Mike McFarland

Um, one of them...

So we recorded volume two prior to the passing of Mike McFarland, who played, um, Buggy the Clown in the Funimation/Crunchyroll dub, uh, for One Piece, and was the ADR director.

We did a tribute episode to him, which we highly suggest you check out.

It's, uh, titled our special 23.

Yep.

Um, on September 9th, the, we got the news that Mike McFarland passed away.

Um, if you know that name, uh, it means you're probably a hardcore Dragon Ball fan.

If you don't know that name, you probably know his work-

Yeah.

Um, so gone too soon.

Um, Mike McFarland-

Mm

Yeah, so if you ever listen to the Japanese, uh, the original Japanese, uh, dubbing of One Piece and you listen, you're gonna occasionally hear, be like, "Is that, is that Pikachu speaking and it's not cringey?" [laughs]

[laughs] Uh, before we head out here, I do want to give a, an unfortunate in memoriam to Mike McFarland-

Yes

... who passed away on September 9th, 2026, at the age of 56 following a battle with glioblastoma, which is brain cancer.

The fight ends.

Today we have VA shoutouts, the usual We Spark Your Chaos and Mike McFarland tribute.

Let's start the show.

A journey of thought with Kyle and

But we want to talk about him because he's a legend in the industry.

I feel like L.A. had Tony Oliver.

You know, I feel like in Dallas we had Mike McFarland.

Oh, yeah.

That's a bummer.

It sucks because after Chris Ayers and now Mike McFarland, it's like, yeah, we're going to start losing all these voices that we grew up with, and it's not going to take as long as we think.

Mike was terrible, though, because he was so young.

He wasn't even that old.

Yeah,

I was going to pass it over to Kestrel to give us maybe a little bit of an introduction for those who don't necessarily know who Mike McFarland is outside of being Master Roshi in some of his other roles, because this gentleman in particular had a very storied and varietous career in the anime industry stateside that really kind of...

He had his fingers in every pie that you could think of, I think, when looking at his IMDB or basically any of his credits on his websites.

But yeah, Kestrel, if you want to put some folks in for those who may be a little bit newer or just unawares.

I certainly hope I will be educating all of you along with our listeners.

Um, cause I'm sure anytime we've talked about dubs, I've talked about Mike McFarland being my favorite ADR director and writer.

Um, And when we had our episode almost 10 years ago about our favorite dubs, probably all of my picks were ones that he pretty much worked on, uh, exclusively and at least some that, he worked on in some unusual ways as well.

So just to give some background here, um, Mike McFarland was, as we mentioned, um, One of the only consistent mainstays of anime dubbing in the Funimation talent pool, I'm not going to call it Crunchyroll, it's Funimation.

...

the day that Mike McFarland passed away.

Yeah.

Who-

Yeah.

Um-

W- W- An iconic voice in the w- a, a different style to Mike McFarland.

Yeah.

Sure, sure, sure.

It seems like all my news of the weeks have been depressing of late, and I can't help but, uh, continue that, because the anime community lost another giant this past week as Mike McFarland finally succumbed to his glioblastoma diagnosis from 2025.

And not unlike Peter Cullen, who we talked about, uh, two weeks ago when I was on the podcast, who was obviously Optimus Prime, Mike McFarland probably had a, a larger hand in a lot of the younger anime fans' growth.

Um, he was a producer, a director.

Um, he was best known as the English voice actor for Master Roshi and Yajirobe in Dragon Ball and its sequels.