The Sonny Strait & Terry Klassen Prank Call

Back in 2000, FUNimation was still partly allowing its voice actors to conduct their own personal interviews with the fan base, and more specifically, fan websites (before stopping that practice entirely for a long period of time). After an interview with Sean Schemmel (FUNimation’s “Goku”), Jon Allen (a former staff member of Daizenshuu EX, a predecessor website of Kanzenshuu) conducted another interview with Sonny Strait (FUNimation’s “Krillin”).

In addition to the transcript of the interview, Jon Allen also posted some MP3 audio files from the phone interview to go along with it, partly as an attempt to put a real “face” with these voice actors, but also just to have fun! As you will notice, this so-called “prank call” can be found at the very end of the interview, and is in no way any type of real prank call with Terry Klassen, the original Ocean Studios voice for “Krillin” in FUNimation’s English dub of Dragon Ball Z. It is all just good fun being had during an interview. Besides… didn’t you ever wonder why the other guy on the phone was laughing? If it was indeed Terry Klassen, wouldn’t he (presumably?) be insulted and not laughing?

Combine Jon Allen’s frustrating practice of never ID3ing his MP3 files, our own in-retrospect-frustrating-practice of not checking things well enough, all wrapped up with the very nature of Dragon Ball fans on the Internet… and you have yourself a new urban myth!

(It is perhaps worth noting that, many years later, Jon Allen finally had a chance to get a credited role himself in FUNimation’s English dub of the franchise, playing Nigrissi during the Tournament of Power in the Dragon Ball Super television series!)