New Petition Demands That Detective Pikachu Be Voiced By Unexpected Celebrity

Nintendo recently announced that Japan will receive a new Nintendo 3DS mystery adventure game called Detective Pickachu. The game features a smart-mouthed Pikachu mirrored after the BBC's newest Sherlock series. Well, gamers are hoping that Hollywood actor Danny DeVito will voice the yellow, electric furball if the game does get localized for a Western release.

Game Informer is reporting that there's a petition over on Change.org asking for Nintendo to include DeVito as the voiceover for the Pokemon hero's eponymous game.

The unnamed starter of the petition is from the United States, and briefly wrote on the page...

You can laugh and scoff all you want, but the petition has already garnered more than 25,000 signatures. Apparently gamers really want to see DeVito take on the vocal role of Pikachu. But why?

According to Grant Ginsburgh from Williamsburg, Virgina, he believes that DeVito has the perfect “dulcet” tone to take on the role of Pikachu. Ginsburgh also suggests that DeVito could even do the motion capture for the character, since Nintendo appears to be using motion capturing to help bring Detective Pikachu to life, which was briefly evident in the announcement trailer.

The whole thing is filled with troll comments and jokes. However, there is a measure of plausibility to the request: DeVito would be a pretty good option as a snarky, weathered, sharp detective Pikachu. They're already going for that kind of tone based on the promo material they've released so far, and Pikachu appears to be taking a young kid named Tim under his tutelage to teach him the ways of being a great detective.

The whole premise is odd to begin with, so gamers going out on a limb and asking for DeVito to fill the role doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. I mean, it's a talking Pokemon going around solving a mystery... is it really so far fetched that a Hollywood actor couldn't assume the role?

What's amazing is that when Game Informer first wrote about the petition earlier in the day, they had only managed 18,000 signatures. So over the course of a few hours they have garnered 7,000 additional signatures. It's picking up steam.

As of the writing of this article, Nintendo has not responded to the petition and it's likely that they never will... unless it reaches like 50,000 or 100,000 signatures. At the 100k mark, it's going to be kind of hard to ignore it because that's like an entire first week sales margin for Japan.

We still don't know a whole lot about this upcoming Pokemon-based title, but it makes sense that gamers are getting the petition up and out early to give Nintendo time to mull over the possibility of actually hiring Danny DeVito to voice the titular character of the 3DS title. Whether or not they will actually consider it is a whole different topic, but maybe first gamers should worry about whether or not Nintendo will actually port the game to the West.