So I stumbled across something interesting. I was watching that atrocity of a Netflix live action adaption of Bleach (honestly, people can whine about western live action all they want, at least those make passable attempts to make the characters recognizable, Japanese live actions just fart out a bunch of identical looking people who look nothing like their anime versions and people think it's awesome somehow) and noticed that not only did Rukia look literally nothing like her - excessively so, like the creator has something against Rukia, poor girl - but her voice wasn't the proper one. Rukia has a distinctive english voice, and the one they used sounded like Orihime instead. So I looked into it to see if maybe the voice actress didn't like the movie or had retired or something, only to discover this tweet:
http://archive.fo/wip/y3rKV
OG Rukia literally wasn't even
told they were doing a dub of it, let alone asked to appear.
I dug a little deeper and found this tweet:
https://web.archive.org/web/2020031...om/MichelleRuffvo1/status/1240356320621899776 (Archive.fo refused to work so) where Michelle apparently only heard about the remake/extension planned of the anime by news on twitter, rather than confidential discussions or at least an inside talk where she could personally confirm it with someone. Note the date, and that she's enthusiastically hoping to be brought back to voice Rukia if they dub the new anime. In March she says she wants to continue to play Rukia in any future dubs, in October (-ish) the dub of the movie is released without anyone even mentioning it to her.
From what I can tell, Rukia/Michelle is the ONLY one singled out and replaced like this. Why? No one knows.
JYB (Ichigo, for the plebs who don't know), who was the one that essentially announced the english dub by enthusiastically tweeting about it, literally didn't even know it happened. He'd thought everyone reprised their roles, and no one bothered to mention to him that Rukia had been replaced. They also didn't mention it to Michelle. Cassandra appears not to have made a comment.
Michelle is LA based, and from what I can tell Bleach itself was licensed by Viz, so probably will be in any future iterations. The movie, however, was licensed by Netflix. Technically, they're not involved with any of that stuff. However, I happen to know that rather than hiring their own VAs for their own anime, Netflix likes to source from Crunchyroll. Who sources mostly from Funimation.
I would be remiss in mentioning all this by not bringing up the FMA Netflix live action dub. From what I could tell, it brought back all the Brotherhood era VAs, including Vic. However, for some completely unexplained reason, ALL of Vic's audio is mixed weirdly. Jarringly so. It's not that Vic does a bad job, it's that the audio levels are quieter than every one else, and the audio quality itself is atrocious, like he has a significantly worse mic or was given a room without sound proofing. It's almost unbearable, and
only Vic's sounds are an anomaly. I'm not saying anything crazy like they did this
intentionally, or anything, I'm just laying out the facts I've observed. I haven't found out why this is, but it could be anything from each VA having their own isolated tracks and his getting bumped maybe on accident to Vic needing to record his lines in a different location from the others for some reason and the sound mixer was unable to bring the tracks all in line with each other.
Here's some final information about the two Rukia's:
This is the OG Rukia VA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Ruff - she's OLD guard, she's been active since 1997, so about the same time as Vic. She started as Speed's Mom, she's been Chii, Euphemia, Jill Valentine, and other various notables and is active to date. But she's also 52, married, and although pleasant looking she's not exactly a hot bod.
This is the VA that replaced her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_Lee_Morris - she's been active since 2005, but only really broke through in 2011 with the drummer from K-On! and Kyubey - since then she's done a bunch of cute girls like Taiga Asaka, Leafa, and Benio Adashino. she's married, but only 38 and I can't really be the judge, but you can decide for yourself if she's cuter or not than Michelle. It's worth noting that Cassandra was part of the short lived NYC group of actors and then moved to LA in 2010 just before her VA career kicked off, not Texas.
I don't know what either of these girls' positions are on ISWV/KV/smartly keeping silent, but it doesn't matter because this all took place in 2018, before the attack on Vic started.
I'm just saying, though.
It sure
looks like a case of a beloved but older voice actress who definitely didn't need Sabat's help to get a leg up on anything mysteriously being replaced by a much younger, prettier voice actress who was definitely a nobody during the time Sabat's 'casting couch' seems to have gotten going. And there's definitely a trail that can sneakily lead to his influence over the project.
www.youtube.com
