New Ron Wasserman DBZ interview

[Kakacarrottop]

For anyone who cares, I found and transcribed a portion of this interview with Ron Wasserman (composer for MMPR, X Men TAS and the first Ocean dub of DBZ), since it brings up his rarely mentioned work on DBZ, which has often been misattributed to Shuki Levy. Quite similar to what he said in another interview a few years ago, but nonetheless still a fascinating insight into the creation of the music.

Interviewer: Do you think that the Dragon Ball Z music you composed between 1996-1998 is still your darkest work to date?

RW: Yep, and I remember they [Saban] didn't give a damn about the show. It was after I left Saban and they just go, "Hey do you want to score this thing? We'll just pay you per episode, you can do it at home and just do whatever you want." So I'm sitting with my Mac, I think it was an LC-3 that's got a disk drive, those hard-floppy drives. I remember I just scored MIDI, and I had two small speakers. I remember sitting in front of my 27 inch tube television and scoring that thing in the living room of the apartment I was living in at the time, and just getting those massive, dark, ethereal, building sounds. I would deliver it and they would go like "Cool, we'll have another one for you in a week." I mean there was never a single note, I don't think they watched anything I did, I think they just mixed it and delivered it. I never even knew the show was big until a couple of years ago. I loved the show and when it got yanked from Saban, I asked Funimation if I could still score the show, but no response. Nothing. That was a shame, but I had a blast! That crazy ass fighting animation, I loved it!

[8000 Saiyan]

I always loved his work on X-Men TAS, particularly the themes of Bishop and Apocalypse.

[NitroEX]

Very interesting. Strange that Funimation gave him no response. Wonder what would've happened if he'd contacted Ocean when they started up again.

[cRookie_Monster]

Wow thanks for posting this! That really 100% clears up the credit issue there. It's sad that two major American scores have similar issues like that.

I really dig the dark sounds he used to get.

[Super_Divine_Genki]

Thanks a lot for this!

Wasserman is responsible for the only English dub replacement music that I like for DBZ. It's too bad that FUNimation decided to do a complete house cleaning, since he was available and willing to continue working on the series. The thing that I liked about his score is that it helped compliment scenes through adding textures rather than being full of distracting character themes. Its eerily dark ambience that it went into sometimes seemed to fit the given scene well too. It just sounds good to my ears.

[90sDBZ]

I've gotta echo what others have said that it sucks that the score will forever be known as "The Shuki Levy score" when he had nothing to do with it. I'm still stuck in the habit of calling it the Levy score because its been referred to as such for so many years. Even many of the hardcore Ocean dub fans on Youtube aren't aware that it was Ron Wasserman and not Shuki Levy who composed it.

On a side note I love Wasserman's work on the Power Rangers series.

Even though I'm a bigger fan of Team Faulconer's work, I still find Wasserman's music to fit DBZ and hold up really well. I also think the Westwood dub of DBZ would have been infinitely better if they'd hired Wasserman to score it instead of recycling music from the old Megaman cartoon.