Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:13 pm

VegettoEX wrote:FUNimation was hardly the only company in the running for the series at the time. We have ancient anecdotal evidence from other companies actively pursuing it, and it seems like U.S. Renditions may have actually already had it at some point prior to FUNimation.
U.S. Renditions, Pioneer, Viz, AnimEigo, ADV, hell even Central Park Media to some degree, all of these companies and others of the time would've torn one another's heads off and drank the blood to get at a license as lucrative and widely beloved as Dragon Ball was at that point in time. Anyone who was at all even ankle deep into anime fandom of the time knew damn well that it wasn't a matter if "if" but "when" one of the licensing companies would get their hands on Dragon Ball, particularly after Ranma took off.

This idea that all of anime as a medium was this unknown, niche, undiscovered, completely invisible entity until Cartoon Network/Toonami came around with Dragon Ball and Pokemon in the late 90s is a complete and utter myth that is in NO way accurate to reality.

What all of the people in this thread (and tons of others on this site) are missing when they talk about Dragon Ball "not being able to have taken off without a company like FUNimation doing what they did to it" is that they're only focusing on one single market: children's broadcast television. This market was not only hardly the only market out there that anime played to, it wasn't even at all in any way the main primary focus of the anime industry at the time. Had Dragon Ball been picked up by ANY of the above companies I just mentioned, it in all likelihood may very well have NEVER seen the light of day on children's television, and instead been sold to a MUCH older audience on home video (meaning that a TON of people on this forum may very well have NEVER been exposed to it). And it very likely would've been a major success in its own right within that venue and among a completely different sect of fandom. I'm not just pulling that out of my ass: this was the way of the anime industry at the time for roughly 15 years prior to the Toonami era.

The problem with this entire community's outlook on this subject and other topics related to it is that most people who post here (and on a lot of other Dragon Ball/Shonen anime-focused communities) have an INCREDIBLY narrow scope of media as a whole, beyond just anime and Dragon Ball. There is, and long has been, a myopic over-fixation on children's television, children's animation, and children's media in general, at the direct expense of any kind of awareness or interest or knowledge of ANY form of media for any kind of older, adult audience.

This has long been an EXTREMELY problematic and glaring as all hell blind-spot that this entire community, that most of Dragon Ball and Shonen anime fandom overall in the U.S. has, for the most part, been exceedingly guilty of and almost NO ONE ever acknowledges or talks about it. Often times because the realm of non-children-centric media is so subconsciously walled off from the minds of most fans here that they don't even know or think to acknowledge or talk about it. Its THAT deeply, deeply ingrained of an issue within the core fabric of the general Dragon Ball and mainstream U.S. anime fanbases.

This fanbase has a hyper-awareness and laser-focused interest and knowledge of any form of media that is primarily (oftentimes solely) within the realm and confines of things like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Power Rangers, Naruto, Kids WB, Toonami, Jetix, Nickelodeon, Digimon, Ben 10, One Piece, Gargoyles, Batman: TAS, Teen Titans, Adventure Time, Powerpuff Girls, the overall oeuvre of Weekly Shonen Jump from circa 1997 to now, and on and on and on like that.

Anything that's the slightest bit outside of that specific realm of media (that wasn't maybe briefly shown on Adult Swim or something like that at one point), particularly if it was something sold and marketed to an over 18 audience outside of the realm of broadcast children's television, has traditionally all too often and with EXCEEDINGLY few exceptions, been a complete and utter blind spot to large swathes of this community. That's the giant elephant in the room that no one ever acknowledges whenever these kinds of discussions come up, and I know it'll get a ton of pushback and denial from plenty of people here who don't like to hear this. But its 1000% true.

No, this is NOT the case of course for every single solitary individual that's on here. Of course not. There's people, on an individual, micro level around here to whom none of this much applies to. Absolutely. But on an overall, macro level? This isn't even up for questioning: yes, its a MASSIVE problem when attempting to discuss anything among most people here that's from within almost any kind of wider sphere of media and creative works that exists outside the boundaries of 90s and 2000s kids' action cartoons and TV shows.

Its also one of the reasons unfortunately as to why the topic of martial arts fantasy fiction is often such a complete unknown to most people in this fanbase today as well, despite it having a sizable presence in Western pop culture at various point and to varying degrees for decades now: a lot of it is comprised of stuff that most children's stations don't generally air, nor would you find in the Disney section of a video store.

Whether people here want to admit to this or not, there is undeniably and unmistakably an "Overton Window" of sorts of discussion on creative works of media within this particular community and within communities related/similar to it, and that Overton Window skews HEAVILY and unremittingly towards children's action, toy-selling mega-franchises, particularly ones that have heavy broadcast TV exposure. And this Overton Window of discussion all but completely edges out most anything that doesn't fall within that realm of media, no matter how otherwise widely visible or of cultural importance it might be. And that kind of MASSIVE media blindness overall leads to insane, ridiculous discussions, like the complete and utter ignorance of there being ANY kind of anime industry, marketplace, and fanbase in North America prior to 1998/1999 or so.

Of fucking COURSE there was. Not only was it plenty visible: in video stores, on non-children's cable TV channels, in magazines, in films, and so on, but it was written about and referenced and discussed publicly by massively mainstream pop culture figures throughout much of the latter end of the 80s and early half of the 90s from Roger Ebert, to Steven Spielberg, to Quentin Tarantino, to fucking Michael Jackson even. The Matrix, released in 1999 and in the works since at least 1995/1996 or so, was as most people know heavily influenced by anime. Does ANYONE here think that the kind of anime the Wachowskis were influenced by was your typical 4Kids 'Mon-esque "gotta collect 'em all!" anime? Does anyone here seriously think that the debut of Pokemon in late-1998 suddenly inspired two up and coming Hollywood directors to then suddenly shit out one of the most singularly important and influential mind bending sci fi/cyberpunk action movies of the last 25/30 years within the span of six months?

Where do people think that the long-held lofty reputations of Akira and Ghost in the Shell originally come from initially? Who do people think that the ancient, old fansub VHS tapes for DBZ and other anime of the time (from Cowboy Bebop to Yu Yu Hakusho to Evangelion to Kenshin and on down the list) that they might've come across in 1999/2000 were originally made for? Do people here genuinely think that all those fansub tapes, all that information about the Japanese version of DBZ, about other popular anime of the time that you'd all found on the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s, all those "spoilers" as people here often would call them.... do people here genuinely think that those had up till that point existed in a complete and utter vacuum?

Do people here seriously think that some lone, random guy - maybe Curtis Hoffman or Steve Simmons - out in the middle of nowhere somewhere out in the void of nothingness just put ALL of that info and content out into the world solely for their own personal amusement? Or that all that content and info somehow just majicked themselves into existence out of thin fucking air purely for the whole lot of you as kids to stumble across? Or do you think its more than likely that these artifacts were catering to an entire fanbase that was out there following and consuming and spreading around all this stuff for years beforehand, and most of you just came to the party way too late and way too young to be cognizant of any of it?

How is it that no one here in this fanbase has EVER gotten the sense after ALL these years, all that initial evidence above coupled together with the modern information gathering and archiving age of Youtube, Wikipedia, Google, BitTorrent, etc. (where virtually ANYTHING about anything, no matter how obscure, is fully capable of being found and read up on within five minutes and a few mouse clicks) that ALL of these works of media and the (North America) fanbases for them have a vast, long, dense history that clearly predates them by a good number of years?

The sheer, palpable degree of obtuseness and lack of awareness it takes to continually wall oneself off from THAT much glaringly obvious and more than readily findable information for ALL these years on a set of topics (Dragon Ball, anime, etc) that are of ridiculously obsessive interest to them is just... unreal. There is simply no good excuse for it at this point. Not in 20-goddamned-17, where everything that you can possibly think of in almost all of pop culture history has been largely cataloged and archived onto any number of blogs and websites and Wiki articles online for anyone and everyone to find within moments, should they simply take a few minutes out of their day to actually look at something that isn't the latest news updates on what the latest Nickelodeon cartoon lineup is, what Pixar is doing, who the next Power Rangers cast is gonna be, how well the new revamped Toonami is doing, what new Yu Gi Oh merch is coming, what the next Pokemon game is gonna be like, what new console gimmick Nintendo's cooking up, whether anyone has dug up another lost early 2000s Toonami promo, what the next Smash roster is gonna be like, what someone's latest Zelda timeline theory is, updates on whatever new mega-franchise Shonen Jump is shitting out, what shitty 4kids anime is some Youtube group abridging, anything ever to do with ANY anime 4Kids has ever dubbed, what TeamFourStar is up to, which minor Youtube celebrity of a reviewer is saying what about DB Super, who reviewed what new DC Animated film or show on Toonzone or Kotaku, and on and on and on down that exact same, specific rabbit hole of fanatically loyal fealty to childhood nostalgia on an almost Peter Pan level of dedication.

If you're looking at that above paragraph and are unable to see or comprehend how that list of stuff can be seen as in any way a stiflingly narrower than all hell, heavily askew and slanted intake of media and pop culture that leaves out a GIGANTIC boatload of incredibly major kinds of works from a person's periphery of awareness (with age demographics being one of the key factors at play)... then your inability to see the wider picture here only proves my point about how deeply ingrained and internalized this mindset is.

Again, a lot of this is unfortunately, sadly is because generally speaking, if its not something that was heavily marketed (often with a crapton of merch) to 10 year old boys at any point from around 1998 to today, most people in this community (again, NOT ALL, but a great deal most) often don't acknowledge it, don't know much about it, don't have any intellectual curiosity towards it, nor many times are they often even aware that it exists: oftentimes despite how incredibly well known and mainstream it was to gigantic swathes of pop culture at the time.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by 8000 Saiyan » Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:40 pm

Great post as always, Kunzait.
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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 6:00 pm

Bardo117 wrote:The show obviously has SOMETHING special to it for it to have such incredible and independent fanbases all over the world. Several Countries have obsessions and great fandom for the show, strongly indicating that it would've been a success either way.
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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:04 pm

U.S Renditions later got absorb by Manga Entertainment in the mid 90's. In another reality if U.S Renditions release DBZ in 1992-1994, the rest of the series would probably have been release by Manga Entertainment if the series did well in that time period.

My idea on what a U.S Renditions DBZ voice cast may look like (From the Saiyan saga up to the Namek saga) in the early-mid 90's:

Tom Fahn - Goku
Keven Lee (From Giant Robo OVA) - Gohan
Melissa Fahn or Debra Jean Rogers - Bulma
Mimi Woods (Mimi J. Davies) - Chi Chi
Victor Garcia - Kuririn
Steve Areno - Tenshinhan
Debra Jean Rogers - Chazou
Gregory Snegoff - Muten Roshi
Doug Stone - Piccolo
Steve Bulen - Kami
Gary Michaels - Raditz
Beau Billingslea - Nappa
Steven Blum - Vegeta (He did voice Guyver 3 in the early 90's who is another anti-hero ally type of character)
Sonny Byrkett - Captain Ginyu
Kevin Seymour - Freeza (He did voice other characters in U.S Renditions dubs)

That's all I can think of for now
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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:10 pm

@ Kunzait (no way in hell am I quoting that thing!): I feel like it's because cartoons were (and still are for the most part) expected to be tailored towards a children's market first with the rest being sort of periphery and seen as a bonus. Movies like what Pixar does are viewed as kids movies first with the deep heart being a (close) second. Shows like Batman: The Animated Series proved that there is a market for non-kids stuff, but that feels very much like a niche and if you can't make your show appeal to kids, you're going to have an uphill battle to solve.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:52 pm

KBABZ wrote:@ Kunzait (no way in hell am I quoting that thing!): I feel like it's because cartoons were (and still are for the most part) expected to be tailored towards a children's market first with the rest being sort of periphery and seen as a bonus. Movies like what Pixar does are viewed as kids movies first with the deep heart being a (close) second. Shows like Batman: The Animated Series proved that there is a market for non-kids stuff, but that feels very much like a niche and if you can't make your show appeal to kids, you're going to have an uphill battle to solve.
Batman: TAS is still aim to kids and it is probably one of the very few non Japanese kids shows that don't suck because most of them are garbage. There is no real high bar when it comes to kids media made in North America because most of them are your typical cookie cutter show made for kids that have no real attention span. It's the same with non Japanese animated kids movies like Fantasia, Watership Down and The Thief & the Cobbler (The Original version, not the god awful Miramax) because those movies have effort to be art.
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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:56 pm

KBABZ wrote:@ Kunzait (no way in hell am I quoting that thing!): I feel like it's because cartoons were (and still are for the most part) expected to be tailored towards a children's market first with the rest being sort of periphery and seen as a bonus. Movies like what Pixar does are viewed as kids movies first with the deep heart being a (close) second. Shows like Batman: The Animated Series proved that there is a market for non-kids stuff, but that feels very much like a niche and if you can't make your show appeal to kids, you're going to have an uphill battle to solve.
1) Batman: The Animated Series WASN'T for adults. It was made for and aimed at kids. A ton of adults ended up loving it, but they were never the intended audience. And a big part of the reason that some adults ended up gravitating to it was because it was written to a much better standard than virtually every other kids' cartoon show of the time. A standard that is still ultimately a children's standard, just one that doesn't take children for complete and utter idiots. Which should be like, part of the bare-most minimum that most people should be asking from that kind of stuff. But that doesn't somehow mean that the show was ever intended for or in any way geared towards a legitimately adult audience. Were that the case, it would yet be a VASTLY different show still. It simply represents what is an unfortunately unusually better standard of children's show that the rest ought to be held to more often.

That Batman: TAS is so often seen somehow as being an "adult cartoon" is endemic of how utterly broken and skewed the entire critical scale for these things so often is in communities like this.

2) There are a great, great deal of legitimately adult-geared animated works out there, should one be genuinely interested in seeing them. The vast majority of them sadly though are not American. They range from Japanese anime (of the Seinen variety mind you) to acclaimed and influential European films, and even some from the Middle East. There are still some that hail from the U.S. end of things, but most of the mainstream examples tend to very often be Simpsons-esque sitcoms or Adult Swim stoner fodder. Anything that isn't in those two categories typically tends to either be 1) fairly underground 2) only shown on MTV in the long, long, long time ago when MTV was still culturally relevant and also not horrible, or 3) made by Ralph Bakshi more than 30/40 years ago. HBO's Spawn is like a unicorn of an outlier there.

3) You're still missing the bigger picture. You point out that cartoons are generally speaking expected to be tailored to a children's market primarily. This is of course indeed true, at least on the U.S. end of things (Japan and Europe alone though have a smorgasbord of wholly adult-geared alternatives that legions of U.S. animation enthusiasts often tend to just blissfully waltz right on past as they dig all in on Japan's Shonen market). But that premise presupposes that cartoons and animation are literally ALL THERE IS (or at least the very vast majority of which) to be had out there. Which is of course... not even remotely the case. At all. Obviously.

Therein lies the issue: that almost all rhetorical roads in these kinds of communities almost always inevitably lead back to stringent loyalism towards and even an outright dependency upon mainstream children's cartoons. Usually either American or Japanese. This isn't normal. Certainly not to the extreme that its so often taken (and it IS indeed taken to an absurd extreme with ridiculous regularity, and most people who do so don't even realize it because its just THAT deeply ingrained). This isn't at all intellectually or creatively healthy, especially for a growing or fully grown human mind. It is inherently stunting and cuts oneself off to a WHOLE GARGANTUAN LOT of a dizzying array of VASTLY different kinds of massively, massively crucial works and stories that do so very many things that are eons FAR beyond the boundaries of anything you'll find in the kids' cartoon realm. This mental roadblock and bias can and often does render one both intellectually and artistically handicapped and hobbled as an individual. Needlessly, pointlessly so.

Most people in this community, and in other similar communities though, harbor either an unconscious ignorance or bias against venturing outside the confines of what they'd grown accustomed to on kids' TV throughout their childhoods, or sometimes even an outright conscious fear and mistrust of doing so (I've encountered more than plenty of both round here and elsewhere over the years). There are people here and elsewhere who legitimately believe that there isn't anything at all of any kind of worth to be had in adult-geared media of any sort, particularly non-animated, and that children's cartoons are somehow the ultimate singular form of creative expression. Which is...an attitude like that goes WELL FAR beyond the bounds of "subjective opinion" and straight on into just plain demonstrably incorrect: and stunningly, horrifyingly so.

Sometimes it is to that above conscious degree of extremism, but a lot of other times this "kids cartoons > any adult work especially non-animated" bias is often totally subconscious and because so many people around parts like these are so heavily conditioned throughout their lives to just stick to whatever their parents let them watch as kids that it doesn't even OCCUR to them that there even IS anything else out there that they could turn to as an alternative and explore instead. And for some other people it also comes from soooooo many long years of fighting the whole "kids cartoons can have adult merits too you know!" battle against people who have traditionally deemed that ALL children's animation 100% across the board is all worthless garbage, that they've gone so far over the edge into the exact opposite wrongheaded extreme of the original extreme that they've been fighting against where they just plain constantly focus all of their energy and attention on championing and defending kids' animation whilst forsaking and neglecting and downplaying most everything else.

Its a fan cultural rabbit hole that goes a WHOLE lot deeper than that, and its the one big thing that I'd wrestled with making a whole thread devoted to around here for many years now. But there you have the basic gist of it now.

And insofar as this particular discussion goes, this ingrained bias is what leads so many fans to over-focusing solely on the market for anime among mainstream children who predominantly watched kids cartoon channels. Which yes, that market WAS largely (though even then, hardly at all ENTIRELY) devoid of the influence of anime prior to Toonami, DBZ, and Pokemon. But again, this COMPLETELY ignores the OTHER major adult market that anime HAD enjoyed for decades prior to the Toonami boom. One which focused mainly on home video releases, along with the odd cable airings on non-children's stations.

Dragon Ball was/is indeed Shonen (for children) but in the U.S. at the time, for a variety of factors (a bunch of which I'd actually gone into somewhere within the bowels of the big wuxia thread) it also had a healthy older/adult-aged crossover fanbase that made up the bulk of its U.S. fandom in the early 90s. One that would've certainly bought up the series on home video and made it more than enough of a hit for that market had it gone straight to there from Pioneer/U.S. Renditions/Manga/whomever in the early/mid 90s, most likely with a vastly better dub and certainly with multi-lingual releases all from the outset (which was in large part the standard at the time within this market, even during the VHS era). No censorship, no absurd localizations, no bad dubs, no replacement scores, no needless mistranslations, and no mind numbingly endless years worth of circular fan debates over any of it. Just another hotly anticipated mid-90s anime video release crossing over officially from the fansub realm, no fuss no muss.

Yes that turn of events would've likely excluded a LOT of people on this forum (and plenty of others) from probably being exposed to the series, as it certainly wouldn't have been something that approached being akin to a Power Rangers or TMNT-level kiddie action phenomenon that would've come up under most of your collective (and at the time, anime home video averse) radars. But speaking purely as a pre-dub fan since 1992-ish and someone who was never at all at any point in my childhood in any way enmeshed in that whole side of children's media, those are things that I would not have been in a position to have ever lost any sleep over. In fact, being perfectly honest? Even right now, I'd probably STILL prefer that things had turned out that way instead. 100,000% less pointless baggage and nonsense to have dealt with over the years. Over something as ridiculously, gloriously inane as Dragon Ball no less.

In other words: not only could I more than live with DB/Z having never become a children's TV juggernaut in the U.S., I would've actively preferred it. Because Dragon Ball, as with most other things that end up falling into that position (see also: the transition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Mirage Studios' indie comic pages to legions of toys and a dumpy cartoon series) almost always ends up suffering for it, and the trade off of an extra piling of mass awareness of the property (as if that somehow matters or means anything in itself) is just about never at all worth it.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:28 pm

I disagree with the Batman thing because when I was a kid, it felt like I was watching a show that was so not for me because it wasn't the usual stuff I was watching. Like, "Oh, jeez, I should probably change channels this is something my dad would watch". Maybe it was just me but I had a strong sense that I just was not the target audience for that show as soon as I saw it.
Kunzait_83 wrote:1) Batman: The Animated Series WASN'T for adults. It was made for and aimed at kids. A ton of adults ended up loving it, but they were never the intended audience. And a big part of the reason that some adults ended up gravitating to it was because it was written to a much better standard than virtually every other kids' cartoon show of the time.
IMO so was Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I consider Batman to be much more adult than that show because it wasn't so dark.
Kunzait_83 wrote:2) There are a great, great deal of legitimately adult-geared animated works out there, should one be genuinely interested in seeing them. The vast majority of them sadly though are not American. They range from Japanese anime (of the Seinen variety mind you) to acclaimed and influential European films, and even some from the Middle East.
Which, as I said before, is because the typical Western audience (I live in New Zealand so this isn't exclusive to the US) consider cartoons to be the children's market for the most part. And as I said I am NOT disagreeing with you. Works like Watership Down or Grave of the Fireflies are very much not kids material, but the fact is that they are also very much outliers compared to everything else in the animated medium. And cartoons aren't the only material for kids either; me and my sis watched a bunch of live-action stuff on Disney like That's So Raven, or Nickelodeon with The Amanda Show.
Kunzait_83 wrote:Most people in this community, and in other similar communities though, harbor either an unconscious ignorance or bias against venturing outside the confines of what they'd grown accustomed to on kids' TV throughout their childhoods
Well... yes, that's how nostalgia works. And it isn't limited to cartoons; many people struggle to get into new music genres past a certain point in their youth, and prefer to stick with what they're familiar with. I have it too; I haven't watched cartoons in years and have absolutely no interest to pick up stuff like Gravity Falls or Regular Show or Adventure Time (mind you that would also require that I watch TV again).
Kunzait_83 wrote:[lots of other stuff]
Okay seriously dude it feels like you have a massive chip on your shoulder and you're using this thread as a soapbox. I don't think you even mentioned Dragon Ball anywhere there so I'm struggling to reason out what your core point is here in relation to the thread.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:42 pm

KBABZ wrote:I disagree with the Batman thing because when I was a kid, it felt like I was watching a show that was so not for me because it wasn't the usual stuff I was watching. Like, "Oh, jeez, I should probably change channels this is something my dad would watch". Maybe it was just me but I had a strong sense that I just was not the target audience for that show as soon as I saw it.
I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember watching Batman: TAS when I was in pre-school in the mid 90's. I remember when I was 3 in 1994 when it was on Fox Kids before KidsWB! was created. All of the kids that I knew in my pre-school loved Batman and watch the show on TV. When I was a kid, I was not scared to change the channel. I enjoy staying up late to watch dark and violent anime on Sci-Fi or Grindhouse films at 3 AM on some obscure local TV network.
KBABZ wrote: Works like Watership Down or Grave of the Fireflies are very much not kids material, but the fact is that they are also very much outliers compared to everything else in the animated medium.
Watership Down is a kids movie and the novel is written for children too. The movie is rated PG and I remember I had to read the book back in the second grade in the late 90's. Richard Adams didn't care if the story was dark and violent, he just wanted to tell a good story for children. Richard Adams even said that he does not believe in talking down to children. Dragon Ball is not much different in my opinion.
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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:51 pm

KBABZ wrote:I disagree with the Batman thing because when I was a kid, it felt like I was watching a show that was so not for me because it wasn't the usual stuff I was watching. Like, "Oh, jeez, I should probably change channels this is something my dad would watch". Maybe it was just me but I had a strong sense that I just was not the target audience for that show as soon as I saw it.
How you "felt" is completely irrelevant. Read any interview with any creator of the show, or watch any behind the scenes of it. Hell, just compare it against virtually almost ANY work of media that actually IS for adults. Its a kids cartoon show. Clearly and obviously so. It was always intended as a kids' cartoon show. You were absolutely, as a kid, well within the target audience, certainly not your dad.
KBABZ wrote:IMO so was Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I consider Batman to be much more adult than that show because it wasn't so dark.
In all seriousness, in the grand scheme of things Batman: TAS is hardly at all that "dark" of a show. Relative to most other kids shows? Sure. But that's not because Batman is in itself that much darker a work so much as most other children's shows are FAR too overly gentle and... typically not as smartly written or sharply constructed. Again, the scale of what people judge as "dark" in these discussions is also something that is completely broken and off the rails.

Batman: The Animated Series (as well as plenty of other kids' shows of its ilk) being seen, by anybody, as "too dark" is in itself completely ridiculous, and it is also many times indicative of a general lack of exposure to genuinely dark works (which I know isn't entirely the case with you since you also referenced Grave of the Fireflies). Oftentimes, from a lot of people here, because most of the vast majority of what they're trucking in is oftentimes just children's cartoons (and live action children's works as well) rather than actual adult-geared media, which has a tendency to render one's overall meter for "dark" content completely off-kilter and overly sensitive.

Its a circular, self-sustaining cycle: a person avoids or misses a ton of actually dark adult works and indulges primarily, mainly, or even solely in softened kids media, and anytime a children's work comes along that is even SLIGHTLY left of center in what it depicts, its enough to blow the person's mind and make them think "Whoa! This stuff can get so INTENSE sometimes!" Meanwhile, the ACTUALLY intense, heavy shit sits off in a far, cobwebbed corner, unseen and unable to affect the person's internal scale for things like tone and intensity of content.
KBABZ wrote:Well... yes, that's how nostalgia works. And it isn't limited to cartoons; many people struggle to get into new music genres past a certain point in their youth, and prefer to stick with what they're familiar with. I have it too; I haven't watched cartoons in years and have absolutely no interest to pick up stuff like Gravity Falls or Regular Show or Adventure Time (mind you that would also require that I watch TV again).
1) Yes of course I agree that clearly this is all the very nature of nostalgia. And I'm positing that we, as a collective fanbase have over the years taken it WAY too far well past the point in which it is remotely, conceivable healthy. Instead its often grown to be detrimental towards productive and critical discussion. For something as absurd and stupidly silly as Dragon Ball no less. Nostalgia, taken to the extreme its often taken around here, is both an emotional as well as intellectual millstone that keeps a lot of people from further developing their own artistic/creative sensibilities by stretching their experiences and their minds toward more intellectually and creatively mature (of varying degrees) works and narratives.

2) Or its also more likely that you may well have just outgrown those kinds of shows that would normally hook you as a kid. Which is a good thing! Its normal and simply means that your mind has grown and developed to the point where its ready and wanting for something with more sustenance. Its the point where most people should be expanding and branching out to vastly different things that are well outside the comfort zone of whatever they were fed as kids.

Lots of people in this and other communities like it don't though and either are content to wallow indefinitely or handwring constantly over how newer kids shows' don't appeal to them as much as the ones from their childhood do/did. Well no shit they don't: you're a grown-ass now man/woman now. There is however still a TON of incredible stuff out there for where you are in life now that are waiting for you. A person can either waste their newfound adulthood obsessively mourning over their now-finished and gone childhood, or they can get the hell over it and embark upon a brand new journey of discovery for a whole new world of enriching creative art that's nothing at all like what they've been accustomed to as a kid.
KBABZ wrote:Which, as I said before, is because the typical Western audience (I live in New Zealand so this isn't exclusive to the US) consider cartoons to be the children's market for the most part. And as I said I am NOT disagreeing with you. Works like Watership Down or Grave of the Fireflies are very much not kids material, but the fact is that they are also very much outliers compared to everything else in the animated medium. And cartoons aren't the only material for kids either; me and my sis watched a bunch of live-action stuff on Disney like That's So Raven, or Nickelodeon with The Amanda Show.
1) Yes, I know that in the U.S. cartoons are often geared towards kids. I agreed with and elaborated further on that point earlier. But the point was there are tons of international alternatives, many of which aren't even THAT obscure, that people still gloss over. Sometimes its due to U.S. audiences lack of interest in overseas work (which is of course unfortunate) but in communities like anime fandom, that obviously shouldn't be as much of an issue. But we see modern anime fans of the last 10/15 years time and again glossing past the mountains worth of adult-geared anime in favor of Shonen, because the latter more closely resembles what they grew up with as kids. Which is a large part of the issue here.

2) And yes, obviously plenty of children's works are also live action. Many of those shows tend to also get folded into the "kids media bias" I've been talking about, particularly Power Rangers a lot of times. That doesn't really negate anything that I'd said though, and indeed that's also endemic of the problem.
KBABZ wrote:Okay seriously dude it feels like you have a massive chip on your shoulder and you're using this thread as a soapbox. I don't think you even mentioned Dragon Ball anywhere there so I'm struggling to reason out what your core point is here in relation to the thread.
I am partially unloading some stuff that I've held back on discussing publicly on the forums for like, a decade now I'll admit. But no, I didn't entirely get off the subject: the whole second half of my previous post deals with Dragon Ball and the discussion at hand. Give it another look if you feel like it.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:35 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:06 pm

I wonder if U.S. Renditions did release Dragon Ball in 1992-1994 if it would have been DB or DBZ? I think DBZ would sold pretty well on shelves next to titles like The Guyver, Fist of the North Star, Ranma 1/2 and Kabuto the Golden Eye Monster. Toei would probably wanted DB to come out first and I do worry that having a cute little kid like Kid Goku may have scared off casual anime fans at the time who enjoy more darker action shows.

Also Batman: TAS is not the end all be all of Batman or DC in general in my opinion. The show is pretty tame compare to most Batman comics and graphic novels out there which are more darker and violent. If the show was not for kids, it would never have happy meal toys and other kids merchandise sold to kids.
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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:12 pm

Its possible they might've started with DBZ and then gone to DB later. Out of order releases for various series, even back then, was hardly that especially out of the ordincary. Or not though. Maybe we might've gotten it in proper order, or maybe even (though certainly more of a far out there possibility, mind) starting with original DB but partway through after it had grown past a lot of the more overtly gag manga stuff. Who's to say? The landscape and the market therein was a whole other different ballgame at that point in time. I could easily see either scenario (DB then DBZ, or DBZ then DB) playing out.

Oh! Perhaps possibly even some kind of side by side, simultaneous releasing of both, similar to what Viz did with the manga. That I could easily see being done.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:23 pm

Hellspawn28 wrote:I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember watching Batman: TAS when I was in pre-school in the mid 90's. I remember when I was 3 in 1994 when it was on Fox Kids before KidsWB! was created.
I'm 27, so about a year older. I can't quite remember when I first saw Batman, but I think it was around about 1998. Dragon Ball (that is, the OG anime) I first watched in the early 2000s, probably whenever the Funi dub actually got around to airing in NZ (2003 probably). DBZ was obviously talked about much earlier than that, but it never really struck my interest; I watched it after school because I didn't have a game console until 1999 and I was waiting for it to get to the next show like Digimon or Shinzo.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:36 pm

KBABZ wrote:I disagree with the Batman thing because when I was a kid, it felt like I was watching a show that was so not for me because it wasn't the usual stuff I was watching. Like, "Oh, jeez, I should probably change channels this is something my dad would watch". Maybe it was just me but I had a strong sense that I just was not the target audience for that show as soon as I saw it.
Kunzait_83 wrote:1) Batman: The Animated Series WASN'T for adults. It was made for and aimed at kids. A ton of adults ended up loving it, but they were never the intended audience. And a big part of the reason that some adults ended up gravitating to it was because it was written to a much better standard than virtually every other kids' cartoon show of the time.
IMO so was Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I consider Batman to be much more adult than that show because it wasn't so dark.
Kunzait_83 wrote:2) There are a great, great deal of legitimately adult-geared animated works out there, should one be genuinely interested in seeing them. The vast majority of them sadly though are not American. They range from Japanese anime (of the Seinen variety mind you) to acclaimed and influential European films, and even some from the Middle East.
Which, as I said before, is because the typical Western audience (I live in New Zealand so this isn't exclusive to the US) consider cartoons to be the children's market for the most part. And as I said I am NOT disagreeing with you. Works like Watership Down or Grave of the Fireflies are very much not kids material, but the fact is that they are also very much outliers compared to everything else in the animated medium. And cartoons aren't the only material for kids either; me and my sis watched a bunch of live-action stuff on Disney like That's So Raven, or Nickelodeon with The Amanda Show.
Kunzait_83 wrote:Most people in this community, and in other similar communities though, harbor either an unconscious ignorance or bias against venturing outside the confines of what they'd grown accustomed to on kids' TV throughout their childhoods
Well... yes, that's how nostalgia works. And it isn't limited to cartoons; many people struggle to get into new music genres past a certain point in their youth, and prefer to stick with what they're familiar with. I have it too; I haven't watched cartoons in years and have absolutely no interest to pick up stuff like Gravity Falls or Regular Show or Adventure Time (mind you that would also require that I watch TV again).
Kunzait_83 wrote:[lots of other stuff]
Okay seriously dude it feels like you have a massive chip on your shoulder and you're using this thread as a soapbox. I don't think you even mentioned Dragon Ball anywhere there so I'm struggling to reason out what your core point is here in relation to the thread.
Ehhhhh... I REALLY dont like that way of thinking. Batman and Avatar ARE FOR KIDS. They just arent condescending about its plot, themes and overall writing. I REALLY dont. When you say that, you are saying kids shows are meant to be shit and that they only deserve shit.
Marz wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 11:27 pm "Well, the chapter was good, the story was good and so were the fights. But a new transformation, in Dragon Ball? And one that's ugly? This is where we draw the line!!! Jump the Shark moment!!"

This forum is so over-dramatic that it's not even funny.
90sDBZ wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:44 pm19 years ago I was rushing home from school to watch DBZ on Cartoon Network, and today I've rushed home from work to watch DBS on Pop. I guess it's true the more things change the more they stay the same. :lol:

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:43 pm

Cure Dragon 255 wrote:Ehhhhh... I REALLY dont like that way of thinking. Batman and Avatar ARE FOR KIDS. They just arent condescending about its plot, themes and overall writing. I REALLY dont. When you say that, you are saying kids shows are meant to be shit and that they only deserve shit.
Didn't I say that Avatar felt more geared towards kids? To swing over to video games, Mario is incredibly kid-friendly but has enough depth and complexity to appeal to many adults as well.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:47 pm

Yes, but so is Batman. Its a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Sure I do think there's heavy stuff that got past the radar but its still for children. Children wont go "Oh the humanity" if they see Batman TAS. Sure you didnt but its still kind of sad that you thought the cartoon was aimed at adults and not to you as a child. You deserve better than being patronized.
Marz wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 11:27 pm "Well, the chapter was good, the story was good and so were the fights. But a new transformation, in Dragon Ball? And one that's ugly? This is where we draw the line!!! Jump the Shark moment!!"

This forum is so over-dramatic that it's not even funny.
90sDBZ wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:44 pm19 years ago I was rushing home from school to watch DBZ on Cartoon Network, and today I've rushed home from work to watch DBS on Pop. I guess it's true the more things change the more they stay the same. :lol:

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by 8000 Saiyan » Thu Oct 05, 2017 11:05 pm

Cure Dragon 255 wrote:Yes, but so is Batman. Its a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Sure I do think there's heavy stuff that got past the radar but its still for children. Children wont go "Oh the humanity" if they see Batman TAS. Sure you didnt but its still kind of sad that you thought the cartoon was aimed at adults and not to you as a child. You deserve better than being patronized.
Indeed, it's like I said before on an earlier post: Adults tend to underestimate kids. Kids can see violent stuff on television and not be traumatized and influenced by it.
"It was deemed to be too awesome." - Scott McNeil on Dragon Ball Kai not being aired yet in Canada.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by KBABZ » Fri Oct 06, 2017 12:54 am

Cure Dragon 255 wrote:You deserve better than being patronized.
I didn't feel like I was patronized, it's that Batman was way over my head. As a kid (and to a certain extent even now) I very rarely dive into works that have heavy or complex themes in them. Digimon and Pokémon was what I was looking for, not a thematically mature noir take on a superhero I had no familiarity with outside of the name.

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Fri Oct 06, 2017 12:55 am

I know. Batman didnt patronize its audience.
Marz wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 11:27 pm "Well, the chapter was good, the story was good and so were the fights. But a new transformation, in Dragon Ball? And one that's ugly? This is where we draw the line!!! Jump the Shark moment!!"

This forum is so over-dramatic that it's not even funny.
90sDBZ wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:44 pm19 years ago I was rushing home from school to watch DBZ on Cartoon Network, and today I've rushed home from work to watch DBS on Pop. I guess it's true the more things change the more they stay the same. :lol:

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Re: Did Dragon Ball REALLY need Funimation to thrive?

Post by Ripper 30 » Fri Oct 06, 2017 12:57 am

8000 Saiyan wrote:
Ripper 30 wrote:
8000 Saiyan wrote: I would have loved if Steve Blum had voiced either Vegeta, Piccolo or Frieza in such a dub.
Piccolo suits him better than the other two.
I think Blum would have fitted Frieza like a glove by using his Orochimaru voice from the Naruto dub. Can't think of anyone else in that small LA talent pool that could have pulled off Frieza other than Blum back in those days. If LA got to dub DBZ in the 90's, then they could have benefitted from having a huge budget to hire someone like Mark Hamill to voice Frieza. But unfortunately that wouldn't have happened.
Yes by using his Oorochimaaru voice he could have done freeza with a snake type smooth sinister voice but Could Blum have done a Freeza even better than Ayres?
I prefer Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, DB/Z/GT Movies, Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball GT in Japanese.
For DBZ Kai and two new Movies I like both Dub and Sub. I Prefer Shunsuke Kikuchi Soundtracks over All other Composers.
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