Takeshi Watabe

Takeshi Watabe was born in Kochi Prefecture in 1936 and built a long career out of being the thing on the other side of the fight. He was a villain specialist in anime and in tokusatsu, and the credit list reads like a monster manual: Space Brain, Bara Mobile, the Ten-Tailed Emperor Aton, Poison Fang Mask, a dinosaur monster, a walrus, a sea snake. Superhero shows need a fresh adversary every week, and across more than twenty years of Super Sentai, from Himitsu Sentai Gorenger in 1975 to Seijuu Sentai Gingaman in the late nineties, he was one of the voices supplying them.

The anime work is broader than the villain label suggests. He is Gamabunta in Naruto, a voice pitched somewhere between a mountain and a bar room, Kiba Daio in the 1986 Fist of the North Star, Gondou Goromaki in Tomorrow's Joe, Baramos in the Dragon Quest anime, Colonel John Kowen in the Gundam 0083 material and Cosmo Eigesse in Gundam F91. He inherited the ongoing roles of Shingo Kanemoto, the sort of quiet succession that keeps long-running franchises coherent, and he wrote an instructional book on voice acting.

In Japan he is remembered above all for Kaminari in Doraemon, which is not among the credits listed here. He died in 2010. The range is easy to miss because so many of the parts are loud, but listen to the school principal in Ocean Waves and the same voice is doing almost nothing at all, and doing it very well.