 |
The third annual Speed Racer get-together at Anime
Weekend Atlanta saw the return of Corinne Orr, the voice of all of the
dubbed show's female characters, and Peter Fernandez, who voiced Speed
and Racer X and wrote the scripts. Along with Jack Grimes, the third surviving
member of the four-actor group that dubbed Mach Go Go Go, they're spending
time on the nostalgia circuit. The three actors were planning to attend
a Speed Racer reunion in October, and Fernandez stays busy tracking the
construction of replicas of the Mach 5 racing car (of which two have been
wrecked, he said). |
 |
Fernandez is still a busy actor, with his direction
standing out on the Courage the Cowardly Dog series shown on the Cartoon
Network. It's better pay now than the $100 he got for working on Speed
Racer, cash that he had to split with the extra actor he hired for the
cast. In the 1960's, actors dubbed their parts to short loops of film.
Now it's done with computers, and part of the newest technology is the
"band system." In this method, the dialogue is pre-timed and actors are
expected to match the lines they must deliver to a scrolling display on
a video monitor. "You get an okay performance, but you don't get a really
involved performance," Fernandez said. "That's why some of the dubbing
now is really flat." |
 |
Both Fernandez and Orr live and work in and near
New York, and they were in that city when the terrorist attacks struck
on September 11. Fernandez said he was driving to work over the Tappan
Zee bridge, in northern New York about 20 miles from the World Trade Center,
and saw the smoke from the crashes - but he didn't realize what had happened
until he turned on his radio and heard a news report on the attacks. Orr
said she had a friend who worked in the World trade Center, seven floors
below where one of the airliners hit. "On the day after, New York was silent
and everyone was walking. Partly because the subway was closed, and partly
because no one wanted to be alone in their homes," she said. |
