Are yall old enough to remember when all the voice actors in the pokémon dub got replaced with sound alikes because they banded together and asked for a raise after Pokémon blew up into a huge phenomenon?
Voice actors often seem to get the short end of the stick compared to live action actors, seen as disposable since they “just speak into a microphone with silly voices.”
Well, nobody would say that exact phrase but there’s reason why animated feature films by Disney or Dreamworks try to rope in big live action stars like Jack Black or Alec Baldwin rather than regular voice actors.
Any time they do, it’s for a bit part or the movie is pretty much straight-to-DVD. Best they can hope for is a limited theater run that may do surprisingly well if enough on the internet hear about it.
Other times, a movie based on a TV show like My Little Pony will keep the voice actors from the show but have the stars voicing the new characters get top billing to compensate or something.
This, of course, is based on the ever enduring stigma against animation as a whole within Hollywood as studios see it a way to make a quick buck and star power as a way to compensate whether or not the film is, you know, good.
Hence, Pokemon got a real bad case of this mentality when the voice actors who regularly dub Anime asked for a raise and seemed to forget their place when it comes to the arbitrary hierarchy of show business.