Mike McFarland, Voice of Master Roshi and Director Behind Hundreds of Dubs, Dies at 56

Mike McFarland, the voice of Master Roshi and Yajirobe in Dragon Ball, of Buggy in One Piece and of Jean Kirstein in Attack on Titan, died on September 9. He was 56. He had undergone surgery to remove a brain tumour in January 2025, a second operation that April, and was diagnosed with glioblastoma in August of that year. Voice actress Brina Palencia, who had helped organise the fundraising campaign that supported him through his illness, confirmed the news, which was first reported by TMZ and Anime News Network on September 10.

Two careers in one

Most obituaries will lead with the characters, and rightly. McFarland’s Master Roshi was, for a generation of English-speaking fans, the definitive version of the old turtle hermit: lecherous, lazy, and then, when it counted, the most serious person in the room. His Yajirobe was comic cowardice with a core of decency. His Buggy the Clown in One Piece was gleeful noise. His Jean in Attack on Titan was the opposite, a young soldier whose arrogance slowly turns into leadership. Add Makoto Hyuga in the Evangelion films, Hiroshi Odokawa in Odd Taxi, and roles across Case Closed, Fullmetal Alchemist, the Lupin III films and Trigun Stampede, and you have a range most performers would be content with.

But the second career is the one working voice actors will want to remember. McFarland spent decades on the other side of the glass. He was a line producer, ADR director and ADR script adapter, first at ADV Films and then at Funimation, later Crunchyroll, on a list of series that reads like the history of anime dubbing in America: Case Closed, Dragon Ball Z, Eden of the East, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, One Piece, and the Evangelion films. Anyone who has watched those dubs has heard his work twice: once in the characters he voiced, and once in the performances he shaped from the director’s chair.

What an ADR director does

ADR, automated dialogue replacement, is the craft of recording a new performance to picture that already exists. In anime dubbing that means matching mouth flaps drawn for another language, hitting timings set by animators who never heard your voice, and doing it line by line with an actor alone in a booth. The ADR director sits on the other side of the glass and makes it a performance rather than an exercise in timing: reading in the other characters, protecting the emotional line of a scene when the actor is recording it out of order, and knowing when a take that fits the mouth doesn’t fit the moment.

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The script adapter’s job comes before that: rewriting a literal translation into lines an actor can say, at the length the animation allows, without losing what the original meant. McFarland did both, on some of the most-watched dubs ever made. It’s the kind of work whose success is measured by nobody noticing it.

What his colleagues said

Crunchyroll’s statement, added to Anime News Network’s report, was short: “Mike brought so much to all of us who knew him, and to all of the anime fans who knew his work. He was an incredible talent, a good friend to so many of us, and will be sorely, sorely missed.”

The clearest measure of how the industry felt about him was the campaign that ran through his illness. In January 2025, after the first surgery, fellow voice actors J. Michael Tatum and Brandon McInnis launched a fundraiser with a target of $65,000. It passed that goal, then passed several higher ones, and had raised $301,786 toward a $350,000 target by the time donations were paused. The money came largely from fans and from the community of actors and directors he had worked alongside for close to thirty years.

A voice on both sides of the glass

There is a particular kind of loss when a voice actor dies: the characters keep talking. Roshi will still leer and then turn serious; Jean will still grow up; Buggy will still be loud. The recordings outlast the man, and for fans that’s a comfort. For the people who worked with him, the loss is the other half of the career, the one that was never on the credits in the same size: the voice on the talkback saying try it once more, a little less, you’ve got it.

Mike McFarland was 56. He leaves colleagues who called him a friend, and several hundred episodes of television that sound the way they do because he was in the room.

Sources: Anime News Network (10 September 2026, updated with Crunchyroll’s statement).

Lee este artículo en español: Muere Mike McFarland, voz del Maestro Roshi y director de cientos de doblajes, a los 56 años