thaman91 wrote:Okay so you acknowledge that it doesn't necessarily win in every single case by default. That's my point. If someone who is informed about both versions points to a scene and says that they like how the Faulconer score handled it better and is able to articulate why, then it's a valid opinion. For example, if it's an emotional scene, and they think that the Faulconer emotional cue works better than the perhaps goofy-sounding Kikuchi one, then that's valid.
My issue with statements like this is that it is demonstrably untrue that the Faulconer score has very many (if any) cues that work for more emotionally driven scenes, whereas Kikuchi's score is RIFE with cues that are tailored to work in sad/melancholy, or wistful, or hopeful scenes etc. As far as I'm concerned this isn't even a matter of subjective opinion or taste: the Kikuchi score unarguably, matter of factly contains a flat out more emotionally diverse range of cues. Faulconer by contrast, is almost always in "hard-ass action" mode with VERY little variation in any other direction. There's WAY more room for fluidity in emotional range in Kikuchi than there is in Faulconer, and that's just demonstrably ironclad in what kinds of music is actually present in each of their scores.
Lets set aside for a moment the debate on whether or not the fighting action setpieces contained in the Z section of the series count as "martial arts" or not (and as far as I'm concerned that's not even a debate, and the people making the case against it are doing so out of pure ignorance): even if you want to claim that DBZ's fight scenes count more as "sci fi superhero action", then okay, lets accept that: the issue then becomes "does Faulconer's score fit that theme better"? That can be argued for the action scenes then... but the problem is that DBZ isn't ALL nothing but nonstop action scenes strung together. There are character-based scenes CONSTANTLY throughout, which all diverge WILDLY in tone: some are more comedic, others more serious. Some are sad, some are upbeat, some are wistful and nostalgic, others are meant to be subtly unsettling.
For what's supposed to be just a straight martial arts/action series, DBZ contains a VERY broad array of emotional spectrums that it touches on; as such, you'd want a score that can hit all of those varied emotional notes. You'd want a score with tonal diversity and emotional nuance.
Even on THAT
completely non-Wuxia based criteria, the Faulconer score is an abysmal failure OBJECTIVELY. Its just NOT an emotionally varied or nuanced score in ANY way on even the most generous criteria. Its only ever got two real main emotional notes that it EVER goes for: faux-hard edged action, and "mischievous" comedy. That's basically it. It is in no way equipped to handle any scene that calls for genuine emotional gravitas of
any sort.
This idea that the Kikuchi score is too overly "silly" is COMPLETELY made up and based in NO way on the reality of the cues it actually contains. Sure, it has its fair share of silly, whimsical cues: because Dragon Ball Z, as with plain Dragon Ball before it, is chock full of its share of silly, whimsical moments. But Kikuchi's score ALSO contains cues that are tragic, hopeful, adventurous, introspective, even downright DISTURBING and unsettlingly full of dread. Simply put, it has emotional maturity, which is something that the Faulconer score is dearly, dearly lacking in.
And there's a very simple reason for this: Kikuchi scored Dragon Ball like he was scoring a film. A Wuxia film, sure: but a film nonetheless, regardless of its specific genre. Faulconer, by contrast, scored the series as if he were scoring a chintzy Saturday morning cartoon for children. Saturday morning cartoons, in the traditional American/Western sense of the concept, carries with it connotations of simplistic two-dimensionality. There's ZERO pretenses at "art" in the contextual framework of these types of works, particularly as it pertained to them in the 80s and 90s: you are creating a safe, sterile, artless "product" to market to kids without offending their hyper-paranoid and wildly overprotective soccer moms. You are in NO way making the same thing as "film".
This is the exact same framework in which everything from the 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon to G.I. Joe to Thundercats to Masters of the Universe to Transformers to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to Ben 10 (and all of their various imitators) were created: make something sanded down and inoffensive that will play to the dumbest, lowest common denominator imaginable while in no way pissing off extreme conservative media watchdog groups (who will oftentimes find a bullshit reason to get offended by something in the product anyway).
This difference in approach is literally EVERYTHING to the core of this entire eons-long debate between sub vs dub DBZ: what fundamentally separates the two versions is that one version, the original Japanese version, approached the series as if it were making something that, apart from being animated, would be stylistically indistinguishable from a certain genre of film (one that played as much to adults as it did to children). The other, the FUNimation dub, took the approach that it was making the next Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or Fred Wolf TMNT cartoon children's fad.
When people, namely dub fans, claim that Faulconer's score fits more with a "sch fi action" series, they aren't talking any typical, normal sci fi action series that would ostensibly be aimed at an older audience, and thus might contain a score with a modicum of emotional depth to it beyond "epic xtreme hardcore ACTION!!!". They're talking about "sci fi action" in the more Power Rangers/Transformers-ish sense of the term: a kids' Saturday morning breakfast cereal cartoon.
Don't just take my word for it though: here's a cringing excerpt from the back of the Rock the Dragon DVD set (which contained the older Saban/Ocean version of the dub, which was nonetheless in the exact same stylistic vein as the in-house FUNimation dub) that perfectly breaks down precisely where the entire mindset behind the whole original North American dubbing process for this series was coming from:
So when we get into these discussions about "which take on DBZ fans prefer", what we're ultimately REALLY talking about here isn't just simply "generic sci fi superhero action" versus "Wuxia martial arts fantasy": what we're ultimately talking about, when broken even further down to its utmost essence, is "Saturday morning kiddie action Pew! Pew! breakfast cereal schlock" versus "something that was created as if ANYONE, regardless of age, can enjoy it like an actual film experience".
Put it this way: lets take ANY "serious" general sci fi action film from the last 30+ years put the Faulconer score to test against them. Would anyone think the Faulconer score would work well or be more effective with say... Aliens? Robocop? The Matrix? Terminator? Star Wars? The Fifth Element? Starship Troopers? Snowpiercer? Predator? They Live? The Thing? Event Horizon? Minority Report? Anyone? Seriously?
Seriously?
What if we instead put the Faulconer score with say... the 90s X-Men or Spider-Man cartoons? Or any given permutation of Power Rangers? Or any TMNT cartoon? Perhaps with a TMNT knockoff like Biker Mice From Mars or Street Sharks? Or a video game-based cartoon like the ones for Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter? Which of those given groups of material do people think that Faulconer's score would have a better chance of fitting in with more?
By that same token, what does it say that the Saban/Ocean score (Levy/Wasserman/whatever), the very same one that Faulconer's team had taken their overall basic tonal approach from, was done by people attributed to things like Power Rangers and the 90s X-Men cartoon? Or that the Ocean dub in overseas territories had at one point music lifted from the Ruby Spears Mega Man cartoon that was deemed an appropriate substitute for where English dubbed DBZ was creatively at that point?
Whereas meanwhile Kikuchi was a guy who scored not just children's anime like Doraemon, the original Casshan, and Dr. Slump, but also whole HOST of different and
wildly varied film material for older audiences: from gritty and extreme exploitation material like Female Prisoner Scorpion 701, hardcore horror like Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, Tokusatsu such as Gamera and the original Kamen Rider, martial arts like Sister Street Fighter and Sakigake!! Otokojuku, primetime adult dramas like Choshichiro Edo Nikki, etc.
I can
guarantee you that you could drop almost ANY given cue from Kikuchi's DB/DBZ score into any given Shaw Bros. or Golden Harvest Wuxia film, (some aimed at kids but many aimed at older audiences, and most of them featuring all manner of martial artists in familiar looking dogi flying through the sky, firing exploding Chi blasts from their palms and mouths, and punching down mountaintops and buildings with their bare hands) and it would in many cases be almost
indistinguishable from the original film's score.
And yes, I grant that there is now, in 2018, still a LARGE contingent of people (grown people) who genuinely, unironically enjoy and prefer Saturday morning kiddie Pew! Pew! schlock over something more... "emotionally nuanced" to put it mildly; people who can still go back, as grown adults, to MMPR and G1 Transformers and the Pokemon anime and Fred Wolf's TMNT and the like and legitimately say with a straight face "Yes, this shit is MY JAM!!!" If you're THAT person, then by ALL means, FUNimation's DBZ - Faulconer score and all - is unarguably the version of this series for you. You are in that market, the "never want to grow up/be a kid forever" nostalgia market that something like the Rock the Dragon Set was made for.
But that camp ain't ALL there is to either the North American Dragon Ball fanbase, and certain not to just the overall North American anime market. For anyone who is NOT in that mindset, the "80s and 90s-style American Saturday morning kids breakfast cereal action Pew! Pew! cartoons are awesome and I prefer it when things are done in that style" mindset... there just ISN'T any serous comparison between a score like Faulconer's and a score like Kikuchi's just in raw terms of which one has more emotional variance and is better equipped to handle a broader and more diverse array of tonality. Certainly not on a "critically objective" merit.
Both scores are VERY steeped in their respective genres (Saturday morning kiddie breakfast cereal cartoon for Faulconer versus Shaw Bros.-style old school Wuxia film for Kikuchi): but even the stark genre differences aside, there isn't any question AT ALL as to which is the more emotionally nuanced and tonally varied of the two, and that has EVERYTHING to do with the intrinsic and inescapable differences in their core fundamental approaches to the material in question: a difference that people on BOTH sides of this debate need to start getting WAY more specific and honest about if we're ever going to get to something that even passingly resembles "the heart" of this decades-long matter now.
And personal preferences aside, only ONE of those approaches is in ANY WAY in line with Toriyama's original conception of Dragon Ball, and furthermore with the presentation of it throughout the ENTIRE world EXCEPT FOR North America and other English language territories.
