Barbara Goodson

Barbara Goodson's most famous performance is a voice shrieking from a palace on the moon. As the English dub of Rita Repulsa in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, she gave a generation of children their first villain, and she did it by playing a woman with a permanent headache: petulant, theatrical, visibly exhausted by her own minions. She stayed with the franchise through Power Rangers Zeo, Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie and Power Rangers in Space, then returned decades later as Robo Rita in the 2023 special Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always.

The rest of the career is the sort of steady dubbing and animation work that almost never gets read out loud. She was Marie Crystal in Robotech, Red Fraggle and Wingnut in the animated Fraggle Rock, Darling in Lady and the Tramp II, and, in a far darker register, Mother Talzin in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a part she has carried through LEGO Star Wars Terrifying Tales and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld.

She is still working, with an old lady in The Bad Guys, the witch in Monster Summer and additional voices in Toy Story 5. Nearly all of it sits at the extreme ends of the register, high and shrill or low and menacing, which is where dubbing lives, and she has been doing it since the mid 1980s.