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Colleen Clinkenbeard (One Piece, Dragonball Z) doesn’t usually watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. As she shared during her panel at GalaxyCon Columbus—one of Ohio’s comic cons—she found out by other means that her character from the One Piece anime reached a dicey spot on the parade route.
She said, “I was catching up through social media and friends texting me like ‘Oh, the tree got Luffy! It’s taken out seven floats!'”
On the Popularity of ‘One Piece’
One Piece follows the story of Luffy, leader of the Straw Hat Pirates, on a quest to find treasure and become the Pirate King. Clinkenbeard explained that the series took a while to gain traction after she started working on it 16 years ago.
“It wasn’t quite catching on in America for whatever reason. We loved it all the way through. It was this effort of, ‘Please watch it. We love it so much!'”
The One Piece manga created by Eiichiro Oda is also popular. The pandemic may have been a factor in bringing in more viewership. Clinkenbeard pointed to another factor. “Some of it had to do with the fact that Oda announced that he was near the end. So people were like okay, I’ll invest.”
On Watching Her Anime at Home
Clinkenbeard enjoys watching anime at home with her husband and nine-year-old son. They are up to 380 or so episodes of One Piece. Her son even dressed as Luffy for Halloween. “Watching One Piece through my kid’s eyes is the best! I’m not even—it’s hard to watch the screen because I’m watching him all the time.”
While her parents have always been supportive of her career, they haven’t really watched her shows or tried the convention scene. Another relative is gung-ho for it, including with One Piece. “My mother-in-law totally comes! She’s so excited about all this stuff. She showed up at my house recently wearing a straw hat.”
Because of these experiences, the Luffy role resonates with Clinkenbeard on another level. “Luffy is more of a friend than a role at this point. I feel very connected to him and I feel proud of what we’ve done as a crew together.”
On Voice Acting
During the Q&A, aspiring voice actors asked Clinkenbeard if you can enter voice acting without a theater background. As she observed over the years, her colleagues and friends came from a variety of disciplines, including engineering, technology, music, and acting.
“People in music usually have better timing than people who are not. I find that people who are involved in theater are better at knowing what the physicality would be in a voice and then putting that in a voice when you’re standing in a booth.”
In her career as a voice actor and a producer, she witnessed a lot of changes behind the scenes at the recording studio, particularly with capturing a take. “I remember the sound of the tape rewinding so we could get another take. Back then if you started recording the line a little bit too early, it would start too late [on the clip].”
Today, engineers capture the audio digitally instead of on tape and they have more control over timing. Clinkenbeard said, “I can start talking right now. The engineer can decide what they want to capture, then press ‘record,’ and it would retroactively catch everything that I said!”
Visit the GalaxyCon Columbus website for more information. Follow Colleen Clinkenbeard on Instagram for her updates.
