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Sakura
Con - Friday - Lia Sargent
 The last time
Lia Sargent appeared at an anime convention, at a Pioneer panel during
Anime Expo in 1998, the actor got little attention as fans were more interested
in video disc formats than acting. Sargent got plenty of attention on her
return to conventions in 2001, which took place a few weeks after the Cartoon
Network started cablecasting The Big O. Sargent wrote the English-language
script for that series, and voiced Dorothy Wainwright, the soft-spoken
android assistant to Roger Smith. "I love Dorothy Wainwright. She may be
an android, but she has such dry humor," Sargent said. That humor made
it hard for Sargent to get the lines right, since she had to take the emotion
out of her voice and let the words carry the humor rather than her delivery
of the lines. (Sargent's favorite dub character is the hard-fighting Chun
Li, by the way.) |
 So does Sargent
agree with fans who see The Big O as another version of Batman?
"That's real stupid," she answered. "I didn't think of Batman the whole
time - I mean, you can see his (Roger Smith's) face. Rather, Sargent saw
The
Big O as a series in the pulp tradition of Sam Spade, with a little
of the Pierce Brosnan version of James Bond thrown in. One thing that Sargent
didn't agree with was the change, required by the cable network's standards
and practices division, of the motto shown when Smith starts his giant
robot; she preferred the original "name of God" to the revised "name of
good." And the catch phrase of "It's showtime" that Smith uses when he
takes the controls of his robot came word-for-word from the Japanese original,
she said. |
 Sargent miust
have done a lot right with her Big O work; the series has become
the hottest anime series on cable TV and has generated a lot of demand
for the scheduled summer release of the DVD version from Bandai. And that
success may create an atmosphere where more recent anime series (Big
O was produced in 1999) are cabelcast first before heading to home
video (one industry insider said that's "the best way" to handle a series).
Sargent said that she bases her performances and the work of the actors
in dub series she directs on the voices of the original Japanese actors.
"You can go crazy by putting your own interpretation into it. When it comes
to dubbing, I like to listen to the Japanese," she said. Sargent said that
was important in series such as Serial Experiments Lain, where the
story was hard to understand and the English-language actors had to use
the original Japanese performances to learn how to handle the roles. |
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