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The Forgotten Dub of Soar High! Isami

by bowl-of-lentils

This is a re-posting of something I wrote on Tumblr back near the end of April. It is obviously not really about a video game but a lot of the voice talent mentioned in the blog are actors from various video games and the company that released the show in the US was a former visual novel publisher, so I thought the community here might find this interesting. Make sure to click on all the fun hy...

This is a re-posting of something I wrote on Tumblr back near the end of April. It is obviously not really about a video game but a lot of the voice talent mentioned in the blog are actors from various video games and the company that released the show in the US was a former visual novel publisher, so I thought the community here might find this interesting. Make sure to click on all the fun hyper links for videos and other informative stuff :)

Soar High! Isami - Group TAC - 1995

Remember when anime DVDs would always advertise on the box who directed the show? I imagine only a very small number of people knew who Tatsuo Sato was in 2003, or even now.

Back in 2003 Hirameki International, a short lived company mainly known for localizing a handful of visual novels in the early 2000s, briefly threw their hat into the anime publishing industry by releasing two shows, Idol Fighter SU-CHI-PAI and a kid’s show named Soar High! Isami. The later follows a young girl named Isami and two boys, Toshi and Soshi, who are all descendants of the Shinsengumi. They use technology left behind by their ancestors to fight against the Black Goblin, an evil mastermind that is trying to control the world and who is hunting Isami’s missing father in order to steal his scientific research.

Lately I’ve been obsessing over this seemly average kid’s anime because while Idol Fighter can be easily found and watched online there is surprisingly little information about Hirameki’s release of Soar High! Isami. I was especially curious of the show’s English dub since there are no details online about the actors or whoever produced the dub. Because of the lack of information on the show my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to pick up the DVDs, which wasn’t very hard since there were only three volumes released and they can be found almost anywhere for real cheap. According to the ending credits on the DVDs these are the actors and actresses that starred in Soar High! Isami (at least the ones that were credited):

I couldn’t find information on every actor, and I’m not sure if all of my information is correct, but most of the people I did find have pretty interesting backgrounds. Isami’s actress, Rumiko Varnes, has done a lot work in video games including playing Jennifer Simpson in Clock Tower for the PlayStation, the narrator in Taiko: Drum Master, and more recently she played Chloe in Pokkén Tournament. She also did some additional voices for the infamous dub of Shenmue along with several other actors in Soar High! Isami, including Michael Naishtut and Dennis Falt. Dennis Falt was the Master Librarian and Death himself in another infamous dub for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as well as notably playing Walter Sullivan in Silent Hill 4. Soness Stevens is also apparently the official English voice of Hello Kitty according to her website and Sean Nichols is semi-famous for playing the character Sean White in Ultraman Max.

After the first DVD some of the characters were played by different actors. Dennis Falt was replaced by Barry Gjerde as the Black Goblin, who’s voice you may recognize from the first Resident Evil where he famously played Barry Burton. Gjerde also did the voice for Poro Rosso, years before Michael Keaton, in a little known English dub of the famous Studio Ghibli film that was shown on JAL trans-Pacific flights in the 90s. Soshi’s voice actor was also replaced by Jeremy Felton, Greg Dale replaced Richard Allen as Kazuma, Michael Naishtut took over all the roles previously played by Blake Crawford as well as Richard Allen, and Kei as well as Reiko were now played by Terry Osada (who is another actress that played a few classic characters in Shenmue).

Although Hirameki credits most of the English cast for Soar High! Isami, they never mention who exactly created the dub for the show. However my personal theory is that it was the NHK themselves who made the dub for Hirameki. The NHK is the license holder and broadcaster of the show and several of the actors involved in the dub, such as Michael Naishtut and Soness Stevens, worked for the NHK at the time or were English actors living and working in Japan. It makes the most sense to me and there have been other cases of Japanese companies creating dubs for English publishers, such as when Tezuka Productions provided Central Park Media with the dub for the 90s Black Jack OVAs. But I guess we may never know for sure.

Even though the voice talent behind the English release of Soar High! Isami may seem like a mixed bag, the dub actually has a lot of charm to it and I found it to be very entertaining. At the very least it is refreshing to hear an anime dub that doesn’t have the same ten actors that you hear in almost every modern production.

Outside of Soar High! Isami’s interesting dub history, the show itself isn’t half-bad and is a fun little comedy with cute characters as well as some genuinely funny moments. There is also some notable talent that worked on Soar High! Isami: Tatsuo Sato of Nadesico fame directed the series along with supervision from Gisaburo Sugii, who is a an industry veteran that famously directed Night on the Galactic Railway. Animation production was done by the once prolific Group TAC and characters were designed by Kazuaki Mouri, who’s done character designs for the long-running Pokémon anime along with another TAC production called The Daichis: Earth’s Defense Family. If you are a fan of any of these people’s works then I would recommend giving Soar High! Isami a watch, especially if you are a fan of Tatsuo Sato’s later works like Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars.

But don’t take my word for it! I uploaded the dubbed episodes released by Hirameki on YouTube so you can make your own judgment and experience an obscure bit anime history.

EDIT: I re-uploaded DVD rips of the show onto the Internet Archive.