It was 2005 when voice actor Kenny James heard
back from Nintendo: he was to be the new voice of Bowser! This was his first professional voice acting
role ever, so he was pretty excited. Except - throughout his years of voicing the
character, there was one particular event that stood out to Kenny James, and, uh, not
exactly in a good way. It was a recording session that he would never
forget, for reasons you’ll soon find out. This is the story of how Bowser’s voice
actor lost his voice. So, I’ve talked about Kenny James before,
in my video about Bowser’s voice. But what I didn’t mention in that video
was an incident that happened during the recording of Super Mario 3D World. This was around 2012 or so, and Nintendo were
in production on the game. To make it stand out from its predecessor,
3D Land, they had invented a new powerup called the cat bell. Now, the cat bell is a power-up which turns
you into a cat. You can climb up walls, you can scratch enemies. But the interesting thing about the cat bell,
and the thing that makes it important here, is that it’s not just the player who can
use the cat bell: enemies can use it too! Goombas can turn into cat goombas, bullet
bills can turn into cat bullet bills... And, for the final twist of the game, during
the final battle where you fight Bowser, he too gets a hold of a giant cat bell, You have
to try and escape up this tall tower, and then Bowser climbs up the side of it, cat
style! So, obviously, this new cat form of Bowser
needed a catty voice too. Which brings us back to Kenny James. It all started with a regular recording session. Kenny James arrived at the studio where he
would be recording voices for the next Mario game. Now Nintendo are very secretive about their
games, so Kenny James knew basically nothing about what the thing he was recording was. The first 2 hours were fairly normal, with
Kenny James recording various noises for Bowser to make. But then, two hours in, when he turned the
page of his script, he saw the word “Meowser” in quotes. He turned to the person from Nintendo, and
said “This is hilarious! What do you want him to sound like?” And the guy from Nintendo paused, stopped
for a second, and then answered, “We don’t know.” In other words, it was all down to Kenny James
to come up with the voice of the character. It was time for some improv! “So I thought, well Bowser’s too big to
sound like “meow, meow” so I went wild cat, which was more like a “MREOW, MEORW!” And I thought, well he can’t just sound
like a cat, so I have to roll “ROAR” into that. So it wound up being “REOOOOORWW, RAAAWRLL!” So, that was just a few seconds of Kenny James
doing the voice, but notice that the woman sitting next to him, voice actress Jen Taylor,
cut in at the end: “don’t hurt yourself”. That was after a few seconds of the voice,
but take a guess at how long Kenny’s recording session was for Meowser. It was 2 hours. For two long hours, after already spending
two hours making exhausting Bowser sounds, Kenny James had to meow and roar again and
again and again: every sound that Meowser makes in the game was recorded in one go. And by the time he was finally done, Kenny
James could taste blood. His throat was bleeding. That’s just how much this session impacted
his voice. Now, after the recording was done, the audio
would be sent off to Nintendo of Japan, and the Japanese developers would decide whether
it was good enough to go in the game. Kenny was worried they’d say no, and he’d
have to do a whole 'nother session. Thankfully though, it was approved. Phew! But what about Kenny’s voice? Well, whenever Nintendo knew they were gonna
have a really awful session like that, they would be sure to get all the other voice recordings
out of the actor first, because after one of these intensive sessions, the actor’s
voice would be as good as useless. And if we’re talking about intensive sessions,
Kenny James as Meowser is one of the worst that's even taken place. After his throat bled, I can’t image he’d
be able to record much else. Which is why the timing was so terrible! You see, this recording session was on Wednesday. And on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Kenny
James was performing in a live theatre production of the musical Evita. And it’s not like he was a background character,
either. Kenny's character was this guy here, Magaldi,
who has to sing an entire solo tango piece directly to the audience. "Where the music loves guitar, play forever
more!" So, as soon as the recording session for Meowser
was over, Kenny James rushed home and rested his voice completely. He tried not to speak, he tried not to interact
with people: no singing, no nothing! Anything that could stop it from healing,
he avoided it like the plague. So did it work? Did his voice come back? "Hey Heath, it's Kenny James! Hey thanks for stopping by my..." Thankfully, yes it did! Although this was the worst recording session
of Kenny James' life, his voice did eventually bounce back, and his live musical performance
went off without a hitch. More importantly though, he was able to speak
again afterwards. And that would be the end of the story, except
there’s one final twist. You see, you would expect this whole experience
to be extremely traumatic, right? I mean, I was actually considering not making
this video for that very reason - I don’t wanna monetise someone’s trauma after all! But then, I stumbled upon an interview. And, just let me show you. “What are some of your favourite games that
you’ve voiced Bowser and Peach?” “3D World because of Meowser." "I mean, you bled for one of those. Yeah, I was pretty proud of that big cat,
man!” So, contrary to what you might expect - certainly
what I expected! - this recording session was actually really important to Kenny James! Oh, and if you’re wondering how common this
kind of thing is in voice acting - well, most voice actors have some kind of horror story
where they destroy their voice, although I’ve never in my life heard one as bad as Kenny
James'. But for instance, right before Kenny James
told his story in this interview, voice actress Jen Taylor talked about how during one of
her last voice acting sessions for the animated show RWBY, she had to shout for hours on end
and lost her voice for a week. No blood though thankfully! And that’s the story of Kenny James’ most
traumatic voice recording session, although apparently not traumatic for him - just traumatic
for us to hear! Stepping back for a sec, if you want to hear
how Kenny ended up voicing Bowser in the first place, then you should check out my video
on Why Bowser doesn’t sound like he used to! And if you’ve already seen it, then subscribe
to the channel because I’ve got more voice acting and non-voice acting videos coming
very soon. So, I’ll see you then! Ciao!
