Last Updated: 1 year ago
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An episode of The Big Hit Show podcast revealed that famed actor Leonardo DiCaprio was as soon as thought of as a attainable voice actor for Ash Ketchum, the primary protagonist of the Pokémon anime collection.
This info got here to gentle within the Spotify podcast by host Alex Pappademas, who spent the episode discussing the early historical past of Pokémon and the cultural phenomenon it grew to become within the United States. Pappademas defined that in the course of the top of the Pokémon craze, 4Kids and Norman Grossfeld, the producer for the English language model of Pokémon: The First Movie, started “procuring” the movie to American film studios. During a gathering, a consultant of one of many studios pitched Grossfeld the thought of casting Leonardo DiCaprio as Ash Ketchum.
“He mentioned, ‘Hey, we actually need this. We could make this work. We’re going to herald Leonardo DiCaprio to play the voice of Ash,” Grossfeld mentioned. “‘It’s going to get lots of buzz, we will have quite a bit and we’ll get all these celebrities. It’s going to be actually large.'”
Pappademas defined that by the point the primary Pokémon movie was pitched stateside, Leonardo DiCaprio’s starring position within the 1997 movie Titanic had made him “one of many largest stars of his era.” However, regardless of the studio’s pleasure on the prospect of casting DiCaprio, Grossfeld, maintaining the viewers of the Pokémon anime in thoughts, turned the thought down.
“Whether he [DiCaprio] might have been enticed to play Ash on this film is unclear, however both means it would not have mattered as a result of Norman says he mentioned no to DiCaprio in that assembly,” Pappademas mentioned. “Because, as Norman noticed it, having anyone else do the voice would have been bizarre for the youngsters who’d grown accustomed to Ash sounding the best way he did within the present. Pokémon had grow to be so large so shortly that the addition of Leonardo DiCaprio–a individual you typically need concerned in a film should you’re making one, and he is available– would have taken away from it. Norman ended up making a distribution take care of Warner Bros.”
Decades after the primary movie’s launch, the Pokémon franchise remains to be going sturdy, with 24 anime seasons and 23 animated movies beneath its belt. New episodes of the continued Pokémon Master Journeys are being launched in English on Netflix. The subsequent main installments of the Pokémon online game collection, Scarlet and Violet, are presently in improvement and can launch for Nintendo Switch on Nov. 18.
Source: Spotify
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