If you’ve watched the trailer for the new 3DS title Detective Pikachu: Birth of a New Duo, you were probably struck by how Pikachu didn’t sound, well, anything like how you’d imagine him to sound.
In fact, our favourite yellow mouse sounds like he smokes 40 a day and has a whisky problem. It’s rather unsettling, to be honest.
However, the internet have decided to embrace this grizzled new Pika for the modern world, and fans are now campaigning (via petition, of course) for none other than Danny DeVito to voice Pikachu in the western release.
YouTuber Teahollow1 has kindly put together a video (which you can watch below) that uses the Japanese trailer, overdubbed with some of DeVito’s past work from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Batman Returns, just in case you weren’t already 100% sold on the idea.
The Change.org petition “Get Danny DeVito to voice the English version of Detective Pikachu” has soared past 20,000 signatures, and isn’t too far off the goal of 25,000.
Of course, it’s not very likely that the petition will achieve a thing. For one, we don’t even know if Detective Pikachu will see a western release. Secondly, we can’t imagine that Nintendo would let DeVito lend his pipes to one of their most beloved, adorable icons in a million yeas.
So it seems that till Morgan Freeman is announced as the new voice of Yoshi, we’re gonna have to stick this one in the pipe dream category.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.