Flashback to a "Voice Chaos"

Some people today might not know it, but years ago in 2006, the Pokémon anime in the west had a bit of a quandary. It was related to voices and specifically the voice actors that provided the voices for the well-known characters. The issue was that the Pokémon anime was moving away from the previous rights holder for the English dub, 4Kids Entertainment, and therefore new voices had to be found, though in earnest there was an attempt to keep Veronica Taylor - the previous voice actress who voiced Ash - at the very least, but this obviously failed. The initial showing of these new voices with a certain hour-long special was met with criticism, and thus came the "voice chaos".

Many fans were not too pleased, to say the least, and there was a campaign/petition to bring back the old voices or at least a semblance of them. It should be noted that this was a time before social media and smartphones reigned supreme, so whatever communication that had to take place had to be conducted through slower means, one of which was by e-mail to a feedback address, which by now no longer exists. There was a direction to send e-mails to that address with complaints about the voice quality and pleas to save the dub of the anime. Predictably, I was caught up in those affairs, and I sent an e-mail of my own to back the campaign.

If nothing else, what this "chaos" showed was that lots of fans cared about the dub of the anime, and even though the English dub had only run for some years less than Pokémon itself, it still had become, in a way, "legendary" for its time. It would be understandable that fans had such strong reactions back then, and they needed a way to help the dub maintain its status among its fans, whether at that present time or down the line in the future. The same obviously applied to me as a Pokémon fan in general, which led to my contribution to the goings-on at that time.

By now, the chaos has long passed, the dub had since then settled into a "new normal" of its time, and the issue may now be described as "water under the bridge". But the happening is still memorable in some respects for what it entailed for one of the most popular facets of the anime, even detached from its origin. With the dub still continuing to this day and appearing to be just as good as it always was back then, the dub can be considered to have really made it out of the chaos back then, with new voices that continue to serve the enjoyment of Pokémon fans even now.

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