An Afternoon with Mike Pollock

Interview originally Recorded on October 11th, 2010

Mike Pollock is one of New York's premier animation voice-over actors. Saturday morning cartoon viewers of FOX and The CW might recognize his voice as Garbageman on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dr. Eggman and Ella on Sonic X and the Sonic the Hedgehog video games, Bigoriki in Gororiki, and Langston Lickatoad in Viva Piñata.

He is well known to Pokémon fans as the Narrator and Mr. Contesta. Earlier this year we asked viewers of this website for questions to ask Mr. Pollock and he has graciously answered them in the interview. TSS_Killer and inu-liger had the opportunity to interview Mike and to discuss voice acting with him on October 11th, 2010. Below is that interview. A full transcription of the interview is also available. Be sure to post your comments about the interview on the forum thread.

Video of Interview

Source: itsamike.com

For the record, inu-liger and myself were at a 4 1/2 hour concert the night before which explains the inconsistencies during this interview.

Interesting interview with some good questions. The audio quality is very good as expected with the recorded audio equipment used though the video seemed to turn out a bit dark. Could have used a bit more lighting.

Mr. Pollock seems like a very nice and friendly guy, open to all the questions that were asked. It was very gracious of him to agree to do the interview.

Got some interesting tidbits about the internal dubbing process for the Pokemon anime which is always good to know. Fans are always interested in those kinds of things.

The reasoning behind that is because of the automatic white balancing on the other two cameras (the wide shot was done with a Creative Vado HD 1st generation, and the three-shot was taken with a Kodak Zi8). Since I was wearing a dark shirt, and inu-liger was wearing a white shirt, the white balance was constantly searching for the correct white balance. That resulted in the constant shift of light and dark shots.

Nice interview indeed! I only think the sound could do with a little boost, though it was very clear.


PS: You guys need a twitter account so I can RT you ;)

This is really good stuff!

It's really well produced and fun to watch. Congratulations!

The interview was indeed interesting, and I found that the video, as well as the audio were of exceptional quality. The audio being of so high quality sure helped in making the interview more comprehensive to a non-native English speaker, such as myself.

In addition, as Sunain has already said, it was really nice to get some insight on how the American dub of the Pokemon anime has been handled both in the 4Kids era, and nowadays by PUSA. Mr. Pollock gave some pretty funny answers on some of the questions, which made the interview all the more amusing to watch, and also provided us with some really interesting information on what being a voice actor entails.


Last but not least, I'd like to say congratulations to both TSS_Killer and inu-liger for their amazing job on this interview. :-)

Mike Pollock really is a nice guy. It really makes me appreciate the work that VA put into their work, and the people chosen as VA's.

It was also nice to see 4kids stance on dubbing >.>. Still not enough to make me hate them more than TPCi's butchering of Team Rocket

Anyway, this was really interesting and I probably never would have seen it if it weren't on here, thank you PM.net

I had a blast meeting and interviewing Mike Pollock. He was a really fun, great guy to hang out with and interact with!

We will be working on a 'bonus' YouTube video derived from the interview, which should feature some awesome post-interview segments including a vocal booth recording demonstration as well as a tour of the studio.

Stay tuned for news on that.

One thing I notice is most voice actors do not actually watch the show they do voices for, and if they do, its only a handful of eps and not every episode.

He obviously didn't know what was going on in Best Wishes or most of the PUSA dub.

These VA's are not fans, they don't care about the anime unless they are getting a paycheck.