Several Voice Actors Leave The Sonic Franchise

...It's a surprise that she's voicing the character she was voicing while at the same time never confirming that she was finished voicing the character?

 

I think it’s reasonable to be confused. Until the movie, Sonic’s voice cast in multimedia appearance have been kept in parity with the games. There haven’t been two casts existing simultaneously like this since Sonic X as far as I’m aware (discounting the elephant in the room that is the movie, which itself drew fire for not using the game voice cast).

It’s kind of a shame to me as it seems to speak to a philosophy of just how replaceable the actors are to whoever is responsible for these decisions.

 

The concept of actors keeping their roles until they die is only really a thing in Japan. Of course, voice actors are more like actual celebrities over there, versus here where it's usually just a job to everyone involved and eventually some of them will want to move on. Especially for children's media, I think studios are under the assumption that children don't really care about what goes on behind-the-scenes of their favorite cartoons, and that it would ruin the magic for them if they did. Thus, voice actors are replaceable, with the idea that "nobody will even notice".

All of that's been changing with the advent of social media, though. Kids are so much more invested in the actual making of things like Sonic, or even the business politics of SEGA, than they were a decade ago. When Ryan Drummond got replaced, there was a small uproar in the community, but people got over it after a while. But now, RCS is no longer the voice and it turns into this massive drama where even non-Sonic fans are REALLY interested in if he was unjustly fired or not.

 

I know you're not actually advocating the idea, but I've always objected to the idea of "kids will never notice". Think of all the kids who asked for Transformers and got Go-Bots, or asked for Pokemon cards and got Magic cards. The kids ALWAYS notice. Hell, I remember when Power Rangers was in the process of writing out Jason/Zack/Trini, using stock footage and different voices to cover it up. I noticed even at the time. These studios don't give kids enough credit.

 

Maybe I am alone in this or maybe not, but I'd love to see Ryan Drummond make a triumphant return.

 

No, I would too, but let's be real- it's incredibly unlikely

 

If Ryan Drummond can sound like he did in Adventure 2, I'd want him back 1000%.

 

Well, good news, he can! But yeah, it's not very likely that he'll be coming back, sadly. Only time will tell though.

This is something I've thought about before. People (adults) often fail to realize just how many minute details about something a kid will be aware of. When I was a kid I was almost always bothered by inaccuracies in toys, etc. These are things that adults don't see as important, but they're not thinking about it from the perspective of the child who is fascinated by [whatever it is] who will pick up on every other tiny detail about something very important and special to them.

Of course there are things that kids rarely notice, but a lot of the time, something an adult thinks a kid won't notice will be plainly obvious to said kid.

 

The problem is that while kids do notice those things, they can't really articulate WHY so it gives off the impression that they don't notice.

 

Obviously kids know the difference between pokemon cards and magic cards. The difference between say Bobby Driscoll voicing Peter Pan and Blayne Weaver in the crappy sequel is a different thing. Even if kids recognized the difference in voice actors, they didn't care. Obviously this is a case of the original voice actor not being available, but studios are banking on the fact that kids don't care about voice actors enough that it's worth paying top dollar to keep them.

For the most part it probably true, but as of late kids (and adults as well) seem to be more interested in hearing the same actors. The Incredibles and Frozen being good examples. Of course Disney's got oodles of cash now.

 

Very recently, studios have been using voice actors to help out with social media marketing. This is why the Powerpuff Girls 2016 cast came in and replaced the old one, and why there's a newer, younger, hotter actress playing Alyx Vance in Half-Life. It's all so they can appeal to a younger demographic and interact with fans on social media. This simply wasn't a thing 20 years ago. The people behind your favorite games and TV shows used to be completely out of reach, in a totally different world.

 

Very true. This might be why Mike Pollock has been with Sega for so long.

 

I mean, Mike came to us (the community) and interacted with us all the moment he got the role, really. Before the English version aired and while we were all watching it in RAW Japanese and was very open as well.

Even I was PMing him and getting responses back then. Then he turned out to be the one voice everyone agreed that they liked at the time too.

 

Should be noted that Roger has been the most open of all of the VA"s since his tenure started given the social media boom of the 10's. But Jason Griffith did a few fan interviews too, notably for FTCR during his tenure

 

I don't recall people hammering Ryan with NDA-violating questions with why he was fired, nor harassing SEGA employees accusing them of career sabotage.

 

Thing is, the internet was a very different place back in 2003 - 2005, whenever it was that Griffith took the role of Sonic in X and then in the games. People had organised campaigns and petitions on their own little forums and MSN messenger groups, but it was much harder to gather people all in one place than it is now and contacting anyone at SEGA other than random customer support reps was very difficult. This was before the days of Twitter and Facebook. The entire scenario is different.

 

Drummond nipped the former in the bud pretty quickly by saying that he wasn't aware of the change until he saw they were releasing a new game and they hadn't contacted him. I remember plenty of the latter, though.