why? Because they came first?

Kanzenshuu

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