Vorige Waffe wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:46 am
By "the early 2000s" there would be no chance of Pioneer or [insert anime publisher here] putting out an "uncut bilingual release with all the anime bells and whistles, etc" because by 2000, Funimation had finally managed to make Dragon Ball profitable in the US thanks to Toonami's airings of the dub, which in turn was spurred by the re-runs of the initial Saban/Ocean Group episodes. And those got got picked up by Toonami to begin with because they did well in syndication beforehand.
Basically, to imagine a release of Dragon Ball tailored made for the anime home video market and nothing else requires to ignore its success as a hacked together for-TV product that also had happened to have a cult following more interested in its Japanese version thanks to unauthorized VHS fansubs. It's a scenario that's impossible to imagine logically. Even though it was cut and rewritten to ribbons, it was successful, and Toei wasn't going to renege on a success like that no matter how amateur hour Funimation went about it.
All of this is precisely why my whole "what if/alternate universe" scenario that I'm most interested in is one where FUNimation/Saban had NEVER gotten ahold of or been involved with DB/Z from the getgo. Where Circa the mid/late 90s it was Pioneer (or inset whichever then-video market anime licensing company: could be U.S. Renditions, could be Viz, could be a then-fresh ADV, AnimEigo, CPM, Manga, whomever) who had gotten ahold of the DB/Z license instead of FUNi and simply tried to follow its release in the mold of things like Viz's Ranma 1/2 release: straight to video, for the more "mature" anime market at the time, without ANY of the baggage whatsoever that comes with a "slashed to ribbons" U.S. children's TV edit/airing.
No Toonami phenomenon, none of that. A scenario where DB/Z was just another in what was then a still burgeoning/booming anime home video market, one that at that point was JUST starting to expand itself more into the realm of longer form TV anime (without U.S. TV airings) and not just solely stand alone films and short OVA series and find some successes there at last.
Part of the reason that this scenario is so utterly foreign and incomprehensible to so much of this community is because 99.9999999% of this community is made up of people who cut their teeth on not just Dragon Ball, but anime as a whole PRIMARILY from either the original Toonami explosion itself, or in the wake of its aftermath somewhere down the line.
Not only was most of this community in no way a part of or experienced with North American anime fandom (particularly outside of the children's television realm) before then, so much of the modern fanbase has done such a laughably piss-poor job of educating itself for the past 20 years on the history of anime in North America that predates their entry (or is otherwise outside of the realm of kids' TV airings) that the ENTIRE CONCEPT of the "direct to VHS" market that not only catered to a pre-established North American anime fanbase that dates back to the late 70s/early 80s, but that also ADVERTISED ITSELF up front as Japanese animation WAY before something like Toonami ever came along at all is something that is almost 100% entirely outside its scope of comprehension.
The ENTIRE critical, notable, and exceedingly un-obscure era of North American anime is nonetheless SO far outside the purview of most of this community, that these hypothetical questions ALWAYS have to forcibly come around back to the idea that "Well the FUNimation clusterfuck HAD to be done, it was a necessary evil, because otherwise how else could the series be brought here? There was no other avenue for any anime at all but kids' TV at the time!"
These scenarios are 1000% rooted in a false premise and false dichotomy from the getgo: there WERE other avenues, there WERE other ways this could've played out WITHOUT the need for ANY kids' TV airings. It was a lot dicier in the early days of the direct to VHS market in the 80s (where Streamline once again tried not once but TWICE to get a direct to VHS long form TV anime series selling and had failed to do so, to the point of souring Carl Macek on the very notion of ever trying it again entirely), but by the mid 1990s, this was starting to change and longer TV anime was just starting to find its footing in the straight to video anime market of the time and have some successes without the benefit or need of TV airings.
The audience it catered to was FAR different from the kinds of people who were obsessed with and tuned into Saturday morning or weekday afternoon children's TV shows: but that doesn't mean that this audience was somehow not sufficient enough to keep a longform video anime series afloat and going.
All of this is incredibly hard, if not outright impossible for a lot of this community to digest: both because the pre-Cartoon Network, non-children's television anime market of the 80s and early 90s is so foreign and impossibly alien to most of you that I may as well be talking about another plane of reality and existence entirely outside our own: that and also I think because roughly 20 years now of constant, incessant historical revision on the internet from self-styled "anime experts/historians" has jackhammered it into people's heads the false notion that without DBZ taking off on Toonami, and without the Pokemon phenomenon alongside it, anime would somehow have "never" become a thing in the U.S. at all.
Which totally ignores and brushes aside the blunt fact of reality that anime ALREADY WAS a "thing" here in America for YEARS before then:
just not among the Saturday morning kids TV audience. Which is a concept (the idea of ANY kind of notable audience that's completely outside the kids' TV realm) that is also completely foreign and impossible to fathom for much of this community as well.
Would Dragon Ball have become the same level of mainstream ubiquity that its reached today without FUNimation or Toonami? Obviously not, most likely, and no one (least of all me) would ever argue that. Does that therefore mean that it would not have achieved ANY level or measure of success (even NOTABLE success) here or that we would NEVER have gotten the full series?
Absolutely not. It ABSOLUTELY could've, and likely would have given its ability to nab an audience pretty much wherever with relative ease.
PLENTY of older franchises from the 80s and 90s (outside of just anime) have done EXCEEDINGLY well and have lasted into today on the strength of largely video releases from back then, and without having been a part of the whole kids television circuit whatsoever (not that most folks here would know about or acknowledge most of them for the very reason that so many people here are singularly focused largely on kids' media at the expense of much else), and Dragon Ball I'd wager would've not been much different in that regard.
Not everything HAS to be at a Pokemon/Power Rangers/Ninja Turtles-caliber kiddie phenomenon/fad in order to be a "success" of any kind of worthwhile magnitude. That's asinine on its face: but unfortunately that's the metric that this community primarily judges these things by and isn't satisfied unless their thing (be it DB or whatever) reaches that type of plateau in their eyes.
And that ingrained bias (that's SO deeply entrenched into the very fabric of this community/fanbase for the past 20 years, that its effectively invisible to most, akin to the adage that a fish is so used to water that it doesn't even realize that its in water or what water even is) is what colors SO much of these types of "what if/what could've been" discussions about the series' original release, to the point that it is all but IMPOSSIBLE for most folks here to fathom the very idea of Dragon Ball getting anywhere not just without FUNimation, but without taking off on kids' TV in the same way among the same type of audience that Pokemon and Power Rangers and the like had.
