Different kind of voice, same actor?
 

Has anyone noticed that? Some characters like Mikey had a little bit of a higher pitched voice in season 1 and got deeper as time progressed. With Krang his voice was deeper in Season 2 but listen to him in Season 8 and you will know the difference. Even Bebop and Rocksteady sounded different in season 1 compared to different seasons.

I've seen that before where a character will have the same voice actor but their voice sometimes doesn't stay the same and changes over time. I was wondering if anyone noticed that.

Listen to Cam Clarke as Leonardo in Season 1 and then again in Season 8. Yeah, I've noticed that too.

That happens in cartoons sometimes. If you watch early Simpsons episodes, Homer's voice sounds deeper, more serious and less cartoony. It takes a while until voice actors get the right pitch tone for the character they're voicing.

The original cartoon aired over the course of a decade. The voice actors aged 10 years in real life. This is common sense.

I'm not acting as if this is a surprise. I thought that'd be obvious...

I know it's common sense. I'm just wondering if others noticed changes in many characters. April didn't really change her voice that much. I know after close to a decade the voice would change, but even within a season or 2 they'd sound totally different. I think Leo and Krang changed the most. But sometimes Krang will deepen his voice even in later seasons as well. Most of the time his voice was high pitched but would get lower if he was being threatening but in Season 2 almost all the time it was deeper.

Cubed, that has literally nothing to do with it. They were already adults, with adult voices. It's not like they were hitting puberty or something. Your voice doesn't really change much once you hit adulthood and stop growing. Maybe when you start to get really old (like 70's and up) but mostly, it was just them moderating their tone to better fit the characters and the feel of the show. IT happens in cartoons all the time. Actors usually take a season or two to get a real "feel" for the character, before they settle on a "voice" for them.

It's so strange how they can sound so different at first and then later. I noticed in in the first season, it sounded like Uncle Phil was trying to sort of give Shredder a japanese accent. Where Shredder would talk and he would have a slight japanese accent in the way he'd pronounce his words. Krang's voice was deeper and also his other mannerisms disappeared. He would randomly croak in the middle of a sentence but then later he would deepen his voice, and almost sounded like he was burping while he said a word.

Did anyone have a preference? Did you like their first voices or how they sounded? Like, did you like Krang's deeper voice in the early seasons or how his voice sounded later?

I noticed that the characters' voices changed when I rewatched some of the series recently. I preferred the way they sounded in the early seasons.

Sometimes they change because the voice they started out doing is to physically stressful. I think James Avery had that problem, as his Shredder was quite raspy. Sometimes I think they just forget how to do it exactly the same, and it evolves form session to session, and season to season. I guess if you were doing a bunch of voices for other characters, or working on other acting jobs, it would be difficult to keep perfect track of them all.

Voices do naturally change when you get older. Ten years ago or so, they released a special edition of The Good the Bad and the Ugly that had a few extra scenes put back into it from the Italian cut. Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach never recorded dialogue for these scenes because they had been cut out of the English language version before the dub (they shot the movie without synch sound).

So in order to add the scenes back into the movie, the restoration house decided to contact Wallach and Eastwood, and record new audio to complete the dub. The result was less than seamless in my opinion. The movie originally came out in the late 1960s, and the new dialogue was recorded in the early to mid 2000s, so Clint goes from a man in his 30s to a man in his 70s from one scene to the next. Needless to say neither he nor Eli Wallach sound the same.

Things like tobacco can have quite an impact in your voice.