But seriously, how did the Falcouner soundtrack even make it to air?

[Bardo117]

Tbh the Falcouner tracks are pretty terrible up until the end of the Cell Saga lol

[ABED]

There are a few songs that I like and don't mind them as DVD menu music, but just not in the series.

[Xeztin]

DBZ was a big introducer to american kids for anime in general. The common american child would probably be turned off by a Japanese sound track. Rock, Metal, alternative, grudge bands etc... was at its height in the early 90’s and 2000’s in America. Combining what back then seemed to be a kickass song with a kickass show was the best thing to do in that time period. I’d wager 3/5 kids didn’t have internet back in the day nor was aware Dragon Ball came from Japan or a comic book. I remember growing up a lot of my friends were unaware it was a Japanese show despite Japanese characters. They just thought it took place somewhere other than America or the characters was Dragon Ball’s own language in universe. That score back then combined with the show either grabbed your attention by the score or by the fights. I wonder what Bruce’s music would sound like today. Anyways Funimation was also new on the scene, so all of these things combined, well you get the idea. Looking back now it seemed like that kind of score was a bad idea since everyone in this era is internet smart. Though it truley americanized DBZ. If no one ever knew it came from Japan, I doubt the average child would figure it out without the internet.

[Kunzait_83]

DBZ was a big introducer to american kids for anime in general. The common american child would probably be turned off by a Japanese sound track. Rock, Metal, alternative, grudge bands etc... was at its height in the early 90’s and 2000’s in America. Combining what back then seemed to be a kickass song with a kickass show was the best thing to do in that time period. I’d wager 3/5 kids didn’t have internet back in the day nor was aware Dragon Ball came from Japan or a comic book. I remember growing up a lot of my friends were unaware it was a Japanese show despite Japanese characters. They just thought it took place somewhere other than America or the characters was Dragon Ball’s own language in universe. That score back then combined with the show either grabbed your attention by the score or by the fights. I wonder what Bruce’s music would sound like today. Anyways Funimation was also new on the scene, so all of these things combined, well you get the idea. Looking back now it seemed like that kind of score was a bad idea since everyone in this era is internet smart. Though it truley americanized DBZ. If no one ever knew it came from Japan, I doubt the average child would figure it out without the internet.

1) The Faulconer score sounds not a goddamn thing like either metal or grunge. At all. Like, at all-at all. I honestly have long-since gotten the sense that apart from maybe some major Nu Metal bands of the late 90s/early 2000s (Linkin Park, Disturbed, Korn, Slipknot, Papa Roach, etc) most of the folks around here who grew up loving the FUNi dub as kids have never at all at any point in their lives ever listened to any actual grunge bands or non-Nu heavy metal. Hell, Faulconer's score doesn't really ever at any point even sound like Nu Metal in any real way either.

I mean, if someone wants to explain or demonstrate to me how Faulconer's Casio synth cheese and Power Rangers-caliber guitar wank even comes within lightyears of so much as vaguely resembling bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, The Melvins, Hammerbox, Pantera, Slayer, Motorhead, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Smashing Pumpkins, Faith No More, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, Skunk Anansie, etc. Or fuck even Linkin Park at their Linkin Parkiest. Heaven help us, maybe even System of a Down (lord wouldn't THAT side by side comparison be a hoot and a half). I mean... god help me, I'll bite. I'll take that Pepsi Challenge. School me on this one. Someone. By all means.

This isn't meant to be a personal insult: I genuinely, sincerely believe that most Faulconer fans don't have any real substantive or even basic-most understanding of what most popular music in the late 90s/early 2000s actually sounded like (other than maybe a stray band or two they might've heard in an AMV somewhere) if their posts and comparisons are anything to go by. The Faulconer score is a great many things: what it DAMN SURE isn't is Lauryn Hill, Eminem, Mos Def, Jay-Z, DMX, Outkast, Gorillaz, The Roots, Black Eyed Peas, Macy Gray, Destiny's Child, Erykah Badu, Mariah Carey, J-Lo, Fiona Apple, Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Fred Durst, Blink-182, Sum 41, The Offspring, Weezer, N-Sync, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Evanescence, Drowning Pool, 3 Doors Down, Staind, Puddle of Mudd, or even fucking goddamned Nickelback.

Hell, it doesn't even sound like Moby, the late 90s/early 2000s poster child of electronic music/techno (another popular genre of that time period that Faulconer constantly gets compared to, also very much wrongly in terms of stylistic trends of the era).

You wanna know what Faulconer actually sounds like? Pile into a blender (the cheapest, most busted up old blender that the nearest Goodwill or thrift store can provide you) the following ingredients: two cups of the droning schlock heard on 90s kiddie cartoon shows like Street Sharks, Biker Mice From Mars, G.I. Joe, Mega Man, Double Dragon, and so on, 4 tablespoons of the trashy, bargain basement faux-metal heard on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and more than a pinch of a score to any generic Shannon Tweed T&A movie from 1992. Hit puree, and voila: the soundtrack to all your collective childhoods ladies and gents.

So yeah: a lot of us (myself included) have long often said that the Faulconer score was made to sound like a typical 90s Saturday morning kids' action cartoon score: I still mostly stand by that, but there's actually an even better comparison than that. If you ever (somehow or other) go back and take a look at some softcore porn films and TV shows that aired on late night cable channels like Cinemax or the Spice Channel back in the early to mid 90s... yeah, bingo. Faulconer's DBZ score sounds at times almost SPOT ON like those. Especially when it gets all weirdly new-agey sounding like it often does during the Boo arc.

2) Early 90s, the internet was still very much a resource of very limited availability. But by 1999 through 2003? 1998 even? Unless you were truly neck deep in podunk nowhere, far, far from civilization (and this is a general "you" from here on out, not necessarily aimed directly/specifically at Xeztin here), TONS of people in the mainstream (kids and adults of all ages) were rocking late-end dial-up, or possibly even early-DSL. Even if they somehow or other didn't have it at home, they DAMN sure had more than ample access to it at school (or at work), as even some of the shittiest, poorest inner city ghetto schools of the time were starting to get net connection fairly on the regular by the turn of the millennium.

3 out of 5 kids not having access to a connection at that point in time ('98 - '03-ish or thereabouts) is GROSSLY, downright hilariously inaccurate; unless Middle of Assfuck Nowhere Iowa or Northern Bumfuck Wyoming (where the fact that electricity and modern plumbing even exists at all amidst the endless corn rows and Amish Country is a minor miracle) are your primary barometers for "mainstream America". 3 out of 10, 15, or 20 not having it maybe. Maybe. Generously lowballed guess.

3) Unless you were below the age of 5, you don't have virtually ANY excuse whatsoever not to recognize at any point in your childhood that the writing on the character's dogi and various buildings (to say nothing of a lot of the overall architecture) as being Japanese/Chinese/Asian of some sort. You obviously shouldn't in any way be expected to understand or be capable of reading any of it of course: just have a functional, basic-most comprehension that there exist other languages and cultures out in the world, and this is what some of their various writings roughly look like in terms of general visual style. If for nothing else than just by sheer virtue of having ever once in your life ventured near any given Chinese restaurant or takeout joint, of which there are countless hundreds of thousands of throughout the majority of the U.S. Again, unless you were a kid who was raised on a goat farm or cotton fields in the middle of rural Georgia.

I'm not in the least bit joking around here: most 1st graders could and should be able to grasp and recognize shit this fundamentally basic about general language. If my 7-12 year old son told me he didn't understand or grasp what a foreign letter or language from another country looked like or the concept of what it was supposed to be (nor recognize which country it was from, particularly ones as notable and ubiquitous in even U.S. culture as China and Japan), I'd spit my drink out of my nose, call his school in a rage, and demand to know what exactly I'm paying taxes for: whilst also at the same time kicking myself in total shame for failing so miserably and with such gross negligence as a parent. That degree of blackout ignorance is downright legitimately blood curdling.

If the "Kame" character or "Ma" insignia and the like strikes a kid as "some kind of alien language within the show" instead of clear and obvious Japanese/Chinese writing, that kid either suffers from cognitive problems or their parents have kept them locked in their room and out of school/away from the outside world for the vast majority of their life thus far.

I'm sorry for the horrible bluntness here, I really truly am: but it gets utterly ridiculous and exasperating after awhile (quite awhile in my case throughout my large amount of time on this site over the years) seeing just a seemingly constant non-stop barrage of testimonial after testimonial after testimonial after testimonial on this site from countless gobs of people who apparently spent the entirety of their childhoods in the late 90s/early 2000s growing up in 15th Century Mongolia, far from any hint of modern civilization as we know it. Kids are supposed to still be learning and inexperienced at life, not completely walled-off from the faintest shred of contemporary culture and society.

It wasn't like I myself exactly grew up among the cultured, educated elite as a kid either (crack houses and police sirens were more my elementary school backdrop): but Jesus fuck, if you couldn't figure out by age 8 what a kung fu fantasy TV show from some part of Asia looked like just from a passing glance, or legitimately mistake the soundscape of Saturday morning kids' TV buttrock for the then-current Top 40 radio megahits that everyone else not glued to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon 24/7 were generally tuned into back during the twilight of the Clinton era/dawn of the Bush era, you WEREN'T by any stretch of the imagination indicative of the typical experiences of the Joe Blow "average kid" in the United States of the 1990s or 2000s. You were indeed preeeeetty fucking sheltered, and you in NO way whatsoever speak for or represent what the plurality of most American children's day to day lives were like 20 some-odd years ago.

I swear, at this point half the time I'm almost expecting someone here to eventually say "I remember when I first got internet in 2009* (almost nobody anywhere had it before then) and I first discovered what these things called cars were. Like holy shit! Can you imagine? We'd NEVER know about ANY of this stuff before without the internet!"

*That isn't a random year pulled from my ass by the way: someone from this forum once awhile back in PM tried to argue with me that most regular people didn't know what the internet was before 2008 or 2009. Not that most people didn't have it yet: that most people didn't even so much as HEAR OF IT before then.

Also one final thing: understand that I'm even less bothered by the degree of ignorance than various people apparently had individually as kids (horrifying as that certainly still is in and of itself), and much moreover the constant, overbearing ASSUMPTION and projection consistently engaged in that this was indicative of the majority of average children in most areas across America as being similarly clueless about virtually everything in culture and the world around them that wasn't a cartoon or TV show on Cartoon Network or the Disney Channel and whatnot.

[Bardo117]

You take the music thing waaaaaayyyy too serious...


I like the music. I genuinely enjoy the tracks on the Falcouner and there's no amount of explaining that would convince me otherwise. I do acknowledge that the quality isn't too high, and that it isn't the greatest thing out there, but it's pretty cool still. I consider myself to have a pretty good and sophisticated taste in music(I know it sounds contradicting to claim to have good taste but yet I like the Falcouner tracks), but the tracks on the show are some I enjoy mostly out of nostalgia.

[Kunzait_83]

but the tracks on the show are some I enjoy mostly out of nostalgia.

And that's perfectly fine. Like anything you wanna like, out of nostalgia or otherwise. There isn't much to take "waaaaaaaay too seriously" about any of that.

But understand: if you fully understand that the thing you like is of unignorably terrible quality and that the sum total of your enjoyment of it comes almost purely if not solely from sentimental fondness for when you were a little kid first hearing/seeing it, then that all by itself and in itself ISN'T any kind of defensible reason to engage in actual critical discussion and defense of the merits of its quality to others who may not share those warm fuzzy memories as you. I mean, we get it: fans of the Faulconer score apparently really, REALLY miss being 9 years old. Check. 10-4.

But liking something because it reminds you of being little is completely disconnected and irrelevant to what your more critical mind as a grown-ass adult might think of it right now. One has nothing whatsoever to do with the other in any way, shape, or form, nor should it. There's some fairly putrid, shitty 80s pop music that wistfully reminds me of specific times and places where I was little: but I'm not gonna go on music forums and sincerely argue that Eddie Money, Huey Lewis and the News, Paula Abdul, or Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam are bastions of musical greatness to be respected, admired, and revered without a single too-harsh word spoken of them simply because a note or beat in them can bring back a flood of specific childhood memories that apply to pretty much all of nobody anywhere except me. That's fucking asinine, and the general sentiment (but... but nostalgia!) in itself is beyond exhausted at this stage.

[ABED]

What's wrong with Huey Lewis? They had catchy songs.

[Kunzait_83]

What's wrong with Huey Lewis? They had catchy songs.

Catchiness, in and of itself, is hardly the end all be all of good music; especially in a case like Huey where that's literally all he's got going on in his arsenal and nothing else. One of the cornerstone hallmarks of vapid, empty pop tunes tends to be all catchy hooks whilst being utterly hollow and devoid of anything else beyond that to the point of being totally soulless, plastic, and sterilized.

That's Huey Lewis in a nutshell, combined with the further baggage of his songs' lyrical content often being the embodiment and totality of everything stomach churningly materialistic, superficial, and mindlessly conformist about the 1980s. Hip to Be Square became the defacto theme song for American Psycho for a damn good (and fairly self-evident) reason. Don't even get me started on The Heart of Rock 'n Roll, a song which is quite literally anything but.

I like Back to the Future as much as the next person and Power of Love is indeed one of those aforementioned songs that's able to transport me, DeLaurian-style, right back to the mid/late 80s (I Want a New Drug is another): but I'm not gonna pretend like the meat of that band's catalog doesn't make my skin walk right off my body, especially as an adult now, just because they had one of their vaguely less shitty songs featured in a classic 80s movie that most of us grew up on.

This is but one example of why you don't let nostalgia completely rule your taste and cloud your thinking about the shit you're consuming, especially back when you were a kid.

But yeah, just cause a song is catchy doesn't necessarily mean its actually good. If catchiness were the sole or primary barometer we used to gauge the worth of music, we wouldn't have thoroughly amazing shit like experimental jazz, avant garde punk, ambient industrial, noise rock, etc. and we'd all instead be collectively and unanimously hailing Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Ke$ha as virtuoso musical prodigies on the level of artists like Erik Satie, Mozart, Clapton, Prince, Lennon, and so on.

[thaman91]

So, back to the topic of "how did Mike Smith, Scott Morgan, and Julius Dobos's Bruce Faulconer's soundtrack even make it to air"...

...

That's because it's awesome! And evidently, the Cartoon Network execs thought so too! As for me, I don't care how "low-budget" Team Faulconer's instruments were; because apparently, they were still good enough to produce this on the very first episode they ever did ("Ginyu Assault")

Time Chamber Part 1 (0:00-0:56) [used as a standalone track in several other scenes, but aired along with "Time Chamber Part 2" when first heard in Ginyu Assault]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAm2yjqIwGY

Episodic Freeza II (0:00-1:37) [this is a fan rip of this specific unreleased track, along with several others; so quality isn't perfect]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXyfVPRRFoY

Time Chamber Part 2 (0:00-0:43) [one of the most prominently used "sad themes" up until DBZ Episode 238: "Evil Lives On"; after that, it never played again. This part was never released outside of one of the Trunks Compendiums; so it's also known by a plethora of fan names like "Gohan's Innocence" and "Sad Theme"]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayj7gIRNtoc

Devastation (whole video) [one of the most prominently used "ominous tracks"; generally used as ambient music when the mood needed to be tense. Don't be fooled by what CoyCoy88 says about it; it actually originally aired in "Ginyu Assault", and was therefore one of the first tracks]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq5FEwCrkIs[/b]

Guru's Theme (0:00-2:00) [Not much to say about this one; except that there's a released song with this name, despite being one of Goku's themes...weird]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INMKFPp8YR8

And that's just from their very first episode! That's not even getting into just a few of my favorite tracks, like...

Goku's Spirit Bomb, Part 1 (0:00-4:11) [This one was sometimes used as an ambient track for exciting/motivating scenes]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flJbl2Ebzkc

Goku's Spirit Bomb, Part 2 (4:12-6:32) [This part was Scott Morgan's very first standalone song! And what an entrance he made!]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flJbl2Ebzkc

SSJ Transformation [No comments needed]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2zk8UAG43g

Frieza's Death [Was supposed to play at the exact moment Trunk's killed Freeza; but FUNI told them to replace that scene with the "Boogieman" and "Destruction" themes to make it seem like Trunks may, or may not, be a bad guy]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaOOXLt4knA

Great stuff. The ambient tracks are especially good at setting the mood without being too intrusive with what's actually going on. That's one of the things that's often overlooked about the season 3 Faulconer music: the raw ambient nature of it. While there is definitely improvement in the actual musical composition in the Buu era stuff, the atmospheric pieces that were born in the season 3 episodes are still some of my favorites.

And I think Mike Smith composed Time Chamber. It's one of those tracks that really worked right from the beginning and was used throughout the show.

[ABED]

What's wrong with Huey Lewis? They had catchy songs.

Catchiness, in and of itself, is hardly the end all be all of good music; especially in a case like Huey where that's literally all he's got going on in his arsenal and nothing else. One of the cornerstone hallmarks of vapid, empty pop tunes tends to be all catchy hooks whilst being utterly hollow and devoid of anything else beyond that to the point of being totally soulless, plastic, and sterilized.

That's Huey Lewis in a nutshell, combined with the further baggage of his songs' lyrical content often being the embodiment and totality of everything stomach churningly materialistic, superficial, and mindlessly conformist about the 1980s. Hip to Be Square became the defacto theme song for American Psycho for a damn good (and fairly self-evident) reason. Don't even get me started on The Heart of Rock 'n Roll, a song which is quite literally anything but.

I like Back to the Future as much as the next person and Power of Love is indeed one of those aforementioned songs that's able to transport me, DeLaurian-style, right back to the mid/late 80s (I Want a New Drug is another): but I'm not gonna pretend like the meat of that band's catalog doesn't make my skin walk right off my body, especially as an adult now, just because they had one of their vaguely less shitty songs featured in a classic 80s movie that most of us grew up on.

This is but one example of why you don't let nostalgia completely rule your taste and cloud your thinking about the shit you're consuming, especially back when you were a kid.

The end all, be all to whom? I would say the first rule of art is "don't be boring". Things like complexity, lyrical content, and structure, etc. are all interesting, but they are means to an end. What really matters is if someone enjoys it. In the case of film scores, then there's the issue of whether it fits the film to evoke the intended effect. In that case, Faulconer's score doesn't do so.

You can have the most complex story or song in the world, but if I don't have any desire to turn the page or keep listening, the point is moot.

[Kunzait_83]

You can have the most complex story or song in the world, but if I don't have any desire to turn the page or keep listening, the point is moot.

I never said anything about complexity: I'm talking about a basic sense of humanity, which like with most commercial jingles, is utterly lacking in a great deal of top 40 radio hits from the 80s (not all of course, but more than plenty). The sense that someone had a specific idea in their mind and/or a specific emotion they wanted to explore through art and took genuinely risky creative choices in order to get there, rather than attempt to check off a set of boxes for carefully focus-tested and corporate-approved concepts/components/ideas intended to say nothing and offend no one.

I agree that many times simplicity can in itself be its own form of deceptive complexity (god knows most of the best video games ever made positively live and die on that concept): that isn't what I was talking about here. I was talking about music that has a pulse and doesn't give off the sense that it was written by an ad executive trying to generate revenue for his record company rather than a person with a genuine creative spark and an idea to get across. That idea can be simple, complex, smart, stupid, whatever. Just be fucking real.

Also I'm fairly sure that Huey Lewis himself, as a performer and an individual, would sweep many awards for "most boring, whitebread person on the planet". So so much for that "first rule of art".

[ABED]

Risk is also a means to an end. When I brought up complexity, I was listing off aspects of a piece of art. It wasn't specifically in reference to a point you made. Everything that goes into a piece of writing is a means to some end. Is it interesting? Do I like it? That's what's important, to me at least. I like a broad range of music and TV and movies. Some of it is great, some of it not so much. It's like dining. I enjoy a nutritious meal, but I also like cookies despite knowing their nutrional content is non-existent.

Also I'm fairly sure that Huey Lewis himself, as a performer and an individual, would sweep many awards for "most boring, whitebread person on the planet". So so much for that "first rule of art".

There's no objective measure of what is considered interesting. It's a matter of taste.

ANd I really wish people would stop looking down on advertising and corporations, as if they don't understand that getting someone emotionally is among the most effective ways to attract customers. To tie this in with DB, I don't know any of the people at Faulconer, but they very well could've been trying to get the viewers on an emotional level. I don't know if they were, but 1) I think they misunderstood the emotions the scenes were going for, 2) even if I did like it, the music didn't fit, and 3) It's mostly boring music so I don't like it.

[dario03]

I mean, if someone wants to explain or demonstrate to me how Faulconer's Casio synth cheese and Power Rangers-caliber guitar wank even comes within lightyears of so much as vaguely resembling bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, The Melvins, Hammerbox, Pantera, Slayer, Motorhead, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Smashing Pumpkins, Faith No More, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, Skunk Anansie, etc. Or fuck even Linkin Park at their Linkin Parkiest. Heaven help us, maybe even System of a Down (lord wouldn't THAT side by side comparison be a hoot and a half). I mean... god help me, I'll bite. I'll take that Pepsi Challenge. School me on this one. Someone. By all means.

Super Buu's theme gets compared to Marmelade a decent bit.

[Hellspawn28]

DBZ was a big introducer to american kids for anime in general. The common american child would probably be turned off by a Japanese sound track. Rock, Metal, alternative, grudge bands etc... was at its height in the early 90’s and 2000’s in America. Combining what back then seemed to be a kickass song with a kickass show was the best thing to do in that time period. I’d wager 3/5 kids didn’t have internet back in the day nor was aware Dragon Ball came from Japan or a comic book. I remember growing up a lot of my friends were unaware it was a Japanese show despite Japanese characters. They just thought it took place somewhere other than America or the characters was Dragon Ball’s own language in universe. That score back then combined with the show either grabbed your attention by the score or by the fights. I wonder what Bruce’s music would sound like today. Anyways Funimation was also new on the scene, so all of these things combined, well you get the idea. Looking back now it seemed like that kind of score was a bad idea since everyone in this era is internet smart. Though it truley americanized DBZ. If no one ever knew it came from Japan, I doubt the average child would figure it out without the internet.

I hate when people say that the Japanese music would turn kids away. As a 10 year old kid getting into Dragon Ball in the US, I didn't mind the Japanese music.

Also most kids that I knew in Elementary School during DBZ's prime on Toonami in 1998-2001 (I was in Middle School during the end of DBZ on CN in 2002-2003) that was well aware that DBZ is from Japan and some kids knew how to get Japanese bootleg fan subs on VHS. Not to mention the Internet has becoming a major mainstream thing when DBZ was airing on Toonami. I remember kids that I knew would go on the web to print out of DBZ images and even on CN's website to play those shitty flash games.

I feel like people who say the Internet was not a major thing until 2004 or 2007 probably grew up in a middle of nowhere or are too young to use the Internet at the time. It does find it both odd and amazing how many you guys are born around a similar time as me (Late 80's and early 90's) and are completely unaware of these things as a kid. It seems like most of my generation had no idea of any type of pop culture outside of kids stuff until the mid 2000's.

[precita]

I have most of you beat, I was 17 in 2003 and that's when DBZ's dub run was coming to an end, besides the redubs of Seasons 1-2 in 2005.

I do remember most teens at the time liking the dub music, granted most people never saw the Japanese version, just watched the show on Cartoon Network so what did they know?

[Bajosexto]

I swear, at this point half the time I'm almost expecting someone here to eventually say "I remember when I first got internet in 2009* (almost nobody anywhere had it before then) and I first discovered what these things called cars were. Like holy shit! Can you imagine? We'd NEVER know about ANY of this stuff before without the internet!"

We didn't have internet (and a computer) in my house until 2012. The first time I used the internet on my own (outside of school uses in school) was around 2007.

[Hellspawn28]

3) Unless you were below the age of 5, you don't have virtually ANY excuse whatsoever not to recognize at any point in your childhood that the writing on the character's dogi and various buildings (to say nothing of a lot of the overall architecture) as being Japanese/Chinese/Asian of some sort. You obviously shouldn't in any way be expected to understand or be capable of reading any of it of course: just have a functional, basic-most comprehension that there exist other languages and cultures out in the world, and this is what some of their various writings roughly look like in terms of general visual style. If for nothing else than just by sheer virtue of having ever once in your life ventured near any given Chinese restaurant or takeout joint, of which there are countless hundreds of thousands of throughout the majority of the U.S. Again, unless you were a kid who was raised on a goat farm or cotton fields in the middle of rural Georgia.

When I was 4 years old, I remember seeing the Streamline dub of My Neighbor Totoro on Fox Home Video and I remember I was able to recognized the Japanese letters as a kid. I was like "Those letters look like the letters from the Godzilla movies" and my Grandma was like "This movie was made in Japan from the guy at my video store told me". This was one year before I really discover what anime really was. I guess I was lucky enough to know about things at a young age.

[Gaffer Tape]

Hey, remember when reruns of The Flintstones aired in the '90s, and they replaced that dated '60s score with synthesized rock and that stupid, old-fashioned "Meet the Flintstones" song with the wailing guitars of "Rock the Flintstones"? It was sooooo hardcore! Oh, no, wait. That never happened.

See, I just don't get this. The people who nostalgia so hard over Toonami-era Dragon Ball and who insist the music needed to be changed because of how supposedly dated it was and how it didn't sound like other cartoons from that era... I mean, you guys were watching the same Cartoon Network that I was, right? The one that was, at least at that time, filled to the brim with classic cartoons? It had the Acme Hour, which was nothing but Warner Bros. and MGM shorts from the '40s and '50s? It had 50 different varieties of Scooby-Doo from the '60s through the '80s. Hell, even the Toonami block itself ran reruns of Space Ghost and Birdman, and, no, I'm not talking about Coast to Coast and Attorney at Law. I mean the Hanna-Barbera shorts from the '60s, which were so '60s it hurt. I don't know about you guys, but most of my childhood was filled to brim with cartoons that were made decades before my time. They were flippin' everywhere. A kid from the '90s literally couldn't avoid this stuff. There is no way you guys were watching Cartoon Network at the same time I was without being used to material that was not from the '90s. There's just no way you weren't used to this stuff.

[Soppa Saia People]

The Falcouner soundtrack is just generic syth rock. It's not terrible, it's just kinda there, but it really doesn't work for the series. I'm not the one to judge rock though, don't listen to it much.

[Zephyr]

ANd I really wish people would stop looking down on advertising and corporations, as if they don't understand that getting someone emotionally is among the most effective ways to attract customers.

oh no these poor tumors on human civilization

I'm not sure what this does as an argument for not looking down on advertising and corporations. It's no shocking revelation that they'll use mass psychological manipulation techniques to make an extra buck. I don't see how entities who literally go by the book to trick gargantuan groups of people into wasting money on fleetingly emotionally-appealing schlock could ever get enough shit for it.