One of the treats for Ohayocon fans was the opportunity to see the
recently-completed English-language version of End of Evangelion,
one of the films that finished the Neon Genesis Evangelion series.
Tiffany Grant, who voiced Asuka, said she hadn't had a chance to see the
finished product, but Cleveland-area fans would get to see the show. "It
was a lot of me being really, really pissed off at Shinji and my character
had to yell a lot," said Grant about her motivation in the movie's extreme
scenes. "It was great to get back into her skin, so to speak." The recording
sessions for the Manga Entertainment release of the Eva movies also gave
Grant an opportunity to revisit previous performances: since a long stretch
of one movie is made of clips from the Eva TV series, Grant and the rest
of the dub actors had the chance to redo performances they recorded five
years earlier.
Meanwhile, Jessica Calvello spent the months before Ohayocon working
on a project she called her biggest challenge, the lead in Excel Saga.
"She's not human," Calvello said about the intense female who carries the
show and never seems to stop talking. "I don't know what she is. She's
not well." Calvello, who is used to wild and crazy characters, but Excel
is like nothing she's done before. "It's just been really different. I
just hope I hit it somehow. You're in the booth and work and work, and
after a while you say, `did I do that right?'" Calvello gives some of the
credit for her performance to the Japanese actor who originated the Excel
role. When faced with the odd noises that Excel makes, Calvello just duplicated
the original actor's performance. "It's all her - I'm just channeling the
chick," she said.
Some wag in the panel audience yelled out that all of Doug Smith's
outtakes from his Kintaro Oe role in Golden Boy were used in the
dub, and Smith was hard pressed to disagree. (The wag may have been the
series producer.) Smith said his hardest job came once when he got a role
at the last minute and had to make up an accented voice on the spot in
the recording booth. It felt frustrating to struggle for the correct sound,
but it worked, according to Smith. "People come up to me and say, "What?
That was your voice."
