How was the redub of the Saiyan and early Freeza saga?

[precita]

As we know FUNI redubbed the first two "seasons" nearly a decade after the original Saban dub. How was the redub of the first two seasons? I assume it was similar to the Buu saga dub?

[Pokewhiz7]

Voices similar to the Buu saga dub, same awful script as before. Not at all worth watching.

[Soppa Saia People]

Season two has the "hope of urnversise*" speech therefore it is trash for me.
*if you caught that reference you dersve a cookie

[precita]

Really? I thought the redub was a lot closer to the original this time around.

[fadeddreams5]

I'm am very sure it uses the same script as the Ocean dub. The voices are pretty much the same you'd expect from Funi, but the music is different and VERY bland. I prefer the Ocean dub for that season (saiyan saga... I haven't watched the early Frieza portion).

[TheBlackPaladin]

Season two has the "hope of urnversise*" speech therefore it is trash for me.

That's Season Three, which is almost universally acknowledged to be the absolute lowest point of quality for the dub. Don't get me wrong, I hate that speech too, I'm just saying that's not part of the re-dub of the Saiyan and Freeza arcs.

To answer the opening question, though...well, let's put it this way. Overall, it's not that great. There's only one notable problem, but it's still notable enough to be a problem: a fair deal of the script from the Ocean dub is re-used verbatim. This was likely done as a cost-saving measure. In an interview, FUNimation CEO Gen Fukunaga said that the re-dub was very expensive.

Now, what constitutes "a fair deal?" I've never bothered to do a side-by-side comparison, so I couldn't give an exact percentage. If I were to guesstimate, however, I would say that it's about 55-60% identical to the original Ocean dub script. So, when the Ocean script was bad, so was the script for the re-dub.

Now, what about the 45-40% of the script that was re-written? Well, while not up to Kai dub script standards, it's notable enough to be an improvement. References to death and killing are now completely fair game, and some of the weirdest rewrites from the Ocean dub script are corrected. For example, that infamous scene in the Ocean dub where Vegeta claims Bardock was a "brilliant scientist" who invented the artificial moonlight that Saiyans used to become Oozarus? Completely rewritten for the re-dub, and this time, Vegeta actually says what he said in the Japanese version, discussing the effect of the Bruits/Blutz Wave radiation that the false moonlight gives off.

What's also notable about the script for the re-dub is that the most faithfully-written parts tended to be the scenes that FUNimation was essentially dubbing for the first time. Back in the Ocean dub days, FUNimation cut out a lot of scenes entirely (a notable example being Gohan and the robot). So, for the scenes where there was no Ocean dub script to re-use, the scripts were actually pretty good. Not quite Kai-good, but nothing cringe-worthy, either.

However, I think the best part about the new script is that it actually corrected an error in the Japanese version. For the scene where Kuririn is getting ready to throw the Genki-Dama at Vegeta, Gohan fires a barrage of Masenko waves at Vegeta. In the Japanese version, though, despite Gohan using the obvious hand gestures for the Masenko, and despite the yellow color of the ki blasts...for some reason, he yells out, "Kamehameha!" The Ocean dub did this as well. Somebody on the writing team noticed the oddity, though, and Gohan correctly yells "Masenko-ha!" in the re-dub. So, kudos for that at least. I think that's the only time FUNimation's dub has actually corrected an error from the Japanese version.

So the script is an improvement, but still not enough, in my opinion, to be considered good. Rather, it's good enough to be considered...not cringe-worthy. *Shrug*

As far as the other aspects are concerned...well, the music's nothing to write home about, in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there in an age where one can watch the dub with the original score if they want. The acting in general represents a midway point between the quality of "Season Three" and the Kai dub, although there are some great performances, most notably Chris Sabat as Vegeta and Sonny Strait as Kuririn.

That's the long version. The short version is...eh. I'd give it a C. Maybe a C+. Still had a ways to go before we get to Kai's level of quality.

[Soppa Saia People]

Season two has the "hope of urnversise*" speech therefore it is trash for me.

That's Season Three, which is almost universally acknowledged to be the absolute lowest point of quality for the dub. Don't get me wrong, I hate that speech too, I'm just saying that's not part of the re-dub of the Saiyan and Freeza arcs.

Doh I'm fucking stupid, thank you for correcting me though.

[theoriginalbilis]

As we know FUNI redubbed the first two "seasons" nearly a decade after the original Saban dub. How was the redub of the first two seasons? I assume it was similar to the Buu saga dub?

About on the same level as their Buu saga/original DB work: it's watchable and relatively consistent, but nothing to write home about. It would've been a heck of a lot better if they didn't reuse their old Ocean dub scripts pretty much verbatim.

No need to watch it now that there's Kai. Though I will admit, I enjoyed re-watching that part of the series with my Dad back in 2007/2008 thanks to the Orange Bricks with the Japanese score option.

[WittyUsername]

The major problem with Funimation's in-house redub of the first 67 episodes is that it borrowed heavily from the old dub with the Ocean voice actors. A few lines were fixed here and there like the infamous "your father was a brilliant scientist" line, or the line shortly afterwards where Goku for some reason blamed Vegeta for killing his grandpa, even though Vegeta wasn't anywhere near Earth at the time, but it still seemed as though they were too lazy to change a whole of the old scripts.

I'd say that the biggest plus of that redub was Brice Armstrong's role as Captain Ginyu, even if he didn't show up until the last few episodes of that particular portion of the dub.

[TheBlackPaladin]

...but it still seemed as though they were too lazy to change a whole of the old scripts.

I too wish they hadn't re-used 55-60% of the Ocean script, but I wouldn't attribute it to laziness. FUNimation CEO Gen Fukunaga did say that the re-dub was expensive, and I believe that considering how expensive it is to dub and distribute an anime, so I'd attribute it more so to a cost-saving measure than anything else. FUNimation was doing pretty well by this point, but they still had to be financially prudent. Don't get me wrong, it's unfortunate that that's the case, I just don't know that I would call it laziness.

[LSSJGODSSJ4Gogeta]

Spectacular. Makes the bad cropping on the blu ray and orange bricks sets worth buying easily.

[ABED]

I don't know if I'm remembering it correctly, but I recall the scripts for the mirrored ship episodes being very accurate.

[TheGreatness25]

I felt that it was a bit rushed. Every line seemed to have less emotion behind it than the rest of the series. At least that was my impression of it. I also felt like they tried really hard to show you that "we are so uncut!" and looked for any opportunity to throw in "damn," "hell," and "bastard," I believe. The music, though, was so awful. Oh, man, that was horrendous. It made Bruce Faulconer's score seem godly by comparison. Though it wasn't quite as bad as the GT one.

I think that it actually was much closer to the original Saban script than the Japanese version, but I really won't know unless I put them side by side. That might be coming soon because I have extracted subtitles from the DVDs. The only problem is those early episodes don't have English subtitles, so it pretty much hast o be written out.

[Ree]

Its a little more accurate and not censored but from what i watched i think its the worst. some of the voices like Zarbon and Freeza are at their worst.

[precita]

A few lines were fixed here and there like the infamous "your father was a brilliant scientist" line, or the line shortly afterwards where Goku for some reason blamed Vegeta for killing his grandpa, even though Vegeta wasn't anywhere near Earth at the time, but it still seemed as though they were too lazy to change a whole of the old scripts.p.

Actually FUNI did fix that line. I just watched that episode a few days ago, Goku does indeed realize he was the one who killed his grandfather when he turned into an ape. So they didn't use the old Ocean line there.

I'm up to the Freeza saga now, and aside from it still being Linda Young, I haven't heard any cringe worthy dialogue from Freeza yet. He doesn't have any one-liners or weird comments. Does anyone know when dub Freeza gets bad? So far, his dialogue seems decent.

[TheBigBoy]

This redub was aired uncut(or close to it anyway) on Cartoon Network wasn't it? I remember trying to get my girlfriend at the time into the series by making her watch this redub with me. Not surprisingly she dumped my ass a couple months later hahaha.....

[sintzu]

I'm not very familiar with Z's dub quality compared to the original so how would you rate it out of 10 in terms of quality and faithfulness ?

Seasons 1&2
Season 3
Garlic JR,android&cell arcs.
Buu arc.

[Ree]

This redub was aired uncut(or close to it anyway) on Cartoon Network wasn't it? I remember trying to get my girlfriend at the time into the series by making her watch this redub with me. Not surprisingly she dumped my ass a couple months later hahaha.....

sorry to hear that happened to you

[Kakacarrottop]

I've only seen portions, but the voice acting was very competent. The only voices which are major downgrades from Ocean are Yamcha (Ted Cole), Piccolo (Scott Mcneil) and Zarbon (Paul Dobson). For me the main problem was the horribly generic movie music FUNimation felt needed to be added. Massive step down from Kikuchi and the Saban music. The bigest upside (when compared to the original English dub) is the script since It's basicially a less stupid version of the original Saban era scripts.

[Michelle91]

It wasn't that great, but I still had fun watching it on TV. In 2005, I was very happy that to see the Saiyan saga and the first half of the Namek saga uncut with a proper dubbing script. I was let down that they use most of the same scripts as they did in 1996-1998. You would think in 2005 that Funimation would able to translate things better by now. Overall I still had fun waiting until 11:00 PM to watch it since they play it like a half hour before Adult Swim.