Last year, the voice actor for LEGO Ninjago’s Cole, Kirby Morrow, passed away suddenly and the LEGO Ninjago team had to figure out what to do with the character. They had four options on what to with Cole and they have given a reasoning on why they did it.
1. Retire Cole as a character.
2: Use existing dialogue from all available Ninjago content since 2011 to keep Kirby’s performance in the show.
3: Come up with a story reason that Cole wouldn’t speak.
4: Recast.
Ultimately, the team went with a recast of the character with Andrew Francis. He has previously done work on Ninjago for other characters such as Shade, Beta Jay 137, and Morro. You will be able to hear Andrew as Cole in a series of short films in early 2022.
Dear Ninjago fans
It’s about time we talk about this:
When Kirby was first cast as Cole, it was a matter of finding a voice that fit the character which was written by the Hageman brothers. It wasn’t a hard choice to make as Kirby hit everything, we wanted right out of the gate … maybe he had some guidance from voice director Michael Donovan, and if so, well done Michael!
But what we received to base our casting decision on was just perfect. From then on it became a matter of writing a character that fit the voice. Any animation which has been done on Cole since then has been based on Kirby’s performance. He became instrumental to the development
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