@Samwize78:
Also, to shed more light on the Episode of East Blue recast discussion: I saw a twitter convo today with Terri Doty where she explained that anime voice actors get paid for the amount of hours they spend recording in the booth and do not get any shares of the residuals for that property’s releases, so FUNimation could use Vic and the other VA’s previously recorded dialogue without having to worry about paying them.
While that’s true that still doesn't change the fact that using previously recorded dialogue isn't an entirely viable option. Even if they could get away with using some of the original dialogue I guarantee it is not a practice they could rely too heavily on. As I’ve said before:
there are still plenty of times where they have to record new dialogue because the original just doesn’t fit the new animation. This is something they can even have a problem with in relatively short reanimated flashbacks, so there’s no way an entire 106 minute special can be so reliant on that.
And this still doesn’t account for scenes not originally in the anime, scenes where the dialogue is quite different from the anime episodes, scenes that are heavily altered for the sake of condensing the story, or scenes where a character’s performance is visually/audibly different than they were in the original anime (for example, there might be instances where a character is yelling a line in the special where they may of spoke more normally in the original episodes). With this special in particular trying to be a bit closer to the manga than the original episodes were at times this has plenty of instances of differences throughout (especially in the first half)
@Zephray:
I mean, I think the real discussion is whether they’ll re-record lines by actors who no longer work with the company. It seems a reasonable suspicious that they’d just reuse those lines, especially considering how they reused lines for twenty whole minutes of flashback in 3D2Y.
But even in 3D2Y there was still plenty of dialogue in those flashbacks that wasn’t reused from the original episodes. And in regards to Episode of East Blue, there is dialogue from some of these characters (Yasopp for certain) that didn’t exist at all in the original episodes, meaning they wouldn’t be able to avoid recasting.