And the HIp-Hop Kasting goes too...
Yo!
Today, I'm more than thrilled to finally announce that MMPR'96 has crowned the voice for its King purveyor of stylin' Hip Hop-Kido Black Ranger funk, Trey "Smeyton" Smith as Zachary Taylor!
With his original CCC line submissions for Zack all the way back in November 2024 (honorable mentions for his Jason and Tommy ones too!), right from the jump Smeyton made an extremely strong impression on me--much like Alice Irvin's Kimberly Ann Hart, and mcb020's Trini Kwan.
Which, fittingly enough--I wound up nominating all three for their then-potential characters in a "if I were casting today...." blog post at-the-time, so I think that in itself wound up being quite the telling premonition for how casting those characters has ultimately unfolded...
Even as inexperienced as I was with evaluating voice acting back then--Smeyton's CCC audition for Zack was doubly impressive--both for capturing the quintessential sense of slick energy and flair Walter Jones originally brought to Zachary, but even more for the fact the audition lines featured were extremely brief surface-level snippets from the E1 Juice Bar scene, which demonstrated Smeyton's sublime ability to take such sparse lines and inject them with such a natural and effortless, ear-catching swagger.
It was immediately noteworthy to me, practically mirroring verbatim how mcb020 instantly impressed me considering she was in the same barebone lines boat.
So, I was always super duper interested in hearing Smeyton perform the more advanced material for Zack....but it just wound up taking a supremely long time--both from the months it took me to compose the extended audition itself...to a bit of memory lapse from Smeyton in regards to being sent the script to record for.
Nevertheless, once his recording was in and edited, I found my hunch from all the months prior fully validated with Smeyton's marvelous ability to capture the full duality of Zack's character--from both the trademark, eccentric charm, to the more serious side that makes him a debatable rival to Jason as potential leader-man of the team.
Absolutely couldn't be happier to add Smeyton to the team--which raises our official casting count to 8, and now 4 Rangers strong!