The Week in Voice: Three Goodbyes, a Warsaw Win and Simba in Quechua

Three goodbyes, a Warsaw court that says every voice counts, and a little Simba learning his lines in Quechua. Here’s your week in voice, in about four minutes.

Hello again. It’s Friday, and if you’ve got a cuppa going, now’s the time. This was a week with real sadness in it, so we’ll take that first and work our way back to the sunshine.

Three voices we lost

Donnie Dunagan, the voice of young Bambi, has died at 92. He spent 25 years as a Marine without telling his comrades who he’d been. When his first tries at calling for Bambi’s mother didn’t land, a studio coach asked him how he’d cry out if his own mother were lost. That’s the line generations of children still remember.

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JoBe Cerny, who gave the Pillsbury Doughboy his giggle, died on 30 October at 78, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. He was also the silent man in the Cheer ads, so millions knew his face and his laugh without knowing his name.

And Stacy Keach, the narrator of American Greed, died at 85, at his family’s home in Poland. He voiced the show from its first episode in 2007 and called his narrator “an avenging angel.” Our thoughts are with all three families, and with everyone who grew up hearing them.

Your voice is yours, and the courts are noticing

Some genuinely good news from Poland. A Warsaw court ruled for lektor Jarosław Łukomski in the country’s first AI voice trial, ordering a maker of home sewage tanks to pull its cloned-voice ads, apologize and pay damages. The best bit is the judge’s reasoning: the protection covers every person’s voice, famous or not. It isn’t final yet, but congratulations to him. And yes, of all the things to clone a famous voice for, it was sewage tanks.

In the US, Elvis Presley’s rights owners sued Suno for letting users clone his voice, one of the first big tests of Tennessee’s ELVIS Act. The complaint spends real time describing his “unmistakable and iconic voice,” which is the closest a lawsuit has ever come to a love letter.

Less charming: three men have been charged in New York with faking company bosses’ voices to get staff to wire away about $129 million. They’re allegations for now, but it shows what a copied voice can be made to say.

Listeners, credits and the small print

Narrators, here’s one for the fridge door. An RNIB poll found 65% of UK adults wouldn’t listen to an AI-narrated audiobook, and another 20% would but would rather hear a person. Happy 90th to the charity’s Talking Books library, too.

For game actors, SAG-AFTRA’s new pitch agreement lets indie developers hire union voices for investor demos. One catch worth reading twice: on the pitch itself, there’s no minimum fee.

And in Mexico, Netflix apologized after a promo used dubbing actor Diana Galván Santos’s voice in an influencer’s announcement. “We got it wrong and we’re very sorry,” it said. Our opinion piece argues the fix is simple: one line in the credits.

Wins worth shouting about

This one made our week. Fernando Valencia, a voice actor from Cusco, is dubbing The Lion King into Quechua, with his son Dylan as Simba, for Andean kids who don’t fully follow the Spanish. A documentary about them, Runa Simi, has just opened in Los Angeles. He still needs Disney’s yes. Our favorite moment is him directing his own son: “That’s good, but you sound like a teenage Simba.” Every parent and every director in one sentence.

In Uganda, Kampala’s first VO Link-Up put new voices on a live brief, with working voices giving notes on the spot, and the keynote’s advice was that acting comes first. Next Creata’s own young members dreamed it up and ran it. Well done, all of you.

And to finish on a smile

Nintendo held blind auditions for Ocarina of Time’s Japanese voices, with every name hidden, and one of the winners turned out to have played the same character in 1998. “None of us saw that coming,” said producer Eiji Aonuma. Meanwhile Lisa Reimold announced she’s the new Navi with “HEY! LISTEN!”, which is the only correct way to do it.

That’s the week. Look after your voices, be kind to someone who’s had a rough one, and see you next Friday.

Sources: Voice Over Herald reporting this week, linked above.

Lee este artículo en español: La semana en la voz: tres despedidas, un triunfo en Varsovia y Simba en quechua

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