Non-thread-worthy discussions

[Mireya]

Kaioshin: “….Yes…the heart which he gained by going so far as to lower his power through absorption(s)…has returned once again to the way it was…he has no self-control whatsoever…he has become evil itself…”

Kibitoshin talking about the process of Boo absorbing the Kaioshins until being tamed. It's weird to me because it gives an impression that he absorbed the Kaioshins to get a heart. Even looking the JP version raw scans, the implications are overall the same... Like, "the heart gained by going so far as to lower his power", or more literally "the heart he gained even at the cost of lowering his power through absorptions"... Seems like an intent to get a heart by Boo... But that doesn't make sense. How could this be taken?

[TobyS]

North Kai said that he and the other kais help seal him up years ago? How can they if they are weaker than Nappa? Unless Bojack has been training inside of North Kai's planet.

Sealing in DB isn't exactly related to power levels, Mutaito was able to seal king Piccolo inside a rice cooker despite being far weaker.

Though the difference between Mutaito and king Piccolo is not even close to the difference between any of the Kaios and Bojack, so it's a wonder they managed to do it at all... But then again, considering Bojack was sealed within a star, it wasn't in just any place that him and his gang were sealed, at least.

We also have Grank Kaioshin sealing Moro.

[ZombieVito]

Are these original?

I only knew the OG Dragon Ball seasons to be on those horrendous digipacks but these are plastic cases.

[MasenkoHA]

Are these original?

I only knew the OG Dragon Ball seasons to be on those horrendous digipacks but these are plastic cases.

Bootleg or custom made I would guess. Funimation never released them like that

[ZombieVito]

Are these original?

I only knew the OG Dragon Ball seasons to be on those horrendous digipacks but these are plastic cases.

Bootleg or custom made I would guess. Funimation never released them like that

I have seen GT on these cases on Walmart though.

[goku the krump dancer]

I think it’s interesting that in most cases when people think of fan service and Dragon Ball it’s usually tied to characters coming back to life, getting a new transformation to keep up with Goku or getting a modern incarnation to participate in the current run of the story.

Whilst in other probably mostly shonen anime when people think of fan service it’s usually just typically up-skirt panty angles, super bouncy boobs or characters somehow always tripping and landing in provocative poses. Lol just a random thought I’ve been having the last couple weeks.

[MasenkoHA]

I think it’s interesting that in most cases when people think of fan service and Dragon Ball it’s usually tied to characters coming back to life, getting a new transformation to keep up with Goku or getting a modern incarnation to participate in the current run of the story.

Whilst in other probably mostly shonen anime when people think of fan service it’s usually just typically up-skirt panty angles, super bouncy boobs or characters somehow always tripping and landing in provocative poses. Lol just a random thought I’ve been having the last couple weeks.

Ya know, this post made me think, despite pre-Tenshinhan Dragon Bal's rep as a pervy show, Dragon Ball has never really been a "sexy" show. Bulma showering in episode 6 is probably the only real instance of the show doing the kind of fan service you're referring to. Most of the more racy material is is usually done in a more comedic fashion. Less "mmmph tiddies" and more "tehehee boobies" even Lanfang stripping down to lacy underwear with the sexaphone music cue playing is framed more comedically than as titillation.

I think a lot of it has to do with Dragon Ball's target demo being like 8 year old boys and Toriyama being a gag manga author at heart, but it is interesting when you compare it to other Shonen anime like you alluded to.

[Vegetto95]

Ya know, this post made me think, despite pre-Tenshinhan Dragon Bal's rep as a pervy show, Dragon Ball has never really been a "sexy" show. Bulma showering in episode 6 is probably the only real instance of the show doing the kind of fan service you're referring to. Most of the more racy material is is usually done in a more comedic fashion. Less "mmmph tiddies" and more "tehehee boobies" even Lanfang stripping down to lacy underwear with the sexaphone music cue playing is framed more comedically than as titillation.

I think a lot of it has to do with Dragon Ball's target demo being like 8 year old boys and Toriyama being a gag manga author at heart, but it is interesting when you compare it to other Shonen anime like you alluded to.

One of my favorite examples of that is in episode 8/chapter 15 when Blooma agrees to let Muten Rōshi touch her boobs in exchange for putting out the fire on Mt. Frypan. Unbeknownst to Rōshi however, Blooma makes Oolong transform into her as a substitute so that she won't get touched herself... only for Oolong to turn the cruel joke right back around on her when he allows Rōshi to do FAR more than just touch, and instead lets him do several rounds of "pafu pafu" ("motorboating", a.k.a. one person sticking their head between another's tits) on his fake, shapeshifted Blooma booba.

It's a scene that's played waaaaaaaay more for comedy than for any kind of sex appeal (nothing is even shown in in either the manga or the anime aside from a brief shot of inoffensive sideboob), and it works SO DAMN WELL because we already know well by then the kinds of people that Muten Rōshi, Blooma, and Oolong are. Blooma's a selfish bitch who's taking advantage of Oolong's ability to shapeshift as well as Rōshi being a gigantic pervert, and Oolong and Blooma bicker so much (one could argue that Blooma treats Oolong worse than he does her), that Oolong, who's an equally selfish asshole, decides to take equal advantage of the situation and of her sex appeal. It's GREAT because it's one of those types of jokes that only works as well as it does because of the specific characters it involves, which is something Toriyama was honestly amazing at for the entire original run of the series.

As opposed to so many other modern shōnen that... don't really do legitimately funny jokes with their "fanservice", and instead mostly just amount to nothing more than blatant sexual objectification of the female characters' bodies for the sole sake of objectification, or that PLUS the male characters molesting/groping (let's call it what it REALLY is... SEXUALLY ASSAULTING) the female characters without any kind of consent whatsoever (and then there's the equally annoying, beaten dead horse "dude accidentally falling on a girl and landing with his hand on her tit" trope). There's NEVER any ACTUAL JOKE there (Toriyama, as mentioned, at least took the effort to actually write jokes into his more sex-comedy type scenes), and yet those series always seem to treat objectification of women/sexual assault as if it's the funniest thing in the world. And it's just not. It's disgusting and WRONG. (And hell... it's not even just more modern shōnen series, though it does seem to be increasingly more prevalent there... that exact kind of thing is why I dropped City Hunter, a series that ran from 1985 to 1991, right alongside Dragon Ball in its prime, halfway through the first goddamn episode.)

In contrast, again, I feel that, even though most of the sexual gags from early DB obviously are still fairly inappropriate and were for the most part totally unnecessary, they at least had some ACTUAL comedic substance to them and didn't exist solely for base, disgusting titillation. A good example is Rōshi using Blooma's microband to shrink down and watch her in the bathroom. Incredibly disgusting of him, and it served ZERO purpose in the plot. But it clearly wasn't used for objectification, as we only see a shot of Blooma pulling up her panties, and instead the joke comes from the fact that not only does Rōshi arrive too late to actually see anything... but he slips and falls down into the toilet, gets flushed, and comes out literally smelling like shit. He tries to be a disgusting pervert without any kind of consent whatsoever, and receives what almost comes across as divine retribution for it. Is it an inappropriately sexual joke? Yeah. Is it completely unnecessary to the plot? Yup. Is it used simply to objectify Blooma? Not at all. Is it hilarious? Absolutely lol

In complete contrast, Rōshi groping No.18 in the Boo arc just because he could when she literally had her three-year old daughter in her arms... yeah, there was no joke there. That was just gross and wrong (though at least, that was the fault of the anime writers, not Toriyama, as that scene was not in the manga). I know he gets punished by getting smashed against the side of the plane by No. 18... but the way the scene is presented tries to play both that AND the literal sexual assault that precedes it as equally "comedic". FUCK that scene.

[Hellspawn28]

I still want Mr. Satan to meet Freeza one day. He has meet every main DBZ villain expect for him.

[Civic]

Before streaming and fast internet, I had access to the DBZ movies and TV specials through cable TV. But I always wondered - why are the History of Trunks and Bardock - The Father of Goku TV specials labelled this way and not as movies?

[MasenkoHA]

Before streaming and fast internet, I had access to the DBZ movies and TV specials through cable TV. But I always wondered - why are the History of Trunks and Bardock - The Father of Goku TV specials labelled this way and not as movies?

Because they're not movies. They're tv specials. They debuted on television in Japan, where as the movies were initially released in Toei Film Festivals, usually as part of a triple feature with other Toei properties

[Basaku]

They're also significantly shorter than theatrical releases

Funny tho how they're both the most beloved and influental pieces of the franchise outside the main manga/anime, far eclipsing the legacy of the movies. Future Trunks special is one thing, you could say it was just adapting the incredible bonus manga chapter, but the Bardock special was original Toei material

[MasenkoHA]

They're also significantly shorter than theatrical releases

Funny tho how they're both the most beloved and influental pieces of the franchise outside the main manga/anime, far eclipsing the legacy of the movies. Future Trunks special is one thing, you could say it was just adapting the incredible bonus manga chapter, but the Bardock special was original Toei material

With Bardock I think because it was set well before the start of the series and all Toei had to go on was 1. Freeza destroys planet Vegeta 2. Goku's dad looks like Goku per Raditz. It gave Koyama a lot of freedom.

With the movies even though they can't really fit into the main series timeline they still vaguely take place in certain points and I imagine they can't do anything too drastic or interesting

[Vegetto95]

So out of mainly boredom from sitting around with nothing much to do on my day off, I had a thought... what are the differences between the full, original-length movie version of the FUNimation/Saban/Pioneer dub of DBZ movie 3 ("The Tree of Might" as they called it) and the 3-episode TV version they made? I have the original 1998 Pioneer DVD release of the full movie that has the retained Japanese music and the fairly damn faithful dub dialogue (though it does still have some dumb dubisms here and there like "Turles" and the dreaded, cringey "Destructo Disk"), but I've heard that the TV version instead replaced the original Kikuchi score with the Ron Wasserman/Shuki Levy replacement score. Is that true? And what other changes were there, if any? Was any dialogue different? Any more dubisms added? The movie version of the dub uses the MUCH more accurate "Higher Dragon", but did the TV version invent "Icarus", or was that a thing FUNi did by themselves a few years later when they dubbed the Garlic Jr. arc in 2000?

Main reason I'm posting this on here rather than making a new thread of it is I get the feeling this is most likely something that's been thoroughly discussed before... and if it has been and anyone has a link to make it even easier, that'd be perfectly fine too!

[VegettoEX]

Oh man, yeah, the TV dub is wildly different from what came later with the home release re-dub! It would be nearly impossible to summarize it, since almost every single line is different.

"Pick on someone your own altitude!" might be one of my favorite lines of all time...?!

Icarus was indeed first named there in the TV version, and it does indeed use the Wasserman/Levy score.

[Vegetto95]

Oh man, yeah, the TV dub is wildly different from what came later with the home release re-dub! It would be nearly impossible to summarize it, since almost every single line is different.

"Pick on someone your own altitude!" might be one of my favorite lines of all time...?!

Icarus was indeed first named there in the TV version, and it does indeed use the Wasserman/Levy score.

Wow, THAT different, huh? So basically FUNi's writing staff just did to the TV version what they did to 99.9% of the rest of the series throughout the mid 90s to mid 2000s (I'm guessing with the extra censorship that Saban mandated at the time)?

Also, I think I read somewhere that one version still had Ian James Corlett, but the other had Peter Kelamis instead? If so, I'm guessing Kelamis was in the movie version since he was (adult) Gokū's second voice actor and the DVD came after?

Was the uncut DVD version of the dub ever broadcast back then, or just the TV version? I have vivid memories of having once watched it on TV at my grandmother's house, but that had to have been WELL over 25 years ago when I was like five or six, so I do not have ANY earthly idea which version it was.

[VegettoEX]

Yep, it's Corlett in the TV version and Kelamis in the home version.

Yep, the writing on the TV version was in line with all the other random stuff going on at the time. It was broadcast in the middle of syndication season two, so everything about its approach is exactly the same as the surrounding content there.

For those who might not remember, kinda just random fun fact here, but they released them on home video in the order of 1 -> 3 -> 2.

My understanding from still occasionally being tangentially aware of what Cartoon Network was doing: they always broadcast the old syndication TV edit of the movie, even though they were broadcasting edited versions of the home video 1 and 2. This of course is only applicable to the US, because I know that Toonami over in the UK broadcast the "Big Green" version, right? There's a big Cartoon Network logo on its front cover!

[Vegetto95]

Yep, it's Corlett in the TV version and Kelamis in the home version.

Yep, the writing on the TV version was in line with all the other random stuff going on at the time. It was broadcast in the middle of syndication season two, so everything about its approach is exactly the same as the surrounding content there.

For those who might not remember, kinda just random fun fact here, but they released them on home video in the order of 1 -> 3 -> 2.

My understanding from still occasionally being tangentially aware of what Cartoon Network was doing: they always broadcast the old syndication TV edit of the movie, even though they were broadcasting edited versions of the home video 1 and 2. This of course is only applicable to the US, because I know that Toonami over in the UK broadcast the "Big Green" version, right? There's a big Cartoon Network logo on its front cover!

It's kinda crazy to hold the DVD in my hand and think about how it's the very second DVD release of anything Dragon Ball in the US after the "Dead Zone" movie (which, if I recall, you've gone out of your way to collect every different release of that movie that you can, right? )

God, part of me legitimately wants to watch and compare both versions just out of sheer curiosity, but the other part of me doesn't because 1) I vehemently dislike all of FUNi's DB dubs, Saban/Ocean/BLT/Dick and Rogers/Pioneer/Kidmark, etc.-assisted or otherwise, and haven't since I was like 13-14 in like 2006 or so once I started watching a lot of the series in Japanese for the first time, and 2) unless I'm mistaken, I believe the only official physical release of the TV version was in the 2013 "Rock the Dragon" DVD set, which is looong out of print and usually INSANELY expensive on eBay (on the rare occasion there's one up for sale there to begin with), and mild curiosity about a I dub I don't even like is NOT worth 4-500 bucks to me lmao (as opposed to the Pioneer movie DVD that I found at a used bookstore for like 6 bucks a little while ago lol)

[MasenkoHA]

So out of mainly boredom from sitting around with nothing much to do on my day off, I had a thought... what are the differences between the full, original-length movie version of the FUNimation/Saban/Pioneer dub of DBZ movie 3 ("The Tree of Might" as they called it) and the 3-episode TV version they made? I have the original 1998 Pioneer DVD release of the full movie that has the retained Japanese music and the fairly damn faithful dub dialogue (though it does still have some dumb dubisms here and there like "Turles" and the dreaded, cringey "Destructo Disk"), but I've heard that the TV version instead replaced the original Kikuchi score with the Ron Wasserman/Shuki Levy replacement score. Is that true? And what other changes were there, if any? Was any dialogue different? Any more dubisms added? The movie version of the dub uses the MUCH more accurate "Higher Dragon", but did the TV version invent "Icarus", or was that a thing FUNi did by themselves a few years later when they dubbed the Garlic Jr. arc in 2000?

Main reason I'm posting this on here rather than making a new thread of it is I get the feeling this is most likely something that's been thoroughly discussed before... and if it has been and anyone has a link to make it even easier, that'd be perfectly fine too!

If you've seen the 2006 in-house dub Funimation did about 90 percent of that script was recycled from the syndicated dub some corny jokes and dialog censorship are removed and occasionally some additional dialog is added (example when Yamucha is using his Sokidan in the syndicated dub he says "You want some of this, fly face! In the 2006 redub he just says "You want some of this!") but it's basically the same script right down to the nonsense line about the fruit from the tree of might being for the Eternal Dragon and not the gods.

Also worth noting FUNimation was very much in charge of scripting since day uno, even when they were dubbing in Canada. They did indeed get Icarus from the syndicated dub because they invented it themselves (its actually more surprising the Pioneer/Ocean dub wasn't forced to keep it)

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

They did indeed get Icarus from the syndicated dub because they invented it themselves (its actually more surprising the Pioneer/Ocean dub wasn't forced to keep it)

That was probably for the same reason the original pronunciation for Kaio-Ken was kept. The Pioneer movie dubs were produced independently of Funimation as Pioneer got the sublicense for the home video market.

I know Diana Gage was the creative supervisor for the Saban, Pioneer, Westwood and Blue Water GT dubs. Of course Gage probably had less power in Saban Z because that was entirely Funimation's production, but there are examples of more accurate names and pronunciations in the other three dubs so she may have had some influence there.