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Vol 2 Ch 25 | The Criminals are Gentle feat. John Gremillion
149 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to the Sleepover, this episode we are joined by John Gremillion! Most known for his roles as Gentle Criminal in My Hero. This episode includes talking about how cool our moms are, what it was like to dub Dramatical Murder without knowing how it really ends, and the realization that we are teaching celebrities about the nightmares of Homestuck!
You can find John's Socials here :)
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Join our discord here! https://discord.gg/fNKWGs4
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Transcript
Introduction and Name Pronunciation
00:00:00
Speaker
you
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Sleepover Podcast. This is Fandames with Parks and Nebula, and we have an awesome guest on today that Parks actually got to meet in person recently. We have John Gremillion. Hi. Welcome. Welcome. Hi. How are you? Is it... Did I say that right? Don't worry about it. You pronounce it the way that everybody always pronounces it, which is wrong. So it's Gremion, because it's... Oh! My family is French Cajun, right? So it's one of those pesky French names where the L's are silent. So Gremion.
00:00:41
Speaker
Uh-huh. And yeah, but my whole life, don't worry about it. Every doctor, every substitute teacher, John Gremillion, like, no, don't worry about it. But you're, you're right. You're in good company. I think Gremion's cooler. People have joked with me. Are you going to be a Gremillionaire? I'm like, yeah, dude. Okay.
00:01:04
Speaker
You get the same recycled canned jokes over and over again until it drives you crazy. Oh, but it's, you know, I've been that way all my life. But yes, Grammy on. Awesome. Yeah. We'll do it better. We'll be on top of it. No problem. You can slip. People slip. I had some faculty at drama school. I studied, I was at Juilliard for two years studying theater in New York in the mid 80s. And one of the faculty members was calling me gremlin two years later. I was like, all right, you know, I give up. It doesn't matter.
00:01:31
Speaker
Nothing you say will stick. Nothing I say is good. No, I can just do it. I give. That's my, so Nebula is just what everyone calls me.
Artistic Beginnings and Personal Journeys
00:01:40
Speaker
My actual name is Sid and it's S-Y-D. And I think it took my aunt and uncle until I was 13 or 14 to realize it was not spelled S-I-D. So I feel your pain. Like Sid Barrett of Pink Floyd, right? The singer. Yeah. So where does Nebula come from?
00:02:00
Speaker
Um, it's convoluted. The long and short of it is like we talked about before we started recording that I'm an artist. And when I was younger, I, my diehard dream was I wanted to be a tattoo artist and I really wanted to open a studio that was both like
00:02:17
Speaker
kind of separated half and half where you could get your tattoo, do the whole thing like a normal parlor, but the other half would be a local gallery where artists could have their work shown and sold, and then like the studio would get a commission. And I wanted a name for it that would be inclusive of both, but not like isolating either way. And so I came up with Nebula Inc. being I.N.K. instead of I.N.C.
00:02:45
Speaker
And my, whenever my oldest niece was born, my sister-in-law was like, what do you want your aunt name to be? And I have always just had Nebula Inc. as my name online. It's like, well, my favorite Pac-Man ghost is Inky. And I work with ink all the time and art, so they can just call me Inky. So I fluctuate between the two, but now Parks just calls me Nebula religiously.
00:03:10
Speaker
I'm not the one that started calling you that religiously. You were introduced to me as Nebula, and you just stayed as Nebula. That's true. Because the person who dubbed you Nebula was right. Calling you inky, like online as a nickname is stupid. I don't like saying it. It doesn't roll off the tongue. It doesn't do good for our branding. So you're just a nebula sound super cool. I mean, I have to say that that sounds like I don't know if that sounds like a cool spy show or a combination of
00:03:40
Speaker
How would you make that into a series? What would the two of you be in the fantasy world? If it was an anime, Parks and Nebula, masters of what would they investigate? What would their jobs be?
00:03:51
Speaker
I feel like I would be like an alien, like it's like a space being kind of like space dandy to be honest, just be straight up like space dandy. But if we were chicks, yeah, just honestly cowboy bebop kind of a little bit. Right? Yeah. There you go. Okay. This would be the space cowboy. I would be the alien. Okay. And we were talking and before we went on parks, we were talking about how you're in the medical profession. Yes. In the medical field for a while. What did you what medicine did you practice or what area were you into when you got into it?
00:04:21
Speaker
So tech, this is a long route. I've technically been like bred for the medical field since I was eight because my mom is a nurse and one of my uncles passed away from cancer. So I was doing a enriched route through high school to do, um, nursing and then move into oncology for medical school focus. Oh, wow. Okay. Cause I didn't want to do a medical lab degree. I wanted to strictly do patient care because that was where my focus wanted to be.
00:04:49
Speaker
nice so because i have health issues i actually had to stop my career because it's been it's okay it's a whole issue but i was doing cna work and working with my high school to do they had a health professions academy
00:05:04
Speaker
which allowed me to do concurrent work with the university back and forth. And I was the lead treasurer for all of that. So I was taking care of our charity events and stuff like that. All of the concurrent courses we did, all the tours and labs and stuff we got to do up at the university I was taking care of.
00:05:20
Speaker
So I had a pretty sweet deal with them, but I was working as a CNA, but partially earning my LPN because I worked on a technical floor at a large hospital is the easiest way to describe it. So I was doing my CNA program simultaneously to my RN program because I was on a neuro rehab floor where it was more long-term care, but still like working in brain injuries and pretty
00:05:48
Speaker
severe cases, all the CNAs were learning how to do feeding tubes, catheters, things like that that you wouldn't standard do as a CNA. So they were partially doing a hands-on LPN program through their stuff.
00:06:03
Speaker
So I was in the process of doing that before I had to stop. But I stopped right before COVID because I don't have a left lung. So being in like patient care is very rough for me now. So I'm out of it. But my mom is still a nurse. She runs a milk lab downtown where she does she works with donors to get breast milk to babies and NICUs and women who have like sensitive baby issues that can't make themselves or
00:06:32
Speaker
Stuff like that. So my mom is still a nurse and still does nursing. Wow. Well, we were talking that my mother worked in the Texas Medical Center, which I live very nearby, but for about 25 years.
00:06:41
Speaker
And she was like everything from secretary originally and patient relations all the way up to heading the ethics committee before she retired with a master's degree. She got a master's degree, did some more stuff. So she had to eventually talk to doctors and families about, you know, which family had to take somebody off a respirator or how we're going to handle this or that. Really tough, the toughest conversations. So she knows she, her skills of being able to negotiate and talk to people and what kind of language to use and how to diffuse situations is like top notch.
00:07:09
Speaker
because she had to deal with the toughest most emotional situations and approach them so i always call her to get advice whether i'm talking to my landlord or a client or crunchy roll to negotiate if i can record remotely no i'm joking but if but so i went you know so that that's a good that's a real good thing to have around that's that's fascinating
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's it was a lot because I was dealing because it was long-term care and I myself had been a patient I I have a chronic disease that makes it so all of my tissue is damaged I have a connective tissue disorder and it caused my it causes my lungs to just sometimes slip every now and then so prior to me working as a CNA I had already been hospitalized for about three weeks because my lung collapsed and so I already had firsthand experience of being a patient and
00:07:59
Speaker
being under like nurse care that made me feel like I was being cared for and so when I went into nursing my focus I wanted to be a neuro rehab because I wanted to deal with these people who are stuck here for a long time so when I was stuck there for a long time it was really depressing it was really hard I didn't get to talk to anybody but my nurses so I didn't know what was going on outside I didn't
00:08:20
Speaker
have any of that. And so when I went to nursing, I wanted to make sure I could be that person for someone else. So I tried to really lean into empathetic patient care, listening, making sure I know my patients because I was seeing them every day. I worked four days a week at Graves while going to school simultaneously. So I would leave, see them for dinner the next day and then again and again and again until they were gone. But sometimes they were there for two weeks minimum before I went to either going home or a different care facility.
00:08:47
Speaker
Wow. Well, I'm also a video editor and I have been about as long as I've been a voice actor and a lot of the videos I do are for the medical center. And so one of the biggest clients we had was Texas Children's Hospital, which is the biggest, the Texas Medical Center is like a city inside of a city. It's huge and a third of it is Texas Children's Hospital practically. Wow.
00:09:05
Speaker
They've grown exponentially over the last 30 years, right? And so one of the videos we, one of the videos we, our series of
Fandom Culture: The Good and the Bad
00:09:12
Speaker
videos we made was to raise money for this huge facility called the Neurological Research Institute where, which helps brings together under one roof on several different floors, experts from all over the world and different
00:09:23
Speaker
different areas of study. So someone studying mouse models on the fifth floor then they can walk down to the fourth floor and say hey a guy who's studying fruit flies come up to check out what I got on the mouse model and it speeds up research from like bench to bedside and they specifically are helping to cure kids brain diseases.
00:09:42
Speaker
That's incredible. Rett syndrome, Fragile X syndrome, Batten's disease, all the really tough epilepsy. They've cured epilepsy in mice already. They've worked to getting rid of it in mice. Pretty insane. I hear you. That's way cool. We're all connected in some way to the medical field.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, my mom has been, she was a doula before she started because she was on the path to getting her nursing degree. But then I was born, so she had to put on hold, but she was still teaching childcare classes to expect upcoming moms expecting mothers. And then when I was like 10, 11, she started doing like individual or sorry, independent doula work. So she was going and being an advocate for moms when they were delivering their babies.
00:10:26
Speaker
She was doing classes. She was doing placenta encapsulations for moms who wanted to try that route. And then she got her RN and then she immediately moved into being a charge nurse for labor delivery unit. And she was that for about three years.
00:10:42
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. She, she's my trooper. She's also the one who taught me how to do costuming. And she comes on my panels and listens to my podcast. So my biggest hero. I love your mom. She's my hero too. I feel compelled to share my matronly, um, medical relation. My godmother. Um, she's mostly a business woman now retired, but whenever she lived in Oklahoma, before they moved out to Colorado is
00:11:09
Speaker
mostly like an administrative person or a businesswoman. Whenever the Oklahoma City bombing happened in the early 90s, she was one of the very first people to hit ground zero. That was not a first responder.
00:11:25
Speaker
and she is not in the medical field in terms of like practice. She's only on the administrative side and she was after that a really big proponent for local hospital administrations and charities and stuff like that.
00:11:41
Speaker
And then whenever my god sister was born, she was in the NICU because she was born at 27 weeks. I want to say she was barely over halfway through her pregnancy. And she was my god sister was so small when she was born that she could fit in the palm of her dad's hand.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah. And so that was just the, the double connection to the, at least the Oklahoma medical area. And she, my godmother became so close with all the nurses and like always partnered with the, um, the charities that they could through her businesses and stuff. And I think she still knows or at least like sends a Christmas card to the nurses that helped her out whenever my God sister was born specifically.
00:12:28
Speaker
Wow. We all have super moms. Yeah, we do. Super moms. My dad worked at NASA for 35 years and sales. Well, yeah, he saw the whole space program from its infancy, all the Apollo missions and all that kind of stuff. We went to see the movie Apollo 13, and he was sitting there next to me going, that's true, that happened. Oh, that guy's an asshole. I had an office with him. He's a jerk. He's like, that's great. I love that. That's incredible. That's great.
00:12:58
Speaker
I listened to, when I found out that we were going to do this podcast, I heard who you interviewed and I listened to the Chris Sabat interview, which was great. Sabat, Sabat, we never know how to pronounce it. We had that same conversation with him of like, are we saying it right? He's like, no. I heard that and he went, what? Okay. And then I had to drive to Dallas to record some more anime last week. And I said, you know, I'm, I always listen to podcasts when I'm on the road. So I said, well, I'm going to be on Parks and Nebula. So let's just listen to some more stuff that they do.
00:13:26
Speaker
And I for some reason ended up hitting the head of stuck episode. Oh God. I'm sorry. I'm driving to Dallas. I'm driving to Dallas and I just can't turn it off because I'm sitting there. Eventually my car just going, what in the Jesus. I'm listening. I learned more about weird
00:13:48
Speaker
crazy pants, anime plots, and fandoms than I would ever want to know. And I thought, where am I? I don't know if I like it here. What's going on? I'm so sorry that that was your main introduction. I was thinking you were going to say it's like one of the episodes where we speak into the void about how much we love Vegeta and think he's beautiful and did not realize that two years later we would have Chris on the show.
00:14:12
Speaker
But weren't you in Dramatical Murder? Like, nothing we talk about could be weirder than Dramatical Murder. Alright, now I got a Dramatical Murder story too, because I recorded Dramatical Murder, I played the role of Toei, the villain in Dramatical Murder, right? And my friend, who I have been on stage with before, Gabe, he plays the lead. I forgot the lead character's name, but... Alba?
00:14:33
Speaker
Alba, yeah, okay. So Chris Ayers, rest in peace, wonderful guy. He directed me in a lot of shows, but he directed me in Dramatical Murder. Now we're in the studio and I record my last episode, which is episode 12 of the series. My character gets his come up and sees out all is good and all is right in the world. And I leave the booth and I go, well, that was really interesting. That's it. And he goes, and Chris Ayers says, well, good thing you weren't in the 13th episode. And I went, what?
00:15:02
Speaker
And he didn't say OVA, separate plot. He said 13th episode. So I have been thinking for the longest time that Dramatical Murder as a series ends with the OVA that goes into all the darkest places and ends in the darkest place you can imagine, right? You know which one I'm talking about.
00:15:25
Speaker
I thought it ended there and I went, what have I taken? Why didn't they tell? I would never have done, this is terrible. You know? That's why I was so surprised it was getting animated. I was like, cause I was on Tumblr when it was coming out as the game and I was like, there's no way in hell. There are YouTube reaction videos all over the place to just people watching this OVA that has nothing to do with the plot of the first 12 episodes. So I thought, why did Chris Ayres tell me it was the 13th episode?
00:15:54
Speaker
So you would think that for the rest of your life. That's why he did it. He was protecting you. I talked to some people about it, and they said, what? No, dude, that's an OVA. That's a whole separate thing because it used to be a game, and we've got different places you can go. I said, what is the matter with the world? So it was also really funny because David Matranga, his character in the OVA has to do this horrible stuff. And so I said, I went.
00:16:22
Speaker
I went up to Matranga because we were at the same gym, and he was on a treadmill, like three down from me one morning. I went and saw him. I said, David, you got to stop acting that way, man. You got to stop doing it. Knock it off. What are you doing? Oh, my gosh. He was like, shut up. Because we were talking about Dramatical Mary. He said, what a show. He said, yeah, what a show. So anyway. Well, but the show is even, like, censored a little bit. Like, it's worse still.
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So that was interesting. That was fascinating. I'm sorry we taught you about Homestuck. Don't worry about that. That plot just like, I was like, okay, whatever. I was like, I've got my little, you know, water burger shake. I'm like driving down to Dallas. I'm listening to about Homestuck and I'm going, what the hell is going on here?
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah, fun. It's a hot mess. It's the only way to describe it. A peak into our existence. Homestuck was a dark time. Right. A dark time. And I was dealing with that on the other side with Hetalia, which is actually arguably the worst anime fandom of all time on the internet.
00:17:27
Speaker
That's chronicalized as such because of just everything that went down. It was so bad. It's starting to come back for some reason. We don't want it back.
Conventions: Rules and Realities
00:17:36
Speaker
People should not. Because there's a new show or something, I thought. It's a new season. I don't know why the Renaissance of Italy is coming back. It shouldn't. I'm so sorry we talked to you about it.
00:17:49
Speaker
Don't worry about it. It's always interesting to learn these different areas. So when you talk about fandoms being toxic or fandoms being weird or fandoms being this and that, are you mostly talking about the way people talk online about shows on Tumblr and on different message boards? Are you talking about the way people act at conventions?
00:18:08
Speaker
little bit of both because fandom is not just contained by whichever platform you're on, it's a bit of both. Like most of cosplay is people in fandom, it's what they're doing on a day to day basis, having meetups, going to conventions, selling art. There's so many aspects of fandom, but with certain toxic fandoms like Hetalia, both of the transgressions that made it a toxic fandom were on both platforms and were widely like recorded or
00:18:36
Speaker
seen by everybody. And so there are still toxic fandoms now. As we're starting to get back into more events, there's people who are unaware of like convention etiquette, which can make for toxic fandom discourse to appear, because people don't know how to like interact with others in fandom so much outside of an online platform, like if they're on TikTok, the way they act on TikTok is way different than how you would like talk to a stranger in person. And I've had that happen to me like when I was a soccer icon, I had someone approach me
00:19:03
Speaker
and try to roleplay with me while I was in a character, which was normally fine, but if I don't know someone, it's really awkward. I don't want to interact with a minor in that way if I don't know them, stuff like that. That hasn't been a prominent part of convention interactions since, what, 2008? Yeah, that was something that was phased out after the yaoi paddle incidents. We've distanced ourselves from over-specific roleplays.
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, I was just asked the other day about yaoi paddles if I knew anything about them or if I knew about glomping or any of this other stuff. I was kind of going, no, I've got into conventions in a serious way in about 2017 because I'm a stage kid and I did theater all the time.
00:19:48
Speaker
And that helped with voices and help with acting, of course. And so what would happen to me is that I got into anime in the late 90s, kind of on the ground floor at ADV Films here in Houston and then found out about Funimation and then started doing shows at Funimation, et cetera. But I never started going to a lot of conventions. I crashed a couple of them just because I said, hey, conventions sound interesting. I went to see my friends there. Hi, how you doing?
00:20:08
Speaker
that, hey, come on to the table. We're going to sign autographs. We're going to do this kind of stuff. We were giving away autographs free. And this was in the early 2000s. And then when conventions started getting bigger and bigger and there was appearance fees and there was different stuff and there was people selling merch and prints and all this stuff, I found out about it and I wanted to be a part of it. But I was always busy on the weekend because I was with a rep company who did musicals all the time. All my weekends were booked so I can never go to cons. And then I really got interested in it around 2017.
00:20:35
Speaker
went to a few cons, then the pandemic hit and then we took a break and then I got back into it. And so last year I was at about
00:20:43
Speaker
I did about 10 cons last year, and I'm doing almost twice that this year if things go according to plan. So I really just tried to kick it up. It's been great to do during the pandemic because I can go to a con and wear a mask when and where I want to. I can decide how to control that situation. I don't ever have to be without a mask, so I can just decide if I want to be safe about it. And I'm pretty safe about it still, because it's still around. And not just that, but any con crud you can name is still out there.
00:21:12
Speaker
Oh, God, yeah. RSV and strep. And I'm a voice actor, we can't get sick. And if I'm traveling everywhere in airports, and I don't want to get my parents sick, all this other stuff. So it's masks have really come in handy, actually. But the bottom line with that is that no, I got into cons pretty late. So I didn't hear or know about glomping or yowie paddles or what what have you. And just it's just, you know, I guess, I guess nutty behavior conventions for a period of time between different fandoms or different
00:21:38
Speaker
God, I wish I was you, John. I wish I didn't know about it. Well, we're starting to get back into it because what's become really popular in the last year and is still kind of there are the, like, pay to step on people signs, which are completely illegal. They are illegal because it can be considered sexual solicitation. That's why free hug signs were banned from conventions way back when. Stop. Hold up. Hold up. I'm sorry.
00:22:07
Speaker
You can't have a sign that says free hugs at a con? Well, so technically con rules can allow it, but certain states consider that like technical harassment in some way. And so it's always a gray line for what can be brought. But specifically with the like pay to step on or pay to slap signs, because it's fetish, it can like people have been actually like had charges pressed against them for it.
00:22:33
Speaker
And it's also the vendors and the artists that have booths that paid to be there to sell their artwork and to interact with a clientele and then an attendee that only paid the entrance fee is now coming in and without any basis or any paperwork for why they're there conducting a form of business. So it can also land the convention in hot water on legal grounds. Okay.
00:22:59
Speaker
Yeah, there's always something where it's like someone has to be the one to kill the fun and be like, guys, we got to cut this out. And that is a trip. It's kind of weird. You see it come up all the time where it's like, OK, here's another thing we have to tell you guys to stop doing because obviously it's going to get someone in trouble somewhere. We don't want that. Please don't take away from us.
00:23:20
Speaker
I mean, I can understand some of that at least because on some level you are talking about either family-oriented convention situations or you're talking about mostly very young people or people of a certain age. So, or, you know, not adults. You know, you've got a lot of teenagers.
00:23:36
Speaker
you know, high school students and young college students and stuff like that. So it's, you know, I get it in a way. But I guess it just depends on the convention. I mean, I heard about Step On Me signs at Mott Street, at Anime Mott Street, here in Houston. And that's the only place I've ever heard of.
00:23:51
Speaker
They've become very popular recently, which is kind of a surprise because there used to be kind of a market for that like adult conventions way before. Because there was someone who- I get to take cons. Yeah, they did someone who was dressed as like Broly from Dragon Ball at one of the Dragon Ball cons. And she's the one that technically like started all of that. But she wasn't taking money for it. She would just step on you for a picture because it's Broly. And then people were like, we can make money off of this. And that's where it became a problem.
00:24:20
Speaker
And so and they didn't they don't know that it's like the origin. It was just someone doing it for fun at a place where you know, there's not kids. And so now we have it being brought to like basic family cons where it shouldn't be happening. I'm not one to like ever police how someone's dressed or anything. So that part doesn't matter. But it's the actual exhibition of like
00:24:43
Speaker
I was at a convention a while back and it was kind of surprising because it was a family oriented con. It advertised itself as bring the family, kids are free, blah, blah, blah. And in the main hall where we all were, there were booths that were dealing specifically with not safe for work posters and stuff like that. And so they weren't incredibly explicit, but they're not for kids. Right.
00:25:10
Speaker
So i was like daddy what's that hey don't look at that or convention where they were so crowded. And couldn't find rooms to put certain panels in that a couple of plus eight eighteen plus panels were being conducted like in the hallway. Where people could just walk by.
00:25:27
Speaker
Oh, God. Hear what was and hear what was going on. Yeah, I've raised my eyebrows a couple of times that, you know, some stuff. Well, you met me in my even cosplay from one piece where I was kind of kind of explicit a little bit, but I was still making sure that I was covered where it mattered. But there were people who were still complaining about me even. So it's like, we got to, I don't know, it's hard to make sure that people are following the rules explicitly, but not over like, policing them.
00:25:56
Speaker
And a lot of that is like I've been to boost like soccer icon where it's a 24 hour convention where you can buy hentai on the floor but you're strictly ID'd at every step they will not let you touch those boxes without being ID'd and that's the way to do it if you're openly like putting out these weird mouse pads that have
00:26:12
Speaker
like 14 year old characters on them, which I've seen at a lot of like, like booths. That's really gross. I hate it. I don't think it should be like, in the episode you listened to, I talked about being overexposed to this type of sexual content through things like Tumblr. And it's really damaging. I would never ever want to inflict that onto someone else. And I don't think it's making like, a soft generation to say that it's like,
00:26:36
Speaker
There are certain things that shouldn't be at family friendly positions. I'm never going to talk to someone about cosplay or whatever like that. Where would you want? I don't care. Most cons will have a dress code if it applies. If you're within the dress code, that's great. But when it's coming to explicit material like art or media, like children shouldn't be playing dramatic murder, but look at me.
00:26:57
Speaker
I sure did that. And it's just hard to know how to do that. But that's what a lot of the fandom culture can be in person when it comes to toxicity. And of course, there's always small clicks when you're playing model for a day. Clicks form everywhere. That sucks. It's in every fandom, unfortunately. Oh, sure. That's in every facet of life, yeah.
00:27:18
Speaker
That's kind of what we focus on though, is like, you don't need to do this. This can be existing without having to participate in that type of toxic fandom, even if where you're at isn't a great fan of the beginning. I'm a victim of fandom. Oh my goodness. I had a very opposite experience, which I think I talked about a little bit in that episode, but I didn't really go to cons until more recently.
00:27:48
Speaker
like you, John, I just was around the people that did, so I was aware of what was going on. And a lot of that toxicity is in the way that people just want to critique other people's participation in fandom and critique their fanfiction or their fan art or say, well, this character would never wear that or this character wouldn't act that way. So you're damaging the fandom because you're damaging the character.
00:28:17
Speaker
when it's just that individuals interpretation. That's pretty crazy. Yeah.
00:28:22
Speaker
I was in Vancouver, and I went to Vancouver with my folks on vacation one time and never been to Canada. And Anime Revolution was going on that weekend, and I didn't know, so I went up and asked for a guest pass. I said, I'm a voice actor, can I get a pass? And they said, sure. And they gave me a pass to the con. I walked around, I went to some panels, and I did a little roving reporter thing with my phone and interviewed people, and what's your cosplay, and who's your character? And it was really fun. We had a good time.
00:28:51
Speaker
and interviewed some voice actors who were there, and interviewed about the participants of this panel who were about diversity and cosplay, specifically. Everybody can cosplay. You don't have to be a certain color to cosplay a certain gender to cosplay a certain character. It was all about that. It was all about just, if anybody gives you a hard time about it, just blow it off. Say, I'm sorry, I hope you feel better soon. I can do whatever I want. It's, you know, why would, you know,
00:29:19
Speaker
It's interesting why anybody would bother with that, you know, because most critique about stuff that is really of no consequence to you comes from just a need to, I just need to tell you what for, for my own sake, not, you know, that's either about insecurity or it's about some kind of, I don't know what it's about really, but I think it stems from that.
00:29:38
Speaker
Right. And the beauty of having an online fandom and an online community is the ability to hit the block button whenever you want, and that you can curate exactly who you want to see and who you want to interact with. And if someone wants to put that in harmful message or unwanted critique out from wherever that ranges on the spectrum, you can just say, all right, see ya.
00:30:02
Speaker
One of the reasons I'm off Twitter, I mean, I like, I like, I'm still on Facebook. Well, I got off Twitter mostly because I heard that they were saying, hey, let's specifically let people back on who want to talk about COVID disinformation. I was like, nope, I'm not here. So that was the straw for me. But but what
00:30:20
Speaker
Facebook, for instance, says, here, welcome to Facebook. Choose your friends. Start from here and choose who your friends are. Twitter is the exact opposite. Hi, dude. Here you go, buddy. You're in the ocean. Here's your whack-a-mole. Get rid of whoever you don't like because they're all going to come at you at once. It's the exact opposite of that. Especially when the feed doesn't show you your friends. It shows you strangers and you're liking someone's Twitter. I don't know these people. Why am I seeing them talk to me?
00:30:45
Speaker
It's by design, you know, I think it's by design that way, but that's, Twitter's become kind of a mess, frankly. I think it's just, you know, I don't want to do each his own, but you know, if you want to be on it, be on it, it's fine. I'm not going to fuss at you, but I got off of it for those reasons. I just said, you know what?
00:30:58
Speaker
This is just getting a little weird. And what's crazy too about people who fuss at each other on the internet, whether it's Facebook arguments or Twitter especially, is that even if the majority of people having an argument think to themselves, okay, well maybe they have a point. They're not going to say so. They're going to keep that to themselves. Because you're having an argument in front of the world.
00:31:23
Speaker
Everybody's watching you have an argument, so it becomes much more important for people to say, I can't lose this argument. You're both based, and that's it. That becomes...
00:31:34
Speaker
you know, that becomes the goal instead of what are we talking about? How do I really feel about it? Or let's have a discussion. There's been almost no discussions I've ever had. I did a TikTok about it because there was a fan came up to me at My Hero Con in Irving a few months in January, and she had made, this woman is amazing, she had made plush dolls of, hold on, I'll go get it, hang on. Yes, I would love to see.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yes, I did. Okay, so this is gentle criminal, the plush doll that that a friend of mine, this new friend of mine who's a fan, she made plush dolls homemade of all these different my hero characters and passed them out and she keeps going to conventions and passing them out to the to the actors, right? Was that right? So I said, All right, so I'm I'm having a on Sunday, I'm sitting around not doing anything. And it's a little lull in the thing that things are about to close down. And I say, You know what,
00:32:32
Speaker
I go up to David Matranga, who plays Todoroki, of course, who has the hot and cold sides of his body, and I said, okay, I'll tell you what, just do this, do this. And the TikTok is, gentle sips some tea, it's too cold, and then he goes up to Todoroki and has him put his hands on it like a Goldilocks thing, make it hot, make it cold, whatever, so it's, oh, thank you very much.
00:32:52
Speaker
So people went nuts when we put it on TikTok because he's got, I didn't know he had like 98,000 followers on TikTok. And I had like 40 or 105. So people just started like digging it. So I said, okay, fine. So every time I'm at a convention and I know somebody who's in the show, I go up to them and we make a video. So we put it on TikTok and I never call myself the character because I don't think you're supposed to do that. But
00:33:18
Speaker
But that's been fun. And one of the ones that I made was not with anybody else. I just did it at home. He's watching. He's he's on his laptop. And he sees on Twitter that somebody somebody named like Jack Tard McGee or whatever says, I hate that T criminal. He sucks. He's so boring. And so I start to type this really very polite message.
00:33:38
Speaker
And then the next day I'm watching the news. He's, he's watching the news and breaking news. Twitter crashed last night because somebody made a polite response to a comment and the servers melted down. What do I do now? I love that. That's the most in-character thing he could do, honestly. Absolutely. I think so. Yeah. That's what he's doing in the most recent chapter is on Twitter. Right.
00:34:05
Speaker
But I've gotten into Twitter arguments because I've talked about media I don't really like before, which was my bad. Sorry. Sorry for having an opinion. They didn't want to hear me anymore. And they just started like trying to be mean to me as a person. I was like, all right, my bad.
00:34:21
Speaker
I guess I was misinformed. I'm sorry. Blah, blah, blah. And then people kept going because they wouldn't read the thread. No one reads the thread if they can see someone getting dunked on. So they kept going and I would just keep sending them the tweet where I'm like, my bad. Sorry. And
00:34:37
Speaker
It's exhausting because it's like no one wants to see your point. They want to see the argument. Yeah, it's not a real place. It's real addictive too because people know that everybody on the internet can see whatever dunk you're doing and it's about a dunkathon. It's all about, look how I dropped the mic better than somebody else.
00:34:58
Speaker
Compared to Facebook or Instagram, your face is on those ones. It's harder for someone to want to be out there and vocal about it, but on Twitter, no one cares. You can just make a new account like it's nothing and then keep going over and over again. I wish all the internet trolls would just go to an improv class. Just get their ass kicked. At least make a new joke.
Character Deep Dive: Gentle Criminal
00:35:19
Speaker
Just go to an improv class so they can be embarrassed and be like, maybe I shouldn't do this anymore. It's not working for me. I tell people, I've talked about this at panels and I talk about it a lot when I go on podcasts, et cetera, because people have talked about Gentle. Gentle's my favorite character that I've played. I like him a lot. I think he's very well written. I think the show is very well written. It's very three-dimensional. All the characters have backstories that are fascinating and interesting.
00:35:45
Speaker
relatable and they're not just these cookie cutter characters they're not you know and he's so interesting because a lot of people when they saw which so how far along are the two of you on my hero the anime or the manga
00:36:01
Speaker
I'm completely caught up to the anime. I am, I want to say maybe a dozen chapters behind on the manga. You can see my Bakugou boxed figure. I'm a season behind. So I finished the fifth season with everybody with general criminal in it. Yeah, I'm there. I haven't seen the most recent. Yeah, so I was in season four and then and it was right after overhaul and it was an area which was really spooky and, you know,
00:36:30
Speaker
Intense and everything like that and then all of a sudden you get these goofy characters that are on YouTube and what the hell's going on here? And so people I get it when people say I don't like this. I don't like this arc This is kind of filler because it came right after some really intense stuff and right before some really intense stuff with Hawks and Endeavor and everything and what I try to tell people is to give it some time and look deeper because there are messages all over that arc that are just cooking behind the scenes about social media and identity and and
00:36:59
Speaker
people who have dreams that they gave up on. I mean, it's pretty serious. And it's very relatable stuff. I mean, gentle was somebody who just wanted to, you know, make a difference and be a hero and he kept failing. How many people do you know in life, you know, myself included anybody else who have tried things and they didn't go the way they wanted to. And you wish sometimes that you were somebody else and you're envious of somebody else's success or whatever.
00:37:23
Speaker
And you just kind of down on yourself. And he was very down on himself. And then everybody abandoned him and he was so dejected and so down on who he was and had such little faith in himself that he decided, if I'm going to make a mark on the world, I have to be someone else.
00:37:43
Speaker
Can't make a mark on the world as me. I'm just a failure. That's how much of a failure he thinks he is. That's deep, right? That's not filler material. That's pretty, that's not frivolous. That's pretty intense. And I'm going to be somebody else on YouTube and social media. Ding, ding. I mean, how many people do that? How many people put forth a certain image of themselves? So we're so wired to do that.
00:38:06
Speaker
And a lot of people tell me sometimes too, I get this impression from a lot of people, whether I meet them at conventions or I know them personally, whether they're, no matter what age they are, if they're adults I know on Facebook, if they didn't grow up with social media, if they're people who are growing up with social media, I want to do this with my life. I want to do that with my life. I'm not a success unless I go viral. I'm nobody unless I get this many clicks, this many likes, and I call BS on that totally.
00:38:35
Speaker
Your internet popularity, great. If you get it, that's awesome. They can compliment each other, but your internet popularity and your self-worth and your talent are two completely separate things. So I try to tell people, do not, do not think I can't be as good as somebody else unless everybody on the internet thinks I am.
00:38:57
Speaker
That's absurd. So that's a big message, I think, that I take from his arc, that I take from the writing of that. I think there's lots of deeper messages written in there. John, what was the quote that you said right before we started recording?
00:39:13
Speaker
Lesser people have done greater things. Lesser people have done greater things, yeah. Yeah, I think that fits in very well to that. Or people that are not seen, that are not known, have done greater things that you can't even imagine. They may not be on the internet, but they're out there.
00:39:30
Speaker
Exactly. And they may not be even attempting to try to put it out into the universe to be seen by other people. They might just do it for themselves and that alone should be celebrated. And I want to kick anyone's ass that's saying that General Criminal is filler because I love him very much and I love that one. There was filler in that arc and it was not that part. Exactly.
00:39:55
Speaker
Sure. Do you care if I give away a spoiler? No, go for it. Okay. If anybody's watching or listening and they don't want to hear a spoiler, just- Skip ahead 45 seconds. Yeah, right. In the manga coming up, they come back, Gentle and the Brava come back, and he gets to redeem himself and finally become a hero. While he's becoming the hero, the moment he's becoming a hero, people are trying to film it. Students at UA are trying to film it. He's like, go away, be safe. I don't need this filmed.
00:40:23
Speaker
go take care of yourselves. So he's learning as much as anybody ever could learn. I don't need to be seen. I know what I'm doing. I'm actually gonna cry. I knew he was coming back the second we saw Lebron for a minute. I'm like, he's coming. I sense it. Here he is. So good.
00:40:44
Speaker
would also I know he's your favorite, but I also wanted it would be remiss to not mention that my introduction to your voice that I now have to look up his freaking name. Oh, I thought you're about to say mihawk. No, it wasn't mihawk. Oh, it's Roa from Fullmetal Alchemist. Oh, yeah. Because Fullmetal Alchemist is my favorite story period. I think it's one of the greatest stories ever written. And whenever
00:41:12
Speaker
Parks mentioned that she got to meet you in person and she's like, yeah, he's mihawk and he's gentle. And I'm like, that's incredible. And then I looked at your behind the voices like, ah, he's rolling.
00:41:25
Speaker
You know, it's, you know, it's really funny. I was at a panel one time and I was, this shows you how much I know that fans are into. I was talking about, Oh, hi, I'm John Grimeone. And you may know, if you're a general criminal, a couple people are like, yeah, okay, cool. I'm in food wars. I'm the chef and say, Oh yeah, cool. Cool. And I'm a, I'm a general criminal and I'm, and I'm me hawking one piece. Oh yeah. Awesome. And what else have you done? Oh, let's say I've done this, this, this, and then I finally got to, Oh, and I had a few lines in panting and stocking. Everybody went berserk.
00:41:52
Speaker
So I had three lines in Panty and Stocking. They were good lines. Named Coctomus Prime, who was the Transformers knockoff episode, right? So I put it in my demo reel the next week. I went home and I re-edited my demo reel to put him in it so that people go, cool, he was in Panty and Stocking. Because apparently that's a thing. You never know what people are into. We still love Panty and Stocking. We're cosplaying it soon. Well, that's awesome. And it's going to get us season two, isn't it?
00:42:22
Speaker
Yes, it is actually. I completely forgot, because that was announced while I was away on vacation. Yeah, season two. I feel like I was met in black, mind wiped. I forgot that was happening. Yeah. Oh my God, I'm excited again. Yeah. I got to introduce. That's what intercosting is done first. Yes. I got to introduce my partner to Panty and Stocking, because I watched it when I was much younger, and whatever it was coming out, and he had never seen it before. I was like, well, you're just going to sit down and watch the show with me, because it's a trip.
00:42:52
Speaker
And he was glued to the TV. He was so into it. And I did not expect it because he likes a little more grittier shows and very, very much like it has to be colorful or it has to be kind of intense. And
00:43:08
Speaker
Fanny and Stocking is just a dumpster fire in the best way possible and he was all about it. So I can't wait to see all the other new fans and they better bring you back for season two.
00:43:28
Speaker
I mean, it's not a real universe. You can bring it back. You're here. You can still voice someone else. Yeah, sure. They rebuilt him from scratch. So that's fine. I wrote it. I'm the author. I'm the one that wrote that into play. I'll do it. I can't wait.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's gonna be fun. But so your IMDB goes back to like, I think your earliest is like in the 70s. When did you actually start voice acting?
Voice Acting Insights and Inspirations
00:43:53
Speaker
Yeah, that that just means the show was done in the 70s. Yeah. So I started doing anime for the first time in the late 90s, like 1998. I auditioned for ATV films, because ATV films was, which is now Sentai, of course, a
00:44:08
Speaker
were lucky in the mid to late 90s if they were doing two shows working on two titles a month. And anime was so such a baby that there were maybe two cons a month and they were in a warehouse or a high school gymnasium or the lobby of a movie theater or something like that.
00:44:26
Speaker
That's where that's the state of the industry back then. And so they started getting more and more licensing for more and more shows. And they only had a very small pool of reliable voice talent that they could call on and say, get over here and record this. So they needed more actors. So they started to put out one ads in the local paper, literally. I mean, there's nothing like that would happen anymore today, but some friends, a lot of Houston theater actors.
00:44:54
Speaker
heard about it and said, Oh, this is it. This is a voice gig. Cool. It's a voiceover job. Great side gig. I'll come do it. Oh, we get to do cartoons. Oh fun. You know, cause we all grew up watching speed racer and whatnot. And we said, okay, this'll be fun. So I said, perfect. That's right up my alley. I like doing accents. I like doing crazy voices. Uh, bring it on. So we all went to audition. We all sat in a, every, every couple of months, I think they did this until they had a big enough actor pool that they were happy with.
00:45:21
Speaker
And I think over time they kept bringing in different people here and there and a couple of people make like cameo appearances or whatever, but didn't do something after that. But I was part of their just actor pool from the late 90s on. And the more shows you did, the more directors you met, the more roles you got.
00:45:37
Speaker
And everything was out on VHS and it was either sub or dub. Take your pick. You don't get both on a VHS tape, four episodes per tape that you have to rewind and fast forward to watch. So lame. And then DVDs came out and that changed the whole game. And now it's all streaming for under 10 bucks. You can see whatever you want. So it's crazy. But what also happened over that period of time is that when we used to go in and record, you never, you weren't doing simul dubs. There were no such things as simul dubs.
00:46:08
Speaker
The whole show was out there already on tape in Japan in Japanese to make the dub. We knew the whole show. So if you got cast in a role, the director knew every episode you were in, how many lines you had for the whole show brought you in for a chunk of time to do just that. And you jumped all around until your stuff was done. But for efficiency of time, and you probably, I'm sure none of this is news to you, but, um, the,
00:46:33
Speaker
You'd get a call, hey, it's not an audition. You just say, the director wants to cast you as this role. Okay. You show up. You don't know the show. You don't know the context. You don't know the character. You see it for the first time. You come up with a voice and you go. It's like an improv exercise almost matching lip flaps, reading the, reading the translation, et cetera. And that's what ends up on the DVD.
00:46:53
Speaker
So if you wanted to really bring your game as an actor, you had to know something about the show beforehand to really give you some, or you need to have really good improv skills and really be able to just jump in, you know, with both feet having done, having just read the line for the first time. And that's why I always tell people it's so important when they say, what do I need to do to become a voice actor? You need to be an actor.
00:47:19
Speaker
You need to have acting experience or a lot of practice with improv, a lot of practice with school plays, with whatever you do to get the creative juices going. That's my answer always. That's the answer that a lot of voice actors give, because we're always asked that all the time.
00:47:35
Speaker
because you are actors first. Sure. Yeah. The voice is the icing on the cake. Yeah. I have been researching a lot because I want to try my hand at doing just some fun voice acting eventually. And I've been looking into and hearing from all the greats and people who've been a part of like Looney Tunes and things that you just
00:47:58
Speaker
you always hear them as like ubiquitous to childhood and then you peek behind the curtain of what the career actually is and how much goes into it. And it's so much that people do not realize and they don't have the respect for it. I'm so glad to get to chat with you and other voice actors to be able to talk about that more.
00:48:20
Speaker
I know that Kevin Conroy, who's got our soul, love that man, whenever he went in to audition for Batman, which was his first voice acting role, because he was also Juilliard trained, also a stage actor, and whatever the show director was giving him notes, like, this is what the character's like, and he lost his parents, and now he's, you know, vengeance, whatever. And Conroy's response was, oh, so he's Hamlet.
00:48:51
Speaker
which is such a profound but also like blatant way to boil it down. And I think that kind of just encapsulates everything with voice acting that like, yeah, you have to know how to pull everything and where you get that information that that inspiration from. And I just thought that was so fascinating. That is fascinating.
00:49:13
Speaker
That's really interesting. He's Hamlet. Oh gosh. Okay. Batman is Hamlet. It's going to make you think now. You're going to sit back. Yeah. Yeah. You know. Okay. All right. All right. I see it. All right. Rest in peace. Yeah. Yeah. Big time. Big time. Big time. That's crazy.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah, I personally love voice acting. I mostly listen to sub just because it helps me process a little bit better. And also most of the enemies I watch are caught up. There are certain ones that I swear by my hero is definitely one of them because I everyone on board is some of my favorite voice actors are people I talk to on the regular now because wow, this is my job. Um, so it's always cool to level and be on that type of like,
00:49:56
Speaker
On that level where I can talk industry with people who I meet at conventions, who I admire so much because I've been watching work since I was a kid. It's very neat. I feel like I'm rambling, sorry. It's just cool, especially because I come at it from an artistic costuming side where costuming is live performance for me.
00:50:16
Speaker
And so I have to be these characters. When kids approach me, I have to be able to on the fly act like that. And so it's cool when I actually get to meet the voice actors for who I'm dressed as and they acknowledge me and they see who I am. They see what I'm doing for the character they voice because in the same way we're playing the same character, even if it's for me for a few hours, it's very refreshing because it's like in some way we are bringing this character to life and
00:50:42
Speaker
I am very touched by it because most of my work is from anime and games, which are heavily voiced and not just face to face actors. Like most some of the people I know who do like MCU focused stuff or DC like live action costuming, they don't have to worry about that so much, I guess when it comes to what they're portraying.
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The trouble with subs for me is that anime is so, depending on the show, is so active and so jam-packed and so dense sometimes that to catch the subtitles and to watch it is a little tricky for me. Like, same thing with action films, like real live action films that are cut real fast and everything. Certain episodes are tough to follow for me. But I've seen some subs that I think are cool and I love the language, you know, I love the way it sounds.
00:51:32
Speaker
So it's always interesting. And you know, if it weren't for subs, we wouldn't have dubs. I wouldn't have a job. So I can't hate on subs ever. So when people, when people talk about what do you like more, I'm like, well, I like dubs more because I get to do them, but without subs, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be employed.
00:51:47
Speaker
And that field didn't have this career. We need both these things to counterbalance each other. Nev is a soul dub watcher. So she's seen pretty much everything. You haven't gotten to the second mihawk part though. There's more. I haven't. There's more past. I am forward. Mihawk shows up. Mihawk just shows up every 18 months and goes, hi, I'm a badass. Goodbye. Yeah. He's like, that's it.
00:52:08
Speaker
That was we were asked I was doing a youtube live youtube stream panel with some of the of the one piece cast for galaxy con live and
00:52:20
Speaker
The question came in, it was hilarious. The question came in, what kind of, what do you do to get into character when you're in the booth? Like what tick do you use? And calling Clincoln Beard who plays Luffy said, well, I just, before everyone, I go, la, la, la, like the voice. So it just helps me get into this character. It was pretty funny. Then Lucy Christian goes, oh, I'm just, I just get really mad at Luffy. I just go, Luffy. And somebody else just goes, chopper for chopper. And she just tries to get her voice in that place. So John, what do you do? I say, hi, I haven't recorded this guy in 18 months. What does he sound like again?
00:52:49
Speaker
That's the last thing that I forgot who this is. Oh my goodness. At least you're getting Rick again. Well, no, look, I don't forget it anymore because he's on my demo reel and I keep listening to him all the time now and people ask me about his voice. And the funny story about the voice is that four kids did a dub and I think the guy made him a Frenchman or something like that. And I'd say, he's not French, come on. I don't want to do him. I do a French accent, but I don't want to do him as a French guy. And I didn't want to do like a Nico Montoya or something like that. And I said, what does he sound like?
00:53:18
Speaker
and I had just seen a Harry Potter movie and I thought about Snape.
00:53:23
Speaker
Because he was, Mihawk was so just cold and sly and everything. And I thought of Alan, I can't do an Alan Rickman, but I thought of that Alan Rickman kind of voice, you know, like that. And then I just took away the British and kept it sly in my nose like a snake. And that that's Mihawk. He talks like that. You know, he's very sly above it all and blah, blah, blah. He's very, he's too confident in himself in a way. Right. So and the director said, OK, let's do it. You know, all right. That's his voice now.
00:53:50
Speaker
I can't believe you just said, I can't do an Alan Rickman and then proceeded to do an Alan Rickman. Like a perfect Alan Rickman. No, it wasn't a perfect Alan Rickman. Pretty damn good to do it on the fly. Pretty damn good on the fly. But then you got it right when we reveal his big goth castle he lives in by himself. Yeah, there you go. Oh, you know what's really weird? Somebody pointed this out.
00:54:13
Speaker
my two biggest characters that I'm known for the most and recognized for the most over the 25 years that I've been recording anime voice. Because typically I've got a lower voice, lower register, bass baritone. So I don't play the lead teenager. I either play some wacky characters, but mostly I'm the dad or the cop or the cop's dad or the dad who calls the cop on the other dad. Or I'm the guy who owns the evil corporation that's gonna take over the world. I've played 37 of those guys.
00:54:42
Speaker
who have to shapeshift and be killed three times by the end of the series. So I don't play these lead roles, but I play all this eclectic mix of other types of characters over the years. But the two that I'm known for both have mustaches. They both have young red-haired sidekicks who have emotionally based powers. Perona, my beloved.
00:55:08
Speaker
I love her so much. She's my baby girl. She's awesome. And they're the same. Yeah, you're right. They're like the same character just adapted. What is going on in the background thing? So like put Gremmian in the role of the guy who has the sidekick with the powers who has pink hair, whatever. I don't know. I just thought that was crazy. Crazy coincidental. Yeah. You just, you found your niche. There you go. You need someone to be a man with a sidekick who has a little bit of an attitude. Here you go.
00:55:35
Speaker
There you go. And Mihawk's funny. He just shows up and then leaves. He's like Shanks. I know Shanks' VA comes out like rolling his cash every time he's got to come every three years to record something. That's right. That's right. And what's crazy too is that I was in the movie Stampede, but I had two lines. I said, oh, I'm going to be in Stampede. Cool. I was on a beach. I was like, okay, I've done my job. Let's go. That's all I said. I've done my part. Perona, let's go. That's it.
00:56:04
Speaker
That's what he does. It took me five minutes. It took me less than five minutes to record my lines and I was gone. I was like, OK, fine, I'm in a movie. That's like the bit from 90s Sailor Moon where Tuxedo Mask is like, all right, my work here is done. And Sailor Moon says, but you didn't do anything.
00:56:22
Speaker
No, I didn't. Goodbye. Finally, we're getting to a point in the manga. Spoiler, Neb. Mihawk is back in it where he's actually gonna matter. He's a huge play for what's going on. We don't even have an answer to it yet. He's just with some people that also matter. It was actually one of the people we were talking to at Anime Town together before this conversation came up, if you recall. I'm trying not to use names of characters, so I don't spoil this for her too much.
00:56:48
Speaker
It's okay. It's okay that I tell you? Yeah, it's okay. Okay, well, so have you seen anything about Cross Guild with Buggy, Mihawk, and Crocodile forming together?
00:56:58
Speaker
I think I've seen some things and didn't have the full context. That's what's happening in the manga, Jess Hands. So we're getting a renaissance of Crocodile and Mihawk. So that's going to be very fun when that gets animated. And I'm so excited. I just want anything. Because you know what this means now, Parks. It means we have to cosplay a femme version of Mihawk and Crocodile. I was already doing that. I was trying to figure out because Gavin also wants to be one of the two, but he won't tell me which.
00:57:24
Speaker
But I'm gonna cosplay Perona, so he has to cosplay Mihawk anyway, which means I have to make two Mihawks, one for me and one for him.
00:57:30
Speaker
So, so, Parks, you were the tallest person at Anime Town, Utah, if I remember you correctly. Yes. I was like, that woman is very, very tall. OK, that's OK. I remember you. Yeah, I approached you as you even got with my big afro. And I was not wearing high like I was wearing heels, but they were like two boots. So I wasn't even like up as much as I normally am. But yeah, I'm a very tall woman. So I think I have the frame to do mihawk with my big sword.
00:57:59
Speaker
that I have to scale to my height, so it's going to be ridiculously big. Yeah, I tell people it's great that voice acting is fun for a lot of reasons, but the best reason is that you don't have to feel good, you don't have to look good, you can be on no sleep, as long as you sound right.
00:58:17
Speaker
I went to a session yesterday morning and I hadn't slept well and I didn't feel like doing it, but I mean, as I just, you turn it on, you just get the voice. Your voice can, you're pretty resilient. You can, your voice can for an hour is no problem, but you can't, you don't have to look like the characters. You don't have to, it's nothing like film acting or stage acting in the least. And it's really weird because some people say, well, you're only doing the voice. You're only layering in the voice.
00:58:40
Speaker
But the voice, I'm sorry, lends a lot. If you get a lame voice actor to do a role that you're really into and they just don't know what they're doing or they just bring... I've heard some dubs that I think are like, oh man, really?
00:58:52
Speaker
And I just thought, wow, I'm not into this. I'm not into this moment. You get the right actor in there who puts the right fire underneath it, lights it up. When you watch a YouTube video or you listen to a podcast, if you're not on a good microphone, your ears get tired after a while. If the audio is not kicking, it really does matter. And another fascinating thing that I love about voice acting anime
00:59:18
Speaker
is that some people said, well, look, you're not on a stage. You're all alone in a booth. You're not bouncing off another actor. There's not an audience there. You're not getting into a scene. You're totally getting into a scene. If you look at that screen, everything about that story is rocking. It's fully animated, for the most part, unless you do one for, I'll tell you something in a minute, but unless it's fully animated, there's sound effects in music, the whole world is created for you. And it's like virtual reality.
00:59:47
Speaker
lock into that and get into the moment and look at your lines and all that, of course. A lot of it is filled in for you and you're getting into a whole world. It works. It just works in a very different way than if you're on stage. That's what Anthony Bowling was telling us whenever he works with Ian Sinclair or gives vocal direction that Ian will just stay in the Brooks voice and acknowledge everything that Anthony was saying back like, okay, maybe he's
01:00:14
Speaker
He's in this moment, he's in this kind of emotion, and he's just like, oh yeah, in this little Brooks voice that I can't do. He's too good at it. It can't be replicated, I feel like. It can't. He's too good at it. But I just heard you do the classic triple gasp. It's the triple gasp that I call it, because every anime people either go,
01:00:35
Speaker
for reaction or they go. So it's. And the other one, the other day I heard a quintuple. It was really impressive. So many in some anime.
01:00:46
Speaker
the 70s that I was recording the other day. It's back. It's back from the 70s. This was a retro anime that I was doing. I can't tell you which one it is yet. But this one character just went. Because they were about to see a fight take place. It was da da da da da. I was like, wow, you have done the quintuple gasp. That's, that's, you get an award. I have to ask, I don't listen back to my own episodes of this podcast. Because if I hear my voice too long, it makes me feel like I have like,
01:01:16
Speaker
the word I don't know I just I hear it the voices um do you ever have issue or feel like embarrassed when you're having to record or play back anything that you do personally or do you feel like you've owned your voice for so long and it's like oh I've owned it for so long and I and I and I've heard it for so long and I hear it every day and when I'm working out issues by myself I talk to myself out loud I you know I do all that as a creative person I think is and it helps me be a better actor to talk things out loud to to kind of
01:01:45
Speaker
But no, I haven't had a big issue with it. I used to because I used to have an accent. I used to have a little bit of a weird, funky Texas accent when I was a teenager and I didn't realize it. You're preaching to the choir. Yeah. And I didn't notice it. And I heard my voice back was like, that's me. Oh, gross. And I had to work on this. And then I was so in high school, if I got into a Shakespeare play, I thought you have to sound like this. If you're just blah, blah, blah.
01:02:12
Speaker
And really lame, super lame. I look back on some of the stuff that I did and I said, okay, I don't want to think about it. But, you know, you grow. And then later on, when I went to Juilliard, it was really funny, we had this we had a lot of very intimidating faculty at Juilliard. Let's just leave it at that. You were scared of the faculty when you were in the mid 80s. Today, it's very awesome. It's very kumbaya. We went back for a reunion of the drama department when they had their 50 year celebration. And a lot of us met
01:02:41
Speaker
The new faculty and the students love each other and it's very cool. So we were jealous. We said, I could have used that when I was an insecure 19 or 20 year old in New York City being thrown to the wolves. But I went into this vocal class and the teacher had this bow tie. He's a stuffy, thin, tall dude. He's all business and he's just given us a hard time. And so he had us say these certain phrases like these fortune cookie phrases or these quotes from Shakespeare or what have you.
01:03:11
Speaker
And I get up there and I did one in my voice where I think I have to sound like that. And he goes, well, you can hear the briefcase. Yeah. He said, you're just, you just think you got to turn on this little businessman sounding thing. Use your real voice. Where's your authentic voice? They, and they tear you down. They make you get to, they put you in situations deliberately where you know you'll fall on your face.
01:03:37
Speaker
because they have to unravel anything you've been locked into for so long. So it's tough love, but some of it was a little too tough, frankly. But it works. I mean, it works eventually. It got us out of our shell a little bit. And like I said, I didn't laugh. Go ahead.
01:03:55
Speaker
Oh, I was just gonna ask, what would, do you feel like that was affected at all being from Texas and then coming to Juilliard of all places in New York, that that was a little like, kind of led into that? When I sat down with him and he critiqued me in a show, he said, you're from Texas. Yeah. We're men are men, right? He goes, bullshit. This is, you know, let me help you.
01:04:16
Speaker
You don't have to sound a certain way, you just have to sound like yourself. That was the message, you know, to have to sound like yourself. I used to DJ at a college radio station and I listened to a cassette of it the other day and I sound so... It's Marmee radio voice dude that I don't like it, you know, I like...
01:04:32
Speaker
I just like, it's hard to sometimes for me to think, do I sound natural? Do I sound like I have a natural voice? Because when people hear me talk just regularly, like I'm talking right now, they say, you've got a radio voice. You've got this kind of almost trained sounding sort of radioish voice. And so it's difficult for me. What's the toughest thing for me to do is whenever you audition for a commercial these days,
01:04:58
Speaker
This used to be different in the eighties. There was a huge push to have people do celebrity voices and I can mimic really well and I can do celebrity voices pretty well. And I do impressions and this and that. And I grew up as a kid, impressing people in class and being in a class clown, doing impressions, you know, or imitating the faculty at your school or what have you. So I'm a good mimic. And I don't know where was I going with that? When, um, when I,
01:05:26
Speaker
learned to kind of tamper that down, it was tough because what people want now on commercials is don't sound like an announcer. That's always on every single audition I get. No announcers. Don't sound like you're announcing something. But you've got to read a script that no one in their right mind would ever say these words the way they're written in a natural voice. You wouldn't go to your neighbor and say,
01:05:49
Speaker
When it comes to duh duh duh duh blah blah, so you automatically turn on in your brain or I do, it's really hard to shut that off. Yeah. And it's almost like it's becoming a whole subculture of, I feel like commercial voice acting where it's almost the, uh, the joke of like the Siri voice from 10, 15 years ago, that now it's like, when you're thinking of whatever and that's like, it's the weirdly seductive mom voice. It's like, why is this on my TV?
01:06:17
Speaker
And here's the other thing too that I don't get is that there's a voice that people do or there's a style that people use whenever they're announcing like whoever's doing all the, all the, you know, tonight on HBO, blah, blah, blah. There's this breath at the end of it that nobody does ever.
01:06:35
Speaker
He doesn't go to the store and go, I've got to buy some food. He just, you know, they don't do that. But it's this kind of coolness that you've got to put on TV. I once did a commercial, the dumbest, the dumbest direction I ever got. The weirdest direction I ever got. I was doing a commercial for Sarah Brightman, who is a soprano. She was in Phantom of the Opera and then she became a very famous soprano and toured the country and made albums and all this other stuff. So she put an album out and there was a 1-800 commercial that I got cast in.
01:07:06
Speaker
without an audition to record for getting her new album. Call 1-800, blah, blah, get her new album, right? So in the studio session here in town in Houston, on this can and the headphones, I've got the music of the commercial going so I can get into it. And then over here is the director who's piping in from New York. And she's directing me in this thing.
01:07:28
Speaker
And she was pretty nice, but she stops me at one point. I'm going, Sarah Brightman is incomparable. Soprano voice has captivated millions worldwide, announces her new album. And she goes, okay,
Modern Auditions and Commercial Voice Work
01:07:39
Speaker
John, that's great. You're gonna have to forgive me because I speak in metaphors. This is the direction she tried to give me verbatim. She said, what I'm thinking when I'm listening to this music is what kind of wine would I be drinking listening to this music?
01:07:55
Speaker
I'm thinking like a nice full bodied Merlot. And I kind of went, I almost said, do you want a turning leaf Merlot or Barringer? I almost kind of messed with her. But I looked at the engineer and I was like, what the fuck? He's like, I don't know. So I go, um, let me, let me see if I know what you're asking me. Do you want me just to sound more, um, smooth, smooth?
01:08:18
Speaker
I'm like, okay, so like I've got a glass of wine and I'm in a bathtub and I'm looking at the sunset. Oh, that's great. Give me sunset. Give me sunset. All she wanted me to do was like have my eyelids half closed and so like one of those stone guys. So if you listen to the commercial, it's Sarah Brideman is incomparable as a brand new voice. Every line is the same. Everything is the same. You know, kind of stoned thing. And it's weird because you audition for something.
01:08:46
Speaker
And when you audition, you often don't meet the director. When you audition for a play, you meet the director. You're in person. You're personable. You're talking to them. You're saying, hey, let's make this work. What do you want me to do? Help me dial it in. Right? Right. I'm a great mimic. And so the jobs I get often are we're trying to match a voice. Try to sound like this guy, but make it your own, but try to have this vibe and this feel. I can usually imitate it. If it's something I can imitate, I usually get the job or I get very close to getting the job.
01:09:16
Speaker
So what, what you have to do these days, even for anime auditions is you're sending in an audition without the director there. The director isn't telling you, Hey, can you give it a little more? Uh, can you go Clint Eastwood meets this? Can you do this with that flavor? I would love that, but that doesn't happen very often. So you give your idea of what you think the character is and then you hear the voice and it sounds like that. And you're kind of like, I could have done that all day long. I could have played this role. What's wrong with me? I didn't know.
01:09:42
Speaker
if you would have told me or if I could have heard it. Yeah. So that's, that's a weird, that's a weird kind of sometimes annoying part of the whole audition process. And, uh, is that you wish you could meet the director and say, dial it, dial it in with me. You know, I'm a canvas. Tell me what to tell me what you want to hear. Yeah.
01:10:01
Speaker
Because at your core, you're an actor and that's what you do. You need that chemistry and how do you bring to life the script in front of you and people don't grasp that accurately. I also don't mind when I get a line reading. I tell directors, give me a line reading. If you tell me how you want it to sound, you do it and I'll mimic you. I like that. I don't mind that at all. Some actors don't like that because if directors do nothing but that, then you don't feel like you can be creative. Right.
01:10:29
Speaker
So, but if, but I don't mind. Cause cause one of the best things I ever, I edited this video a long time ago about a coral conductor and he was trying to get certain sound out of a choir and he went, no, I want this. He said, be a professional, say, if that's the sound you want, here it is. Oh, you want this? I got that too. No one can afford you. You'll get hired because you can do exactly what they want. That's part of your job. Right. The director for a reason. So tell me what you want to hear. And it's my job to deliver it.
01:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, don't just say I want to be in a bathtub drinking wine, like, okay, then go do that, I guess. It's a great story. It gave me a great story. And she's a very unique director. And she said, Forgive me right off the bat. I speak in metaphors. All right. Give me a metaphor. That's a metaphor. But that is quite a metaphor. Guidance wise, I don't know. I think we should bring back jingles instead of narration for any commercial, we should just bring back a good jingle.
01:11:27
Speaker
Yes, we should. I've heard there's a mod pizza one where it's like about the wings and it's the worst commercial I've ever heard in my life. I was working on a costume and I don't have a TV in my office. So I was watching like YouTube on my phone and just watching some people play games while I was sewing stuff. And I swear to God every five minutes the stupid mod pizza ad with this girl's voice and she's like she's talking like this kind of like an old Navy commercial like I hate you, please.
01:11:53
Speaker
I hate that cadence. I hate the old navy cadence. I don't know what it is about new commercials now. I don't know if it's because old navy has been doing the same thing for the last 20 years.
01:12:06
Speaker
of just the same a woman's up. Like, I don't know. I hate her. I hate the upbeat like kind of yelling at you like excited kind of PTA mom. Yeah. There's another voice that young got young kids do too. Like I heard a Taco Bell commercial or something like that where this guy was talking about tacos and he goes, I really want a taco. It's got crisp lettuce. And he sounded like this. No one sounds like that.
01:12:31
Speaker
Or people who do news radio. News radio drives me crazy. Yeah. Because you have to have this kind of official news sounding reporting voice. And nobody talks like that in real life. They don't. But they've got to kind of be a little bit more official. And some of them take it weird and overboard. It's very strange. Some people on NPR, I can't listen to, they just drive me crazy.
01:12:56
Speaker
Oh, I agree. I just wish people would be more goofy when it comes to commercial books. Have a little bit of personality in some sense. Right, right. I'm the same with audiobooks. Have you ever been in Oklahoma during Christmas time? Me? Yes, mentioned jingles, so now it's my sworn duty to mention this jingle. Christmas time, no.
01:13:19
Speaker
Okay, there is a goofy ass jingle that I want to say is like 70 years old now, maybe older, for jewelers that is so prominent that it is synonymous with all other Christmas carols here to the point that in my school, we sang it like during Christmas time, whenever we would sing jingle bells and whatnot. We're like, all right, we're gonna sing the BC Clark theme. And that was our next Christmas carol.
01:13:47
Speaker
And I just need things to be that level of goofy in camp again. Okay. We have a shanko here that has, we don't have a jingle for it, but it's been going on for so long that everyone in Utah knows this commercial because they're our friends on like 54th South and State Street. I just, we just get a hook.
01:14:07
Speaker
Let the man speak to you because the same person who's been doing that commercial is the business owner who's been doing this forever. I don't even think it's local anymore. I think that broke my brain when I realized Shanko was not a local company because they have the dude actually record his own commercials. Right? And that's what makes them good. I don't want to shop at somewhere where I'm being canned a really bad line from someone who doesn't really care about this product.
01:14:30
Speaker
Same, it's for real same idea because I started no for real I started and then it's like I'm reading I read a lot of horror novels. And when I have someone who's talking to me so flat and they don't know how to talk about like the emotion of a psychologically damaging scene and they're just talking to me like this, I turn that off. I use a library app to read all my audio books and I return them immediately if I hate the voice.
01:14:55
Speaker
I try to go for the dramatization versions now just so I can like have some sustenance to my book. Yeah. Yeah. I used to listen to audiobooks on cassette. Oh, same with my mom. When I was in college, I would drive to and from Austin because I went to UT and I would want something to listen to and you could only get audio books on cassette.
01:15:16
Speaker
So if you had an Unma bridge novel, you had a huge box with all these cassettes in it. And one of them would rip or something, you know, it's terrible. It's awful. So CDs save the world and streaming is even better. CDs weren't that much better though, because so far. And then you had to get the next one out. Cause that's what, that was my childhood is road trips and mom's minivan. And she's like, let's listen to this audio book and they have to swap out the CD. If you're missing, you're one of the CDs is slightly damaged. The whole story is ruined forever.
01:15:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. I'm all too familiar because my mom would do the same thing because audiobooks keep her awake while she drives.
Challenges of Audiobook Recording
01:15:54
Speaker
No.
01:15:55
Speaker
John, it's very interesting that you said people tell you that you have a radio voice because I think you have more of an audio book voice. I think you have more of that like nice timber to listen to consistently and not like the commercial aspect of it. Well, good. I appreciate that. I'm going to file that away. I like that. I haven't done any audio books and frankly, you know, I think audio book recording is really tough. My hat is off to anybody who regularly records audio books because that's a ton of work.
01:16:26
Speaker
You, your voice will get tired after a while. You got to take a break after a while and, you know, anime.
01:16:33
Speaker
Anime, typically you're screaming more or you're doing voices that are not like you. And it depends on what you're doing. But the guy who records the Harry Potter books, the actor Jim Dale has an iPod with all of the different voices on it. So he has to keep who am I now? Who am I listening to? And when you record an audio book these days, I think depending on the studio that you work for, don't, don't quote me, but I think most of the time you have to record it all in your own studio. Then you've got to edit out all the crap.
01:16:59
Speaker
You've got to put it together, but you get paid for how long it takes to listen to it. You get paid by the hour, and if it takes eight hours to listen to it, it doesn't matter how long it took to record it.
01:17:10
Speaker
That's what I've heard on some, at least with some companies that hire you to record audio books. I have two friends who I'm very close with who do audio book recording. One of them just said they're not doing it anymore. They're completely done with audio books. They like the work, but it's not worth the effort because it's just so much and it's for that exact reason.
01:17:31
Speaker
Yes, he used to do all of his own processing for it. They hire him, they pay him for that recording, but it's like per recording, he doesn't get anything else from that. So he stopped doing that completely. And he's focusing solely on game animation. And he's done stuff for Marvel. So whatever he's good, he doesn't need to do that. One of my friends is in a breakout position right now. So she's strictly just doing some like, audio books, that way she can pay the bills while she meets directors. And so
01:17:57
Speaker
Nice, nice. It's it works for her, but she doesn't love doing it. That's not her goal. Her goal is mostly into animation. So she's like, slowly trickling in. But it's really hard because yeah, you have to do all of that post processing yourself, you have to do every take. If you mess up, it's your fault, you have to do it. I've heard some people who use like the dog clickers that way if they start a line, they can click and that way they can just go
01:18:20
Speaker
Cut you know that click and try interesting because whenever I'm recording and I screw up I go like that into the mic I do my own click so it shows up as a spike on your on your Waveform that you can run to edit to when you or two if you're doing second take you gotta do it a third time three clicks blah blah blah, you know
01:18:38
Speaker
Yeah, I do that myself like that. But when you're doing like a 24 hour audio book, it's such a hassle because you can come back to it like the next day, but you don't know if your voice will be slightly different because you were just recording for 10 hours the day before. It's too much work for what it should be. And it's hard. It's hard to do audio books. So I respect my friend for being like, I'm not doing this anymore. I have tremendous respect for anybody who records audio books.
01:19:06
Speaker
I have no idea. I think I'm sure there are some studios that are more high powered that will, if they hire the right actors and actresses, they will do the editing for you and they will, you know, you're more of the town. But you still got a lot of work to do. I mean, if I record a corporate video for Chevron or for Exxon or for, you know, oil and gas companies here, I've done that before. And you're reading a thick, you know, stuff, stuff you don't understand any of because it's all about Internet training for stuff. It's pretty dry material. And, you know, you got to
01:19:37
Speaker
sound all corporate. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I tell people when they do voiceover reels, put a reel together, have your start with your natural sounding voice a couple of times, a couple of different flavors of your natural sounding voice. And then when it's maybe a little young with your eyebrows raised, sounds like that. Or maybe a little more groovy. But then give a corporate read after that.
01:19:56
Speaker
Like, how would you read a corporate video? How would you sound like this and make it sound a little different flavor? Then start putting some impressions in there, some accents, give some range. Some of the jobs I've gotten, a couple of them have been only because someone listened to my demo reel and they said, well, if he can do that kind of range, then he can do what we're looking for. Yeah. Wow. And that gives you the chance to use your guidance to give them what they want rather than just like. Yeah, right. Exactly. Demo reels are important. I should probably make one.
01:20:26
Speaker
They're good to have. I haven't done a new one in a while. I have an anime demo reel with Gentle and Mihawk and Food Wars and some old VHS stuff just for flavor and full metal panic and Pantene Stalking and Uduwari Ramono and all that stuff that I was the lead in Uduwari. Uduwari is such a crazy show. We called it Ray Ramon or Underwater.
01:20:49
Speaker
And we did it at Sentai when it was ADV and then Crunchyroll just picked up like the second season or something because it came back and it got really weird. And so my character who died at the end of the first season or second season of the original one
01:21:05
Speaker
became a disembodied dude or something, or a god. And then a new actor took over and he split into two different people who were being played by two new actors. And the directors were going, what is going on here? So we had to figure out who needed to play what. And then I got to go back and record his disembodied god voice for the other. It's getting nuts. So do you have, in terms of direction, a favorite anime that you've worked on? In terms of how I was directed?
01:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, or in terms of just like the overall vocal direction and the interactions like with that kind of that direction. Well, you know, all the directors that I've I've never really met a bad director in anime. I mean, they've all brought something that was either they've got to know what they're doing. I mean, they've got to know the show left and right. They've got to be interested in it. They've got to be or they can't do a good job. You know, so
01:22:02
Speaker
I work a lot with John Swayze, who's awesome, of course, and Kyle Jones, who's fantastic at Sentai. Shannon Reed is at Sentai. He's terrific. Everybody's really, really skilled. At Crunchyroll, there's a ton of people who I've been working with, and I worked with him at Funimation. Colleen directed me in Black Butler and in My Hero. I didn't realize she was the director for Black Butler.
01:22:23
Speaker
She directed at least some, if I remember correctly, at least some of the stuff that I worked with when I did Black Butler. And I was British in both shows. So I was like, go figure. She only cast me as British dudes. But she's amazing. And they all really, really have a great idea of what they want.
01:22:40
Speaker
Um, and they're, and, but they're all different. They're all different, you know, different levels of, and so, uh, and Mike McFarland and, and just got, there's so many of them, uh, Caitlin, Caitlin glass, uh, directed me recently again. Cause we're in, that's the cool thing about doing conventions too, is that I ran into Caitlin at a convention and we did a Tik TOK video and this and that. And then she cast me in something. I was like, okay, I don't know if that would have happened if it wouldn't run into each other. Cause you're out of sight, out of mind. You don't see this people for a while. And then when you see them again, they go, Oh yeah, you're yeah. Come on. Hey, why don't you come do the show? So.
01:23:10
Speaker
One director, my favorite stuff, or the stuff that I remember the most, was when I recorded with Stephen Foster at ADV. He's an old director at ADV, and he was really just wacky and fun, and he would rewrite stuff on the fly, and it wouldn't have anything to do with the original script. He was responsible for ghost stories.
01:23:33
Speaker
He cast me in ghost story. That's another one. If you say you're ever in ghost stories. Wait, you were in ghost stories? I was a creepy cab driver. That was you? Cab driver. Yeah, I was a cab driver in ghost stories. I think that was the most recent episode I watched because I put that on in the background of my work. I wish I could have done more in that.
01:23:51
Speaker
You know we had a lot of fun at adv and and steven foster directed me in something called chromarti high school. Which was a crazy pants wacky little comedy about these high school kids who think they're tough and think they're cool and they're just goofy stupid. It's a hilarious show and i played completely against type he cast me as the school bully. Never been a bully and i could never be but.
01:24:17
Speaker
he was this bald big dude and he talked like this and it kind of ruined my voice a little bit because he talked like that the whole time. His name was Yutaka Takanuchi and he was really really tough but he had this secret that he kept from everybody which was that he got car sick.
01:24:32
Speaker
He got motion sickness really easily. And so everybody, he thought everybody's going to think I'm a total pussy. If they know that I'm a, if I get carsick, I'm not going to be a tough guy. I'm not going to be a bad-ass. So he was on a bus. So like, okay, let me back up. There's an episode where he's on a bus getting carsick when you're introduced to him and he talks about his problem. And then later in an episode there, they got to get into a cab and he's got to sit bitch in the middle. He's getting all carsick cause they got to go fight the other rival gang. So he's getting all carsick and they're going all over the place.
01:25:02
Speaker
So it was a really really funny show. So we were laughing a lot while we were recording it. Steven laughed a lot. I laughed a lot. We had to keep taking breaks because we were laughing so hard. And eventually we had to reschedule a couple of my sessions because we couldn't get through the recording because we were laughing so hard.
01:25:17
Speaker
Oh my gosh. And at one point, I'm, this is true. I tell this story too at panels. It's kind of funny. So he's, he's like got a side view in this one episode. He's like on the bus and you're hearing his voice go, Oh no, that curvy road is coming up. I think I'm going to be sick. And then his face in the anime goes like that. So I didn't know what it was. So I went.
01:25:37
Speaker
You just instinctively make a noise because you hear a, you see a flap and you go, whoops, I got to do something. So I even started laughing so hard. I thought he was going to die. And he, and he said, I said, dude, stop laughing. I can't get through this. I can't be serious. So I tried to make myself.
01:25:51
Speaker
Gross. I tried to gross myself out. So I would stop laughing. So I said, okay, dead puppies. Okay. Ugly nuns. Okay, whatever. And he said, what? And I said, what? He said, say that, say that as the character. I said, what are you talking about? He said, say that as the character. Say dead puppies and ugly nuns. I said, really? Okay. How's that going to make him less carsick? Don't worry. Just do it. If you watch the third episode of Cromartie high school,
01:26:17
Speaker
You will see his face scrunch up like that when he's about to get sick on the bus, and you will hear sped up really, really quick, that box, no guns, like that. It's on there. It's on the episode. I'm going to go watch it now. It is there. It is there. If you look up Carmarti High School, I don't know where you can find it. I don't know who streams it. I can make it happen. So it's like episode three. Then there's another episode where we're in the cab, and he's getting sick, and they hand him a map, and it's a world map.
01:26:46
Speaker
Instead, cause they're so stupid and like, okay, we have to go down to the Arabian peninsula. And then we have to, could not get through that line to save my life. We had to resk it took 20 minutes to try to do it. He said, come back tomorrow, come back next week. We'll reschedule you. Cause we couldn't, we couldn't quit laughing. So those are my favorite kinds of sessions when you're just having a blast, um, in the studio, those were the fun memories. Uh, so, but all the directors are very, uh,
01:27:14
Speaker
very highly knowledgeable of the material, which I don't, I'm not jealous of him because you got to learn a lot. If you, if you're learning an anime plot of a whole show, that's a lot of work. Yeah. You read the whole script. You've read, you know, that's a lot of work. That's a test. With this carsick bully, that is such a fun character. So I can absolutely see.
01:27:41
Speaker
Yeah, I have to watch the whole show. It's a great show. It's a really super fun, funny, funny show. I'll find it. I love vintage like, I love vintage anime is mostly one of my favorites is Hajime no Ippo. I watch it dubbed because I think it's so fucking funny. I love when an old anime is embellished. I feel like it's a lot more noticeable in old anime too, because you have that old sense of humor a little bit. Yeah.
01:28:03
Speaker
And I love it. It's my favorite thing. So I love going back to like, read it like one of my favorite favorite enemies of all time, which I think you were in but not as like a named character was Sergeant Frog. I love Sergeant Frog. I did I did an episode or one or two episodes of Sergeant Frog once at Funimation a long time ago, but I can't remember who I was to be honest with you. There's so many voices in it. That's another thing that's really weird about anime. And here's an embarrassing story for you. But I tell this when it panels to
01:28:33
Speaker
about vampire hunter d so i recorded i didn't know anything about vampire hunter d whatsoever when they told me john me what got a job for you we want you to record in this vampire i said okay i'll come in i came in on a tuesday you know tuesday afternoon or something like that la di da walking in the studio it's a i say oh cool look at this retro ass animation this is this is badass so i'm the i'm i'm the guy and so
01:28:57
Speaker
Often, most of the time, when you talk to a voice actor, if you say, what was it like recording this show back in 19, they won't remember. Most of us will not remember a session. We'll remember a little of it, but when we see it again,
01:29:08
Speaker
We'll go, Oh yeah. Okay. I remember that. I remember this show, but unless there's something distinct about it, you forget about it. Cause over 25 years, especially you'd go in not knowing it. You didn't know it before and you didn't watch it afterwards. So you forget about it. It just fades from your memory. So I forgot about vampire hunter D when we recorded it, the original 1985 movie, they redubbed it for surround sound to put out on a blue ray for like the 30th or 40th anniversary of it. Right.
01:29:38
Speaker
So I go, okay, great. It took me an hour and a half and I was done because he's got like seven lines because mostly he's just standing there being all stoic and a vampire hunting badass. And so then, you know, a couple of months later, a friend of mine calls me and she's fangirling out. Oh my God, John, you recorded Vampire Hunter G. That's so cool. That's one of my favorite shows. I said Vampire Hunter what?
01:29:57
Speaker
She went, John, Vampire Hunter D, you were in Vampire Hunter D, right? And I went, no, I don't think so. What's it called again? She goes, John, you, you're on the Blu-ray. It's just coming out from Sentai. You just got nominated for like a lead in a movie, anime movie, and the cast got nominated for best ensemble in an anime. I said, I'm not following you. She goes, you were D.
01:30:24
Speaker
And I went, Oh, so I had, I looked it up, I looked it up on YouTube. And then as soon as I saw it, I went, Oh yeah, that. And she was just like, do you seriously at all? Do you know what the hell you just said to me that you didn't remember that you did this iconic? I was like, I didn't know that it was iconic. She goes, dude, this is the sequel. I was like, okay, fine. Sorry. Sorry. You know, it's a job. It's a voiceover job.
01:30:51
Speaker
We're not always necessarily knowledgeable about the history, the fandom, and sometimes that's really better because if I know how popular and incredible something is, I'm going to feel more pressured and not as loose when I go into the studio to be an actor and interpret it, right? Yeah.
01:31:07
Speaker
When I got when I got gentle, I was nervous. I was like, I've got to bring my A game on my hero academia, folks, because this is like the show. And when I auditioned for it, I didn't hear back for about a week and I was pacing the floor going, am I did I get the role? Did I get it? I was waiting for the post the high school musical cast list. Right. I mean, I was that into it. That's never happened before. And so in a way, it's cool and fun. And in a way, it's like,
01:31:35
Speaker
It adds tension. You want to do a great job. I do the best work when I'm not thinking this is a major deal and people are going to talk about it. Don't go read the Reddit forums. Don't go read the comments and this and that about how well they did or not because you're going to read some people who are naysayers and who don't, this and that. So keeping away from that is a good thing. Yeah. Do you feel like that
01:32:05
Speaker
pressure, for lack of a better word, that you want to do great in that old high school, musical feeling. Do you feel like that's what's propelled you for such a long career and such a prolific career? Because you're not staying comfortable with it necessarily? You know, because I haven't had that experience very often when it comes to anime. And I think part of that is because when I started recording anime, it was not a big deal. It was lower on people's radar. It was not a big mainstream thing that it is now.
01:32:34
Speaker
And the experience you have going to the studio, meeting the director, recording the anime has felt the same since lots of things have changed. We used to have printed scripts on paper, Xeroxed copies of the script and everything.
01:32:51
Speaker
And so a lot of things have changed technically, but the experience of recording it just alone in a booth is pretty low key, just with the director on the other side of the glass. It's not this big. There's no audience watching you. There's no, you don't feel what's out there in the fandom, the way that people will react to it when you're doing the job. The job itself is a very low key environment.
01:33:14
Speaker
And that has stayed the same no matter how popular anime has become. So I've not felt that pressure. I felt pressure only when I was auditioning and waiting to hear about my hero because I had heard it was such a big show and a big deal and everybody was into it. And all the actors played roles in it that I knew and I wanted to be a part of it. So I sent an email to Colleen. I said, Colleen, I haven't been to Funimation in a while. I've been out of sight, out of mind. But I just want to throw my name in the hat, let you know that if there's a character you think I might be a good fit for, let me know.
01:33:44
Speaker
Let's audition." So then she sent me a side of Gentle. And then when I saw Gentle, I said, he's got to be British. He's got tea. He's got a mustache. Come on.
01:33:53
Speaker
And she said, well, they're all Japanese students. He wouldn't be British. And I want you to go British, but I want you to also audition in an American accent. I just thought, please, British, please. And we decided that he would be, at least his persona is, right, is a British guy, because that's what he invented for himself. But he didn't maybe start that way. So his backstory, he does not have an accent.
01:34:18
Speaker
His backstory when he's a student is just my young American voice. But when he's the persona, then he is. But it was a big deal. That's the one show I heard about that I was a little nerve wracked about. It's because when you got in, it was already so established. You got on on season four. Yeah, and it's the one show that I've binged all the way through. I binged it up until I recorded it. I got caught up.
01:34:48
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah, I started watching this. OK, let's see what this whole fuss is about. And I love that. Your performance was amazing. Thank you. And it really helps. It does help to know a show, definitely. It helps you more. When you go in cold, it's still an interesting exercise. And you can still kind of use your tricks of the trade to make it work. And with the director's help, you get where you need to go with it. But it does help to know a show, definitely.
01:35:16
Speaker
And I think a key part of that is that you said it's a good exercise, not necessarily like a full absorbance, that you might be in two different mindsets with that. Because I think it really shows that you went in just whole hog, I'm gonna learn everything about this before you went in to do gentle because the relationship between him and Deku in season four is so
Pandemic Impacts on Voice Acting
01:35:41
Speaker
intricate and necessary to both characters and you wouldn't know that if you went in blind and that wouldn't be like a palpable undertone if you hadn't have seen that or had the introduction together to the other characters. What was really interesting is that we had six episodes to record with Gentle and La Brava in season four and after the third episode
01:36:04
Speaker
The lockdown first happened. So everything got locked down completely because we knew that COVID was a danger. It was a big emergency right between those three episodes. So the first three I recorded, we recorded at Crunchyroll at Funimation at the time, the next three and every anime you've ever heard for a year and a half after that, everybody was recording from home in our closets.
01:36:30
Speaker
So Funimation really, really stepped up and said, we've got to send, we can't have anybody in the studio. We've got to send actors who don't have setups. We've got to send them the necessary material to have a setup in their house. We got to test everybody's microphone and every voice you hear in every show for like a year and a half was that. And so La Brava, Megan Shipman, who's incredible, she had to record the big crying scene and everything like that in her closet, you know,
01:36:56
Speaker
Everything, the whole battle with Deku, that's in my closet. So you're doing it like we're doing this podcast. It's as removed as this experience right now that we're having, even though we're talking to each other and seeing each other. I would see an anime on a screen. I would see a script like this. They rewrite the script. I'd see it changed on my phone. We had this whole thing happening in live in real time. If there was a rewrite or something, then I would record my lines in Premiere and then I'd send the files back to them.
01:37:27
Speaker
so that their engineer could make it work. And the engineers really made everything sound like it was all of one show. They did a great job. That's wild. I think that's also very inspiring to people that want to get into and break into an industry that is pretty heavily dominated by well-known names and well-known voices, that you can do it in your closet. You can do it in your bedroom. Yeah. Well, not as much anymore.
01:37:56
Speaker
It's been such a task for the engineers to have to get that to happen. They're on tight schedules. And so they had to do what they had to do. But I think these days you're much more encouraged to either go into the studio in person, which is a better experience to be honest. Um, and then you, uh, or you can go to a studio that they know and work with very well. That's local. So maybe you don't have to drive up to Fort Worth where you are because driving up to Fort Worth and back is that's eight hours total. So that's getting a hotel room that's driving up to Dallas, getting a hotel room. Usually if I'm in the morning and then.
01:38:26
Speaker
and then recording, then driving back home. Yeah. That's a task, but yeah. Dallas sucks. I have to be there in two weeks. That'll be fun. Yeah, we're going to ACON in Dallas, the first weekend of June, and we're paneling too, so that'll be fun. Awesome. Okay, cool. ACON, all right. Right on. It's a good one, but yeah, being in Dallas kind of sucks, so I get the eight hour, and then I have to get a hotel because you don't want to be there for that long.
01:38:54
Speaker
So my late father-in-law, he worked in Dallas for, I want to say 15 years or something like that, but lived in Oklahoma City and had an apartment in Dallas for the weekdays. And sometimes if there was something with the boys going on, he would drive up to Oklahoma City, which is about three and a half hours.
01:39:16
Speaker
and stay at his house and then wake up at three thirty four o'clock in the morning and drive all the way back down to Dallas and work a full eight hour day in the office. And so driving to Dallas and everything, I have so much respect for people. I once had I once had to record anime and the only day I could do it was when I also had a rehearsal in Houston that night for a show that I was doing. So I got up and drove to Dallas, recorded some anime, drove back to Houston, had a rehearsal.
01:39:45
Speaker
That was one day. That sucked. Yeah. I don't want to get on anybody's bad side who likes Dallas, but there's a joke from all of Houston, Dallas rivalry. And so the joke is what's the best thing to come out of Dallas? 45 South.
01:40:02
Speaker
I don't mind being there, but I'm from a very dry state. So being in Texas and dealing with the humidity is disgusting. The first time I was there, we had summer storms so I could like taste the water in the air. I felt sticky. I don't like being in Texas if I could avoid it. Texas is hot. Houston is like living in a mouth in the summer and summer. It's only mid May and I'm already having like, Oh God, this is terrible.
01:40:31
Speaker
Yeah, we just had a bunch of storms and it's the same up here. Utah gets hot, but at least it's dry so I can go find cover. I can be in the shade and feel much better. I don't feel it still even when I'm trying to protect myself. Yeah. I love Utah weather. I'm blessed by it. Hold on just one second. No, you're totally good. Your hair looks cute with the little bangs.
01:41:01
Speaker
Thanks. I flipped it 20 times. I'm going to cut it all off soon. Oh, it looks good. Thank you. So anyway, what else have we not covered? Oh my God. I feel like so many things. So many. And yet we've covered so many things. We have a part two of this one day or something. Wow. You're always welcome to. We extend the offer to every guest. If you liked hanging out with us and you ever want to do it again, shoot us a message. You can come on anytime. Priority to whoever. It's been very fun.
01:41:30
Speaker
Yeah, I love chatting with you. I feel like this is so casual compared to other actors that we've spoken to. It's so nice. The conversation is just naturally going. It feels like we haven't even been recording. We have been. I've been watching it, but it's just been. We better be. We better make sure I got my quick time going here. Yeah, no, we're all good. I've been checking my swipe and like looking over to my other monitor to make sure that
01:42:00
Speaker
I wear glasses so I can't flip between screens discreetly because you just see whatever it pops up. You know what you're up to. I can never hide anything. You can see my ring light. It's terrible. But putting in contacts is worse. Yeah.
01:42:17
Speaker
I've gotten used to it at this point. Oh my gosh. I'm too used to putting in contacts, but it's okay. I have fun with it. So I can tell you a more PG-13 slightly, slightly more so embarrassing and Booth story, if that's- Yes. Would love to hear it. Absolutely. Okay. So this is a fun one. This is what I tell it, like plus 18 panels or whatever, but so the show, you ever heard of the show Gants? Yes.
01:42:42
Speaker
Okay. I was in Gantz. Gantz was so hardcore and so violent. And there was like, there were sex scenes in Gantz, right? There were adult scenes in Gantz. So I, uh, went to, uh, I was leaving ADV and I was walking through the parking lot after having just recorded something else and I'd heard about Gantz and I knew we were all going to be recording it. And so I ran into an old friend of mine and we'll call her Debbie. Okay. So Debbie and I went to high school together.
01:43:11
Speaker
And we were in the drama department in high school together. And I said, hey, Deb, what's going on? She goes, oh, hey, what's up? I said, are you going to, what are you doing out there? Are you going to be in GANS? And she goes, yeah.
01:43:20
Speaker
And I said, what's going on? She goes, I have a scene in Gantz. I said, oh, do you have to do like a hardcore adult scene? She goes, yeah. But they were really cool about it. They asked me if I was OK with it. I said, fine. They explained it to me. We talked about it. They're awesome. It's going to be fine. I said, OK, well, good luck. That's cool. Go you and all that. So I said, see you later. So the next week later, I have to go in and record my scene as a secondary character in Gantz.
01:43:49
Speaker
And little do I know that while my character is in this one room, that's when her character is in the hallway having this adult, very adult interaction. Oh no. In the show. So, um, the director has no idea that I have spoken to Debbie.
01:44:09
Speaker
the engineer does not know this and they have no idea that we've had this conversation and they have no idea that I know what's happening, what's going on. So here's what happens. They go, okay, John, it's like eight 30 at night. Okay. The director's really tired. He's like, okay, John, we're going to queue up your next line. Hang on a second. And I hear different pieces of audio as the engineer is finding it. And I hear, and then I hear this, I hear very intense adult sounds. Right. And I immediately go, is that Debbie?
01:44:39
Speaker
So the director goes, yes, it is. How do you know that that is? Oh, no, no, no, no. We went to high school to go. No, no, no, no, no. And so became this big. You never admit you know what a woman's.
01:44:59
Speaker
Of course not. So that was like, oh my God. Explain your way out of that one real quick. No, you couldn't. You can't explain your way out of that. No, they caught you. They caught you. They caught it. So I was like, oh boy. Anyway, that was fun. That's a fun booth embarrassing. That's my most embarrassing booth story probably. Are you married, John? I am not. Okay. I was about to say how to explain that to your partner.
01:45:27
Speaker
Well, you know, I might have been married at the time. I was married for a while and I think I was married at the time that I recorded Gantz. So yeah, that might, you know, but that's, you know, that didn't, that didn't come up. That topic did not come up in conversation. Thank God for that. Yeah, right. Maybe it did. Maybe, hey, you'll never believe what happened today, honey. I was in the booth. So yeah, that was, that was funny.
01:45:52
Speaker
Is Gantz technically the most adult one you've shot where it's been like, they had to warn you in advance? Because it sounds like they did not warn you for dramatic murder. Tell me about dramatic murder. So let's see. Yeah, probably. That's been the most intent.
Anime Themes and Industry Trends
01:46:09
Speaker
That's Gantz is actually one that I almost, you know, do I have to say this line? Do I have to say this? I actually asked the director if I had to say it because there are some lines that are just horrible. Yeah.
01:46:19
Speaker
Me and Greg Ayers played these two teenage hoodlums that beat up homeless people with bats. It was like awful violence and we were terrible people. And by the time my character dies in the last episode, I had to scream things at people that were just so awful. It was a show that was almost kind of designed to be controversial and ugly and gross to kind of
01:46:45
Speaker
so that people that, you know, like at parties would go, man, if you see this anime, check it out. Yeah. It's totally gory hardcore. I mean, it's not the worst thing you can see. I mean, I've heard that there's stuff that's worse, but, you know, and sometimes I, yeah, go ahead.
01:47:01
Speaker
It's like the Eli Roth film of anime. Yeah, right. Yeah, there are some titles out there I've heard of that are pretty outrageous, that have pretty crazy plots. Like Italian. Higurashi, When They Cry is also one that's very, very brutal. I haven't seen that one yet. It's also based off of a game like Dramatical Murder. And it's horror, and it's basically all gore. And they made, I want to say the show came out in early 2000s, like 2002.
01:47:30
Speaker
ish. And then they did a remake of it recently, that I started watching and did not finish and I need to finish it. Because I need to see if they go to the same level because it's one of those also that you're like, this was made purely so someone can have bragging rights that they sat through it. Yeah, yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah. I've indulged I like psychological horror and I've tend to like gory animese. And I like when they're handled well, and they're not just like someone's weird.
01:47:59
Speaker
thing that they brag about where it's actually well handled. Another is one of my favorites for that reason because I like when it's theatrical. That's why I like the Death Note manga too is because it's like, wow, this is cool. Not just like that's happening over there. I don't know. Like Castlevania, the recent Castlevania animated series is really good with the way it handles the gore. I like it. I mostly watch anime and animation.
01:48:29
Speaker
What's really fascinating to watch is how the animation has changed from the first episode of One Piece to the current episode of One Piece. I started watching One Piece a year ago, so I've been actually watching it happen. Oh, you've got time on your hands. Yeah, that has just been the most dramatic shift in quality. You know, it was just so old school, and I mean, I think they started it in 1998? 99 is when it started animating, and 97 was when the manga started. Yeah, I started recording it in 2007.
01:48:59
Speaker
Mihawk didn't make an appearance until 2007. That was interesting because it was a lot to cover. Well, it's because four kids had it first, right? Right. Oh, yeah. You're right. You're right.
01:49:09
Speaker
I was at a panel at Connecticon in Connecticut with Mike McFarland, who directs a lot of it, and Kyle Phillips, who directs and writes in it. So they knew every answer to every question, and I knew nothing because I was just Mihawk who shows up every year and a half. So I felt like, the panel, don't ask me any questions, please. I'm a dumbass. And somebody asked, what's the one piece?
01:49:33
Speaker
What do you think the one piece is? Mike McFarland said, I think it's a red button inside this thing. They open up a little thing and they find a red button and Luffy says, what's this? And he hits it and the whole show starts all over again. And everybody goes.
01:49:46
Speaker
Oh my goodness. No, it won't be that. It'll be something cool. It'll be something cool. I don't know what it will be. Oda has already said it's not the friendship we made along the way, so. What? It's not the friendship we made along the way. Oda has said that because he hates that theory. Oh yeah, right. It's a physical thing. It's been established. He hates the theory that it's just like the adventure is the...
01:50:09
Speaker
No, the journey is not destination. No. Anthony had some good theories, whatever we talked to him about, what the one piece is and what the goal overall is. I liked his take on it a lot. He liked my takes. A lot of people ask me, they say, what do you think is going to happen ultimately with Mihawk versus Zorro?
01:50:32
Speaker
And I like to think that what would happen, this is my wish, it's not even a theory, it's just what I hope happens, is that Zoro at one point during a rematch with him will get the better of him for some reason and have the ability to kill Mihawk, but instead he doesn't, he just marks him the same way and they call it a draw.
01:50:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. Because there's a level of respect between them, especially after like, yeah, yeah, it's their relationship with one another changed between Baratie and then two time skip. And so it's like he had this, he always had a respect for mihawk from the beginning and then coming to like, be on his knees in front of him asking him to be better. It's like the respect and dynamic between them changed. They were like roommates for two years.
01:51:20
Speaker
They're not going to hold the same feeling to one another. So I definitely think that's what's also going to happen between them when we get that resolve.
01:51:27
Speaker
I love, it's another reason I love Mihawk is because he gets to stay so calm while everybody else is around him is yelling, either at him or fighting him or Perona's, being the actress who plays Perona is incredible. And she's so intense. And Perona is so childishly intense and just all, so much energy. And yet at the same time, she really knows what she's doing. So she's got a childish quality, but at the other moment, look out, right? Like don't mess with her.
01:51:55
Speaker
you know what you're getting into. And she's just, man, he's like, I don't care. I get to go to the studio and go, man, it's fun. I love when she fires off. And all he can say is all right. All right. Yeah, you're still making it. He's doing this. He's like plugging his ears. So there's like, um,
01:52:17
Speaker
I love the fact that at least one of the good things that could come out of a lockdown was that there's a one-piece renaissance because so many people started watching it because it's something you can watch forever and you can binge all day and all night and for months. And a lot of people did that. And so I think that's one of the biggest reasons. That's a big theory that why people are digging on One Piece right now where they weren't before. We got a lot of new fans.
01:52:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's her and I. I, for adamant, for years, I was not gonna watch One Piece. I had a bad experience with fans early on. And I just was very turned off to the whole thing and Parks got into it because of her partner and then she basically sat me down and was like, look, you're gonna watch this show and you're going to love it. And she was correct because now I'm almost done with Whole Cake and I started watching it in September.
01:53:08
Speaker
Yeah, she's catching up. Again, that's so interesting that you say that one of the reasons you don't want to watch a show is because there were unfortunate fandom interactions. Yeah. That's so crazy. That's why I was quiet about liking Dragon Ball. That's so crazy that the fandom can have that kind of impact. I did the same for Parks with My Hero because she had a very negative fandom interaction with some My Hero fans, and then I was like, nope, you're going to watch it because you're going to love it, and she did.
01:53:37
Speaker
So there's something about these experiences with fandoms that are legit enough in your mind that they turn you off to the actual show. They're not separate. They're kind of locked together. Yeah, a little bit. Because you can see how these communities interact. And I can use Dragon Ball as an example, where people will be adamant about how Goku is, or they'll have wrong opinions, or they'll be like, have you heard the, you can't beat Goku thing, where people will just say,
01:54:02
Speaker
Whatever character you like can't beat Goku Goku's always better and they kind of like throw it at you and it's the worst way it's like what I would never own up to being a Dragon Ball fan because if I want to talk about like Piccolo or Gohan I have to deal with those people who are screaming in my face and it's like that's why I didn't want to watch my hero is because I would be around people at conventions who are cosplaying as my hero who didn't
01:54:24
Speaker
Have any etiquette and they would be kind of rude to me or they would be a little weird And acting like they shouldn't in public and I'm like, well, I don't really want to participate in this because it's Uncomfortable to look at that's what turned me off being into my hero is just like that's that's too bad because the show is so is such a different Yeah, completely different experience and it doesn't have any it's not responsible for any of what people want to interpret and how they want to act but it just turns you off to it all the same and
01:54:53
Speaker
Yes, because I don't want to interact with those people but still want to be present because I have to enjoy fandom to like it. If I can't do that, I have a hard time. Once I got into my hero, I started to not engage with it cosplay-wise because I cosplayed Uraraka like two years ago and I still get really weird jams about it sometimes. I don't do that anymore, but I do interact with fan artists on Twitter and stuff where it's like, okay, we can talk as people who do this instead of like,
01:55:21
Speaker
I can curate it now better than I could at conventions. Your mom's face is a Vegeta. Yeah, I get it feels like whatever. I'm going to I'm going to be at a con in the future and somebody's going to come up with a t-shirt. I just I just made the t-shirt. It's going to be I'll wear it. We're going to make it and give it to Chris. We've given Chris so much merch that we just like put his name on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Wow.
01:55:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's why we didn't that's why she didn't watch one piece either was because people would be like, well, this is the best thing ever. Your stuff sucks compared to this, whatever. And it's hard to hear sometimes. And it makes you not want to touch the thing that's actively being like thrust it upon you in a negative way. But I got her. I got her so good.
01:56:08
Speaker
I think the easiest thing to equate it to is when you're wearing like a band t-shirt and someone that you maybe barely know or don't know comes up to you and they're like, do you even listen to that band? Can you even name one of their albums or one of their songs? And then you're like, I don't have to answer to you. And obviously I'm wearing the shirt and it's my shirt, so it doesn't matter. But that's kind of where that feeling lies. You don't get it, man. You don't understand how I feel about that band. You don't get it. Yeah.
01:56:36
Speaker
That's kind of how it is. It's like that for a lot of like Shounen anime, I feel like because a lot of the community is a lot of men. And I'm not saying that like in a men are all like this, but it's like, that's the kind of conversation that they focus on. It's like, we're going to talk about power scaling when we don't need to talk about power scaling, or it's always one or the other. And I don't want to engage with that. I want to engage with other stuff that's happening. I want to watch Piccolo learn how to drive. I don't care about their power level. Yes.
01:57:07
Speaker
That's actually what our panel at Acron this year is going to be about is masculine anime through a feminine lens and women and shonen and kind of... I'm going to talk about Sanji for an hour. I'm very excited. I love talking about him. I've never done a Dragon Ball. I've never done a voice for Dragon Ball and part of me is glad because I don't want to yell like they have to yell in Dragon Ball. I've done so much yelling in my time that I like just put me in a role, sounded like a dad or sounded like a British dude or... Those dudes yell in Dragon Ball.
01:57:37
Speaker
I don't think I can name one person who doesn't yell in Dragon Ball. Isn't there an old man character who's like, old and wise and shady? Oh, but no, he'd be yelling. He'd be yelling probably more than anyone else, honestly. Yeah, he yells. All right, never mind. But it's not even like a power up yell. He's just screaming. Yeah, Mike McFarland and I make each other laugh in the studio a lot because the first show I ever did for Mike was called Galaxy Railways.
01:58:05
Speaker
Sorry. I played Captain, Captain Schwanheld Bulge is his name. Captain Bulge and his, his ship is called the Big One. Hello. Get out of it. I love it. Come on. Come on.
01:58:18
Speaker
And there's not, and the show is not even adult or stupid or inappropriate. It's, it's just this, it's this kind of sweet show about these railroad, nevermind. And I'm thinking like, what is this character? And so the character that comes up and he's like this old crusty guy and he's just yelling, it's just typical stuff. And Mike, so Mike McFarland and I have this kind of catchphrase with each other. I'm old and mean.
01:58:43
Speaker
Man, and that's that's all it is. I'm old, so I mean, and that's it. I'm an old dude. Old dudes are mean. Get off my lawn. It's the Simpsons bit of old man yells at cloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You damn kids with your fun. Oh, I love that. You're good at being old men. What can we say? I used to be with it and then I found it what it was. They changed it. Yeah.
01:59:11
Speaker
Well, I love the men that you voice, especially the old gentle criminal, because when they showed him the animation for the first time, I was very head over heels. What a beautiful guy. Well, he's a bad boy, but a good man. He's a he's a criminal, but he's not a villain.
01:59:31
Speaker
Yes. Right. That's kind of characters. I always love side characters more than the main cast most of the time. And he's one of my favorites for sure. I really, really dig it. And I yeah, and so I, I'm waiting for I'm, I'm, I'm waiting for mihawk to get a Funko.
01:59:50
Speaker
He's not had a Funko Pop yet. I'm surprised he hasn't. I thought he would have totally come with the last. He's one of the only warlords that doesn't have a Funko Pop yet. So they may be waiting until this buggy stuff comes up with crocodile before they really blow it up with a... Who knows? I don't know. I've got friends who are like deep into the Funko world and knowing all the rumors and I'm texting like, where's the... Have they said anything? Please?
02:00:14
Speaker
Apparently not, not yet. I was not in the Funko Pops until One Piece and then they released the Stealth Black and I've never bought a chaser before ever in my life. But then they made the chaser like sometimes you'll get a limited edition one where it's slightly different than the original.
02:00:30
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they made a stealth black one. And then they made a chase that makes him invisible. So I had to go and I don't know how to, I don't know how to buy Funko Pops. I'm not a professional Funko Pop. I collect actual figurines. I don't usually get Funkos unless it's like a niche character I can't get a figurine for. And so I was messaging everyone like, how do I do this, please? I don't want to order six of them and then be wrong.
02:00:54
Speaker
You sound like a cheerleader in an 80s movie trying to buy weed. I figured it out. I had to go through like a proxy side, but it took forever to get to that point. Cause it's like, please, I just, I don't want to lose. I think I'm like, just buy this here. It hasn't been shipped yet, but it's okay. I just, Funko pops stress me out sometimes. I, but I do like getting them signed. They're fun to get. I hope they make me hook.
02:01:22
Speaker
They're hard to sign. They're challenging to sign. One time, if your pen blows up, it's a big problem. You can't just replace the print right in front of everybody real quick. You need to use hand sanitizer and a cloth and you need to clean it all off and everything like that. There's ways to do it. It's first world problems, but yeah, it's definitely...
02:01:43
Speaker
people want interesting quotes and like half paragraphs of quotes and stuff. And so you're, you're, you gotta bring in my side. Yeah, sure. That's the entire thing.
02:01:54
Speaker
That's all fun though. I need to do a con with Megan Shipman where we can both go with the pop and have our booths. We had our booths next to each other at one con, but we didn't have the Funko pop out yet, but we haven't been to a con together with the pop that's out. So I'd love to do that because she's always fun to do a con with. We did a panel together a couple of years ago. She's really, really, she's blown up. She's a spy family and that's, that's kicking ass.
02:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, gosh, so what are the latest ones that I've done? The latest stuff I've done, if anybody's asked me, there's a show called Buddy Daddies that just came out. Yeah, it's like the other spy family one, right? It's kind of a similar theme. Yeah, sort of. Yeah, it's the cute family thing, but it's also a little bit of a bloodbath.
02:02:38
Speaker
And so I play a really bad guy in that, really bad, heavy dude in that. And then I just went up to, well, I can't talk about that show yet, because I don't know if it's an old school show, but I played a really jerk, big time jerk character in this other one I recorded last week. And there's a, I don't know what I'm gonna talk about.
02:02:54
Speaker
Sentai, what did I just, I don't know how much I can talk about yet. And it's not because anything's a big secret. It's just because until they officially release a cast list, you're just not supposed to say I'm in this yet. It's just respecting the process of they just have not officially announced online that there's an English cast yet. So is there any project, like any project in the world that you would want to be a part of that you would want to do a voice for? For anime? Yeah.
02:03:24
Speaker
Boy, I hear Trigon is super cool. Trigon rules. There's definitely a niche for you that would probably come up in the next season of St. Pete. Or yeah, there might be, you know, Blue Lock sounds interesting. And I hear that there might be a season in the future of that show where they go, they start playing different international teams. And so we could all use our accents and have some fun with that.
02:03:53
Speaker
Gosh, yeah, those are the ones that come to mind immediately. And I like doing, and sometimes movies are fun, you know, doing movies is kind of cool. Like a movie for an anime or like an animated? Yeah, just anime film, anime films that are coming out. There's one I've done recently that I can't mention yet because they've announced it, but they've not announced the English cast yet as far as I know. So, but I've been up to Crunchyroll a lot recently.
02:04:22
Speaker
their new studios are great. And again, I like recording remotely, sure, definitely has its advantages, but being in person with a director, there's something about, especially if you're meeting the director for the first time, to meet them on remote and just hear their voices is just too impersonal. There's something about proximity that loosens you up that's very special and different that I like more than...
02:04:45
Speaker
Well, with your background with stage acting, that makes sense that you get to be a little more vulnerable and you fully put yourself into it physically. Yeah, that's true. That's awesome. It's gotta be fun, especially since you've been doing it so long, you have so much experience on every medium, basically, in form of acting.
02:05:06
Speaker
Just apply all of it. I'm very impressed. I was very thrilled when you said that you would happily come on because it's like you have so much you could talk about and it's amazing to hear you. I enjoyed talking to you that day, so when you were like, yeah, I'll absolutely come on. This is the best. When I heard your head stuck episode, I knew it was going to be a party. I knew this was going to be a blast.
02:05:27
Speaker
So next time you're on, we'll just find the most batshit unhinged anime and we'll all just watch it and re-dub it. Yeah, you'll explain stuff to me. That'd be great. We'll do a whole ghost stories style. Yeah, we'll watch ghost stories. I love ghost stories. I gotta go back and watch that again just for fun. It's on Amazon Prime. I think it's free if you have Prime. Okay, well.
02:05:54
Speaker
All right, Mr. Fancy. Yeah, then I'm going there. I'm totally. Yeah. I love, I love buying the Amazon one. I love watching that one. Nice viewing. All right.
02:06:04
Speaker
Well, John, it was so nice to talk to you. It was such a lovely, awesome to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Is there anything that you want to plug your social media, your TikTok or anything? You know, if anybody wants, I have a website, just johngremion.com, just my name in all lowercase. And it has a store where you can buy prints that I normally sell at conventions or autographic conventions.
02:06:31
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, I'll custom sign them and mail them to you. You can get those. If you see, you can't see me at a convention. You can do that. I'm on Cameo, but also on my website, there is a, there's a QR code at the bottom pay of my front page of my website right underneath where like, here's the animated convention appearances. You get updates of news and there's a QR code that's got all my social and my link tree. So that has everything that has Cameo that has YouTube, uh, tick tock and Instagram. So it's all, yeah.
02:06:57
Speaker
Dang, I'm going to have to get a print from you now. Yeah, go for it. Perfect. What is your next convention announcement? Have that. Let me cheat a little bit and go and go check out. Let me see here. I will tell you exactly where I'm going to be and when. I think you announced one today, but.
02:07:15
Speaker
Yes, I did. Is that the next one? Yeah, well, no. The next one is going to be Gamers and Beaks Con in June in Mobile, Alabama for a couple of days. Black Hills Con in Rapid City, South Dakota is in June 23rd and 25th. Delta H-Con back here in town in Houston, June 30th to July 2nd.
02:07:34
Speaker
Then Anime Town Louisiana, which we announced today, August 18th through the 20th. That's in Gonzales, Louisiana. It's very close to Baton Rouge. And then something called Cult Classic Convention. That's September 2nd and 3rd in Baton Rouge as well. Those are the ones that there's more coming that I know are going to happen, but they just haven't made it official yet. We haven't signed a contract yet. Yeah.
02:07:59
Speaker
But they'll come up. In the talks, it's working on it. You bet. You bet. We're working on them. Very exciting. Nebula, for a quick wrap up, do you want to drop where we can find you on socials? Yeah, you can find me at nebula underscore inky, I-N-K-Y, on Instagram and Twitter. And Parks, where can they find you? You can find me at Crown Guard Cosplay on Instagram and Little Light Beyond Twitter. You can find the podcast at patreon.com slash fandavespod and fandavespod on Instagram and Twitter.
02:08:27
Speaker
You got it right this time. I'm so proud of you. I know. That's why I said it so fast. You wouldn't take it from me, but I did it. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Marketing skills. I told you, that's what I do. That's my job here. You got it down. That's our girl. I did it. Thanks again, Jaron. Thanks again, Jaron. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for listening, and we'll see you later. Goodbye.