Unpopular opinion time, I guess: I don't mind too much if Mike Pollock is replaced by another VA for the next game. Don't get me wrong, he's a great Eggman... but so were Deem Bristow, Long John Baldry and Chikao Otsuka. And currently, Kotaro Nakamura, Marc Bretonnière, Jim Carrey, etc... are all doing a great job too. I'm not saying Pollock is a bad voice actor at all (I mean look at his motherfucking resume, hot damn), just that his interpretation of Eggman isn't THE definitive interpretation of the character, like David Hayter was for Solid Snake for example. Yeah, it would suck for a well established VA to get replaced like that...but they're already doing that for the next game anyway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
He's been voicing Eggman for almost 20 years at this point. Only two or three more years to get to that.
Everyone has their opinions, but I honestly think people don't understand how important it is for a character to have a specific voice. If a character is constantly swapping voices, it just destroys the immersion. Like personal feelings aside, Sega constantly swapping voices like it ain't no big deal just makes me care less about these characters because I know Sega doesn't care that much either. Like Mario can keep the same voice for 20 years, why can't Sonic? The new Scooby-Doo movie caught shit for swapping out the established VA's of almost 20 years for celebrity voice actors.
Yeah, when Pokémon Company decided to move anime localization entirely in-house and no longer use 4Kids, people were furious over the recasting. It's assumed that when you have a role as a voice actor, you keep that role until you die. So with what we are seeing on Twitter from the various VAs, I seriously have to ask: what the hell is going on?!
One can only hope it doesn't go for the worse, that's for sure... But yeah, I agree that a voiced character should retain said VA forever. Each time Sonic cast changed VAs, it felt like they weren't the same. It might've been the point...if it had happened in Japan as well...
I stopped watching pokemon for entirely that reason. Also the best part of the Transformers movie was that they got Optimus Prime to reprise his voice. I'm sorry to see any of these voice actors go, but Mike Pollock has been the shining star in the Sonic franchise. He's been the only consistency throughout the last 20ish years, and it's obvious that he loves voicing Eggman. No one else is so involved in the Sonic community. I might be done if they replace Mike.
https://twitter.com/itsamike/status/1356829213165297664?s=19 I really don't want Mike to go. He's the best part of modern sonic to me period.
Ya don't get rid of Pollock they'd be real stupid to do that. The rest though? Honestly indifferent. While it sucks that SoA is prone to just toss everyone while SoJ has had mostly the same VAs since 98, besides Roger who I felt mostly didn't fit the role, the rest I really never liked that much. A lot of it may have been poor voice direction but like Forces sounds like a bad Saturday morning cartoon half the time. Shadow's voice was never good, Amy sounded too much like Minnie Mouse, Vector and Charmy are just grating, and Tails sounded like a douche. Off the top of my head the only performance that I liked consistently was Rouge's and they barely use her.
Whilst it obviously sucks that people are out of a job voicing characters they love, I never felt the current cast fit the characters that well. That being said, I'm not excited about a new voice cast either, as I feel the latter, how the cast don't fit, are all down to the voice directors, which as far as we know, haven't had a change of heart to direct them differently or been replaced entirely. At least the benefit is the writing team is being switched up, so there's a possibility any new VAs have something better to work with, script-wise. For instance, don't get me wrong, Mike Pollock is amazing, but my disappointment comes from how the voice directors + the writers don't give him anything to work with. 100% of the time he's this "hardy har funny villain" when there's times he should actually be menacing. Compare the first cutscene of Sonic Forces to his performance in Sonic X (for instance the cutscene where Chris confronts Eggman), the former he should actually sound menacing but doesn't, whilst the latter he has a lot more range of emotions he goes through imo. All down to writing and voice direction, all sorely lacking in the latest games. The above example is just to show that any of the VAs, even ones we're not too keen on, they have talent to do different voices, that's their job, but they've not been directed or given much good dialogue to work with, so of course their work won't be up to the standard it *should* be.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned what seems to be the obvious thing that's happened: they likely only wanted one VA contract (which we know they're weird about) and recast for the Netflix show. Those folks will wind up holding the game contracts, too. Exact same thing happened with Sonic X.
It didn't happen with Sonic Boom tho, so there's gotta be more to it than just Sega recasting because there's a cartoon in the making.
Scarred's guess definitely seems the most likely to me so far. I'm honestly personally ruling out the idea that it has anything to do with the movie because of the heftt price tag Sega would have to pay, and because I really don't think they want to tie the movie into the games in any way. Every time Iizuka or anyone else speaks on the movie, I get the impression that they really want it to stay separate - can't exactly explain why. I also really hope they keep Mike... yeah sure there are other Eggman VAs who have done great work, but I think it's easy to underestimate just HOW MUCH of the US Eggman VA work has been done by him. While most of the other central cast have gone through at least 2 VAs since SA1, it's just been Mike the whole time. He seems to enjoy doing it, so I'd honestly be surprised if they dropped him or couldn't reach a negotiation.
I have hope Mike is still voicing Eggman because of the ridiculous non-answers he’s been giving, which IMO seem to suggest he’s still bound by an NDA.
Not necessarily. It's clear he's bound by an NDA, but you also can sign an NDA on leaving a company too. It's not a sign that he's still voicing Eggman. (I hope he is though).
In Japan it's expected that a character have one voice actor and one voice actor only. VA's only change when the current one straight-up dies or retires. This is why SEGA is so bizarrely obsessed with having ONE cast across games and other media and why they dump their casts whenever a new cartoon comes out.
To springboard from this, we had Mike around for a comic book day event a few years back. He was kind enough to humor us so we pulled one of the Archie Sonic trades (Flynn-era) off the shelf where Eggman is sincerely menacing and he read through some for us. Chills, man. If they ever threw that kind of tone his way he’d handle it no problem.
