James Arnold Taylor
"The Force will be with you, always."
A well-known voice actor. He provides the English voice work in Squaresoft's popular video game, Final Fantasy X, as the voice of Tidus (and again in Dissidia: Final Fantasy). He is also known as the voice of Ratchet in the popular Ratchet and Clank video game series from Insomniac Games, (except for the original game, in which Ratchet was voiced by Mikey Kelley); as well as Leonardo from TMNT. Taylor's other large roles include the role of Wooldoor Sockbat on the Comedy Central animated series Drawn Together, voice acting for both Captain Jack Sparrow and Timon in Kingdom Hearts II.
Mr Taylor is perhaps best known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars: Clone Wars series as the voice double for Ewan McGregor. Later, Taylor reprised his role as Obi-Wan in the video game adaption of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Battlefront II, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and the series with the same name.
Taylor has also worked as a voice double for actors such as David Spade, Johnny Depp, Michael J. Fox, Nathan Lane, Billy Bob Thornton, Ewan McGregor, and Christopher Walken.
Simply put it, he is truly the Man of a Thousand Voices. He is often compared to his fellow colleagues Tara Strong, Tom Kenny, Grey DeLisle, Frank Welker, John Dimaggio, and Billy West; many anime voice acting regulars like Steve Blum, Crispin Freeman, and Vic Mignogna; and even the legendary voice actor Mel Blanc (which he often compares himself to). You can pretty much hear him nearly anywhere: from commercials to Western Animation and video games without you even noticing it) The only thing missing in the list is Anime voice acting (but ah, that's a whole different story).
- Tidus in Final Fantasy X and Dissidia Final Fantasy
- Ratchet in the Ratchet and Clank series
- Leonardo from TMNT
- Wooldoor Sockbat in Drawn Together
- Captain Jack Sparrow and Timon in Kingdom Hearts II
- Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Clone Wars, the video game adaption of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Battlefront II, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars
- Pippin in the video game version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- Green Arrow and Guy Gardner in Batman the Brave And The Bold
- Ash in A Detective Story
- Eddie Felson/Speed Warp in Static Shock
- Gingerbread Man, Prince Charming, and Wolf in the video game version of Shrek 2
- Overload in Teen Titans
- King Sandy in Codename: Kids Next Door
- Captain Cold in Justice League: The New Frontier
- Johnny Test in Johnny Test
- The Fallen in the video game version of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. He was originally cast as the role in the movie proper, but was replaced by Tony Todd.
- Gabe Logan in the later Syphon Filter games
- Young Emmett Brown in Back to The Future
- Ascended Fanboy (see One of Us below)
- Crowning Moment of Funny / Crowning Moment of Awesome: At the recent Star Wars Weekend at Hollywood Studios Florida he hosted a number of shows, one being about his work in voice acting. In general his set was hilarious, but the last part of this particular show was a solid 5 minutes plus of non-stop impersonations of celebrities and characters. 150 of them.
- Large Ham: HELL YEAH!!
- Man of a Thousand Voices: virtually impossible to typecast, this guy has one of the largest vocal ranges in the voice acting industry. Here's a clip to boot. He even compared himself to Mel Blanc several times. This also means the following tropes also apply to him:
- One of Us: Word of God, he's a self-proclaimed geek of many things like Anime, cartoons, Comic Books, and Video Games. But more particularly, he's a Star Wars fan (which lands him into the most iconic role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the cartoon series).
- Relationship Voice Actor: often work together with John Dimaggio and Tara Strong.
- Unions in Hollywood: Word of God that he's contracted to SAG and AFTRA, which is one of the major reasons why doesn't get a lot of anime voice acting work (since most anime voice acting projects are non-union). He even got into some problems with the unions when he worked on Johnny Test, which was a non-union project.
- Apparently, that doesn't really excuse him from not working in anime voice acting, since there are union studios that highly specialize on this (e.g. Bang Zoom), but he also said that is a whole different experience and he's mostly a "pre-lay" voice actor. So it's somewhat justified.