How I solved Super Monkey Ball's biggest mystery

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my childhood

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 8 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/tinman217 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 09 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Ready? Go!

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 7 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/reefersmok πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 09 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

I never played this game but the video was very fun to watch. I can imagine it must've been a fun experience for the voice actor to realise people like him this much.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 5 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/JustStayYourself πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 09 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Man make a new super monkey ball game already!🀩

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 4 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/StrangeVoiceGamer πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 09 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Okay I'll watch that later

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/pougliche πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 09 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Video is gold.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/ubebread πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 11 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

Yeah that was a good video

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/thereal7777 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 13 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies

He needs help

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/theflyjack πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Dec 09 2019 πŸ—«︎ replies
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If you've ever played Super Monkey Ball, there's a 100% chance you've heard this: - "Ready? Go!" That is the voice of the Super Monkey Ball announcer, and he is omnipresent throughout the entire Monkey Ball experience. You never go more than a few seconds without hearing his voice - Roll off the side of a level and you'll hear him say: Run out of time, and you'll hear: And, perhaps most satisfying of all, finish a level and you'll get to hear him yell: - The announcer chimes in constantly during a standard game of Monkey Ball, and that's to say nothing of the party games. The Monkey Ball announcer is present in every single Monkey Ball minigame including Monkey Target: - Very good! Monkey Baseball: - Hooome ruuun! Monkey Bowling: - Turkey! And... all the others, you get the idea. All that to say this: anybody who's played Super Monkey Ball has heard this man's voice tens of thousands of times, but... who exactly is he? Now, for most games, this would be a relatively easy question to answer - you'd simply pop over to the credits and check for yourself, right? But if you bounce your way all to the end of Super Monkey Ball's interactive credit sequence, you'll find that the only mention of any voice acting at all is categorized under "Monkey Voice", and the only names listed are the Japanese voice actors for the playable monkey characters. The narrator's identity is nowhere to be found. See, it turns out the role of the announcer in Super Monkey Ball is uncredited. Nobody knows who he is. He's completely anonymous. Now, of course people have their own theories about the Monkey Ball announcer's identity, and while researching who this guy could possibly be, there were two names that kept coming up over and over and over: Jack Merluzzi and Patrick Harlan. Now, the very first time Jack Merluzzi's name popped up on my radar was also the thing that kicked off this entire Super Monkey Ball adventure. Way back in January, I tweeted: "I wonder what the Super Monkey Ball announcer did today. I hope he had a good weekend." and somebody replied, "I think he is Jack Merluzzi, but it's hard to find info on that stuff." Now, I was intrigued by this, so I asked this person for more info, and they told me that Jack had done uncredited voice work on plenty of other Japanese games over the years, including the announcer voice in Tekken 5 and in King of Fighters XIII... and honestly, if you listen to the King of Fighters XIII system voice: - Select your character. Select the order. You've gotta admit, it sounds like it could be the same guy. Now that evidence might seem a little anecdotal on its own, but to understand what makes Jack Merluzzi a really compelling candidate, you need to know a little bit about the creators of Super Monkey Ball. See, Super Monkey Ball and its sequel Super Monkey Ball 2 were developed by Amusement Vision, a division of Sega that was founded in 2000 and then dissolved in 2005. And in Amusement Vision's short existence, they only shipped three original console games: Super Monkey Ball, Super Monkey Ball 2, and a little game called F-Zero GX. Now, there are a lot of voice actors who worked on F-Zero GX - all of them uncredited - but by far the most prolific performer on the game was Jack Merluzzi. Jack voiced Dr. Clash, Black Shadow, Mr. Zero, Beast Man, QQQ, the Skull, Dai Goroh, and, last but not least... the F-Zero announcer. - Three, two, one, go. An announcer, by the way, who had more than a few phrases in common with the Super Monkey Ball announcer: - Thanks for playing. - Thanks for playing. - And the more I looked into this - the more I looked into Jack Merluzzi as a candidate - the more it seemed to fit: here we had a voice actor, active in Japan in the early 2000s when Monkey Ball was made, known specifically for doing announcer voices who had worked uncredited on Amusement Visions only other game besides Monkey Ball. It had to be Jack, right? Six months ago, I reached out to Jack Meluzzi's management via email and I never heard back. Over the summer, in July, I reached out again...and nothing. I was about to give up, and then finally, after four emails and one very awkward phone call, I got the following email from Jack's manager: "Hello, Nick. I'm sorry for emailing you back late. We are now in the production week for theater. Jack is very busy this time of year, helping with several stage productions in addition to his regular narration work. Also, most of the games he is involved with include NDA (non-disclosure agreements) which prevent him from discussing that. However, I can say that Jack did not voice the Super Monkey Ball series in the link you sent. Thank you for understanding. Shinji. I was a little shocked to read this email, but also, I guess that settled it. Against all odds, the announcer in Monkey Ball is NOT Jack Merluzzi. I crossed Jack off my mental list of candidates and moved onto the only other one: Patrick Harlan. Now, Jack Merluzzi was more of a personal pet theory, but Patrick Harlan is by far the person most commonly believed to be the Super Monkey Ball announcer. Patrick's name comes up constantly when looking into this. For example, on this YouTube video composed entirely of clips of the Monkey Ball narrator voice, somebody said, "wonder who was the announcer," and somebody else replied, "I think the announcer is Patrick Harlan, the voice of Gongon and Dr. Bad-Boon." And a third guy replies, "hey... you're right." Likewise, when I talk to my friends who are experts on Super Monkey Ball, or even just taking a cursory search of a popular Super Monkey Ball discord, they always bring up Patrick's name as the most likely candidate. And it's not just internet hearsay, either - there is some pretty compelling evidence that Patrick is the guy we're looking for, and that evidence is found within the Super Monkey Ball series itself. See, while Patrick is nowhere to be found in the credits of Super Monkey Ball 1, Patrick does show up in the credits of Super Monkey Ball 2. Play through these interactive credits - an entirely different minigame from in the first game - get to the Monkey Voice section, and there you'll see Patrick Harlan, the only American name on the entire staff of both games. Now, here's where it gets interesting. In most places you look, Patrick is credited as doing the voice of two characters in Super Monkey Ball 2: Gongon, the monkey who sounds like this; and Dr. Bad-Boon, who sounds like this: And while both those voices are barely recognizable as human, the logic goes like this: since Patrick is already confirmed to have contributed his vocal talents in some way to the Super Monkey Ball franchise, and since he's the only native English speaker on the game's staff, it just makes the most sense that Patrick is the announcer. Hell, go to Patrick Harlan's Wikipedia page and he's listed as "Monkey voice and narrator in Super Monkey Ball 2." At this point, the evidence seemed clear: Patrick Harlan had to be the voice of the announcer in Super Monkey Ball. He is literally the only guy it could be. All that was left was to confirm it with the man himself. Simple, right? - Goal. (speaking in Japanese) - The thing is... Patrick Harlan is not an easy guy to get a hold of. While he may not be a household name here in the west, Patrick is a certifiable celebrity over in Japan. Turn on the TV in Japan, and it won't be long before you see Patrick's face. He's been a comedian living in Tokyo for over 20 years, and he's also half of the two man manzai comedy duo, PakkunMakkun. (speaking in Japanese) Patrick does commercials, public appearances, he co-hosts TV shows: (speaking in Japanese) Patrick is easily in the running for being one of the most famous American-born celebrities living in Japan. For this reason, I knew hunting down Patrick was going to be tricky. Understandably, there has been no contact info for Patrick Harlan available on the Internet, and in an act of desperation, I had even tried months ago to reach out through his management, but never heard back. It didn't take long for me to realize that if I was gonna speak to this guy, I would have to track him down in person. Out of options and desperate for some sort of resolution, I knew what I had to do, so I booked a plane ticket and got on a flight to Tokyo in search of answers. Upon arriving in Tokyo, I began formulating a plan. I already knew that there was no way to contact Patrick directly, so that wasn't gonna be an option, and I started looking for other ways to reach out to the man. Eventually, I found an article about Patrick in a local newspaper called the Japan Times and was able to piece together the reporter's email address. I reached out, explaining the situation of this reporter, not expecting much of anything, but incredibly, just a few minutes later, in my inbox I had a reply. Here's what that reporter told me. "Patrick's email address is (whooshing noise), although I can't guarantee he'll reply. He can be quite a tricky person to get a hold of because his schedule changes quite a lot, but that's probably your best bet." The next morning, I excitedly fired off an email to Patrick, telling him I wanted to speak to him about his days a voice actor in the early 2000s, and then I waited. No reply. I kept waiting. Nothing. Soon, almost an entire week had passed and I still hadn't heard back from Patrick. I don't know what I expected - I had been warned that he was not an easy guy to get a hold of, but I was running out of time. I only had a few days left in Japan, and meeting up with Patrick was a major part of my reason for coming. Out of total desperation, I fired off one last late night email to Patrick, figuring it was at least worth a shot and then fell asleep. The next morning, having overslept, I rolled over, picked up my phone, and saw this: "Hi, Nick, you've actually caught me on a good day. I'm free 'til two if you want to meet for liquids or solids. Pat." Disheveled but excited, I jumped out of bed and immediately called Patrick on the phone number he had given me, terrified that I had overslept and missed my chance. Two o'clock was only a couple hours away and I wanted to do everything in my power to make this appointment, so I called Patrick. (phone ringing) Hey, Patrick, it's Nick. - Hi, Nick, thank for reaching out. Well, if you've got something to do at two o' clock, I am happy to come to you. Do you have any favorite lunch or coffee places you'd recommend? - Oh, tell you what, I'll look something up and I'll meet you at the station. Ooh, okay, sounds good. All right, looking forward to meeting you. - All right. All right, see you soon. - See you soon. Bye. - Okay, bye-bye. And suddenly, just like that, I had scheduled an in person meeting with the Patrick Harlan. Soon, I left my Airbnb and began making my way towards the train station Patrick had asked me to meet him at. As I made my way toward Shinjuku, I still couldn't quite believe this was happening. It seemed kind of crazy to be taking time out of a celebrity like Patrick's day just to answer this trivial question that we basically knew the answer to already about a video game from 18 years ago, but at the same time, I was excited to just have it so the world could finally know with absolute certainty that this man was the announcer from Super Monkey Ball. Finally, I met up with Patrick and he brought me to a nearby kebab restaurant for lunch and we began our interview. So, if you can introduce yourself and tell me what you do? - Sure. My name is Patrick Harlan. I go by the stage name Pakuun of the manzai-komi - which means a comic duo - PakuunMakuun. I am, at least in my telling, the original... the first American-born comedian in Japan and I've been here for 26 years. I've been a professional comedian for 23, and I am probably the most famous American that no Americans know. (laughing) That's a good way of putting it. I know in your early years in Japan, you did a little bit of voice work, right? - Mhm. Can you tell me some of the projects you worked on? - You probably know better than I. Okay, (laughing) it's been a while. So, the one that I'm most interested in is Super Monkey Ball. - (laughing) Okay. Super Monkey Ball is my personal... one of my favorite game series of all time. - Okay. And you're credited as doing the voice of Gongon. - Okay, what's his voice? He's like, (grunting) ...he doesn't really talk a lot. It's mostly monkey noises, and then there's Dr. Bad-Boon. - Okay. But one of the mysteries that I was hoping to solve while I was here is there's a narrator in that game, and nobody knows who he is, he's uncredited, but the working theory is that it's Patrick Harlan. - Really? wow! Yeah, but nobody knows for sure. I've got some clips of him. - Okay. I know this almost impossible, but this-- - Well, we'll see if it sounds like me. Honestly, I was nervous, the answer to this question was finally right within my grasp. This was it! This was the moment of truth! I pulled up a YouTube video of the Super Monkey Ball announcer's voice and I pressed play. - "Clear, goal, goal, goal, go, go, go, lose, lose, player one, player two, player three, player four, rank in, ready, ready, results." - That's not me. That's not you...?! - No! So many people have... So there's a few possible answers, but Patrick Harlan is the one that everybody seems confident is the right answer. "I think the announcer is Patrick Harlan, the voice of Gongon and Dr. Bad-Boon." "Hey, you're right." (laughing) Maybe not! Seemingly not. - Sorry, Jim. Sorry, Josh, I don't think so. Wow. I was floored. Patrick Harlan was not the Super Monkey Ball announcer. Just a few minutes ago, I was confident, thinking I'd had the answer in my hands, and suddenly, I had felt like I had no idea, no leads, nothing. I was overwhelmed. When I finally came to, Patrick was still talking, and graciously, he offered to help steer me in the right direction. - Have you talked to the old narrating crew? - Brian, I can't remember his last name, but I can come up with it... Chris Wells... Michael Nashtut... there used to be a group of us who did this, lots and lots of voices. And they might be able to help us suss out who this is here. - Yeah. Patrick explained to me that back in the day, there was a small tightly knit crew of English voice actors living here in Tokyo and that most of them all knew each other. (laughing) All right, well, I'll keep digging. - 'Ready, geeeaaauuux!' I don't usually say 'geeaauuux.' Yeah, he definitely says 'geaux.' - 'Geaux.' (laughing) you've gotta look at the guy who, when he answers his phone or says good morning in Japanese, he's like 'Oh-hie-yao go-zayy-mahs.' Listen for that 'Geaux.' - 'Geaux. Geaux.'. Amazing. All righty, well, I'll let you-- - Yeah, sorry to waste your time, buddy-- You did not! You did not. I said my goodbyes to Patrick and I headed home. I was torn. On the one hand, the number of possible candidates for the Monkey Ball announcer had suddenly gone from two people... to infinity. It was extremely daunting. I thought this trip was a tactical strike, a surefire hit where I just pop over to Japan, as one does, and casually confirm a long-held Super Monkey Ball fan theory. But that theory... had just been shot down. I had thought I was rolling up to the goal, but as it turns out, I had suddenly hit a ceiling. And yet, somehow, in a weird way, this road block left me feeling reinvigorated. I had just discovered that the entire Internet was wrong about something - something significant - and the responsibility to uncover the truth landed squarely on my shoulders. I went back my Airbnb to regroup. I only had a little bit of time left in Tokyo, just a few hours, so I decided I would spend that time chasing down every last lead. After our discussion, Patrick had given me the number of another voice actor named Chris Wells - a guy who, according to Patrick, knew everyone in this underworld of Tokyo narrators and voice actors, and a guy who might be able to point me in the right direction. So I gave Chris a call. (phone ringing) (speaking in Japanese) Hi, is this Chris? - Hi, this is Nick Robinson. Patrick Harlan gave me your phone number. Yes, yeah, hey, nice to meet you. All righty. I was speaking to Patrick because I'm trying to find the uncredited voice of the announcer in Super Monkey Ball, the Sega game from 2001, and it's proven very tricky because the only credited English speaker on the game is Patrick, but it's not his voice and I'm curious if you have any good leads or any idea who might have done work with Sega as an English speaker in 2001. I know that's pretty broad, but I'm trying to chase down every lead here. Yeah, sure. What's the name? Oh, no worries... Now, while Chris wasn't able to identify this voice on the spot, Chris told me that there was a resource that I hadn't looked into yet. See, there existed what amounted to a full list of every single English speaking voice actor active in Tokyo, Japan in the early 2000s. And that list? That list was the voice cast of the video game Shenmue. Yeah? Wow. And Chris' point was a great one. Shenmue had a voice cast cast chock-full of Tokyo-based English speaking voice actors, so if the Super Monkey Ball guy was anywhere to be found, there was a significant chance he was somewhere on this list. Now, this was exciting - it felt like the first remotely concrete lead I had since I hopes were dashed that Patrick was the Super Monkey Ball announcer - but Shenmue also had a cast of over 70 people, and there was no real guarantee at the end of the day that any one of them was definitely the culprit. And worse than that... I was out of time. Well, Chris, thank you so much for your time. I actually have to catch a flight back to Los Angeles in a couple hours. But thank you so, so much for your help, seriously. If this mystery gets solved, it's gonna be because of this conversation, because of your help today, so thank you so much. Thank you so much, Chris. Thanks, have a good rest of your day, bye. With my mystery still unsolved, I flew back to Los Angeles feeling more than a little dejected. Honestly, the whole situation was a little maddening. Here I had poured so much time and energy into uncovering the identity of the Super Monkey Ball announcer, but at the end of the day, I was going home empty-handed... And, what's worse, I had no idea if I was 95% of the way to solving the mystery or 5% of the way there. I felt like I had failed. Over the weeks that followed, I reached out to everybody I could from the Shenmue cast, but a lot of them were hard to get in touch with, and many of them had no public internet presence to speak of. I was haunted by the potential dead ends in this situation. If I learned anything from the interviews I had conducted, it was that being an English-speaking voice actor in Japan was a busy job. Often, these guys have multiple voice recording sessions every single day, and this was just one specific session from over 18 years ago. We're talking about a video game from 2001. This was so long ago at this point that it seemed like most of the voice actors from that era barely remembered anything from back in those days. What if I found the culprit and he simply didn't remember? I was ready to give up. - Ready? Go! In a hail-mary last ditch effort to solve this mystery, I fired off one last email to Chris, the guy I had spoken to on the phone, to see if he could help me get in touch with the last few people I hadn't been able to contact, and if this didn't work I was ready to set down this mystery for good. I emailed Chris, but I didn't hear back right away. But then, a few hours later, I got an email - an email from a name I didn't recognize. It was from a man named Brian Matt - a name that was nowhere on my list of potential candidates to be the Super Monkey Ball announcer - and it read as follows: Hello, Chris and Nick, hope you're both doing well. Yes, I did this narration. Can't remember which company, but, yes, that is my voice. Hope you are both well. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu, Brian. My heart practically stopped. Could this really be the guy? Frantically, I emailed this Brian guy back trying not to sound too excited and asked him if he would agree to an interview. He said yes. (phone ringing) Hey. - Hey, hello, how are you? Good, how are you? - Good, good, good. - You found me. I did..! that's exactly how I feel right now - I found you. Finally, I found him. I guess just to start, question number one for me is, how much do you remember of this role? Do you remember the session? - Yes, I do. I do remember going there and it took roughly two and half, three hours, maybe a half hour break, and at that time, it's funny, the director's there, the producer's there, the Sega sponsors are there. There's many, many people in the room - and then when you hit a certain pitch or you hit a certain tone... "Go! GO! Congratulations!" - ...and then they're like, hey, keep going, keep going, then they just add and add, and add, and add. - So I do remember that in particular. We do a lot of work, I'm sure Chris Wells or Patrick told ya. - It's in and out, in and out, in and out, - I hate to say it's a commodity, but... Have you ever seen what the gameplay of Super Monkey Ball is like? - I saw it actually in the studio. Oh, interesting! You were seeing it as you were recording the voice over a little bit? - No, I saw it first just to get the idea and then I got to see what the whole characters and try to understand the insanity of it all, to get an understanding - otherwise, I mean, you really don't know, so when you're going into something that's a game like this, like I said, they're not gonna use the standard, "It's a Sony," they're not gonna [want] the low voice. They want someone who... I mean, monkeys are crazy, They want someone who's a crazy monkey, I guess you could say. Totally, yeah, that actually does make perfect sense. I feel like this interview would be incomplete if I didn't ask you to revisit the voice at least a little. Like, I just wanna hear... it's been like 20 years, I just wanna hear a little bit of the "ready" and "go," and just that cadence again. I think that's what would be the perfect end cap to this if you have it in you. - 'Congratulations! Ready? Go!' yeah. Oh, my God. I wanna highlight this moment, I wanna pinpoint this, because it was this moment that he said "ready!" and "go!" in the exact voice of the Monkey Ball announcer, it was then that I knew with 100% certainty this was the guy. - "Ready? Go!" Now, with the mystery finally solved, there was only one real question left, which was: who was this Brian Matt guy and how did I not find him before? Well, the thing about that is... I did find him before. On multiple occasions actually. Let me explain. See, in putting together this video - the one you're watching right now - I went through all my interviews multiple times when editing all this together. I thought back to my conversations with Patrick and Chris and... I found something interesting: It turns out that Brian guy that Patrick remembered and the Matt guy that Chris remembered - both of them were the same guy. So the person who contacted me - the guy I just interviewed - his name is Brian Matt. They remembered his first and last name separately. Incredibly, it turns out that Patrick and Chris had BOTH been right: without any of us realizing it, both of them had been able to accurately identify the voice of the Monkey Ball announcer when I played it for them. Unknowingly, we had had all the puzzle pieces right under our nose the entire time. But only in hindsight were we able to put the puzzle together. - Goal@ At the end of all this, I couldn't help but feel incredibly grateful to the people who helped me on this journey - the guys who took time out of their lives to help some random YouTuber on a search that probably seemed very inconsequential for them. For almost 20 years, the Super Monkey Ball announcer was completely anonymous - a faceless, nameless, disembodied voice that was inexorably to millions and millions of childhoods... mine included. Without the help of Patrick Harlan or Chris Wells - without their expertise, their network of Tokyo-based narrator friends from the old days, their incredible ear for detecting each others' voices, without those things, who knows how much longer the Monkey Ball announcer's identity would have stayed a mystery? Maybe he would have taken another 18 years before we figured it out - or maybe it would have remained a mystery forever. And, y'know, maybe you're asking yourself, "Who cares?" Maybe you're just laying in bed and you've been watching this YouTube video and you've been too lazy to turn it off, so you watched all the way to the end and you're not a Monkey Ball fan. That's fine. I think that's a lot of my audience, frankly. But... I care. Like... it's important to *me*. The idea of this guy going uncredited for the rest of time... bothered me. Like, putting aside the personal satisfaction I get from cracking open a mystery like this, there's something about finding these blind spots and finding these voices that I've heard literally tens of thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands of times... - Ready? Go! When I reflect on this, I think about my experience playing Monkey Ball as a kid - the way that these small voice clips that this guy Brian Matt recorded in a studio somewhere in Tokyo 18 years ago - the way that they're burned into my head, the way that the exact cadence and rhythm of the way he read these lines is... just feels like it's a part of my soul. I think about how there are millions of people who had that experience just like me: millions of kids and adults, all the speedrunners who played Monkey Ball hours a day for over a decade now - how many times they've heard this guy say "Ready, go!", "fall out," all that stuff. It's tempting to... to make this into a joke for me and to act like this is trivial and it isn't important, but honestly, if I'm being real, it is. This, to me, is important. And... yeah. I'm just... it feels good to have solved this mystery, so... I'll leave it at that. Thank you for watching. - [Announcer] "Thanks for watching youtube.com/babylonian! Don't forget to like this video and subscriiiibe!"
Info
Channel: Nick Robinson
Views: 3,082,648
Rating: 4.9551916 out of 5
Keywords: super monkey ball, gaming, aiai, meemee, baby, gongon, dr. bad-boon, smb, super monkey ball 2, history, amusement vision, voice actors, announcer, narrator, super monkey ball announcer, patrick harlan, pakkun makkun, pakkun-makkun, γƒ‘γƒƒγ‚―γƒ³γƒžγƒƒγ‚―γƒ³ 公式, packunmackun, sega, banana blitz hd, monkey voice, mystery, discovery, theory, investigation, voice, seiyuu, interview, nintendo gamecube, super monkey ball deluxe, super monkey ball dx, voice actor, voice acting
Id: inUkotGb-K4
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 31min 15sec (1875 seconds)
Published: Sat Dec 07 2019
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