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Voice Actor Armageddon: No Sacred Ointment for Funimation's Leaks

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Submitted by RJ Carter on Fri, 08/30/2019 - 21:13
Funimation Dragonball Z

Schadenfreude ran rampant today among anime fans who have found themselves at odds these past several months with a handful of voice actors employed and/or contracted to Funimation, a company licensed to provide English language dubs for Japanese animated franchises, including the extremely popular DRAGONBALL Z.

Funimation has been at the core of a controversy surrounding one voice actor, Vic Mignogna, who has been accused of sexual misconduct and summarily fired from doing further voice acting for the studio. Fans of Mignogna have come together under the banner of #IStandWithVic, claiming no concrete proof has been established, and indeed Mignogna has set up a legal fund for the express purpose of filing a defamation suit. Meanwhile, his accusers have organized under the hashtag of #KickVic for the purpose of protesting conventions that continue to host Mignogna as a celebrity guest.

However, while the #KickVic crowd was busily trying to point out the alleged mote in Mignogna's eye, it appears there was a rather ugly beam sticking out of their own.

Funimation found itself trending in the number one position on Twitter today, and not for reasons it would want to brag about. At issue was the release of several audio recordings of prominent Funimation voice actors, recorded in the Funimation studios with Funimation equipment, and voicing Toie Animation's DRAGONBALL Z characters pretending to be engaging in homosexual and pedophilic acts. Heard on the recordings are voice actors Chris Sabat, who voices a graphic youthful sex encounter involving rubbing on the 'sacred ointment', and Sean Schemmel, who drops the one-letter-smaller, more explosive F-bomb more than once referring to another character because of that characters homosexuality.

Archives of the links were spread around Twitter in tweets like the following.

Defendents in the Vic MIgnogna lawsuit, including Monica Rial, Jaimie Marchi, and Ron Toye, normally vocal on social media, were unsurprisingly mum on the subject today, with Ron Toye's account put into protected mode after Twitter took note of a protective order brought against him by an ex-wife (which was later dismissed without prejudice by the courts).

Toie Animation, which owns the rights to DRAGONBALL Z, was recently ranked #33 in top global licensors of 2018, with retail sales of nearly $2 billion. Neither Toie nor Funimation have issues responses to the leaks at this time -- but the day is still young in Japan at this writing.