In the '90s, Toei supplied Funimation with Digital Betacam transfers of film prints of the first ~20 episodes of DB, as well as the three original movies, for use in their 1995 dub with BLT. They were later given similar copies of DBZ for the first two seasons (and the related movies). Funimation then switched to getting materials from Latin America when they moved in-house, because it was cheaper.
However, I always found it quite curious that early DB and Z from the DVD singles looks very filmic. Almost like a proto version of the Levels. Whereas the later stuff looks more like what I'd expect from an old tape master.
But, the big thing I wondered about is where this mysterious Toei DigiBeta master came from. It's quite commonly known that Funi got their video materials in the syndication days directly from Toei. To be honest, I can't remember where I heard this first, but this has always been my understanding, and it's also very well established that in the in-house days they got DigiBeta video from Latin America...
But, it always struck me as odd that no one really knew where the Toei DigiBeta masters came from. Presumably they came from Toei transferring film prints in the '90s for foreign distribution?... But that never quite sat right with me. Particularly since they were sending film masters to France as late as 1995, the same year Funimation's first swing at Dragon Ball aired in syndication.
Recently, someone (I think JulieYBM? If you're reading this, Julie -- thanks a bunch!!
) linked a video in a thread showing a behind the scenes look at DBZ from about 1998 (video title says 1996, but the show imminently airing on Cartoon Network is mentioned, so it was definitely filmed in 1998. Likely "1996" was a typo or something). In that video, Byron Watson, chief video editor of DBZ, and brother of the infamous Barry Watson (who is also interviewed in the video), explains:
(Click on the name for the relevant timestamped video. Link to the full video, for those who'd prefer to see the whole thing. It's quite short, only 6 minutes, and very interesting)Byron Watson wrote:We get the film from Japan, we transfer it in Dallas to Digital Beta, and then I take the Digital Beta, and we edit the shows together, then we send that to censorship people, and the censorship people make comments, they send that back to me, then I go through the show and fix all the video fixes that-- uhh, all the paint work.
Byron Watson has no reason to lie here, nor does he have any reason to be wrong, as far as I can tell, and it makes perfect sense, really, that Toei would have just sent them film prints, which Funi then got transferred in a very basic way (that is, no real cleanup; watch the old DVD singles again, and marvel at all the tape marks everywhere), which they then worked on digitally to make the show as they needed. In those days, Toei deciding on a whim to scan all of DB+Z from film, even just from prints, would have probably been quite expensive, particularly since foreign licensors seemed content to just have film sent to them, and TV stations already had their own prints, which they could transfer to tape if they preferred to air it that way (funfact: To this day, in Japan, TV airings of DBZ are from a tape transfer of the original broadcast prints that was done sometime in the '90s or early '00s. My guess is it's just cheaper and more convenient for them to have done that than for them to have acquired the Dragon Box masters, and/or they did this before Dragon Box, and saw no reason to change).
This would also add another reason for why Funi would have chosen to switch to getting their video materials from Latin America instead of from Toei in Japan directly; the Latin American distributor (whose name I forget) had already prepared a tape master some time prior, likely transferred from their own set of film sent by Toei, so by instead acquiring pre-transferred DigiBeta from Latin America, Funi could save money on transferring film (which seemed to be a priority; Z episode 2 shows a marked decrease in transfer quality compared to the prior material from DB, as well as Z episode 1 -- and, remember, edited Z episode 1 uses footage from uncut Z 1 and 2, so the switch in transfer quality happens mid-episode in the original edited dub -- which suggests they may have switched to cheaper equipment, possibly they transferred to analogue tape first, then to Beta, or something else along that line. Money saving in general is also known to have been a big priority in Funi, to the point of them cutting major corners to make even small savings).
As for Funi acquiring film for the Orange Bricks in 2008; it seems they already had the first chunk of DB (roughly episodes 1-20) as well as at least the first episode of Z (likely the entire first 67, at least, since Byron Watson was talking about them receiving film in the video from '98), and the first movie of each of the two shows (though likely they had the first three of each). Probably at some point while they were working on the idea of doing "Season" releases, they realised that, while some of their episodes look stellar, a lot don't, so it would be very nice to re-transfer a lot of it... Of course, ideally, they would then have film of all 291 episodes of Z, so... My guess is they either purchased new film copies of all the remaining run of Z (as well as the remaining Z movies), or they bought out all the film the Latin American distributor had lying around that Funi didn't already have.
As for why Funi didn't bother transferring DB from film despite them almost certainly having access to it (they definitely had roughly the first 20, and likely could have easily acquired the remaining 133), I think that's just the usual non-Z apathy from Funi.
This isn't anything earth-shattering, but I find this quite interesting, so I thought I'd make a post about it. I'm curious to hear if anyone else has anything to add.
Anyway, TL;DR:
Funimation didn't acquire film of DBZ in 2008, they were sent a good bunch of DB and Z film back in the '90s by Toei. But they likely didn't have even close to a complete run of either series until 2008, at which point they likely acquired film of all the DBZ episodes they didn't already have film of. They most definitely could have completed their DB run too, but either they chose not to, or they hvae elected to not use their DB film since the creation of their original DigiBetas of those episodes back in the '90s.
At they very least the Blue Bricks should have been a film scan if thats the case.
