Yeah, most of the voice actors in the CWi episodes were very good, just poorly directed and in some cases, poorly cast. Linda Ballantyne did do a fantastic job as Serena under the circumstances, but she never should've been cast. Her voice just isn't right for the part. She sounds too deep and mature. Emilie Barlow, Jeff Lumby, Jen Gould, and Kirsten Bishop also turned in good performances, though everyone sounded much more polished in the DiC era. The absolute worst voice was Liza Balkan as Amy, but given Balkan's background as a stage actress, I'm sure it was mostly just her being inexperienced with dubbing anime and voice acting in general. I'm sure she's a fine performer on stage. She was also a miscast because her voice sounded far too old for the character.
However, Stephanie Beard and Emilie Barlow were better choices for Rini and Mina than Tracey Hoyt and Stephanie Morgenstern, but even their performances weren't as polished as they could've been under better direction. They're still probably my favorite voices for those characters though. Tracey Hoyt always made Rini sound like an annoying brat, and Stephanie Morgenstern sounded far too mature as Mina, and too stiff for the character's sillier moments. I like Sandy Fox as Chibiusa, but Stephanie Beard sounds like a more natural choice, and Cherami Leigh has always felt like a slight miscast as Minako, but still sounds alright enough. Honestly, most of the Viz cast is like that. None of them are bad choices, but hardly any performance is interesting or outstanding (though there are a few, mostly villains). It's a very routine-sounding dub for the most part.
BlueMoon said:
Going off a tangent but Pioneer’s handling of the movies in general was a bit weird. You had their release of the first Dragon Ball Z movies which used the same cast the tv dub had being using at this point but it was uncut with the Japanese openings and endings and insert songs left undubbed (something funimation didnt do when theu redubbed them with their own cast) and the scripts were much much closer to the Japanese version even if they used dub names for consistency. And even though they used the same actors it felt much different from the tv dub
Pioneer/Geneon always entrusted all dubbing to the studios. They had very little input themselves. Most of the credit for those DBZ movie dubs goes to Ocean, who hired their own script writers (Ward Perry, Terry Klassen, etc) to do the script adaptation. The credit for the SM movie dubs goes to Optimum, who had their own writers doing the scripts (Lisa Lumby Richards).
