The first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is out, and while the main character looks like Harrison Ford and moves like Harrison Ford, he certainly doesn’t sound like Harrison Ford.
It hasn’t been long since we last joined Indiana Jones on a thrilling adventure, with the fifth installment of the film franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, hitting theaters in June 2023. Still, even after just six short months, we were delighted to see that first shot of Harrison Ford’s charming face. What followed a shot of Indy’s iconic smirk, however, was not the husky vocal performance of Harrison Ford but the sound of voice-acting veteran Troy Baker, and it felt a little off.
Now, Troy Baker is not a bad voice actor by any means. The man has more than 400 credits to his name on IMDb and is behind some of the most prolific characters in gaming – from Joel from The Last of Us and Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite. Yet, during the trailer, it felt odd to hear Baker’s questionable Harrison Ford impression coming out of a digital duplicate of Indy.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this
Celebrities not going on to voice the video game counterparts of their characters is nothing new, however. Tom Hanks, who provided the voice of Woody in Pixar’s Toy Story films, has never voiced the character outside of the movies. Instead, his brother and fellow actor, Jim Hanks, voices the cowboy in any game appearance. So when you played through Kingdom Hearts 3 and Woody was standing up to Xehanort on your behalf, that was all Jim Hank’s doing.
While Jim Hanks does an incredible job replicating the tonality and phrasing of his brother, the same can’t be said for Troy Baker. In the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle trailer, there are moments where you can almost fool yourself into believing it’s Ford speaking, but it’s incredibly hard to unhear Troy Baker’s highly recognizable voice once you’re aware it’s him doing the role.
Reddit users shared similar sentiments. Within a thread on r/Indian Jones, one user commented that Troy Baker is “too prevalent to be doing an impression role where he needs to sound like someone else, never mind sounding like someone as iconic as Harrison Ford”. In contrast, another commented, “I do not like the voice at all.”
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Baker is, of course, not at fault here. The man clearly has the acting chops to take on any role that gets thrown at him, and if any of us were to be given the opportunity to become one of the most beloved characters in film history for a brand-new video game adaption, no one in their right mind would turn that down. It’s also highly likely that Bethesda didn’t have the budget to cast Ford in the role and that his triumphant sendoff in Dial of Destiny was how he wanted to leave the character.
It’s also not the first instance that the role of Indiana Jones has been voiced by someone other than Ford. The snarky adventurer has been featured in over 20 games and even more recently as a Fortnite skin, hat and all. Actor Doug Lee took up the reins of voicing Indy in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999), with John Armstrong more recently taking on the role for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings (2009.)
Multiple actors have taken up the mantle, but with the hyper-realistic likeness found in the upcoming Bethesda game, it feels redundant to cast any actor besides Ford himself. Creating a more stylized version of Indiana Jones, including majorly altering the appearance and setting up the Great Circle to be a new iteration of the character, would have better served Bethesda’s upcoming game.
With this being the first official reveal of Indiana Jones and Great Circle, we can’t judge an entire performance on what is only a few minutes of dialogue. The full game is set to release on Xbox X/S consoles and PC sometime in 2024, where Baker’s version of Ford’s legendary role will be out for all to experience. Still, with Bethesda choosing to make its Indy look so much like Harrison Ford, it may be hard for fans to accept the legendary actor is nowhere to be heard.
