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Dragon Ball Z's Christopher Sabat never heard the Japanese dub of Piccolo before he recorded his lines - but he did hear the Latin America dub of the anime

Dubbing anime in the West has always been a wild ride, but finding out that Funimation got the Latin America dub as a reference instead of the Japanese dub is a bit surprising.

Piccolo Surprised Dragon Ball — Image credit: Toei Animation

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Mon Apr 07 2025

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When it comes to dubbing anime, few people have been doing it quite as long as Christopher Sabat. He’s been playing Vegeta, Piccolo, and Yamcha, plus plenty of other characters in Dragon Ball Z, since 1999. So when he talks about how the dubbing industry has changed over the years, it is worth listening to him. As he puts it, things were so different back when he first started voicing Piccolo that he never even heard the original Japanese voice until years later.

In an interview, Sabat was asked if he tried to make his Piccolo voice different from the original Japanese actor, Toshio Furukawa. Turns out, he never got the chance to even hear Furukawa before he stepped into the booth.

“It’s been interesting, because when we first started working on Dragon Ball, back in the late ‘90s, we didn’t have a lot of good material, nor did we have the digital technology we have today. So we didn’t even have the correct Japanese version of Dragon Ball. In fact, I think they got the master recordings from Mexico. They were a licensed broadcast that already aired, so in Japan, they told us, ‘Just use theirs.’ So even when we did listen to the ‘original,’ it was in Spanish. And so I never got much exposure as to what Piccolo really did sound like in Japanese. We had to guess on a lot of it.”

It wasn’t until years later, when Christopher Sabat and the rest of the Funimation dubbing team were exposed more to the original Japanese version of the show, which changed the way he viewed several of the characters. “I had some real revelations about Goku,” he explains. “So over the years, my interpretation of these characters has changed quite a bit, based on the knowledge I’ve gotten about the show.”

So it turns out you can thank Carlos Segundo, the voice of Piccolo in the Latin America dub of Dragon Ball Z, for a lot of the English version of the character. Because sometimes even the most influential anime rely on a strange case of telephone to be made.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included...