Once again, a non TFS abridgey showed up in my feed, and at almost 60,000 views in less than a month: I gave it a shot.
DragonBall Z Abridged: Closing Chapters - Episode 1
https://youtu.be/JR1ld5UsPMY?si=Oka6AmnOJ8K_ze5d
Like one of the Bojack Abridged Movies, it's another attempt to continue the TFS style, jokes, and subplots. I do think the quality of VA's are higher. Got some chuckles out of me. It was okay.
Sparking Dubz' DBZA
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Robo4900
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Re: Sparking Dubz' DBZA
It's interesting...
They're making the same mistake Funimation did when they brought the dubbing in-house—the voice actors are trying very hard to sound like the TFS cast, and the result is a little jarring, and IMO restricts the actors' abilities to perform. In particular, I think whoever they got as Goku was likely chosen because he could sound the most like MasakoX of the people they tried out. Arguably one of the key reasons MasakoX was so good in DBZA is because he didn't just sound like any of the other notable voices of that character, he did his own take.
What really doesn't help is this first episode features Freeza and Cell briefly. Good luck ever living up to those two.
The use of the GT recap theme is interesting. Always liked that tune. The narrator is clearly trying to be Kyle Hebert, which is weird.
The writing is fine. Feels very "Season 1"—these people are clearly passionate and enjoying what they're doing, but with all the expectations of TFS at their peak, it's a little rough going onto this. No doubt they'll improve a lot as they go. They've clearly got potential. Some of the jokes feel to me very "What would TFS do here?", and I think there is a lot of just doing scenes from the original show but with some references thrown in (either to TFS, or to other pop culture), which is something TFS used to do a lot in their early days too. But for the material where it's these guys doing their own style and humour, it works a lot better, and IMO is head and shoulders better than TFS's first season.
That is to say—I'm going to be critical, but this is a better first episode than TFS had. They're off to a good start. If any of them are reading this post, I'd like to congratulate them.
But, I think ultimately, these guys are sort of shooting themselves in the foot by trying to continue where TFS left off. Even if you literally did a perfect job, you really can't continue with another team and not look like you're a cheap knockoff, even if you are doing your own charming thing with legitimately funny jokes in there. It's just not quite there, and it's clear what you're trying to be, and that's just inherently jarring. (See: My comparison to Funimation's early in-house days.)
If these guys had their own niche, I think they'd do better. As it is though, if you're desperate for more DBZA, and you aren't jarred badly by the voice actors all being different, this seems to be pretty well-done. I watched the whole episode, and quite enjoyed it. I probably won't come back for more, but I think a lot of people will really like this. It has the energy of early Abridged series in general, and I know a lot of people are very nostalgic for that era.
Their editing is also rather well done.
I think the immediate improvements these guys could make, though, are:
They're making the same mistake Funimation did when they brought the dubbing in-house—the voice actors are trying very hard to sound like the TFS cast, and the result is a little jarring, and IMO restricts the actors' abilities to perform. In particular, I think whoever they got as Goku was likely chosen because he could sound the most like MasakoX of the people they tried out. Arguably one of the key reasons MasakoX was so good in DBZA is because he didn't just sound like any of the other notable voices of that character, he did his own take.
What really doesn't help is this first episode features Freeza and Cell briefly. Good luck ever living up to those two.
The use of the GT recap theme is interesting. Always liked that tune. The narrator is clearly trying to be Kyle Hebert, which is weird.
The writing is fine. Feels very "Season 1"—these people are clearly passionate and enjoying what they're doing, but with all the expectations of TFS at their peak, it's a little rough going onto this. No doubt they'll improve a lot as they go. They've clearly got potential. Some of the jokes feel to me very "What would TFS do here?", and I think there is a lot of just doing scenes from the original show but with some references thrown in (either to TFS, or to other pop culture), which is something TFS used to do a lot in their early days too. But for the material where it's these guys doing their own style and humour, it works a lot better, and IMO is head and shoulders better than TFS's first season.
That is to say—I'm going to be critical, but this is a better first episode than TFS had. They're off to a good start. If any of them are reading this post, I'd like to congratulate them.
But, I think ultimately, these guys are sort of shooting themselves in the foot by trying to continue where TFS left off. Even if you literally did a perfect job, you really can't continue with another team and not look like you're a cheap knockoff, even if you are doing your own charming thing with legitimately funny jokes in there. It's just not quite there, and it's clear what you're trying to be, and that's just inherently jarring. (See: My comparison to Funimation's early in-house days.)
If these guys had their own niche, I think they'd do better. As it is though, if you're desperate for more DBZA, and you aren't jarred badly by the voice actors all being different, this seems to be pretty well-done. I watched the whole episode, and quite enjoyed it. I probably won't come back for more, but I think a lot of people will really like this. It has the energy of early Abridged series in general, and I know a lot of people are very nostalgic for that era.
Their editing is also rather well done.
I think the immediate improvements these guys could make, though, are:
- More consistent mics. It's very obvious everyone involved is recording on different setups—for the most part this is fine, but their Goku is clearly using much cheaper equipment than everyone else. Some careful EQing could help close the gap, but that will only take you so far.
- A few of the guys could also do with some better mic technique. Some of the actors (Goku in particular) seem to have widely variable distance from their mic, giving some lines a very different sound (and sometimes the sound changes drastically mid-line) betraying this. The other problem is pops; the King Kai actor in particular (who is IMO the highlight of the cast) keeps making "P" sounds directly into his mic, creating a dreadful popping sound. You hear this a lot among inexperienced podcasters. A pop filter might fix this, but careful angling of the mouth and mic will do it better.
- Better footage. They're clearly using Dragon Box-derived footage, but there's a lot wrong with it. It was imperfectly scaled, possibly had some weird deinterlacing? Certainly it seems to be a very low-bitrate source, so freeze-frames and custom lip flaps have some bad macroblocking around them. They'd be better off using the Seed of Might encode, up-sized to 960x720 (probably with an ffmpeg resize) before being imported into their editing software—but without any lossy re-encoding.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.