Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" Dub Turns 14; Still Unreleased

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by 8000 Saiyan » Thu Feb 21, 2019 7:04 pm

Considering how dubbing has gotten better over the years, I'd say it has more chances than being on par with the Saban dub, it could be just as good as Funi's dub of Kai.

The replacement score should have done away with, though. I'd would have preferred a better placed Kikuchi score.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by JohnnyCashKami » Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:31 pm

8000 Saiyan wrote:The replacement score should have done away with, though. I'd would have preferred a better placed Kikuchi score.
The Kikuchi score itself on Kai was a replacement score and it wasn't a very good one at it.

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by 8000 Saiyan » Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:40 am

JohnnyCashKami wrote:
8000 Saiyan wrote:The replacement score should have done away with, though. I'd would have preferred a better placed Kikuchi score.
The Kikuchi score itself on Kai was a replacement score and it wasn't a very good one at it.
Yeah, I know, but I'm just saying that I'd prefer a dub with a much better placed Kikuchi score.

Hopefully when this comes out, someone can make videos of the Ocean Kai with better placing of the Kikuchi score.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by JohnnyCashKami » Mon Feb 25, 2019 3:24 pm

What's done is done. The Kikuchi score for Kai is the same across all dubs, although Toonzai did have a temporary Kikuchi score which was a lot better than the final placement but yeah, that's that.

The Kikuchi score on Kai is serviceable but if watching it for a dub then it's not that bad and given the fact Ocean Kai use their own score makes it already much better.

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Scsigs » Mon Feb 25, 2019 3:49 pm

JohnnyCashKami wrote:What's done is done. The Kikuchi score for Kai is the same across all dubs, although Toonzai did have a temporary Kikuchi score which was a lot better than the final placement but yeah, that's that.

The Kikuchi score on Kai is serviceable but if watching it for a dub then it's not that bad and given the fact Ocean Kai use their own score makes it already much better.
Not really. Depending on who or what they used for the replacement score, it could be good, be serviceable, or be bad. Not always is a replacement score good.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Dragon Ball Ireland » Mon Feb 25, 2019 4:35 pm

Scsigs wrote:Not really. Depending on who or what they used for the replacement score, it could be good, be serviceable, or be bad. Not always is a replacement score good.
It's by the same artists that composed the score for the Westwood dub. For better or for worse they have a track record of reusing tracks from previous projects. According to SX10's sources it sounds like a score you'd hear in DC animated shows. So someone familiar with other shows Keenlyside and Mitchell scored (I'm not) would probably have a partial idea of at least how the score will turn out as some tracks will likely be reused in Kai. I also fully expect that we will hear The Army Theme at least once.

I don't have as much of a problem with the Kikuchi placement in Kai so I'm not too worried about the new Kai score having inferior sound or placement, but nonetheless I'm looking forward to hearing the new score for the Anitunes team to have a second chance at scoring Dragon Ball with a hopefully less rushed schedule, and because their work basically holds the same kind of nostalgia for me a lot of people have for the Faulconer score.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by SX10 » Mon Feb 25, 2019 6:43 pm

I was actually really surprised by how well received the Anitunes score was for Westwood dub! I remember just never getting into it, but it is true that it was much better utilised as the show went on. Some of the fresher tracks around Fusion arc were great too!

So I am pretty excited to hear this new take.

Hopefully there's some update in March!
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by MasenkoHA » Mon Feb 25, 2019 7:45 pm

SX10 wrote:I was actually really surprised by how well received the Anitunes score was for Westwood dub! I remember just never getting into it, but it is true that it was much better utilised as the show went on. Some of the fresher tracks around Fusion arc were great too!

So I am pretty excited to hear this new take.

Hopefully there's some update in March!
The Anitunes score just sounded like inoffensive Saturday Cartoon music. It didn’t distract from the show like Faulconer. It has less hubris so it fails less in my book.

I would have preferred they kept the Kikuchi score but I’ll take forgettable cartoon music over “hardcoooooooore” faux edgy background music

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by TheBlackPaladin » Mon Feb 25, 2019 10:09 pm

MasenkoHA wrote:I would have preferred they kept the Kikuchi score but I’ll take forgettable cartoon music over “hardcoooooooore” faux edgy background music
That's very interesting, my feeling was the opposite.

Like you, I would have preferred that they used the Kikuchi score over either of the replacement scores, no question. That said, between the two replacement scores, I definitely preferred the Faulconer score over the Anitunes score, and I'm not even a Faulconer fan. Faulconer's score, for all its faults, at least had an enormous variety, with a lot of compositions made for specific scenes. For that matter, even when they re-used previously-composed music, whoever was in charge of making the music selections did a fairly decent job. For me, the Anitunes score was the distracting score, and it had what I considered to be a very annoying lack of variety.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Dragon Ball Ireland » Tue Feb 26, 2019 7:38 am

For me the Faulconer score is definitely the distracting score. The Anitunes score used in the Westwood dub, despite being extremely repetive incidentally felt closer to a "Dragon Ball score" than the Faulconer score, which despite being created specifically for the show (or more strictly Funimation's reversioning of it) was never fitting. The Faulconer score ruined a lot of the drama and tension Kikuchi created by constantly bombarding the viewer with loud music when it was not needed.

The Anitunes by contrast fared much better with tracks that fit stare down moments, which the Faulconer score failed to capture and was thus a massive flaw. The saturday morning cartoon feel was also more appropriate for Dragon Ball than a score which was clearly intended to make the show more hardcore and edgy because Dragon Ball is ultimately meant to be a whimsical adventure fantasy.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by 90sDBZ » Tue Feb 26, 2019 12:07 pm

TheBlackPaladin wrote:
MasenkoHA wrote:I would have preferred they kept the Kikuchi score but I’ll take forgettable cartoon music over “hardcoooooooore” faux edgy background music
That's very interesting, my feeling was the opposite.

Like you, I would have preferred that they used the Kikuchi score over either of the replacement scores, no question. That said, between the two replacement scores, I definitely preferred the Faulconer score over the Anitunes score, and I'm not even a Faulconer fan. Faulconer's score, for all its faults, at least had an enormous variety, with a lot of compositions made for specific scenes. For that matter, even when they re-used previously-composed music, whoever was in charge of making the music selections did a fairly decent job. For me, the Anitunes score was the distracting score, and it had what I considered to be a very annoying lack of variety.
I also found the Westwood score to be repetitive to the point of being distracting, and even depressing at times too actually. "The army theme" is actually a decent track, but gets waaay overused throughout every major scene in the Android/Cell saga and a large portion of the Buu saga.

I grew up watching the UK broadcast, so I heard both Faulconer and the Westwood scores, and I have to say that I found myself rewatching the Funi episodes more often than the Westwood ones. A huge reason for this was the variety in the scores. With Faulconer there was always new music being introduced for specific scenes/characters, while the Westwood score relied largely on a small handful of similar sounding pieces that got stale quickly, and made it hard to get through some episodes.

But the Westwood Fusion and Kid Buu sagas started using Monster Rancher music, which not only had more variety than the Megaman score but was also just plain better. I think I'd feel very different about the Westwood dub if they'd started using it sooner to be honest.

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Robo4900 » Tue Feb 26, 2019 6:11 pm

8000 Saiyan wrote:
JohnnyCashKami wrote:
8000 Saiyan wrote:The replacement score should have done away with, though. I'd would have preferred a better placed Kikuchi score.
The Kikuchi score itself on Kai was a replacement score and it wasn't a very good one at it.
Yeah, I know, but I'm just saying that I'd prefer a dub with a much better placed Kikuchi score.

Hopefully when this comes out, someone can make videos of the Ocean Kai with better placing of the Kikuchi score.
Nah. Isolating the voices out would be a pain in the neck, and even with that done, you'd still have to come up with a whole new Kikuchi score placement.

If anything like this happened, no doubt what we'd actually get is some guy doing a decent-but-deeply-flawed isolation of the voices with the Yamamoto score placed over it but with reverb of the Funi voices not totally removed. Or the same thing but with the standard Kai Kikuchi score.
To me, even if both of these were executed perfectly, neither is as appealing as a replacement score.

Yamamoto's score is totally off the table for me: Plagiarism = cannot listen to the damn thing. Even if I could put that aside, the thing only covers -- at most -- the first 52 episodes of the show, leaving a weird transition in the middle of the run.
Kikuchi's score is tolerable in absence of other options, but it's a bit crap. They turned some masterful scoring from the original run into a random assortment of tracks that just doesn't flow or work in any capacity beyond just being background noise.

Give me a proper replacement score over the crap of the Kikuchi Kai score any day; say what you will about replacing scores for dubbing, at least it would actually have been composed and assembled for the show, while the Kikuchi score was just haphazardly thrown on so they could get rid of Yamamoto.

Having said all this, if it was possible to get a really good isolation of the voices, I'd absolutely be willing to be involved in a fan project to get a custom Kikuchi score going over this dub. Could be a lot of fun.
Scsigs wrote:
JohnnyCashKami wrote:What's done is done. The Kikuchi score for Kai is the same across all dubs, although Toonzai did have a temporary Kikuchi score which was a lot better than the final placement but yeah, that's that.

The Kikuchi score on Kai is serviceable but if watching it for a dub then it's not that bad and given the fact Ocean Kai use their own score makes it already much better.
Not really. Depending on who or what they used for the replacement score, it could be good, be serviceable, or be bad. Not always is a replacement score good.
I have a feeling this replacement score will be just fine. Perhaps even rather good. It won't be like the Faulconer score, where you either consider it a masterpiece or an abomination unto god, but it won't be a bland assortment of reused themes like the Kikuchi or early Westwood scores.

So, that's my official prediction: It won't be a masterpiece, but it'll be perfectly good, and it'll be far better than the alternative.
Dragon Ball Ireland wrote:It's by the same artists that composed the score for the Westwood dub. For better or for worse they have a track record of reusing tracks from previous projects. According to SX10's sources it sounds like a score you'd hear in DC animated shows. So someone familiar with other shows Keenlyside and Mitchell scored (I'm not) would probably have a partial idea of at least how the score will turn out as some tracks will likely be reused in Kai. I also fully expect that we will hear The Army Theme at least once.
FWIW, a lot of "Anitunes scores" weren't actually scored by Anitunes. The Westwood Z dub score was basically just Ocean throwing Anitunes songs they had in their library onto the show to get a replacement score going.
I think Anitunes' only involvement in the early days was putting together the opening theme, which they did a couple of years before the Westwood dub got going.
I think Anitunes did indeed eventually become involved in the Dragon Ball scoring later on, at the very least composing original tracks starting in the Fusion saga, but at the very least up 'till then, they had no direct involvement with the scoring of any given episode, and didn't even compose any original themes aside from the OP.
Dragon Ball Ireland wrote:I don't have as much of a problem with the Kikuchi placement in Kai so I'm not too worried about the new Kai score having inferior sound or placement, but nonetheless I'm looking forward to hearing the new score for the Anitunes team to have a second chance at scoring Dragon Ball with a hopefully less rushed schedule, and because their work basically holds the same kind of nostalgia for me a lot of people have for the Faulconer score.
Heh. I'm in a somewhat similar boat.
Putting aside how I criticise the Kikuchi score for Kai, I can live with it. But I'm excited to hear a proper score in Kai for once. Yamamoto never really did much for me anyway, and with the plagiarism both making the score unlistenable for me, and resulting in that score not being available for the entire run anyway, this will really be the first time Kai has a full, proper score composed for the show, so... Yeah, I'm pretty psyched.

And yeah, I'm also pretty nostalgic for the old Westwood score, so I'm looking forward to hearing what those guys can come up with now that they've been able to actually assemble a score for it, rather than either just Ocean throwing their themes onto the show wherever the editor for that episode saw fit.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by MistaL » Tue Feb 26, 2019 6:19 pm

I mean, it probably wouldn't be hard to ask IHaveNoUserName for just the music tracks from his Kikuchi Revival edit, assuming he still has the project files for all the episodes.

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Robo4900 » Tue Feb 26, 2019 6:25 pm

MistaL wrote:I mean, it probably wouldn't be hard to ask IHaveNoUserName for just the music tracks from his Kikuchi Revival edit, assuming he still has the project files for all the episodes.
That's true.

I guess the only thing needed, then, would be cutting it to match the Ocean edit visuals. Which would be an utter pain, but it could be done.

Still... Doing such a thing would only really be possible if this dub was mixed in 5.1 in a particular way that makes isolating the voices easy. I think if this dub was mixed in 5.1, Ocean probably went just a touch more in-depth with their mixing than Funi's simplistic approach of basically making a 2.1 mix with some back-channel reverb.

And we haven't even heard this dub. Maybe the replacement score will turn out to be awesome and none of us will want to replace it... :lol:
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by JohnnyCashKami » Tue Feb 26, 2019 6:27 pm

Scsigs wrote:Not really. Depending on who or what they used for the replacement score, it could be good, be serviceable, or be bad. Not always is a replacement score good.
Well, that's the thing. The Kikuchi Kai score is serviceable but not great, and Ocean Dub has shown before that they're capable of making really great Dragon Ball-themed tunes that fit perfectly with the series so I'd bet the composer knew what he was doing.

I'm excited for Ocean Kai and just waiting for it to premiere. :)

I've already listened to multiple Kai dubs and while they're phenomenal, the Kikuchi score kinda fucks it up (not the composer's fault but TOEI's) and that's somewhat insulting to say because the Kikuchi music in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z series/movies was absolutely amazing.

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by MasenkoHA » Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:40 pm

JohnnyCashKami wrote: and Ocean Dub has shown before that they're capable of making really great Dragon Ball-themed tunes that fit perfectly with the series so I'd bet the composer knew what he was doing.
As far as I am aware Ocean Group has never made any music for Dragon Ball before Kai. The Funimation/Ocean collab dub had its music done by Saban Entertainment via Ron Wasserman. The Westwood era used recycled Monster Rancher/Megaman music

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Scsigs » Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:45 pm

MasenkoHA wrote:
JohnnyCashKami wrote: and Ocean Dub has shown before that they're capable of making really great Dragon Ball-themed tunes that fit perfectly with the series so I'd bet the composer knew what he was doing.
As far as I am aware Ocean Group has never made any music for Dragon Ball before Kai. The Funimation/Ocean collab dub had its music done by Saban Entertainment via Ron Wasserman. The Westwood era used recycled Monster Rancher/Megaman music
I thought the same. The Ocean Group alternate English dub was done on the cheap, so they didn't even bother to license the Japanese music for use for their dub, or create an entirely original score, so they just reused music they created for other shows.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:46 pm

GOD! This is it guys! The day of DESTINY! Its' comin' in March.
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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by MistaL » Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:48 pm

Cure Dragon 255 wrote:GOD! This is it guys! The day of DESTINY! Its' comin' in March.
NANI THE FUCK? SOURCE???

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Re: Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" dub seems to be coming...

Post by TheBlackPaladin » Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:51 pm

Cure Dragon 255 wrote:GOD! This is it guys! The day of DESTINY! Its' comin' in March.
I thought WOW was going to announce their lineup in March (though I could be wrong, as I admittedly don't remember)......?

Could somebody with more optimism refresh me on the date to be watching?
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