What do Brock, James, Squirtle, Wartortle, Aerodactyl, Hypno, and about ten other Pokémon characters have in common?
Well, if you said they’re all Pokémon characters, you’d be right. If you said that they all like to eat pickle, cream cheese, and sauerkraut sandwiches for breakfast, then you’re kind of weird. But if you said they are all stars of the Pokémon television show, you’d be sorta even more right.
Their voices—and a bunch of other voices in the show—are all done by the same actor! His name is Eric Stuart, and he’s a musician who lives in New York City.
I know what you’re going to ask: If the show is from Japan, why is the actor who does the voices living in New York City? And just how early does he have to get up to go to work?
In truth, the voices for the show that American kids see are all done in New York City. So although the picture part of Pokémon cartoons is the same in America as it is in Japan, the voices belong to different actors. The reason for that, of course, is that in the Japanese versions, the actors are speaking Japanese. So the people that make the cartoons hire English-speaking actors to play the parts for American kids.
Don’t worry, though, all the characters are pretty much the same in both the Japanese and American versions. The stories are also the same. However, the actors who speak the parts are different. That is, except for one character—Pikachu! The Pikachu voice is the same in both Japan and America!
Eric started in the series doing just Brock. Then, after the first four episodes he began doing James, too. Did you notice that the voices sounded a little different in some of the first episodes? Listen closely next time you watch those beginning episodes.
Anyway, everyone liked Eric’s voices so much that they wanted him to play the roles of some of the other characters, and soon he was doing a lot of different human and Pokémon characters. He also does the voices for another cartoon, not on television, called Slayers, where he plays the part of Gourry. And he’s done voices for commercials, too. In one commercial he played a giant cat for a convenience store!
In Japan, the people who do the voices for anime (cartoons) are called seiyuu, which means voice actors. Eric Stuart has probably one of the best-known voices—actually a lot of different voices—in our country today.
Now, if you’re thinking that’s weird, well, it isn’t. A lot of cartoons have characters that play different parts using the same person. Do you know what Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Taz, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Tweety, and Barney Rubble all have in common? The same person—a man named Mel Blanc—did the voices for all of them, as well as a lot of other cartoon characters! So what Eric is doing is not that unusual. Though it must be pretty weird to talk to yourself in a cartoon!
However, as I said, Eric Stuart is also a musician. He has three CDs out and they are called Curiosity, Picture Perfect, and Eric Stuart! The music he writes and performs has nothing to do with Pokémon. It’s rock-and-roll.
In 1997 Eric toured in concert with Ringo Starr, who was one of the Beatles! Eric’s also played concerts with Lynyrd Skynrd, Jethro Tull, Hall and Oates, and Chicago. I realize you may not know who some of these bands are or what they do—but they are all really famous bands that have been around a long time.
Eric writes all of his own songs and plays the guitar in the band, which is pretty cool. He also has a web site that is called (what else?) ericstuart.com. You can get to his web page by typing in: www.ericstuart.com. The site has already had over 100,000 visitors and there’s a great guestbook where you can write your comments about his music and Pokémon!