StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by MasenkoHA » Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:43 pm

Adamant wrote: Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:34 pm
MasenkoHA wrote: Wed Jun 16, 2021 4:55 pm Was their Yu-gi-oh dub actually considered good? From what I recall they had a top to bottom replacement score, censored any reference or threat of death (sometimes to extreme measure that made no sense) and just generally rewrote dialog and censored any and all guns (even though they were never fired)
Much like certain other wildly inaccurate dubs, it's mostly "considered good" by people that were introduced to the franchise through it and thus have difficulty associating the franchise with the tone it was actually supposed to have before the dubbers rewrote the hell out of it.
Right, I haven’t been involved in the Yu-gi-oh fandom since I was like 13 but I definitely remember the common online opinion was not “It’s a good dub except for” the common opinion by fans who had either seen the Japanese version or knew of the changes was the dub was complete shit and overly censored. Seems like a DBZ dub thing where popular opinion did a 180 over the years due to nostalgia.

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Wed Jun 16, 2021 9:32 pm

MasenkoHA wrote: Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:43 pm
Adamant wrote: Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:34 pm
MasenkoHA wrote: Wed Jun 16, 2021 4:55 pm Was their Yu-gi-oh dub actually considered good? From what I recall they had a top to bottom replacement score, censored any reference or threat of death (sometimes to extreme measure that made no sense) and just generally rewrote dialog and censored any and all guns (even though they were never fired)
Much like certain other wildly inaccurate dubs, it's mostly "considered good" by people that were introduced to the franchise through it and thus have difficulty associating the franchise with the tone it was actually supposed to have before the dubbers rewrote the hell out of it.
Right, I haven’t been involved in the Yu-gi-oh fandom since I was like 13 but I definitely remember the common online opinion was not “It’s a good dub except for” the common opinion by fans who had either seen the Japanese version or knew of the changes was the dub was complete shit and overly censored. Seems like a DBZ dub thing where popular opinion did a 180 over the years due to nostalgia.
Of course the 4Kids One Piece dub was also a shitty train wreck of a dub in every respect and almost universally despised from the word go, but that's a case where it was so god awful that nobody in the fandom really looks back on that period of the show's history here in the States with any degree of positivity. It took until FUNimation picked up the license and continued on/going back with their version for the series to get a proper dub and the former is all but an obscure oddity nowadays.

There were certainly no reversal there, it still continues to be viewed as one of if not the worst of 4Kids' dubs and a laughing stock by the One Piece fandom.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by MasenkoHA » Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:31 am

Yeah but there is a few factors at play here

1. Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh aired on Kidswb at the height of its popularity. 4Kids One Piece aired on Fox Box which I don’t think ever got the popularity of Fox Kids or Kidswb. It’s biggest show was….what? The 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon?

2. 4kids One Piece was replaced by Funimation’s version relatively quickly.


I don’t think the lack of nostalgic love for 4kids One Piece is because it’s so much worse than their other shows. Look at how well loved season 3 of Dragon Ball Z’s dub is

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by VegettoEX » Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:44 am

One point of my own before attempting to drag it back in topic:

The 4Kids One Piece dub didn’t endlessly repeat the same way FUNi’s DBZ dub did, which in DBZ’s case is what allowed such an awful product to make such an impression upon a very impressionable audience at a very specific age in a very specific time slot.

Anyway, I’m back in old magazine purchase mode, so I’m attempting to dig back and find further references to what the assumed/presumed DB license holder was in America. I’ve acquired/gone a couple years further back in Mangazine, and got nothing so far. The further back you go the more it becomes a fan-comic-zine, so I’m not too hopeful. I’ve pretty much tapped out Usenet at this point, too. I’m starting to get into industry trade magazines, but that’s such a black hole....
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:46 am

MasenkoHA wrote: Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:31 am Yeah but there is a few factors at play here

1. Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh aired on Kidswb at the height of its popularity. 4Kids One Piece aired on Fox Box which I don’t think ever got the popularity of Fox Kids or Kidswb. It’s biggest show was….what? The 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon?

2. 4kids One Piece was replaced by Funimation’s version relatively quickly.


I don’t think the lack of nostalgic love for 4kids One Piece is because it’s so much worse than their other shows. Look at how well loved season 3 of Dragon Ball Z’s dub is
That is definitely true, both of the former aired when their respective franchises were at their most massive waves of popularity here and KidsWB was already a huge programming block for a good few years by the time that they picked them up. FoxBox/4KidsTV/whatever definitely didn't have nearly the amount of success as those and TMNT 2003 was i think indeed their most popular series at that point.

You've got a point there, even if the old 1999 dub of the Freeza arc is awful in every way there's a lot of fans who still love it regardless.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by MasenkoHA » Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:48 am

VegettoEX wrote: Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:44 am
Anyway, I’m back in old magazine purchase mode, so I’m attempting to dig back and find further references to what the assumed/presumed DB license holder was in America. I’ve acquired/gone a couple years further back in Mangazine, and got nothing so far. The further back you go the more it becomes a fan-comic-zine, so I’m not too hopeful. I’ve pretty much tapped out Usenet at this point, too. I’m starting to get into industry trade magazines, but that’s such a black hole....

Maybe I’m way off but I was under the impression Harmony Gold had a 5 year licensing agreement that stayed even after they canceled the project. That’s why it took until 1994 for another company (Funimation) to acquire the license? Was there any other company besides U.S Renditions that expressed interest in the license?

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by VegettoEX » Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:58 am

“Expressed interest” and “had the license” are two separate conversations.

“Had the license” is my big one, considering I have that one Mangazine article that seems pretty convinced about US Renditions. I want more on that, even if it shakes out to be untrue.

“Expressed interest” though? EVERYONE was interested in... uhh... the guaranteed giant worldwide success that was Dragon Ball. I came in “late” in 1996, but even then the chatter was still going about how lots of companies had been going after it before Funimation grabbed it (and we know nepotism played a role there).

(That Internal Correspondence article I put up recently is of note in that regard, since they acknowledge Viz in negotiation for the manga YEARS before they actually released it.)
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Robo4900 » Fri Jun 18, 2021 3:20 am

I'd just like to point out in this thread, because it should be pointed out whenever these kinds of discussions are had for the benefit of newer fans who haven't been around in these discussions in the past, that Funimation and 4Kids were far from the only realistic choices for Dragon Ball's licensors, despite the fact so many fans think of 4Kids as the alternative. Viz, for instance, had done an excellent job of Ranma 1/2 and could have easily got Dragon Ball and done a great job of it; faithful scripts that would've been comparable to the Pioneer dub, an Ocean cast with solid direction, etc.

Similarly, at that time, you had Animaze doing Cowboy Bebop, and various other outlets that tend to get forgotten these days.

Just thought I should say this. Much like the "Toonami saved DBZ" nonsense that often gets paraded around, "If it wasn't Funimation, it would have been someone worse, like 4Kids!" is a mindset that none of us should allow ourselves to fall into, and as long as we regularly refresh the fact that, yes, these notions are nonsense, the more thoroughly we stamp out this hogwash.

Though, that said, I honestly think 4Kids would have been better for the franchise in the west than Funimation; Funi as they are now tend to do good work with everything they do including Dragon Ball, but circa 1994-2005 Funimation had no business getting a franchise like this, and IMO pretty much anyone else would have been better, 4Kids included, since they would have at least done it in order, the dub would have been at least as faithful as Funi's (but probably a lot more faithful), we wouldn't have had the godawful cast switch-over in 1999, etc. etc. The only downside is that under 4Kids specifically, we may not have finally had the full subtitled show available starting from 2008, like we did in reality. Though in fairness, 2008 is an appallingly late time for that to happen anyway.

Anyway...

As for Streamline, I have never heard of this. I wouldn't be surprised if this is just someone on TVTropes getting their wires crossed.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Adamant » Fri Jun 18, 2021 1:20 pm

Robo4900 wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 3:20 amThe only downside is that under 4Kids specifically, we may not have finally had the full subtitled show available starting from 2008, like we did in reality.
We probably would have, because that's around the time 4Kids started doing subs of some of their bigger shows like Yugioh and Sonic. And fan demand for subbed Dragonball was enormous.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Fri Jun 18, 2021 1:38 pm

Adamant wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 1:20 pm
Robo4900 wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 3:20 amThe only downside is that under 4Kids specifically, we may not have finally had the full subtitled show available starting from 2008, like we did in reality.
We probably would have, because that's around the time 4Kids started doing subs of some of their bigger shows like Yugioh and Sonic. And fan demand for subbed Dragonball was enormous.
Oddly enough 4Kids never attempted to do this with Pokemon when they still had the license to the franchise back in the day given it was by far their biggest hit, though i wonder if that may be because they didn't get the rights from OLM/Game Freak/TCPI/whoever to release the Japanese version over here in the States. Unless i'm mistaken it's one of the few animes which still doesn't have a subtitled release of any kind of the series and most movies (barring the CGI remake of Mewtwo Strikes Back) by extension and thus relegated to dub only for the past 23 years since the show first premiered on TV here.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by MasenkoHA » Fri Jun 18, 2021 3:53 pm

Robo4900 wrote: Fri Jun 18, 2021 3:20 am I'd just like to point out in this thread, because it should be pointed out whenever these kinds of discussions are had for the benefit of newer fans who haven't been around in these discussions in the past, that Funimation and 4Kids were far from the only realistic choices for Dragon Ball's licensors, despite the fact so many fans think of 4Kids as the alternative. Viz, for instance, had done an excellent job of Ranma 1/2 and could have easily got Dragon Ball and done a great job of it; faithful scripts that would've been comparable to the Pioneer dub, an Ocean cast with solid direction, etc.
The “It could have been 4Kids!!!!!!” fear mongering the fandom does is dumb because no it was never going to be 4Kids. They didn’t break out into dubbing until 1998. It’s pretty obvious in 1994 someone was going to get that license and it wasn’t going to be a company that wasn’t involved in such things.


All evidence points to FUNimation being the actual worst outcome. I’m trying to think of what other bad reputation dubbing company that was actually around in 1994 that might have licensed it. Maybe Saban but at the time they were heavily focusing on licensing Japanese Tokusatsu shows and repurposing them for American audiences.

Realistically had FUNimation not cheated their way into getting the license a company like U.S Renditions or Pioneer and Viz would have acquired it. And it sounds like it was U.S Renditions who were on track of actually getting it.





4Kids included, since they would have at least done it in order, the dub would have been at least as faithful as Funi's (but probably a lot more faithful), we wouldn't have had the godawful cast switch-over in 1999, etc. etc.
As far as those decisions go. I don’t think any company would have been stupid enough to switch their entire cast after two seasons or skip 140 episodes.

Has any other company actually done anything like that?

I think FUNimation was better than some companies in certain regards. (Would Saban or 4Kids allow bilingual releases as early as the year 2000 or allow Pioneer to release an uncut faithful dub for the movies to home video? Fat fucking chance) but when it comes to general business decisions on producing the dub FUNimation was remarkably incompetent.

The only downside is that under 4Kids specifically, we may not have finally had the full subtitled show available starting from 2008, like we did in reality. Though in fairness, 2008 is an appallingly late time for that to happen anyway.
Sure , but having most of the show available with subtitles by 2004 is better than none. 4Kids doing it so late in the game seemed more like damage control where at least FUNimation seemed like they wanted to do right by fans….even if they were really really bad at it.


I agree with BlackPaladin that 4Kids and Funimation had opposite trajectories. 4Kids started out decent, nowhere near as good as people on here want to pretend, but decent and then but steadily got worse and worse and engaging in adaptation practices that pretty much no company was doing by 2005 ish. Where Funimation at least took in fan feedback and tried to improve.

But again saying “Well at least 4Kids didn’t get Dragon Ball” is like saying “Well at least that knife didn’t shoot bullets at me”

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sun Jun 20, 2021 10:18 am

So I'm old enough in the Western anime scene and enough of a Streamline fanboy going WAY back to their very beginnings to 1000% confirm that at NO point in time did Streamline EVER have or obtained the license to Dragon Ball.

What more than likely happened with that TVTropes source (also to reiterate: please for the love of god STOP using TVtropes as a reference point, the overwhelming majority of the userbase there tend to be made up of absolute fucking imbeciles) is that they confused the Harmony Gold dub for Streamline, since Carl Macek owned and ran both companies.

But understand that while Macek had his hands in both, Harmony Gold and Streamline were two VERY different companies with almost DIAMETRICALLY opposing aims and goals with their anime licenses.

I've talked about this quite a bit on this forum in more recent years, but it really bears repeating here: an absolutely CRITICALLY important piece of information about the history of the Western anime licensing market of the 1980s and 90s that goes COMPLETELY ignored in both this specific community here and in a lot of more wider/broader modern day Western anime fandom is that back in those days there was a steep, STEEP, rigid-ass divide between anime that was specifically being licensed for airing on mainstream broadcast U.S. children's television (where the fact that the material was from Japan was all but hidden from the audience entirely), and anime that was being licensed for the direct to video market (with TV airings only on channels like HBO, Showtime, MTV, and later on Sci Fi Channel) and aimed at an audience of largely full grown adults, or much older teens at the absolute youngest (where the fact that this was animation from Japan was bandied about proudly as a marketing point to an audience that was at least somewhat familiar already with anime as a concept).

The Dragon Ball/Kanz community, along with a horrifyingly gigantic chunk of millennial Western anime fandom as a whole, has been for literally decades now almost COMPLETELY clueless and ignorant about this incredibly fucking important distinction in the Western anime licensing market of the 80s and 90s, and has maintained much of its ENTIRE focus and base of knowledge around SOLELY the children's broadcast television side of the 80s and 90s U.S. anime licensing market.

Not only has there been next to NO base of knowledge or even basic intellectual curiosity about the straight to video adult market for anime in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s, for most folks they're not even aware that such a market even EXISTED at all (despite its incredibly widespread proliferation across countless mainstream video stores and outlets from the late 80s and throughout the 90s).

I bring all this up again because Carl Macek had two different companies that were intended for these two DRASTICALLY different markets: Harmony Gold was Macek's company that dealt with anime licenses meant for broadcast on mainstream U.S. television (meaning there would be a great deal more censorship, Westernization, and other alterations, and the audience of small kids were not meant to know or understand that these were shows from Japan at all), while Streamline was VERY much the exact opposite and dealt pretty much EXCLUSIVELY in anime released straight to video, with zero censorship and minimal alterations, for an audience that was strictly 18+ (many of whom had already knew what anime was or heard of it, and where the fact that these were animated works from Japan was HEAVILY made crystal clear in the marketing).

Both Harmony Gold and Streamline were MASSIVELY big deals to Western anime fandom throughout the 80s and early bulk of the 90s. Harmony Gold having briefly had DB has always been widely known, but had Streamline at ANY point gotten ahold of it, I can 1000000% guaran-fucking-tee you that that news would have been EVERYWHERE at the time and the talk of the then-anime community far and wide.

So no guys, Streamline NEVER had, even briefly as far as anyone is aware of, the DB license. Whoever it was on TVTropes who made this claim likely got confused because of Macek's involvement in both companies. Once again TVTropes are, and have always been from day one, a bunch of clueless doofuses, please stop going to that godawful site and listening to them or taking them the least bit seriously.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by jjgp1112 » Sun Jun 20, 2021 11:46 am

Adamant wrote: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:56 pm
MasenkoHA wrote: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:08 am Also I don’t know a single person who ever said 4Kids could have done better. They’re always people’s go to for “It could have been worse” (Never mind 4kids was never going to get the license)
Chris Psaros wrote:Last but not least, we have Pokémon, another show that I must admit to really liking. And what can I say about the conversion? Well, plain and simple, this is by far the most faithful-to-the-original broadcast anime I have ever seen. These people (4Kids Productions) take some risks! Why couldn't they have gotten the rights to Dragon Ball? About the only "censoring" they've done so far is to darken the screen slightly when there are any especially bright or strobing effects. (Long story behind that, but I'm sure you're all well aware of the "Pokémon incident.") I've seen this show deal with death, religious overtones, lechery, violence, and all that other good stuff with complete confidence.
This was a pretty common opinion back in the day, Pokemon was handled a LOT better than Dragonball.
If 4Kids got Dragon Ball then the Japanese version would have probably never been legally available in the US to this very day.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Sun Jun 20, 2021 12:50 pm

jjgp1112 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 11:46 am
Adamant wrote: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:56 pm
MasenkoHA wrote: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:08 am Also I don’t know a single person who ever said 4Kids could have done better. They’re always people’s go to for “It could have been worse” (Never mind 4kids was never going to get the license)
Chris Psaros wrote:Last but not least, we have Pokémon, another show that I must admit to really liking. And what can I say about the conversion? Well, plain and simple, this is by far the most faithful-to-the-original broadcast anime I have ever seen. These people (4Kids Productions) take some risks! Why couldn't they have gotten the rights to Dragon Ball? About the only "censoring" they've done so far is to darken the screen slightly when there are any especially bright or strobing effects. (Long story behind that, but I'm sure you're all well aware of the "Pokémon incident.") I've seen this show deal with death, religious overtones, lechery, violence, and all that other good stuff with complete confidence.
This was a pretty common opinion back in the day, Pokemon was handled a LOT better than Dragonball.
If 4Kids got Dragon Ball then the Japanese version would have probably never been legally available in the US to this very day.
Just like there has never been a release of any of the Pokemon series and films for the most part with the Japanese version over here. The exception is the streaming release of the Mewtwo Strikes Back CGI remake from a couple years ago, although the subs on that are dubtitles and reference a good number of lines from 4Kids' 1999 dub of the original film which had some quite infamous rewrites (circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant, no time for your stupid motto.etc) rather than translations of the original dialogue.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Adamant » Sun Jun 20, 2021 7:06 pm

SuperSaiyaManZ94 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 12:50 pm
jjgp1112 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 11:46 am
Adamant wrote: Tue Jun 15, 2021 9:56 pm



This was a pretty common opinion back in the day, Pokemon was handled a LOT better than Dragonball.
If 4Kids got Dragon Ball then the Japanese version would have probably never been legally available in the US to this very day.
Just like there has never been a release of any of the Pokemon series and films for the most part with the Japanese version over here. The exception is the streaming release of the Mewtwo Strikes Back CGI remake from a couple years ago, although the subs on that are dubtitles and reference a good number of lines from 4Kids' 1999 dub of the original film which had some quite infamous rewrites (circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant, no time for your stupid motto.etc) rather than translations of the original dialogue.
4Kids hasn't had Pokemon for ages, it's extremely obvious it's TPCi that are blocking the release of the show. These are the same people that insist on referring to it as "the animation" becaue they don't want it to be thought of as anime at all.

Meanwhile, 4Kids themselves gave us subbed Yugioh and Sonic.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Sun Jun 20, 2021 8:08 pm

I can't see Streamline Pictures dubbing the entire series. A TV series would have been too much money for them seeing that most anime that was sold on VHS was OVAs or Movies (With some exceptions such as Ranma 1/2). Supposedly, Streamline Pictures wanted to dub the City Hunter series, but the license holders was asking too much for it. I could see Streamline Pictures dubbing one of the Dragon Ball movies back in the day. Some of the voice actors from the Streamline Pictures days did work on the Bang Zoom dub of DBS such as Gregory Snegoff.
Adamant wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 7:06 pm
Meanwhile, 4Kids themselves gave us subbed Yugioh and Sonic.
They also give us subbed DVDs of Ultraman Tiga as well.
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Sun Jun 20, 2021 8:37 pm

Adamant wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 7:06 pm
SuperSaiyaManZ94 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 12:50 pm
jjgp1112 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 11:46 am
If 4Kids got Dragon Ball then the Japanese version would have probably never been legally available in the US to this very day.
Just like there has never been a release of any of the Pokemon series and films for the most part with the Japanese version over here. The exception is the streaming release of the Mewtwo Strikes Back CGI remake from a couple years ago, although the subs on that are dubtitles and reference a good number of lines from 4Kids' 1999 dub of the original film which had some quite infamous rewrites (circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant, no time for your stupid motto.etc) rather than translations of the original dialogue.
4Kids hasn't had Pokemon for ages, it's extremely obvious it's TPCi that are blocking the release of the show. These are the same people that insist on referring to it as "the animation" becaue they don't want it to be thought of as anime at all.

Meanwhile, 4Kids themselves gave us subbed Yugioh and Sonic.
Yes, i know that 4Kids lost the Pokemon dubbing/production license well over a decade ago and TCPI has been the ones blockading any potential release with the Japanese version. It just surprises me to a degree that even when the former still had the rights they didn't try to do so then. It's literally unless i'm mistaken one of if not the only anime shows from the big anime boom of the late '90s/early 2000's here which never got a subtitled release alongside the dub and still hasn't in the 23 or so years it's been available unlike the vast majority of animes. It's clear they have a very distorted view of what the series is versus what it actually is.

I'd really like if the Japanese version was available even if it were just the OG seasons and movies, though they'd have to be separate since the dub had frames and scenes cut here and there on top of the digital editing so a bilingual release can't be done.
DB collection related goals as of now:

1.) Find decent priced copy of Dragon Box Z Vol. 4 (Done)

2.) Collect rest of manga

3.) Get rest of Daizenshuu (2-7)

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Vorige Waffe
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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Vorige Waffe » Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:04 am

Kunzait_83 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 10:18 am So I'm old enough in the Western anime scene and enough of a Streamline fanboy going WAY back to their very beginnings to 1000% confirm that at NO point in time did Streamline EVER have or obtained the license to Dragon Ball.

What more than likely happened with that TVTropes source (also to reiterate: please for the love of god STOP using TVtropes as a reference point, the overwhelming majority of the userbase there tend to be made up of absolute fucking imbeciles) is that they confused the Harmony Gold dub for Streamline, since Carl Macek owned and ran both companies.

But understand that while Macek had his hands in both, Harmony Gold and Streamline were two VERY different companies with almost DIAMETRICALLY opposing aims and goals with their anime licenses.

I've talked about this quite a bit on this forum in more recent years, but it really bears repeating here: an absolutely CRITICALLY important piece of information about the history of the Western anime licensing market of the 1980s and 90s that goes COMPLETELY ignored in both this specific community here and in a lot of more wider/broader modern day Western anime fandom is that back in those days there was a steep, STEEP, rigid-ass divide between anime that was specifically being licensed for airing on mainstream broadcast U.S. children's television (where the fact that the material was from Japan was all but hidden from the audience entirely), and anime that was being licensed for the direct to video market (with TV airings only on channels like HBO, Showtime, MTV, and later on Sci Fi Channel) and aimed at an audience of largely full grown adults, or much older teens at the absolute youngest (where the fact that this was animation from Japan was bandied about proudly as a marketing point to an audience that was at least somewhat familiar already with anime as a concept).

The Dragon Ball/Kanz community, along with a horrifyingly gigantic chunk of millennial Western anime fandom as a whole, has been for literally decades now almost COMPLETELY clueless and ignorant about this incredibly fucking important distinction in the Western anime licensing market of the 80s and 90s, and has maintained much of its ENTIRE focus and base of knowledge around SOLELY the children's broadcast television side of the 80s and 90s U.S. anime licensing market.

Not only has there been next to NO base of knowledge or even basic intellectual curiosity about the straight to video adult market for anime in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s, for most folks they're not even aware that such a market even EXISTED at all (despite its incredibly widespread proliferation across countless mainstream video stores and outlets from the late 80s and throughout the 90s).

I bring all this up again because Carl Macek had two different companies that were intended for these two DRASTICALLY different markets: Harmony Gold was Macek's company that dealt with anime licenses meant for broadcast on mainstream U.S. television (meaning there would be a great deal more censorship, Westernization, and other alterations, and the audience of small kids were not meant to know or understand that these were shows from Japan at all), while Streamline was VERY much the exact opposite and dealt pretty much EXCLUSIVELY in anime released straight to video, with zero censorship and minimal alterations, for an audience that was strictly 18+ (many of whom had already knew what anime was or heard of it, and where the fact that these were animated works from Japan was HEAVILY made crystal clear in the marketing).

Both Harmony Gold and Streamline were MASSIVELY big deals to Western anime fandom throughout the 80s and early bulk of the 90s. Harmony Gold having briefly had DB has always been widely known, but had Streamline at ANY point gotten ahold of it, I can 1000000% guaran-fucking-tee you that that news would have been EVERYWHERE at the time and the talk of the then-anime community far and wide.

So no guys, Streamline NEVER had, even briefly as far as anyone is aware of, the DB license. Whoever it was on TVTropes who made this claim likely got confused because of Macek's involvement in both companies. Once again TVTropes are, and have always been from day one, a bunch of clueless doofuses, please stop going to that godawful site and listening to them or taking them the least bit seriously.
I just want to point out that, while your post is very much on the money, you've made one error yourself:

Carl Macek never "owned" Harmony Gold. He was just contracted to work for them, such as producing and dubbing Robotech. Harmony was always owned by Frank Agrama. Hell, by the time Harmony got to dubbing and testing their aborted dub of Dragon Ball in 1989, Macek had left HG and formed Streamline Pictures with Jerry Beck with the intent on focusing more on distributing anime films and OAVs for the video market (in addition to other cartoons) as you later mentioned.
Hellspawn28 wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 8:08 pm I can't see Streamline Pictures dubbing the entire series. A TV series would have been too much money for them seeing that most anime that was sold on VHS was OVAs or Movies (With some exceptions such as Ranma 1/2). Supposedly, Streamline Pictures wanted to dub the City Hunter series, but the license holders was asking too much for it. I could see Streamline Pictures dubbing one of the Dragon Ball movies back in the day. Some of the voice actors from the Streamline Pictures days did work on the Bang Zoom dub of DBS such as Gregory Snegoff.
Adamant wrote: Sun Jun 20, 2021 7:06 pm
Meanwhile, 4Kids themselves gave us subbed Yugioh and Sonic.
They also give us subbed DVDs of Ultraman Tiga as well.
Indeed, moreover Macek has stated that at Streamline he never wanted to dub TV series unless he could get a broadcast deal like when he was working for Harmony Gold. In Macek's eyes, putting a long form series like Dragon Ball out just for the video market would've been commercial suicide since there was always the risk of sales dropping off as the series progressed (hypothetically, would've bought "volume 43" of a show being sold on $35 VHS in 1992? Not many, if you're looking for a return on your investment) and broadcasters being uneasy about a show that's already on the video market where viewers can own and watch something at that their leisure instead of tuning in to a station's broadcast. Where would the ratings come from?

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:15 pm

Vorige Waffe wrote: Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:04 amI just want to point out that, while your post is very much on the money, you've made one error yourself:

Carl Macek never "owned" Harmony Gold. He was just contracted to work for them, such as producing and dubbing Robotech. Harmony was always owned by Frank Agrama. Hell, by the time Harmony got to dubbing and testing their aborted dub of Dragon Ball in 1989, Macek had left HG and formed Streamline Pictures with Jerry Beck with the intent on focusing more on distributing anime films and OAVs for the video market (in addition to other cartoons) as you later mentioned.
I'd completely and utterly forgotten about Frank Agrama. My apologies, and thanks for the correction.

Vorige Waffe wrote: Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:04 amIndeed, moreover Macek has stated that at Streamline he never wanted to dub TV series unless he could get a broadcast deal like when he was working for Harmony Gold. In Macek's eyes, putting a long form series like Dragon Ball out just for the video market would've been commercial suicide...
And he would know from firsthand experience, since Streamline did indeed at one point very, very early on try to release not one, but TWO long-ish form TV anime onto the direct video market in the late 80s and early 90s: Red Photon Zillion and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water respectively.

Needless to say, neither were financially viable enough for them at that point in time to see either series through to their conclusion: though that certainly didn't mean that getting a longer form TV anime out onto the direct to video market without TV airings and have it be a success was as outright impossible to do back then as Macek himself had believed, as companies Viz would later go on to prove that it COULD be done (granted, at GREAT amounts of tenacious effort and strategic, carefully precise marketing).

Nonetheless, I'd say its a good bet that Macek's then-attitude about using the direct to video "mature" anime market as a sole means of releasing long-form TV anime was likely informed a great deal - and understandably so - by Streamline getting burned with both Zillion and Nadia (both of which had failed despite having had some fairly devoted and hungry audiences within the hardcore fanbase at the time).

Until Viz first broke the mold with Ranma, the success model in the direct to video Western anime market for a good long while there was either standalone anime films or VERY short OVA series, like Akira, Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, Bubblegum Crisis, Project A-Ko, Vampire Hunter D, Crying Freeman, etc.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: StreamlinePictures had Dragon Ball at one point!?

Post by theoriginalbilis » Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:01 pm

Slightly off-topic, but...

Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, I was of the opinion that either Pioneer or Viz would've snatched up the rights to dub DBZ and release the rest if FUNi were to ever cease dubbing or lose the rights after ep. 52 of their syndicated dub. And the cherry on the top would've been keeping it not only uncut, but with a consistent voice cast. Both studios frequently hired The Ocean Group for their dubs and the Pioneer releases of DBZ Movies 1-3 were very high-quality.
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