Jeddostotle7 wrote:Sabrblade wrote:Presently, we have Jake Tillman and Hiro Diaz in the current shows and they sound fine.
Yeah, I think I would prefer Jake Tillman take up the mantle. As much as like Jon Bailey... I've never been a huge fan of his Optimus voice tbh? It's never sounded quite right as a serious Optimus to me. Jake Tillman could probably afford to put a bit more range in the voice, but he's still settling into the role, and his voice already sounds closer to Peter Cullen's to me.
Jake Tillman sounds good but I think him trying to sound too much like Cullen is to his detriment. For one thing, he's a very young guy (**** he's younger than me!
) and it seems like he's aiming for the Movie-verse/Prime-styled 'Old Peter Cullen' voice, which is very deep and aged. Maybe its not his fault and its the producers telling him to try to be as 1:1 to Cullen as he can which is a shame because Chalk, Kaye and Kaplan all voice some incarnation of Optimus without doing that voice. Granted, David Kaye was doing a young Optimus Prime but still.
Yes, I know Peter Cullen is
the iconic Optimus Prime voice and has very much reclaimed the throne after 2007 but lets be real: when Gary Chalk was doing Optimus Prime in the Unicron trilogy it was fine. Same with Corey Burton doing a spectacular Megatron on Animated. Its only because of the movies and TF Prime that Peter Cullen and Frank Welker's modern take on the characters seem to have taken over our mental image.
However, since Transformers reboot itself every couple year I wouldn't mind (and think it would be better!) if they let these voice actors do their own thing and inject some personality into their role. Beast Wars Megatron would not be as fondly remembered if David Kaye had been told to 'try to copy Frank Welker'. A good example of a role that keep changing hands and work every time: Starscream. We've had, in recent years, Michael Dobson, Tom Kenny, Steve Blum, Sam Riegel, Charlie Adler and Billy Bob Thompson doing their own take and they usually work.