Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" Dub Turns 14; Still Unreleased

[Dark Vegeta-Sama]

The most that AB Groupe actively did was provide the video tracks for the last 4 episodes of DBZ because FUNi hadn't dubbed those episodes yet when the Vancouver cast went in to record them at the end of 2002.

The odd thing is, that while those final Westwood DBZ episodes did use the AB Groupe footage, the scripts of those episodes were just as based on the Funi scripts as the rest of the Westwood run. I don't know if Funi "hadn't dubbed those episodes yet" or not, but the Funi scripts of those episodes had to be at least close to completion at that point.

Scripting is done long before anything else is. Look up how any show or movie is produced. Scripting happens months (sometimes years) prior to actual production.

At any rate, FUNi's video tracks for those last four episodes were not available when Ocean dubbed them in late 2002. Either FUNi hadn't quite finished dubbing them yet, or both dubs were essentially being done simultaneously. It doesn't really make a difference. Westwood didn't have access to them, but they weren't going to wait for them either.

At that time, FUNi was releasing the DVDs of the Buu Saga prior to their American television airings as well. The final volume of DBZ, which included those last four episodes, wasn't released until March 2003, and they didn't air in the United States until April.

By that time, those final episodes (dubbed by Westwood) had already aired in the United Kingdom. Blue Water's GT was already starting to air over there by then.

Interestingly, when those final four episodes aired in the UK, they didn't actually include FUNi's episode title cards, but when they aired in Canada later on in the spring of 2003, FUNi's episode title cards were reinserted. Obviously, by that point, they were available.

[Danfun64]

Was the footage still from the AB Groups master despite the funi episode title cards?

[Godgoku95]

i Asked Sean Schemmel about the dub while i was at Fan Expo in Vancouver and he claimed he never heard the dub

[90sDBZ]

i Asked Sean Schemmel about the dub while i was at Fan Expo in Vancouver and he claimed he never heard the dub

He probably just doesn't want to get in any trouble by mentioning it again. For all we know he got in trouble for it last time, supposedly Kirby Morrow did.

[Godgoku95]

i Asked Sean Schemmel about the dub while i was at Fan Expo in Vancouver and he claimed he never heard the dub

He probably just doesn't want to get in any trouble by mentioning it again. For all we know he got in trouble for it last time, supposedly Kirby Morrow did.

makes senses but i don't think he really heard it

[Godgoku95]

why would Toei still care about the Ocean dub being leaked? it been 8 years

[90sDBZ]

why would Toei still care about the Ocean dub being leaked? it been 8 years

He's probably just playing it safe at this point. And it's possible Toei still don't want this dubs existence being made public (which is much too late obviously) due to some sort of complicated business reason.

[Godgoku95]

why would Toei still care about the Ocean dub being leaked? it been 8 years

He's probably just playing it safe at this point. And it's possible Toei still don't want this dubs existence being made public (which is much too late obviously) due to some sort of complicated business reason.

i guess it could make senses

[Robo4900]

why would Toei still care about the Ocean dub being leaked? it been 8 years

It's not been released yet. People are still talking about it... It's still new kind of a new product. So, the companies involved want to be careful about any potential damage that could be done to the potential hype/buzz, and thus potential profits, if the beans are spilled before the thing airs.

makes senses but i don't think he really heard it

He did hear it.
Funimation got work-in-progress copies of every episode of Ocean Kai across 2010-2013, since they used Ocean's edited video master to create their own. It appears that Sean Schemmel may have been one person at Funimation to have peeked at the Ocean dub audio, and he let slip some details about it in a Facebook conversation or something(Naturally mixed in with some insults he threw at it that favoured his dub, which Toei likely weren't all too pleased about), which he swiftly deleted after. In his words, it was "Strictly internal Funimation knowledge", so he wasn't sure why people were asking about it. I think he got some flak from Funi and Toei for what he did there.

Then there was another weird situation where we got a different intro/ending to Canada for Blue Water GT, but they would occasionally slip up and air both the UK and Canadian intro one after the other, and the same with the endings too.

Huh. I swore I heard somewhere that in Canada we got the Japanese OP while the English version of it was only used for the UK airing. I was really young when Dragon Ball was still airing in Canada so unfortunately I can't really remember it at all, and all the episode recordings online are from the UK broadcast.

Canada and the UK had the same opening for GT. I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. I believe the source of this misinformation is, as is often the case, Dragon Ball Wikia.

It's possible this misinformation stems from OG Dragon Ball having different openings in the UK and Canada.

In the case of Rock the Dragon I'm guessing there was some sort of licensing or royalties issue going on.

If this was the case, then why was this opening composed by the same people that would later provide the recycled score for the AB Groupe/Westwood seasons of Z? Some weird coincidence? Not that I doubt you, it's more like I'm just genuinely curious.

It doesn't really seem like that big a mystery, at any rate. The plethora of tapes I have of the early seasons 1 and 2 airings of the show on YTV in the late 1990s all have that alternate Canadian version of "Rock the Dragon" playing before the show. Any Canadian fan old enough to have watched the show back then will tell you the same. We always had that same opening theme, even before the Westwood dub was produced.

It might shed some light on this -- and also raise additional questions -- that Canadian airings always had an "Ocean Group" logo shown in broadcasts, I believe even during the in-house Funi seasons. My guess is that Ocean were involved in the distribution in Canada, but that they only licensed the show off Funimation; licensing the opening theme would have cost extra or just been a messy tangle of rights since Ron Wasserman composed it under Saban, so instead they had Anitunes put together their own.
Though given the YTV situation, I would guess either my info on the bumper being on the in-house seasons is wrong, or the nature of this deal was more complex, and involved YTV and Ocean being in some kind of partnership for the licensing of Dragon Ball.

You got a shortened, English-dubbed version of the Japanese OP

Just wanted to point out, I've made a much better video of this available.

I don't get anything for views of this, to be clear, but the quality is much better than the other uploads of this I've seen, so I suggest linking this version in future.

There are some things that fans will probably never know. Whatever legal loophole allowed Westwood to do their own alternate dub after the FUNimation season 3 recast will likely never be revealed. After all these years, even the actors themselves like Brian Drummond and Peter Kelamis have said they don't know.

Don Brown said in a telephone interview conducted with one of the UKDB guys in December 2002 (about a week after he went in to record the final four episodes of DBZ) that he'd initially been told by producers that international audiences weren't happy with FUNimation's recast and that they wanted the original cast back. I have no reason to doubt what he said, but we'll likely never know for sure.

My best guess based on the various things I've heard has for a long time been that it was a combination of factors: It's known that Funimation charged a heck of a lot for their episodes starting from season 3, and that YTV had a lot of problems getting ahold of Funimation's tapes once they licensed them, the fans were not very receptive to the new cast meanwhile the old Ocean-based cast were sitting pretty, happy to return to do more if the opportunity arose, and of course, AB Groupe were handling Dragon Ball's distribution for the European territories we're talking about, so my guess is that when the UK, Holland, and Ireland(Plus some others?) were picking up DBZ, and Canada were having some troubles with their Funimation deal, AB Groupe saw an opportunity to produce their own dub instead of licensing Funi's. Ocean had already got a main cast in place, and could easily throw together the additional cast members they needed fairly quickly, and already had some arrangement in place with Canada, and Anitunes could easily get a replacement score going on the cheap, in fact they already had their own OP that they'd done for Ocean's distributed version in Canada, and with all the other stuff going on, if AB Groupe could get Ocean producing a dub on the cheap, they could get a very attractive-looking dub for Canada to pick up, and an in-house dub for AB themselves to distribute to the European countries they were putting Dragon Ball in English into so they didn't have to pay Funimation's extortionate prices to license the show.

I don't know how close this is to the truth, but given all the stuff I've heard about potential explanations and such over the years, I would say this is the most likely explanation. And yes, I am very deliberately not addressing cancon. I don't think cancon entered into any part of this aside from the minor element of it being somewhat convenient for YTV that they would have a stronger cancon percentage for airing this show they were already going to air. I would guess it would have been the same situation even if Ocean and its cast were based out of LA, all else being the same.

There's also another weird thing about the situation. The fact that Canada didn't switch to it until the Cell Games while the UK, Ireland, and Holland got it at the Android saga which sort of puts the Canadian content theory in doubt. And the Westwood dub contained extra cuts when it aired in the UK but I've seen some Canadian fans claim it didn't for them. Furermore when the UK got the Funimation dubbed Fusion saga on the air for a couple of months it aired without any extra cuts but later when the Westwood version aired it had the extra cuts.

As I say, I don't think cancon entered into it at all.
As for the cuts and such, I've always been dubious of the claims of Canada having a less-cut version. Only time I'm aware of Canada having a different edit of an episode to the UK is GT #64, where the UK version edited the ending montage to remove the Japanese text, while the Canadian master has been claimed by many to have included the full thing. I don't have a video of just the Canadian version to illustrate this, but I do have this, which I was sent a while ago. I don't have any guarantee of its authenticity, but it's all I have.

[90sDBZ]

Then there was another weird situation where we got a different intro/ending to Canada for Blue Water GT, but they would occasionally slip up and air both the UK and Canadian intro one after the other, and the same with the endings too.

Sorry for the confusion guys. This was a typo on my part and I meant DB not GT.

As for the cuts and such, I've always been dubious of the claims of Canada having a less-cut version. Only time I'm aware of Canada having a different edit of an episode to the UK is GT #64, where the UK version edited the ending montage to remove the Japanese text, while the Canadian master has been claimed by many to have included the full thing. I don't have a video of just the Canadian version to illustrate this, but I do have this, which I was sent a while ago. I don't have any guarantee of its authenticity, but it's all I have.

I've also been dubious of Canada getting less cuts as I've never seen a single video proving it in all these years. It could just be a Mandela Effect situation where Canadian fans are remembering Funimation's home releases which they also got alongside the Westwood broadcast.

[Robo4900]

I've also been dubious of Canada getting less cuts as I've never seen a single video proving it in all these years. It could just be a Mandela Effect situation where Canadian fans are remembering Funimation's home releases which they also got alongside the Westwood broadcast.

Yes, that seems quite likely. Especially since I have heard people claim they saw the guy's face melting in Westwood episode 127 in the first broadcast, and that it was only edited out for future broadcasts, even though I have recently heard confirmation that on the first broadcast, the guy's face was not visible melting...

[MasenkoHA]

Aside from using destroy in place of kill was the Westwood dub anymore censored than the US Toonami Broadcast dub as far as visuals?

[90sDBZ]

Aside from using destroy in place of kill was the Westwood dub anymore censored than the US Toonami Broadcast dub as far as visuals?

Yes. Scenes like Super Buu getting shot by the gunman and also jumping down his throat were cut in the Westwood dub but not in Funimation's edited version. The scene with the fart joke when Gotenks and Piccolo get knocked into the bath by Super Buu was also shortened to cut the joke and implication out completely.

And huge portions of Vegeta's battle with Kid Buu were removed completely, like when he stares him down and gives a speech that causes Kid Buu to look genuinely scared, and parts of his beating. And the short scene with Frieza in hell right before Goku kills Kid Buu was removed. And the scene with Goku, Goten, and Trunks in the hot tub was cut so you don't see it exploding or the boys fusing, or Goku turning SS1 and the episode ends abruptly with Chi Chi in the kitchen being happy.

There were also time cuts like the episode were Super Buu turns to Kid Buu and the episode ends before you see that last ominous shot of him standing there in the steam. And that same episode had other random bits trimmed down.

[MistaL]

Towards the end of Z they used "kill" and "die" a few times. A notable example is when Vegeta remarks that Goku "never fought to kill".

[Robo4900]

Aside from using destroy in place of kill was the Westwood dub anymore censored than the US Toonami Broadcast dub as far as visuals?

Yes. Scenes like Super Buu getting shot by the gunman and also jumping down his throat were cut in the Westwood dub but not in Funimation's edited version. The scene with the fart joke when Gotenks and Piccolo get knocked into the bath by Super Buu was also shortened to cut the joke and implication out completely.

And huge portions of Vegeta's battle with Kid Buu were removed completely, like when he stares him down and gives a speech that causes Kid Buu to look genuinely scared, and parts of his beating. And the short scene with Frieza in hell right before Goku kills Kid Buu was removed. And the scene with Goku, Goten, and Trunks in the hot tub was cut so you don't see it exploding or the boys fusing, or Goku turning SS1 and the episode ends abruptly with Chi Chi in the kitchen being happy.

There were also time cuts like the episode were Super Buu turns to Kid Buu and the episode ends before you see that last ominous shot of him standing there in the steam. And that same episode had other random bits trimmed down.

Specific censorship edits are rather rare, though. Thing about the Westwood dub's editing is that it's hard to give you a picture of what it is without having you compare it yourself. Basically, since they were using their own score, they had no obligation to keep to the old timing, so to shorten it for time, they cut(Or sometimes trimmed) tons and tons of shots. Some of the stuff you mention may in fact be among the time cuts, in fact. It's done pretty seamlessly so you'd never notice if you weren't comparing the sources, and in fact aside from when they've made a censorship edit that you'd look out for, people just don't realise what's cut from the Westwood dub. In fact, way back when I watched a lot of episode uncut for the first time, even though I'd been used to the Westwood dub, I didn't even notice that all these extra shots were here that I didn't remember, and in the years since then when I'd watched both, I didn't notice until somewhat recently, when I started to compare them side-by-side and get into the idea of trying to sync up Dragon Box footage or something... It's usually stuff like coverage shots, close-ups of characters who aren't speaking, etc. that's gone.

In terms of dialogue censorship, as mentioned, Westwood tended to stick more to "Destroy" instead of "kill" or "die", though in the Boo arc, they dropped in some kills and dies. Aside from that, minor rewordings of lines("Push ups, sit ups, and plenty of juice" > "Push ups, sit ups, and plenty of milk", for instance), and the aforementioned edits, the scripts and video master were the same as Funi's edited dub, to my knowledge. Though some stuff is pronounced differently -- "Pikkon" is pronounced so as to make him a "Pecan" pun, a lot of characters such as future Trunks pronounce Goku with the Japanese-style emphasis on the second syllable, Kaioken is pronounced correctly...

[Azelf89]

It might shed some light on this -- and also raise additional questions -- that Canadian airings always had an "Ocean Group" logo shown in broadcasts, I believe even during the in-house Funi seasons. My guess is that Ocean were involved in the distribution in Canada, but that they only licensed the show off Funimation; licensing the opening theme would have cost extra or just been a messy tangle of rights since Ron Wasserman composed it under Saban, so instead they had Anitunes put together their own.
Though given the YTV situation, I would guess either my info on the bumper being on the in-house seasons is wrong, or the nature of this deal was more complex, and involved YTV and Ocean being in some kind of partnership for the licensing of Dragon Ball.

Actually you’re kinda right. They did use the Ocean Group logo for the in-house Funi dub (as shown here), though not always as other episodes that aired on YTV had the Funi logo at the end (as shown at the end here).

Funnily enough, I've had this theory that Ocean was the ones responsible for distributing Dragon Ball to YTV for a while now, but for a different reason than you may think.

You see, for whatever reason, the YTV airing of Funimation’s dub featured some audio edits not present anywhere else. The big one being added SFX (which you can hear in the last clip I linked) much like in the Ocean dubs of DBZ and the Blue Water dub of Dragon Ball and GT, but there was something else too. The music was changed too, as some episodes actually had their music changed (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4). Now as you can tell, it was still the Faulconer Productions score being used, and it was only certain parts of episodes where the music was changed, but still this stuff is incredibly interesting. Hell, the most interesting difference was the end of Episode 117 (voila), where the different music used is, and I'm pretty sure I’m right about this, the original music intended for that episode by Faulconer Productions, before it was changed (presumably) by Funimation.

[Special thanks to Arian for posting those clips on the Unreleased Faulconer Facebook group, as I had no idea about these differences until then. Here’s a playlist of all of the ones he posted there that I made for convenience.]

[wjbraden]

As much as I hate to get even further off topic with talking about DBZ more, as we've done that for about 300 of the 314 pages of this thread lol, these recent revelations from Dark Vegeta-Sama and Azelf89 regarding the YTV airings of the Texas dubbed Funimation episodes actually puts a lot of things into perspective as to the origins of the Westwood dub, for me at least. Before this, I had no idea that the YTV airings of ALL episodes (besides a few episodes where the American version was used by mistake, as previously mentioned) featured the Westwood version of "Rock the Dragon". I assumed that episodes 1-165 aired exactly as they had in the States, with the same American "Rock the Dragon" intro/outro up to Namek and the Faulconer Instrumental intro/outro until the cell saga. But this whole added sound effect thing adds another layer to the whole situation. So hear me out, even though I'm not an expert like any of you guys.

Before I start, I want to note something. I recently read an article on anime news network (I can't find the particular article now link now) that mentioned that it is not uncommon for Japanese production companies to request foreign distributors to send dubbed masters back to Japan. When they are sent dub, the masters, scripts and promotional materials become property of the studio (in DBZ's case, Toei, of course). This is evidenced on how the Dragon Boxes featured foreign dubbed clips from a bunch of different dubs, including the Texas Funimation dub. Toei already had these dubs in the vaults, and likely didn't just ask Funimation randomly in 2008ish for a clip from their dub to use for this extra, they already had the Funimation dub in their vaults since day one. Also, the fact that these YTV airings had the original Faulconer placement as Azelf89 linked to also further proves that Toei supplied the tapes. Funimation had probably given Toei the first version of the tapes to Toei, and didn't send them revised masters for just for a couple of music re-scoured, so Toei just gave Ocean what they had. So while a lot of us thought that Ocean had "borrowed", sub-licensed, or had Funimation send them tapes, now I'm thinking it was Toei who supplied these tapes to Ocean.

Here's what I think happened. Once Funimation moved production of DBZ moved from Canada to the States in '98-'99, Ocean and Funimation had a falling out because the people at Corus Entertainment (shareholders of YTV and Teletoon, both which aired DBZ at one point) had a big problem with it, since their big prime-time program was no longer going to meet Cancon requirements (not to mention Ocean was losing a lot of work from a lucrative property due to outsourcing, which is always a point of contention in many companies). Corus then requested that Ocean somehow remedy this issue, and somehow get partial Cancon credit for future episodes of the program (eps. 55+), which Canadians were demanding. Ocean, now no longer on good terms with Funimation, then turned to Toei to see what to do. Toei, who had recently become the right-holders of the Funimation masters, told Ocean they had English masters to episodes 55+ (from Funimation) and gave a copy of the tapes to them (as ironic as it was to be receiving masters, though indirectly, from the very company you were on bad terms with, it made financial sense to use these already localized masters, as opposed to making a costly new dub or produce new English title-cards, visuals and whatnot). Ocean then devised a plan to insert their own sound effects into these episodes, continue using the Canadian "Rock the Dragon" intro/outro song (until now I thought the American version of "Rock the Dragon" was also Canadian-made, but since I now know it wasn't even used for the Saban-era episodes, it must have not been since they had to make a whole other version for it), present it to the CTRC and claim their Cancon points and call it a day. Ocean probably also thought that slapping the Ocean logo over the Funimation one in the credits might also help for Cancon points (though I don't know how they thought they'd get anyway with making it out as if they had been a major producer in these episodes, that seems like shady business practices to try to get the CTRC to approve them, and disrespectful their rivals in Texas whose dub it was).

Anyway, the CTRC took a look at this "quasi-Canadian" version of the Namek/Trunks saga episodes, and told Corus "no dice". Corus, which a few of you mentioned, had tried to lobby for partial Cancon points for added music and such to their programs, but were ultimately denied by the CRTC. With the show continuing to be extremely popular on Canadian airwaves, and Corus not receiving points for it, they were at a crossroads (I should also mention that Cancon limits, from my understanding, have eased since the early 2000's, but during the time DBZ was on the air, to meet Cancon prime-time quotas, many channels would have to remove foreign-made productions and relpace them with Canadian production, even if the foreign-productions were more popular and brought in better ratings, which led to many channels suffering poor viewer turnout. YTV and Corus didn't want to have to have to take DBZ off primetime and suffer like other channels had, so they had to do something to try and get DBZ Cancon-ized again).

It was at that point Corus and Ocean relaized that the only way they were going to get Cancon points legitimately was to make a dub from scratch again like the Saban-era days, complete with a Canadian cast, music, etc, which is what led to the birth of the Westwood dub (I do have to wonder if they got permission from the CTRC to use a script based almost verbatim upon the American dub, instead of creating a new one like they did for Dragon Ball and GT, and continue using American masters , but if I had to guess, the people at the CTRC are so busy with Cancon paper work that it slipped through the cracks and was just stamped "approved" once they heard "Canadian voice cast and Canadian music". If they investigated it further, things might have escalated legally on an international level, with Funimation and the CTRC pressing charges for plagiarizing, which could have been extremely complicated, expensive and ugly. Maybe that's why they decided to play it safe and ask Toei for the AB Groupe masters for DB and GT and start fresh.)

Also, why they started the dub at ep. 108, and not back at ep. 55 or ep. 166 when the Wetwood version finally started to air in Canada, I'm not entirely sure, but some weird contractual things with Toei may have been at play there. As for the reason why the initial airings of episodes 273-276 used the AB Group masters, perhaps because Toei hadn't received tapes from Funimation yet, as many of you guys have mentioned, so they gave the next best masters they had to Ocean. Once Toei had the Funimation masters, they informed Ocean, which swapped them out with the Funimation ones for consistency's sake. But then, as I described earlier, Ocean/Westwood switched to the AB Groupe masters for DB and GT to play it safe with the CTRC and Funimation.

So, in short, I think Ocean received tapes from Toei, rather than from Fuimation for eps. 55-165, tried to "fool" the CTRC into thinking they somehow met Cancon standards, got burned by the CTRC for doing so, then decided to go about things the right way, and make new new dub which became the Westwood dub. Combined with the fact that it was lucrative property, with many fans internally who enjoyed the Canadian cast over the Texas one, and the Canadian cast who really enjoyed Dragon Ball (and the paycheck that came with it), it led to this weird alternate megaman music dub that we all know and love.

[Cure Dragon 255]

WOAH NELLY EPIC WALL OF TEXT! Sure its an EPIC one because the information is so very interesting but still. That has got to match Kunzait's post length.

Anyway I'm not even from Canada and i LOVED THIS POST. So much rich information. I wonder if this is what YTV meant with being "Sick to death of editing the shows"

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

I do have to wonder if they got permission from the CTRC to use a script based almost verbatim upon the American dub, instead of creating a new one like they did for Dragon Ball and GT, and continue using American masters , but if I had to guess, the people at the CTRC are so busy with Cancon paper work that it slipped through the cracks and was just stamped "approved" once they heard "Canadian voice cast and Canadian music". If they investigated it further, things might have escalated legally on an international level, with Funimation and the CTRC pressing charges for plagiarizing, which could have been extremely complicated, expensive and ugly.

Well Terry Klassen was a writer for Funimation at the time right? He would have more than likely been writing and taking credit for both dubs.

[MasenkoHA]

In the case of dubbing could Funimation even really file plagiarism against Ocean? It’s not like stealing an original work. Toei licenses Dragon Ball out to Funimation. By legal technicality or loophole that I wont pretend to understand Ocean is sub licensed. Funimation writes am English script based (however loosely) on the Japanese scripts. Ocean records an alternate English dub for Canada/countries AB group has distribtion rights too following the Funi scripts almost verbatim (and like Ireland said Klassen and Ward Perry were credited writers by season 4 at least if not sooner)

Less rambly response: I’m not convinced Funi could get Ocean for plagiarism given the circumstances of dubbing