Do you ever recognize voice actors when watching anime? Generally because I watch anime in Japanese, no, but there are a select few times where I have recognized the voice actor. More commonly though, I recognize them in English because they usually have the same voice actors for most of the characters. Travis Willingham is a great example of this. Best known for his role as Roy Mustang in Full Metal Alchemist (and Brotherhood), he's also voiced Ace from One Piece, Kanda from D. Gray Man, Mori from OHSHC, several digimon from the various series, Thor is a ton of Disney animation stuff, and more.
I think my favorite cases of "spot the voice actor" are the most recent Japanese voice actor case I had and the most recent (and mentally scarring) English voice actor I spotted.
So to start, I recently binged both seasons of Noragami, and from the start, this character named Kazuma bugged me. Not like the character itself, but just like, something about him bothered me. It wasn't until I was trying to fall asleep after binging the whole second season that it hit me. I knew that voice actor! That was Yukio Okumura from Blue Exorcist! After further research I confirmed they did indeed have the same voice, and what's worse, the two are like carbon copies of one another personality and appearance wise. It's like the meme "Hey can I copy your homework?" "Yeah just change it a little so it doesn't look the same." That's exactly what happened here! It totally blew my mind!
The second case is the most recent English dub. This was a bit mentally scarring and let's just say I can never watch Yuri!!! on Ice in English ever again. So a friend of mine calls me and asks me to watch some Yuri!!! on Ice with her. She's just starting to get into anime and even though I had already watched the entire series as it was coming out, I decided to oblige and watch it with her. So we're watching episode 2 and as soon as Viktor speaks, I freeze. My friend can't figure out what's wrong but all I can see is him, Claire Stanfield. For those of you that have watched Baccano! you can understand why I'd freak out a little. The two are so drastically different in personality that hearing Claire Stanfield speaking in a poorly done Russian accent sent off all kinds of flares. I mean, I love both characters but I will never see Viktor the same again.
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