First of all: every single argument being made here to the effect of skipping original DB cannot help but come across to me as wholly and utterly wrongheaded.
The crux of the argument seems to revolve around playing the series to fall as much in line as possible with general people's "preconceived expectations" for how the series is viewed in pop cultural osmosis. And honestly... WHY is that something that's even DESIRABLE to want to entertain in the first place?
For starters, lets just be real here: the preconceived American mainstream osmosis take on what Dragon Ball is like is both A) unbelievably stupid, irritating, and vapid in the extreme as just a thing unto itself and B) totally wrong and inaccurate to the actual reality of what the series is truly like anyway.
Here's the "pop culture osmosis" image in the U.S. mainstream of what Dragon Ball embodies, summed up inside of one 2 minute clip.
Lets not mince words here: suffering through even the most abbreviated and turd-polished version of that general vibe possible would still be just unbearable water torture for almost ANYONE who isn't a total and utter slave to early/mid 2000s middle school-level nostalgia.
And while yes, I know I'm gonna get a LOT of disagreement here on this point, Kai is the abbreviated & turd-polished version of this. Even with the massively improved English voices (some of which, outside the obvious and welcome recasts, are STILL impressively bad even by this point: no one's getting around those Kaio and Muten Roshi voices, among other choice gems which aren't all THAT especially improved with time), you still have a thoroughly uninspired and droning replacement score (and a sloppily, thoughtlessly placed Kikuchi piping in later on, which only clashes that much more jarringly with the Yamamoto stuff beforehand), you have UNBELIEVABLY bad, careless editing (that edits out just as much important manga material as it does filler, willy nilly), not to mention poorly, chintzily redrawn and reanimated scenes and censorship out the yin yang. And Dragon Soul, which is suicide-inducingly rancid. All of these problems, which are ever-present throughout the Saiya-jin through Cell arcs, are only compounded further by orders of magnitudes with Boo Kai. I'd be totally fine and all on board with a true and proper hypothetical "manga cut" of the anime (provided the music used didn't suck), but Kai
is not that and never was.
No matter HOW tedious some of the original Z filler gets (I'm no fan of shit like Maron or Mr. Satan's entourage myself), even the rock bottom worst of it is in NO WAY whatsoever worth having actual fantastic moments and
giant stretches of the whole meat of the series totally eviscerated and turned into something much more closely resembling typical 2000s Shonen schlock.
If something like the Garlic Jr arc is really seen as THAT unbearable,
just fucking skip past it and be done with it. That's the whole beauty of home video and streaming: you're NOT chained to HAVING to sit through it as if you're following it on TV week to week in its original run. The filler issue with Z is, 8 times out of 10, nothing that isn't solved with a simple click of the DVD remote. Don't wanna subject someone to Fake Namek or Bulma vs Giant Crab? Click "next episode". Voila. Problem solved.
In NO WAY is not having to just skip past a few filler eps here and there worth just totally junking an otherwise cool anime and replace the whole thing with what is basically just Toei's rendition of the Saban/Ocean edited dub from 1996/1997. That is some seriously scorched earth logic that I have never been able to remotely fathom.
And at the end of the day, if that's STILL seen as somehow an unfathomable route to take: then just show people the Damn Manga
tm and be done with it.
No matter what twisted pretzel logic you contort yourself into to try and convince yourself otherwise,
Raditz landing on Earth is the middle of the fucking story.
Zero context,
zero setup. Its in NO way meant to be seen as a "beginning point" for ANYTHING other than the next story arc. It flows precisely and fluidly from where things left off in the aftermath of the 23rd Budokai and mostly hits the ground running from there without really stopping to look back. You're plopping someone into the middle of a book starting at chapter 195 out of 519 for absolutely no good goddamn reason, with very minimal opportunity to look back at much needed context and character/story growth.
And asking that new people simply just "dig for context within random, scattered, and otherwise out of context scraps of character interactions" as they go along is just an unbelievably stupid, STUPID, and incredibly sloppy and boneheaded notion, one which does scores of tangible DAMAGE to the story (a story which isn't exactly supposed to be rocket surgery to start with). The reason that people are in ANY way making apologetics for this approach at all is solely because most people here were forced to do the exact same thing as kids when the U.S. brought the series over out of order. And we see how well THAT worked out for the wider fanbase as a whole now don't we?
Even as people acknowledge that running the series out of order did
far more harm than good for the series' U.S. image and its fanbase, people STILL defend taking that approach when introducing it to others, almost like some weird kind of stockholm syndrome.
And even if we're just talking a matter of raw length here: then honestly, it hardly even matters which version you go with at the end of the day. Any way you slice it or dice it, you're looking at anywhere from 167 (Kai) to 291 (Z) episodes (320 to 444 if we include original DB, like we should). No matter which road you take, Dragon Ball is inescapably and unavoidably a long, long, LONG-ass series. Absolutely
nothing you do to it, be it with Kai or skipping DB or whatever, is gonna really cushion that particular blow very much ultimately in the grand scheme: so if you and a new person are gonna lock yourselves in for the long haul with a monster like this one, you may as well just go all-in with the most consistent and high quality version (not to mention most representative) possible, as opposed to a sloppily thrown together patchwork that does little besides homogenize DB (to whatever extent) with any number of other current Shonen shows out there.
Like I said: the "just show them Kai in English, because it's a mildly less shitty and cringey way of giving someone the mainstream pop cultural osmosis American DBZ experience" argument is innately stupid to me simply because the "mainstream American pop cultural osmosis" rendition of Dragon Ball is just
inherently fucking terrible in and of itself as well as unrepresentative of what DB is
actually like on just about ANY possible level. Or put it this way: if the mainstream pop cultural osmosis popular image of Dragon Ball is so unrepresentative of what its really like AND so embarrassingly cringe-worthy in itself, why on god's green earth would you WANT to actively ENFORCE that image by starting at Z with whatever long-after-the-fact altered rendition of it? Wouldn't you want to SUBVERT expectations with something that this hypothetical new person is
totally not expecting?
Dragon Ball is, like it or not, a Japanese children's martial arts fantasy epic (rooted in Chinese myth) that ran from the mid 80s to the mid 90s, with a boatload of elements that made it genuinely stand out (warts and all). It just is what it is. Anything else after that ranges from after-the-fact attempts to homogenize it in line with either Western children's action cartoons of the late 90s (which are in large part unwatchable and a dime a dozen) or cookie cutter Japanese Shonen action anime of the 2000s (which are also in large part unwatchable and a dime a dozen).
Either way you go, you're purposefully trying to dilute what made the series originally stand out and apart from resembling a billion other things in both American and Japanese children's media throughout the years AFTER DB was a thing in order to place it somewhere within the average person's comfort zone of what they're used to. Which to me seems to be entirely self-defeating, and pointlessly so.
tl;dr - Original DB and DBZ anime (movies and specials included) subtitled, with GT and/or Super as an optional end point, skipping over whatever filler you like; and barring all that just Read the Damn Manga
tm. That's the most holistic route for anyone to go, with the other options (Kai and FUNimation in general) being just plain senseless and filled with WAY too much deceptive and tedious tacked-on baggage of their own distinct creation.