Vol. 1, Issue 46 - Interview with Michael Haigney
Welcome to issue 46 of the Johto Times! Today we will be sharing a special interview with Michael Haigney, the original Voice Director for the English-adapted Pokémon anime from 1998 until around 2002, who worked on the anime and the first four Pokémon movies. He voiced beloved characters such as Charmander and Psyduck as well as many other Pokémon during his time at 4Kids Entertainment. It was a pleasure to speak to Michael about his time working on the show, and I am excited to share this interview with our readers!
On behalf of the Johto Times team, we wish all our readers who celebrate a very merry Christmas! Have a wonderful time, and if you receive any awesome Pokémon-related gifts, be sure to share them with us via our mailbag! You can find our email on our Johto Times Mastodon account, where we will be sharing any breaking Pokémon news during our break.
Michael Haigney (Mike) was the original Voice Director for the Pokémon anime and the first four movies, responsible for adapting the scripts for an English audience. He is also the voice actor who provided the voices for dozens of Pokémon heard throughout the early Pokémon anime, such as Ash's Charmander and Snorlax, Misty's Psyduck, and James's Koffing and Weezing. Michael's voiced Pokémon can also be heard in several video games, such as Pokémon Puzzle League and the Super Smash Bros. franchise of games. These days, he attends conventions and hosts his own podcast, Original Pokéman. We are excited to share our interview with him for Johto Times!
Mike:
I guess all those local TV shows like Soupy Sales, Chuck McCann, Officer Joe Bolton, Sandy Becker, Captain Jack McCarthy, Beachcomber Bill and Zacherley got me interested in television as a kid, and I guess it seemed like an interesting and exciting field. Not like a real job.
Mike:
I went to Fordham University at Lincoln Center and my friend Liz and I wrote for the school newspaper, but she also worked in the student placement office. I told her if she saw any jobs that were glamorous, required very little work and paid a lot, let me know. One day just before the beginning of my senior year, she called and said a listing came up for CBS Pages, which were like ushers.
The CBS Broadcast Center was just a few blocks from Fordham. I went in and got the job which, by the way, did not pay a lot. Except for one other courtesy interview many years later, I think that was the only job interview I've ever gone on. Every job I've had since stemmed directly or indirectly from that CBS Page job.
Mike:
I worked as a low level assistant (Associate Producer) on a bunch of live specials at CBS and other places for a few years, but after that I mostly worked on kind of fringe syndicated specials and series, so I'm not sure what I can compare my experience to. I liked working around the edges because there wasn’t the kind [of] interference a lot of television people complain about from corporate people giving advice and suggestions and demands. I worked with Marc Juris -- who had also been a page at CBS -- on a bunch of things, and once the shows were decided on, we pretty much created, wrote, and produced them on our own with basically no “corporate” input. Except for budget, of course.
Mike:
My first impressions of anime were seeing things like Astro Boy, Gigantor, and Tobor the 8th Man on local TV in New York. I think I knew they were all from Japan but I have to say there was something “foreign” about them in the broader sense. Speed Racer particularly was more than vaguely disturbing, not just because of the way the characters looked, which was so different from American animation, but also because of the way they spoke. In the dub, I mean.
The dialogue was so fast and jammed in and just…weird. But that's not a criticism. After adapting and directing hundreds of episodes of anime, I have a lot of respect for Peter Fernandez and the job he and the other localizers faced in adapting those early anime series without the help of digital recording and editing equipment.
Mike:
I had worked a bit with Norman Grossfeld at a company called Select Media and Norman became the president of 4Kids which was the company that had the Pokémon license, and they were going to localize the TV series. I’d worked with Norman on some things like Pillow People and Mr. Men and he knew I was localizing Japanese animated series so he called me about doing Pokémon.
Mike:
Pokémon had been all over the news because of the episode with the rapid, flashing colors that triggered seizures in some kids in Japan, so my memory is that I asked him if that was the series he was talking about and he said, “Yes, but we’re not airing that episode.” I watched the first episode and never thought it would last past 13 episodes.
Mike:
Well, thankfully for me, but I’m sure you know a lot of especially hard-core anime fans accused 4Kids of destroying the original. I understood their objections but now I smile when I see fans on social media saying how great the original was. As for working memories, I remember it quickly became overwhelming to adapt, cast, and direct the voice actors. A lot of very late nights.
Mike:
Oh, yes. After just me basically adapting the scripts and directing the actors and reviewing the mixes, we got Jim Malone to direct and hired writers like John Touhey for the scripts. The scripts were, by far, the toughest part of the job. At the beginning, I was sometimes writing or rewriting just one of the characters’ lines page by page while they were waiting in the recording studio. Larry Juris who owned TAJ which was the production company we were partners in for Pokémon -- would call me at home while I was writing and say, “They’re almost on page 12…fax 13 ASAP!” or something like that.
And it was hard to find writers. We went through a bunch. Some who tried were really good and smart and witty but trying to fit lines into the mouths of the characters to match the flaps– it drove them nuts. And I was really rough on their first drafts, which I know a lot of them felt would be their only draft. Ask John Touhey. He did a lot of them and we worked on other series after Pokémon, too. And because of the air dates, I frequently wound up rewriting them myself. It was a lot.
Mike:
At the beginning, we were casting a lot, too, but once we had the main cast, we would schedule them based on the number of lines they had in each episode, their availability, and how fast we came to know how each actor and character would take, more or less. We always did one actor, one character at a time, and almost always one episode at a time. Once in a while somebody would plan to be out of town or on vacation so I’d have to go into the next episode and write at least their lines to record before they left so we could stay on schedule.
Mike:
I wish I had more but we always had the Japanese track to copy. In our version, the names of the Pokémon were mostly different from their Japanese names, but I usually tried to have our Pokémon sound like the originals. But somebody at a convention recently told me how some of our Pokémon sounded substantially different than the originals which I hadn’t remembered. Not sure how true that is.
Mike:
Mostly good. Just about everybody I worked with was experienced. But not everybody. But I rarely had significant trouble with actors. And if I did, I doubt I’d say who.
Mike:
It wasn’t so much the character but how many extreme reacts (which is what we called their sounds in the scripts) a character might have in a script. But because I was directing, I could do reacts over several days, recording them when somebody finished early, mostly. And after a while we had a library of reacts for some Pokémon which Ron London and the other engineers could drop in where appropriate, but we usually wound up recording new ones to fit very specific attack reacts or emotional ones anyway.
Mike:
Just tap into my huge reservoir of raw talent. (Really raw.)
Mike:
Somebody from Nintendo would review the episodes, I think, but I don’t particularly remember a lot of notes from Nintendo on either the shows or the movies. At least the ones I worked on. Most of the things we changed – besides gags – were because of the stations’ broadcast standards and practices. We knew guns and easily replicable violence – punches, slaps – had to go.
Mike:
I think the ones that didn’t make it to air were not close calls. We would always try to re-edit and change dialogue because we never wanted to lose an episode. A few times that wasn’t possible. That’s my memory.
Mike:
More time, more money, bigger mix studios, at least for the first two. Can’t remember beyond that.
Mike:
Norman was more involved in the scripts and I guess there was more Nintendo scrutiny but I don’t remember anything specific.
Mike:
Assuming they were, no, not for the series at the beginning. I guess we knew the movie would attract a lot of fans, but you can never know beforehand, really.
Mike:
I have some Funko pops and lots of things fans have given me at conventions, things they’ve either made or bought. Really nice people at the conventions.
Mike:
I’ve heard others with different memories, but my idea was to write a Christmas musical around the Pokémon characters. I think at first I was hoping they might actually animate a Christmas special, because I loved Christmas specials and would’ve loved to have created one. Not sure I ever voiced that at the time, though. But at least I was thinking of the old Hanna-Barbera records – Yogi Bear Meets Frankenstein, holiday stuff like that. I brought the idea for a Christmas album to Norman which he approved. I think he had a deal with Koch, a record label 4Kids had already worked with on some Pokémon record, I don’t really remember.
Anyway, I wrote a few songs but never came up [with] an overall story. Pretty quickly Norman told me Jim Malone and Eric Stuart who were both music guys wanted to write songs too, so that’s how it came out the way it did. I wish I had had the time and talent to write an overall story, dialogue and songs. Carter Cathcart who was a friend of Larry’s and who also voiced Gary and other characters on the show and later went on to write a ton of scripts after I left, wrote and performed the music for my songs based on the way I hummed/sung them.
Mike:
Just getting studio time, occasional equipment failure, scheduling and mostly keeping up with the scripts.
Mike:
Sorry…I have to save SOMETHING for my podcast!
Mike:
Pokémon was up and running and 4Kids wanted to expand.
Mike:
Maybe how important it is to pick the things that are most important – in scripting, performance, mixing – and let the other things go a bit. I never successfully or consistently did that, but it’s a lesson, I guess.
Mike:
That’s [a] tough one. I’m tempted to say the infamous “jelly donut” lines but it’s something people always ask me about and I’m not actually sorry I did it. I don’t think I would do it now, though.
Mike:
Pride isn’t exactly a feeling I have or deserve about Pokémon. The Japanese creators deserve the credit or criticism for the series, not me. I guess the fact that a lot of the fans remember specific gags I wrote is a nice feeling.
Mike:
All great. Everybody likes what they like, but I really think Pokémon had something special, something kids and even adults really connected and still connect to. I’m lucky to have been a little part of that. All these years later, to have people come to the conventions and say such beautiful, touching things about the show and me, it’s really great. I really enjoy meeting everybody at the conventions, even if they don’t buy autographs. So if you see me at a show, please come up and say hello.
Mike:
I heard someone connected with the show say something on social media about the series which I know to be untrue. So I thought it might be fun to at least record my memories about my time with the show. I’m very clear though: Original Pokéman is about my memories, not facts. And memories differ, which is understandable. Having said that, some stuff is just wrong. I also talk about stuff I’m still learning about Pokémon.
Mike:
To record more. But I’m a world-class procrastinator and I’m told I have ADD. So I can always find something else to do and other things seem to find me.
Mike:
I have mixed feelings. I’ve never watched any of the “new” episodes with the new cast, although many of them have been doing the voices much longer than the original actors, I’m sure. That’s not because I have anything against the newer cast, but I spent a lot of time with the original characters and their voices. I don’t need to alter or add to that. But I’m curious about the final episode to see how the Japanese handled the end of Ash’s journey. Maybe I’ll find the original Japanese version online and watch the subbed version. I don’t know. Someday.
Mike:
Not really.
Mike:
I keep in touch with Ron London who recorded and mixed Pokémon and other series I worked on. He was the person I really spent the most time with. The actors were one group and the 4Kids employees were another group. Nothing against the actors. It was a job for us all. A few of the actors became friends with each other, but they never spent a lot of time together at the studio. And they all worked other jobs, too, so they didn’t have that day-to-day contact which is a big factor in developing most friendships. And a lot of friendships are site specific.
Mike:
Just thank you for all the years of watching and listening. And if you have nothing else to do, listen to Original Pokéman (with a “man” at the end) and email me your thoughts. But if you have something else to do, don’t listen because you might get distracted. “CHAR CHAR and PSY-YI-YII!?”
We would like to thank Mike for taking the time to speak with me and share so much information on his time with Pokémon and his career in television. If you want to hear more about the original episodes of Pokémon that Mike worked on, I urge you to check out his podcast Original Pokéman on iTunes, Spotify, and many other podcasting platforms.
A couple of weeks ago, we shared a Pokémon-themed word search, featuring twenty Pokémon from the Kanto region, including a duplicate! Here are the results!
Congratulations to everyone who got the correct answers, including readers Emet, Kennedie and Saul! If you enjoyed this puzzle, be sure to let us know, and we may do more of them in the future!
ncG1vNJzZmiin53BsHrSrpmsrJGYuG%2BvzqZmqWempLlyeZNv