>>15437043I have. If I wanted Matsumoto I would listen to Matsumoto. Sarah cannot act very well, and doesn't sound like a kid at all. She sounds like a chain-smoking woman some of the time and an awful Taylor impersonator the other half. It's uneven. Natoshitty was also told to sound like Taylor (but kids won't care about the voice changes, right?) and does a bad job of that, too. Part of it probably isn't her fault because the show's direction is just awful nowadays (the new director is supposedly a dick, too), but even taking that out of the picture, there's more to it, which I'll get to below.
Actual VOICES aside, let's get to the more important part: the acting. What I liked about Taylor's performance is that she took the character beyond that hot-blooded, almost angry sounding performance you mentioned. She gave him a charm that went beyond Ash's competitive streak. She made him more three-dimensional. She gave Ash compassion and had a more "realistic" performance. If you've heard interviews with Taylor, she talks about all these different facets to the character that she was able to bring out that, quite frankly, haven't resurfaced since the recast. I'm not sure if that was just Taylor's ability as an actress or the superior voice direction from the previous dub (probably both). Poor woman, she really loved the character and didn't deserve to be kicked off the show because of corporate greed. You truly do get what you pay for and the dub's suffered ever since. 4Kids wasn't perfect (it was actually pretty flawed and the old actors, stripped of 4Kids' idiocy, would have REALLY been able to shine if they were brought on board and TPCi had different writers/directors). I say TPCI needs to move away from DuArt (the people dubbing it now) and give the dub to Funimation. Awesome dubbing company with plenty of experience with '90's anime hits. Maybe they'd even bring Taylor back on board, although their in-house talent would still do a better job than Natochenny.
