Fallout from revelations about legendary voice actor doesn’t appear to be over yet.
A brand-new arc of the Dragon Ball anime, Dragon Ball Daima, is set to premiere next week, and there’s plenty of excited speculation about which established characters from the series’ gigantic extended cast will be returning. We now know for sure that Yamcha, the once-feared banditfrom the the very first Dragon Ball anime TV series, will be showing up in Episode 1 of Daima.
But while Yamcha will be a familiar face for long-time fans, he won’t be a familiar voice, since the character’s voice actor is being recast.
This would have been an unthinkable decision just a half-year ago. Yamcha’s original voice actor, who had the role since 1986, is none other than Toru Furuya, one of the most popular and prolific male voice actors in the history of the industry, whose resume also includes original Mobile Suit Gundam protagonist and Sailor Moon love interest/formalwear enthusiast Tuxedo Mask. Though he’s now in his early 70s, Furuya has remained active in the voice-acting scene, and while he no doubt commands much higher rates now than he did roughly four decades ago, Yamcha’s supporting-character status means that Furuya doesn’t usually have to be booked for all that much time in the recording studio for any one Dragon Ball project.
However, in May of this year Furuya, who’s been married to his second wife since 1985, admitted to having been in a four-and-a-half-year extramarital affair with a fan. He also admitted to having struck the woman, and also pressuring her to get an abortion after she became pregnant with his child.
There’s far less forgiveness for extramarital affairs in the Japanese entertainment sphere than there is in the Hollywood show business world, and while it doesn’t reference Furuya’s affair directly, on October 4, one week before the show’s premier, the Dragon Ball Daima official website posted the following statement.
The decision has been made to recast the voice of Yamcha, a role which has been played by Toru Furuya in the Dragon Ball series for many years. Starting with Episode 1 of Dragon Ball Daima, which will air on October 11, the character will be voiced by Ryota Suzuki.
Suzuki, whose previous roles include Yu Ishigami in Kaguya-sama: Love is War, was born in 1998, meaning that Furuya has been the voice of Yamcha for 12 years more than Suzuki has been alive.
With Yamcha having been laughably outpaced by Dragon Ball’s other martial artists as the series and its stakes have grown in scale, Furuya being replaced isn’t likely to have a huge effect on the Daima viewing experience, even for fans unconcerned with his off-microphone conduct. However, Yamcha is the third semi-recurring role in a prestige series that Furuya has departed from since his affair became public knowledge, following Detective Conan’s Toru Amuro and One Piece’s Sabo, so it may very well not be the last.
Source: Dragon Ball Daim official website via Oricon News via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin
Top image: Toei Animation press release
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