When it comes to Anime circles there is few bigger names than Christopher Sabat. Sabat has been voicing Anime characters for longer than any of us care to remember and has been the pivotal voice artist in popular series such as Pokemon, Attack On Titan and Dragon Ball and all of its offshoots. And if you’re a gamer then chances are you have also hear Sabat’s work as he has done voice work on everything from The Ghostbusters games through to The Walking Dead, Saints Row and Call Of Duty.
Recently in Australia for Madfest 2018 HEAVY Mag’s Dave Griffiths and Harley Woods caught up with Sabat to chat about his latest work on the much anticipated Dragon Ball Super: Broly. Now we are pleased to announce that the film will now be getting special screenings in Australia this month (see the poster below)
“I get anxiety just having to prepare for Dragon Ball sessions because there are always so many episodes,” says Sabat as we talk about the number of years that the Dragon Ball universe has existed now. “I am very excited about the new Broly movie though because I love the fact that Akira Toriyama has taken the Marvel approach to the movie where he has just been like ‘hey let’s just pretend there was never a Broly movie and that this is the first Broly movie. It is kind of like a Batman or a Superman movie and I like that approach, although I sometimes wish he would find some new villains instead of using Freezer and Broly, but I do like him being able to tell the story the way he envisions it.”
“There is so much happening now that is making working on dubs of Anime so very special,” says Sabat as we talk about how much Anime we get to see in cinemas in Australia now. “As you just said – the cinematic events – getting to see Anime in a theatre is just epic and so much fun. The other thing I really like is that when I first started dubbing Anime twenty years ago we were working on stuff that even then was ten or twenty years old and it felt like we dubbed the entire back catalog and all of the old stuff but now we are dubbing stuff that was released in Japan a week ago. Fans in the United States are able to hear our dub a week or two later and it feels so much more special when you get to dub something and then immediately get fan feedback about that, whereas back in the day we never knew when it was going to come out on VHS or DVD, like it might be a couple of year later before we ever saw the work we did on it, but now it is so immediate and that is fun.”
You can hear our full interview with Christopher Sabat in the Spreaker player on this page.
