Peter Fernandez
Speed Racer reached American children through Peter Fernandez's typewriter as much as through his voice. When the 1967 anime was brought over, he co-wrote the English scripts, directed the voice cast, and wrote the English words to the theme song, which is why the whole thing sounds the way it does: the breakneck line readings squeezed to fit Japanese mouth flaps, the compressed, over-explained dialogue, and a theme that half the people who can sing it have never seen the show attached to.
His career reached back to the 1930s, long before any of that, so the anime work was a second act rather than a start. He kept at it. Star Blazers, the English version of a serialised space opera that trusted its audience to follow a plot across a whole season, gave him Mark Venture. Superbook followed in the 1980s. In practical terms he was one of the handful of people who decided what Japanese animation sounded like in English at the moment American audiences first met it.
The 2008 feature version of Speed Racer brought him back for a small announcer part, and he narrated the audio edition of the picture book It Looked Like Spilt Milk. He died in 2010.
Movies (1)
TV (3)
Where to start with Peter Fernandez
Star Blazers is the one to watch first, and it is a better show than Speed Racer. It was among the earliest Japanese series to reach American television with its serialised story mostly intact, one continuous plot with a deadline hanging over it, and Fernandez's Mark Venture sits at the centre of the crew.
The 1967 Speed Racer series itself is not among the credits listed here, which is a shame, because it is his monument. What is here is Speed Racer, the 2008 feature, where he takes a small announcer role in a film that sincerely tries to translate the cartoon's colour and speed rather than apologise for it, and Speed Racer: The Next Generation, the later animated continuation.
Superbook rounds it out and is mostly of historical interest, the same dubbing pipeline he helped build pointed at a completely different audience.