Voice actor Samantha Kelly discovered her 18-year tenure as Super Mario characters Princess Peach and Toad was over on the day that Mario Kart World was released — without her in it.
I feel like Mario Kart is a bit ambiguous, there’s always the potential they could just re-use voice work from a previous entry rather than bringing all the actors in to go “Whoa! Ha-ha-ha. Luigi number one!” I don’t know if they still do this, but in the N64 era a lot of the same samples were used for Mario Kart, Mario Party, maybe other stuff, so the actors wouldn’t have been involved after the original recording sessions.
They do mix and match sometimes, but I can’t imagine she would have been waiting for a call up until the day the game launches. It may be some awkward wording or some NDA/negotiation stuff that just resolved. I don’t know, and I’m not gonna jump to conclusions. Somebody may want to ask her instead of just reporting on a tweet, though.
But if they were just re-using old recordings of her as Peach saying “Yeah!”, there’s every chance she wouldn’t get a call for that at all. Not getting a call back for the new Mario Kart doesn’t immediately mean “I’m not Peach any more,” until the game comes out and it becomes clear they haven’t used archive recordings and somebody else is Peach in it.
On the day before launch, she was basically Schrodinger’s Peach: “I haven’t recorded any new lines for this one, so I’m either in this game via archive recordings or I’ve been replaced.” She doesn’t need a phone call for either of those to be true.
I feel like Mario Kart is a bit ambiguous, there’s always the potential they could just re-use voice work from a previous entry rather than bringing all the actors in to go “Whoa! Ha-ha-ha. Luigi number one!” I don’t know if they still do this, but in the N64 era a lot of the same samples were used for Mario Kart, Mario Party, maybe other stuff, so the actors wouldn’t have been involved after the original recording sessions.
Or she did her sessions and they didn’t use it.
I feel like she’d have said that if that was the case, since it would be unusual.
They do mix and match sometimes, but I can’t imagine she would have been waiting for a call up until the day the game launches. It may be some awkward wording or some NDA/negotiation stuff that just resolved. I don’t know, and I’m not gonna jump to conclusions. Somebody may want to ask her instead of just reporting on a tweet, though.
But if they were just re-using old recordings of her as Peach saying “Yeah!”, there’s every chance she wouldn’t get a call for that at all. Not getting a call back for the new Mario Kart doesn’t immediately mean “I’m not Peach any more,” until the game comes out and it becomes clear they haven’t used archive recordings and somebody else is Peach in it.
On the day before launch, she was basically Schrodinger’s Peach: “I haven’t recorded any new lines for this one, so I’m either in this game via archive recordings or I’ve been replaced.” She doesn’t need a phone call for either of those to be true.
I don’t think it works that way. They have recorded new stuff for pretty much everything since the N64 days, and she voiced Toad, too.