For a generation of American anime fans, the sly cackle of Master Roshi and the manic sneer of Buggy the Clown arrived in the same voice. That voice belonged to Mike McFarland, the Texas-based voice actor and ADR director who died on September 9, 2026, at age 56. His nearly three-decade career shaped how English-speaking audiences heard Japanese animation, from Cartoon Network afternoons to the streaming era, Dexerto reported.

McFarland was never just a voice in the credits. Hired by Funimation Entertainment in 1997 as one of the company's first Texas-based cast members, he spent the following decades as both a face of its biggest franchises and one of its most trusted dub directors. He also worked as a line producer, ADR director, and script adapter for ADV Films across numerous series, alongside his long tenure at Funimation, according to Anime News Network.

He was the original Funimation English voice of Master Roshi, the lecherous, wise old martial arts master of the Dragon Ball franchise, a role he carried across multiple series, films, and video games. He also voiced Buggy the Clown in One Piece, Jean Havoc in Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Jean Kirstein in Attack on Titan, Kotaro Amon in Tokyo Ghoul, and Carnage Kabuto in One-Punch Man, a run of characters that put his voice at the center of some of the medium's most watched titles in North America.

His work behind the microphone extended past his own performances. McFarland was the ADR director on Funimation's dub of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which premiered on Adult Swim on February 14, 2010, with McFarland himself voicing Jean Havoc in the cast. The following year, he was credited as English Language Track Director on the studio's dub of Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars, released on home video in February 2011. His other directing credits included Yu Yu Hakusho, Case Closed, Trinity Blood, Galaxy Railways, and Blood Blockade Battlefront, along with the Funimation dub of the Rebuild of Evangelion films.

He described his approach to the work in blunt terms. "I play the original performances every time no matter what," he told Otaku USA Magazine, describing the discipline behind matching an English performance to the Japanese original it was replacing.

He kept working into his final years. McFarland voiced Helmeppo in One Piece Film: Red in 2022, reprised Yajirobe for Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero the same year, and voiced E.G. Mine in Trigun Stampede in 2023, carrying characters he had helped define from the era of broadcast syndication into the age of global streaming.

In a public message, fellow voice actors J. Michael Tatum and Brandon McInnis, longtime friends and colleagues, described him simply: "Those who know him best count Mike among the sweetest, funniest, most compassionate humans on the planet; always quick to lend a hand, give sage advice, advocate for the underdog or share in an adventure."

McFarland's death closes out an era of American anime dubbing that he helped build from its earliest, scrappiest days in Texas. The Master Roshi that a generation of viewers grew up with, the Buggy still quoted at convention panels, the Jean Kirstein who anchored Attack on Titan through its long run, and the dozens of dubs he shaped from the director's chair rather than the recording booth all carry his choices. Anime fans who found the medium through Toonami reruns or a modern streaming catalog were, more often than they likely realized, hearing decisions Mike McFarland made.