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Same Voice Their Entire Life

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In flashbacks, it is customary for characters to have different voice actors if they're shown significantly younger. This either involves Children Voicing Children or Crossdressing Voices where a woman voices a young boy.

This trope is about exceptions to the rule. It's about when a character's voice actor stays the same in flashbacks, or more rarely when a young character's voice actor plays them as an adult. This usually doesn't cause issues if it's a female character, or if the character is an adult in all scenes; however, male ones can cause Vocal Dissonance easily. If a male character is voiced by an adult man even in flashbacks, then his voice is usually too deep, while on the opposite side boys who are voiced by women but keep their voice actresses even past puberty often come off as high-pitched sounding.

In works with multiple installments where the characters are voiced in different eras by different actors, this is usually the consequence of a previous installment's voice actor not being available for the newest installments.

Compare Dawson Casting, Flashback with the Other Darrin. Sister trope to Voices Are Mental.

Examples:

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    Anime 
  • In Beyblade G-Revolution, there were a few flashback scenes that showed Tyson Granger as a 5/6-year-old boy. In the English version of those scenes, Younger Tyson was voiced by the same voice actor as his current self (Marlowe Gardiner-Heslin), but he attempted a younger-sounding voice.
  • Bungo Stray Dogs: The Fifteen arc showcases Dazai and Chuuya back when they were fifteen, keeping the same dub and sub actors that portray the present-day versions in their twenties. Dazai sounds normal enough overall, though Chuuya is still given an incredibly deep voice in the sub which can be jarring to hear since he's extremely small and Older Than They Look. In the English dub, Atsushi keeps his usual young adult voice even as a kid.
  • Chris Patton played Joshua Christopher from Chrono Crusade even when he was shown as a child. The audio commentary shows that they used a mixture of Patton speaking higher and editing. The Japanese version used a voice actress.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • This most famously happened with Goku; several instances of women voicing adult men in anime are inspired by him. In Japan, Goku's voice was so iconic that his voice actress, Masako Nozawa, kept on voicing him even when he became an adult. She wasn't changed so that Goku's childish mindset could be expressed through his voice. In most dubs, his voice actor changes to a man after the second Time Skip (including the last arc of Dragon Ball and all of Dragon Ball Z outside flashbacks), and instead portray Goku's boyishness through acting.
    • Also in Dragon Ball Z, probably because it runs In the Blood, Son Goku's sons, Son Gohan and Son Goten, also retain their child voices during adulthood in the Japanese dub, especially seen in Gohan and also in Goten during Dragon Ball GT.
    • Vegeta kept his male actor in Japan even when shown as a kid. Most dubs used voice actresses, with the Funimation English dub being the exception. The same applies to Trunks: 8-year old present Trunks has the same male voice actor as his 17-year old future counterpart in Japanese.
    • In the AB Groupe dub of Dragon Ball Z: Bardock - The Father of Goku, Vegeta has the same young boy's voice in Bardock's visions of him as an adult as he does during the events of the movie. What makes this an especially odd example is that adult Vegeta has a grown man's voice in AB Groupe's other Dragon Ball Z dubs. The European Spanish dub of the same movie (derived from the AB Groupe dub) does the same thing with the vision of Goku using the Kaio-ken.
  • Free!: Zigzagged. In the anime series proper, the main characters are voiced by women as middle schoolers in sub and dub (except for Nagisa in the dub who was voiced by Greg Ayres all throughout the series), but they have their teenage/young adult voice actors in the prequel movie High★Speed! - Free! Starting Days.
  • In both Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Ed, Al, and Winry are played by the same voice actors no matter their age. This causes Vocal Dissonance in the English dub when it comes to Ed and flashbacks, as he's voiced by an adult man which causes him to have a rather deep voice for a pre-adolescent. It creates the opposite issue in the original Japanese, as Ed has a woman's voice even as an adult.
  • In ADV's Gag Dub of Ghost Stories, Satsuki and Hajime travel back in time to 1973, where it's revealed that Satsuki's mother Kayako spoke with the same masculine voice she has as an adult when she was in elementary school. This was very intentionally Played for Laughs and commented on.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • My Hero Academia: In flashbacks to their childhoods, Tenya Iida and Yuga Aoyama are played by their teenage voice actors, Kaito Ishikawa/J. Michael Tatum and Kosuke Kuwano/Joel McDonald. Most others such as Deku, Bakugou and Todoroki had different voices as kids than their usual voices as teenagers.
  • Naruto:
    • Naruto kept his Japanese voice actress even when he grew into an adult. His English voice actress also voices Naruto into adulthood.
    • Yuri Lowenthal voices Sasuke even in pre-series flashbacks in the dub. Sasuke already had a low voice for a 12-year-old at the start so it's not too jarring, plus he sounds young enough in the flashbacks. He also voices Sasuke as an adult using virtually the same tone he did when Sasuke was twelve.
  • Pokémon the Series: XY: The flashback in "Giving Chase at the Rhyhorn Race!" depicts the younger versions of Serena and Ash with the same voices they'd end up having at age ten. The younger Serena does sound a bit higher-pitched, but it's still Haven Paschall doing her voice.
  • Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Ramona, alongside her Future Self and even older future self, share the voices with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Fairouz Ai.
  • Any time the teenagers are shown as children in Urusei Yatsura they have their same voice actors speaking in higher pitched voices.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Played for laughs in Diary of a Wimpy Kid when Greg has an Imagine Spot of himself as a muscular, rich adult and Quentin, a school bully, as his employee. They still sound like middle schoolers.
  • Used in the epilogue of Have Dreams, Will Travel, where protagonist Benjamin Reynolds (portrayed by a then 12-year-old Cayden Boyd) grows up, becomes a baseball player, retires from the field to become a writer in his 40s, gets old, has a wife who eventually passes away, until he's a lonely old man by himself... but the narration until the end is still done in Cayden Boyd's child voice.
  • In A League of Their Own, the older characters at the Baseball Hall of Fame have the voices of the actresses who played the characters in the 1940s.
  • Combined with Fountain of Youth in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps: after Buddy is tricked into ingesting a dose of Sherman's youth serum, he regresses into a toddler — but retains an adult voice!
  • In Superman: The Movie, Richard Donner decided to dub over the voice of the actor playing teenage Clark Kent with the voice of Christopher Reeve, suitably softened to sound younger. Many fans never noticed this awesome voice acting.

    Literature 
  • Parodied in The Misfit of Demon King Academy. Anos Voldigoad, the Demon King, is killed and reincarnated thousands of years later, being born to a hapless newlywed couple. Only seconds after being born, his parents try to name him when Anos states his full name (with his deep, adult voice).

    Live-Action TV 

    Radio 
  • The BBC Radio Drama adaptation of Night Watch has a different actor for teenage Vimes, but teenage Vetinari is played by the same actor who plays him as an adult and sounds distinctly not teenage. Since he's meant to be in his late teens, it's not surprising that his voice would already be as deep as it's going to get, but certain other characteristics that tend to distinguish teenage voices from adult ones make him sound a lot older.

    Video Games 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: In both Japanese and English, a Pensieve Flashback shows Ann's younger self being voiced by the same voice actors; Yuki Hirokawa and Suzie Yeung.
  • At the end of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, Cortex turns into a baby due to the Time Twister's malfunction. He's still voiced by Clancy Brown, but he uses a different tone of voice to better fit a (talking) baby.
  • Averted in Dreamfall Chapters, where Saga is voiced by no less than three different voice actors, depending on her age in a particular scene, as we follow her (episodically) from birth to very advanced age.
  • Fire Emblem's English dubs tend to keep the same VA for a character regardless of age, even if the original Japanese version used a different, more age appropriate voice. In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the English dub has Jason Adkins voiced Ike, both as an adult and (notoriously) as a child.
  • Mark from Inazuma Eleven kept his voice actress even into adulthood in Go. Incidentally, he's voiced by Junko Takeuchi, who is best known for voicing Naruto (who also kept her voice into adulthood).
  • Retroactive example in the Kingdom Hearts series. In the first game, 14-year-old Sora was voiced by 14-year-old Haley Joel Osment. In Kingdom Hearts II, a year has passed, and the much-older voice of 18-year-old Osment suits the much-taller 15-year-old Sora quite nicely. However, the series' rather twisted timeline means that the tiny 14-year-old Sora has made many further appearances, with the now-adult Osment in the role every time, sometimes even dubbing over scenes he did when he was much younger.
  • This is done with Impa in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where Andi Gibson plays the Sheikah elder again in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, 100 years before the events of Breath of the Wild.
  • In the Like a Dragon series, Haruka Sawamura is voiced by Rie Kugimiya whether she's a child, a teenager or a young adult.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Mortal Kombat X's flashbacks:
      • Kung Lao and Liu Kang retain their older selves' voices during Raiden's flashback in Chapter 10, set during the events of Mortal Kombat 9. Justified in that they both died at the end of 9, so they're basically the same age as when they died.
      • Johnny Cage, Kenshi, and Sonya Blade retain their older selves' voices during the flashbacks in Chapter 1 (Johnny Cage's flashback, which happens almost instantly after the end of 9) and Chapter 5 (Sonya Blade's). Johnny's flashback takes place nearly 25 years before the events of X (meaning no member of the cast which was present in 9 in this flashback is voiced by their VAs from 9), while Sonya's take place 12 years before.
      • While the exact time frame between him becoming Chujin of the Shirai Ryu clan and his recruitment in the Special Forces is unknown, Takeda retains his older self's voice both in the X timeline as well as during his Chujin ceremony flashback.
    • Mortal Kombat 11: With the Time Crash, several of the present-time characters meet their older selves, without their voices changing (even though they're voiced by different actors in their original game and 11), such as Johnny Cagenote , Scorpionnote  and Kanonote . Raiden never gets to meet his future self because the rule doesn't really work with Gods, while Sonya's present self died before the Time Crash.
  • Charles Martinet voices both the Super Mario Bros. and their baby counterparts.
  • XenoGears: In the English Dub, Fei and his child self are both voiced by Brian Tochi.

    Web Animation 
  • David from Camp Camp has the same voice actor as a young child and an adult, albeit his child voice is literally just Miles Luna doing some kind of weird falsetto. Though, this could be because he's telling the events as a story in the present and putting on a voice for his younger self.
  • The Most Popular Girls in School:
    • Played for Laughs with Matthew Derringer, as a third-grader he's depicted as having the same deep, baritone voice and speaking in the same eloquent manner he does as a seventeen-year-old.
    • Mackenzie, Brittany, and Rachel have the same teenage voices as third graders in "Third Grade". It's especially notable in Rachel's case, as she's still voiced by a man.
  • In a flashback in RWBY, a ten-year-old Cinder remains voiced by Jessica Nigri, her voice barely changed.
  • Helluva Boss: Zigzagged with Blitzo and Fizzarolli. While they have different actors as kidsnote , they have the same voices of Brandon Rogers and Alex Brightman as teenagers/young adults.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time: Played for Laughs in "Ring Of Fire" where Tree Trunks keeps her old lady voice throughout all the stages of her life, even as an 18 year old.
  • The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In "The Tomorrow Boys", Jimmy, Carl and Sheen meet their older selves (as well as Cindy as an adult), and they don't sound much different from when they were kids. However, their VAs voice their older selves with slightly different inflections.
  • In The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 episode, "Toddler Terrors of Time Travel", King Koopa and Kooky, using Kooky's invention, try to go back in time to prevent the Mario brothers from ever leaving Brooklyn. However, they go too far back in time, causing them all to become babies. King Koopa, Kooky, Mario, Luigi, and Toad all retain their normal voices, despite being babies. The absolute strangest thing though, is that Mario and Luigi even retain their mustaches.
  • The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin: The episode "Octopede Sailors" contains a flashback to when Grubby was in a shipwreck as a child. The younger Grubby sounds similar to the normal Grubby.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Gi", Nicole imagines her sons Gumball and Darwin as 32/30 year-old Basement Dwellers... But still having their 12/10 year old voices. In "The Mustache", Gumball and Darwin also become adults and stay with almost the same voice.
  • Whenever there's a flashback to Stan Smith's childhood in American Dad!, Stan is still voiced by Seth MacFarlane, albeit in a falsetto voice. This also applies to Francine, Hayley and Steve as well, who all retain their voice actors in flashbacks, though often with higher pitched voices.
  • Arthur:
    • Mr. Ratburn is still voiced by Arthur Holden in flashbacks of his childhood, though Holden does speak in a higher register.
    • While many of the child characters underwent The Other Darrin as the show went on, some of them (Buster, Muffy, Francine and Binky for instance) retained their voice actors through the entire series, including the Distant Finale "All Grown Up". Arthur's first voice actor, Michael Yarmush, even returned to voice the grown up Arthur as well.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • The only one in the main cast to be voiced by a different voice actor in flashbacks is Zuko, likely to avoid causing Vocal Dissonance. This gets subverted in The Legend of Korra, however, where these same characters have aged considerably and are voiced by older actors.
    • In fact, the latter show goes out of its way to avert this trope by casting actors in the appropriate age range (or the appropriate vocal range, at the very least) for every flashback depicted on screen. As such, some characters can be voiced by up to three different actors depending on when the scene takes place.
  • Bob's Burgers: Various flashbacks in episodes (including "Turkey in a Can", "Hamburger Dinner Theater", and "The Trouble with Doubles") show that Tina had a deep voice even as a toddler.
  • BoJack Horseman:
    • Will Arnett voices BoJack through all stages of his life in flashbacks, including an awkwardly high-pitched voice as a child. This is averted in the Japanese dub, in which young BoJack is dubbed with a child's voice.
    • In "The Old Sugarman Place" and "Time's Arrow," Wendie Malick voices Beatrice Horseman through all stages of her life, from an eight-year-old to a young adult to an elderly woman.
    • Amy Sedaris voices both adult and child Princess Carolyn
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog: In "Remembrance of Courage Past", baby Courage doesn't speak, but his wails and screams sound just like his present-day adult self.
  • Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark has the same exact voice as his kid self, whether as a baby or an adult, and any time Dexter aged himself into a teenager, adult, or old man Christine Cavanaugh still provided his voice, the exception to this is Action Dexter from Ego Trip where he’s a Future Bad Ass with an Arnold Schwarzenegger esque voice provided by Jeff Bennett.
  • Family Guy:
    • Zigzagged whenever baby Stewie is shown as an adult, as he still has the same adult voice with a British accent.
    • Brian has the same mature voice when he was a puppy.
    • In flashbacks to their childhoods, the adult characters have the same voices, though with a childlike inflection. Averted in "Valentine's Day in Quahog", where a younger Lois voiced by an actual child.
  • The Fairly Oddparents:
    • In "Go Young, West Man", Catman is briefly shown at younger stages in his life, but even with the very few noises and lines he has, he clearly still has the same middle-aged voice as his present self. Justified in that he has a Celebrity Voice Actor.
    • Also any time Timmy grows into a teenager, adult, or old man it’s still Tara Strong doing the voice in different registers, averted with Channel Chasers where the adult Timmy is voiced by Alec Baldwin.
  • Fanboy and Chum Chum:
    • The titular boys themselves keep the same voices as they do now in flashbacks to when they were toddlers, albeit with higher intonations.
    • In the episode where Kyle turned into a baby, he keeps the same voice as his pre-teen self, making him sound like an adolescent in an infant's body.
  • Gravity Falls:
    • Zigzagged with Stan and Ford. While the flashbacks to them as children are voiced by actual kids, they’ve had the same voices by Alex Hirsch and J. K. Simmons since they were teenagers.
    • Played straight with Mabel and Dipper. In the flashbacks to when they were in elementary school, they had the same voices by Kristen Schaal and Jason Ritter.
    • Also played straight with Soos. During the flashback to his twelfth birthday in "Blendin's Game", Hirsch kept the same voice as he has in the present day.
  • Hey Arnold!:
    • Played straight and averted during the preschool flashback in "Helga on the Couch". Arnold and Helga are indeed voiced by younger actors, but Harold is still voiced by Justin Shenkarow.
    • Likely Played for Laughs in "Married". When Arnold and Helga are dreaming about growing up and marrying each other, Arnold still has Spencer Klein's young boy voice in both dreams. Why they didn't bring back one of Arnold's previous voice actors (especially since both Toran Caudell and Philip Van Dyke were still around voicing side characters after their voices changed) to voice the older Arnold is anyone's guess (It's possible that the crew didn't want the older Arnold to sound like Wolfgang or Ludwig). Francesca Marie Smith, Jamil Walker Smith and Ashley Buccille were still voicing Helga, Gerald and Lila as well, but it's less of an issue since the former two already sounded like adults due to them staying on post-puberty and the latter doesn't sound too girlish.
  • Kamp Koral recycles the entire main voice cast of Spongebob Squarepants for their much younger selves in this series. Ironically, this had been averted by the Poorly Disguised Pilot movie The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, in which the younger characters were Children Voicing Children.
  • In Kevin Spencer, Greg Lawrence voices the younger Percy as shown in the flashbacks in "Bruno Gerussi Must Die Again" and "Uncle Lester". In both cases, younger Percy notably has a high-pitched version of adult Percy's voice. It's especially noticeable in the latter episode, specifically the scene where Percy yells at his dad after receiving a concussion from a baseball thrown by his brother Lester.
  • In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979), the Distant Finale initally appears to be an aversion strategically using Peter for all the spoken dialogue since he was a teenager with an adult voice from the earliest scenes. Then, bizarrely, the adult Edmund speaks twice in the same pre-pubescent voice he had all along. This is only true in the British dub, however: in the American dub, Edmund gains an adult voice.
  • The Lion Guard:
  • In The Loud House short "10-Headed Beast", Lincoln and Clyde imagine themselves as fully-grown, muscular warriors... that still have their high, preteen voices.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The Octonauts: In "The Walrus Pups", Barnacles still has his mature voice during the flashback of him as a younger Polar Scout. Averted in the flashback in "The Caves of Sac Actun", where his vocal effects sound much younger.
  • Regular Show: In "Don", during the flashback to Rigby's sixth birthday party, Rigby, Don and Mordecai still sound like their adult selves.
  • Played for Laughs in a Rugrats episode where the babies imagine themselves as adults. They all keep their same childish voices. Played straight in the spin-off All Grown Up!, where the preteen characters retain the same voice actresses they had as babies in Rugrats, though they do alter their voices to sound older.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Bart and Milhouse keep their voice actresses in almost all flashforwards, though this is subverted in several flashbacks.
    • The same applies to Nelson, Jimbo, Dolph, Kearny, Rod, Todd, Ralph, and Martin who also keep their voice actresses as teenagers and adults, though once averted in the case of Martin in “Lisa’s Wedding” where his adult self was voiced by Dan Castelanetta instead of Russi Taylor.
    • Adults like Homer and Marge also possessed the same voice when in flashbacks to when they were kids. Although, "Homer's Triple Bypass" did make fun of this concept in a flashback to a young Homer singing in a choir. At first, he sings with an appropriate-sounding child's voice, before his voice suddenly breaks and out comes his adult voice, which sings terribly.
  • Plankton from SpongeBob SquarePants had the same voice as a baby that he does as an adult.
  • Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Freddie Prinze Jr. and Vanessa Marshall reprise their roles as Caleb Dume/Kanan Jarrus and Hera Syndulla respectively, despite the show taking place about 15 years before their characters debuted in Star Wars Rebels.
  • Steven from Steven Universe is voiced by Zach Callison regardless of his age, which is noticeable when he's shown as a baby. Likewise, Sour Cream is voiced by Brian Posehn, both as a baby and his present teenage self. Since the show is set from Steven's point of view and the flashbacks are often told to him, this could be justified as being part of his imagination.
  • Robin keeps his voice actor in Teen Titans when shown as Nightwing, as do his friends. This itself is not unusual; however, he keeps his same teen-sounding tone of voice as an adult. Teen Titans Go! changed it so that he sounds deeper as Nightwing.

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