Hey all, I was recently watching all the TNG movies back to back and in Nemesis Worfs voice seems to be pitched down. It's something Ive never noticed in the 1000 times Ive watched all the TNG movies. Its really jarring. Did Michael Dorn just make Worf's voice deeper or was it something in post?
Artificially pitched down in post production because Stuart Baird thought that with 11 seasons of Worf appearances, he didn't seem "alien" enough.
I always hated Worf's voice in NEM. You can hear some of his unaltered dialogue in the trailer, the difference is jarring.
Obviously it points to the NEM Worf being an imposter and the real Worf is still on the Klingon homeworld hunting with Martok like he should be
Luckily the script conspired to give Worf almost no dialogue so the new voice wouldn't stand out. EDIT: In fairness the Remans (and possibly the Romulans?) are voice pitched as well, so it seems to have been a general alien thing rather than just picking on Worf. Still daft though.
Voice pitching isn't a bad idea in of itself, but it does seem an unnecessary slight to Dorn/the fans that general audiences wouldn't even notice.
I think it's more an insult to Dorn than a slight, as if his performance somehow wasn't good enough, even though he'd been playing the character in television and film since 1987.
I never really noticed it until I read this thread I always thought it was his natural voice but it was just a consequence of him getting older and more grizzled like Clint Eastwood has. Interesting.
I'd noticed his voice was a little different, but, yeah, it'd been years since I'd seen him, and different sound directors produce different sounds to characters (note how differently Spock sounds in the third year of the Original Series compared to the first year), and, what the heck, maybe he was getting over a Tallarian cold.
Not only that, but it seemed Dorn deepened his voice in season 1 and slowly let it slide until it was closer to his regular voice. So after a few years away from the character, I figured, like you, it was either age or just him "forgetting" where Worf's voice was last left at.
My impression was just the opposite. If you go back to Encounter at Farpoint, Worf sounds much like everyone else. Seemed to me he didn't really get to being deep-voiced yet.