What if any obscure dubs became popular?

[Gilby1385]

If this topic has already been discussed in another thread, please link me to it.

We all know that FUNimation handled most English-language dubs of the Dragon Ball franchise, but other companies such as Harmony Gold and Creative Products took a shot at it, although they didn't cover the entire series like with Blue Water's dubs of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball GT.

But if those dubs or any other lesser-known dubs did end up covering the entire series (which could also mean FUNimation's dubs would be non-existant), how different would things be? For example, do you think Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z would have fared better if the Creative Products dubs did well enough to cover the entire series and even get exported to other English-speaking territories?

Or if Harmony Gold dubbed the entire Dragon Ball series and moved on to Dragon Ball Z? For me, I should kinda thank FUNimation for obtaining the rights from them in 1994, as I'm pretty sure Harmony Gold wouldn't have done an uncut release, but it would still be interesting to see what their dubs of the remaining 148 episodes of Dragon Ball and the entirety of Dragon Ball Z would have been like.

[MasenkoHA]

Judging by what Harmony Gold couldn't seem to get away; no Goku peeing and implying Oolong saw his penis, no Oolong getting diaherrea he has to get paralyzed instead, I can't fathom any way Harmony Gold could have covered all the original Dragon Ball much less Z. It always seemed to me the project ended because Harmony Gold realized they couldn't dub Dragon Ball and edit it to conservative late 80s US kids tv standards with what they had at their disposal.

[MrSatan2099]

Not only do I echo Masenko's thoughts on the censorship, if you know anything about the history of Harmony Gold it would have likely been an awful situation anyway.

Basically after using the original Macross footage for Robotech they became a legal doorstop for the series coming to the US, with a few small exceptions. There have been numerous successful shows since then that no other company has been able to import. (Whether they would have actually been successful here is another discussion) All of that has only just recently been resolved.

So there's an alternate timeline out there where Harmony Gold had some success with the original Dragon Ball and they held the rest of the franchise hostage here in the states.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

We don't really know why the Creative Corp Product dub ended. By all accounts it was rather successful during its run on Filipino TV. Creative Corp released the Songs of a High Spirited Saga CD and staged a musical to promote the series, and dubbed most of the Saiyan arc before going on to dub most of original Dragon Ball with a new cast and later redubbing the Z episodes they previously covered with the new cast for consistency and continuing on to some point in the Namek arc. The movies were also released on VCD. It should be noted that when Creative Corp's dub was moved from RPN9 to GMA Network, Telesuccess took over the dubbing, originally in Tagalish, which is a combination of the English and Tagalog languages but over time the English was phased out and the remainder of the series aired in full Tagalog.

As MasenkoHA explained the Harmony Gold was likely cancelled not because it was unsuccessful relative to its exceptionally limited run. The episodes, which have been recorded indicate the company had no idea how they could have continued the series further.