Dragon Ball, an iconic anime series with a large and diverse fan base, had to have their own panel, of course, at Fan Expo Dallas. The comic con team brought in the voice actors who play Goku and Vegeta to do a Q&A session for the fans. Sean Schemmel, Goku’s voice, who can also be heard in Shaman King (as Amidamaru) and Christopher Sabat, Vegeta’s voice, who can also be heard in Yuri!!! On Ice (as Christophe Giacometti) have such a great chemistry after years of working together.
Article by William Gray
This panel was such a fun one to sit in on because they have been doing panels long enough that they know how to work a crowd. Early in the panel, Sean was joking about his mom and how she reacts to his friendship with Chris. They even tried to call her so they could put her on speaker phone to have her join in on the panel, unfortunately she did not answer.
While telling a story about their co-worker, Chris Rager, who plays Hercule, the voice actor in question called out from the back of the room. Joining the panel and bringing Josh Martin, the voice of Majin Buu with him, the panel unexpectedly grew to a full group. Chris and Josh were there with the acting school that they went to, KD Studios, and signing autographs. Taking a break they came by to watch the panel and ended up joining it instead.
The part I found most interesting about the panel was the story about how they get no information about the upcoming episodes. Christopher Sabat, who also directs Dragon Ball Super, explained how difficult it is to direct a show without knowing what is going on in the future. He told an example where they asked questions about Goku Black, one of the enemies in the series, and they would not give them any information. When they asked if they could get more information about the character so they could know how to act the character and all they were told is he is evil Goku. They could not get an information about if this was a different character or the same person turned evil or anything.
When the subject of the Dragon Ball video games came up all of their faces lit up, and they talked about how the translations are done and told the story of one of the games that was translated by a different group but they only translated part of the script because the excel spreadsheet was not set up to wrap-around text so they didn’t know that there was more to it.
They also mentioned how they would sometimes tweak some of the lines and that some of these lines were actually included in the game. Sean, in particular, was proud of a line where Goku was supposed to say “Knowledge is half the battle!” Sean had a running joke where he continued that line and recorded in Goku’s voice and they left it in the game. The final line in the game was “Knowledge is half the battle, and the other half is the battle!”
Featured image credit: Toei Animation
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