Knowing the channel that aired Dragon Ball Z on Finland (SubTV) aired an English dub I recently asked on Reddit, and received some interesting responses. What I’ve been told by Finnish fans, which is consistent with another ancedote I’ve heard over the years is that the later Ocean dub by Westwood Media was aired, meaning Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, and Ireland were not the only countries that received this dub.
As this Twitter thread indicates, much like the aforementioned European countries the Android, Cell and Boo arcs used Ocean’s dub, which makes sense because AB Groupe held the license for Finland at this time, and as the posts below will indicate the Finnish airings took place at a later time than any of these countries, so I suspect there was no dub switching between Ocean and Funimation, unless the latter dub was aired in error as the former was available in its entirety throughout the Finnish broadcast going by this timeline.
All these posts are auto-translated from Finnish to English by Google.
If I'm not mistaken, dragonball's ocean dubb was shown in Finland with questionable subtitle quality.
By the time Goku arrived at Namek, the dubbing changed to a version of Funimation. Would it have been for Androids or Buu when there was Ocean in between and Funimation in between. The last episodes were on the German dub.
Here’s a post from August 2005 when SubTV announced they had acquired new episodes, seemingly starting from Dragon Ball Z episode 139 (or 124 edited), although this would have given them more episodes than there are in the series, so this seems to be an overestimate, or a clerical error of some sort.I myself jumped on the bandwagon at the beginning of the Cell saga when it started spinning that year, the dubbi was made by Ocean. Maj's Buu fights began in the fall of 2006.
It appears that when SubTV acquired this batch of episodes they began airing them on a Sunday, but as one fan recalls here Saturdays were added:Sub TV wrote:
super popular anime series Dragonball Z will continue on Subtv on Sunday 18.9.
NOTICE 31.8.05
Subtv will make the wish of anime fans come true in September! The Japanese anime series Dragonball Z will continue on Subtv on Sunday 18.9. at 10:00 a.m. The series can be seen every Sunday at the same time. Subtv has acquired 168 new episodes for the series. The episodes are spoken in English and subtitled in Finnish. Dragonball Z took a break on Sub last Christmas Eve, and the series now continues directly from there: so it's the turn of season 4 episode 124 (Unwelcome Discovery). Dragonball Z's most central role is Goku and his friends are fighting against the evil forces of space. What will Bulma, Vegeta, Trunks, Piccolo, Krillin and company come up with to tame the androids while Goku is still in bad shape?
This fan isn’t happy with SubTV’s choice of dub, and appears to be under the impression it’s not the “USA dub”. I wouldn’t take this to mean there was a Big Green dub of the series seen on SubTV, but rather that this is a fan unhappy with the Westwood dub, which is likely what aired on the channel.DragonBall Z comes from the sub on Sundays, and will soon start showing on Saturdays as well.
However the series was not only aired on weekends, here is confirmation from two sources that Dragon Ball Z aired on weekdays at 4pm.How can someone watch the whole DBZ that comes from Sub when it's so badly dubbed that you can't really hear the voices when they speak... USA dubbing is much better... I guess Sub has some SHORT Eurodub.
From SubTv on weekday afternoons at From 16:00, there will be DragonBall Z.
The timeslot on weekends was 10am, moreover this seems to suggest there may have been a break towards the end of the Cell arc, which aired in early 2006.Dragonball Z: Mon-Fri SubTV at 16:00
Unsurprisingly, as a small channel Japanese licenses didn’t come cheap to SubTV, and it appears at one point they stopped picking up anime, but were willing to resume Dragon Ball Z, which is nice, and shows that the series must have been rather successful for them, at least compared to other anime that were run on their channel.Dragon Ball Z comes from the sub on Sunday and Saturday at 10.00am. The episodes have not started from the beginning, but continue from where they left off. So the Z-warriors should destroy Cell (I can't write more, because the story would get too long).
I haven’t seen any evidence that SubTV aired anything other than Dragon Ball Z, but what I found interesting about this post, which speculates on the possibility of GT airing is that it indicates by 2006 SubTV was only airing two new episodes a week, likely at the aforementioned weekend slots.I understood that SubTV didn't buy anime for the channel with little money, that's how difficult it was to get Dragonball Z back.
Then there is the case of the final episode of Dragon Ball Z, which aired with the German dub, instead of either of the two English dubs, despite programming information available to viewers beforehand indicating it would be aired in English with the respective title Goku's Next Journey. The final episode first aired in Finland on December 16, 2006 without subtitles and the channel posted a message on-screen saying “We apologize for the lack of subtitles”, from what I’ve been told the episode was rerun the following week with subtitles reinstated. Here is an interesting thread from the time where naturally fans were unhappy.DBGT has 64 episodes. If it was shown like the current DBZ, i.e. 2 times a week, then DBGT would only take approx. 8 months to show.
The channel’s message on their text channel read:
Some responses from the fans:Sub TV wrote:
No more English-dubbed episodes have been made. Since there have been fewer episodes of DragonBall Z than have been sold to us, starting next Sunday, December 17th, reruns will be shown on Saturdays and Sundays at 10.00am. from episode 124 onwards.
You could say to subtv that "It's not true, it's NOT TRUE!" It's pretty blatant lying when you see from the program information provided by Subtv itself that they were supposed to air the final episode of the series "Goku's next journey", made in English, this Saturday.
Dig out youtube etc that last episode as enku, which I missed now. So the episode is called "Goku's next journey" in English, its episode number is 286/290 or a little lower. (At the moment, I think I'm pretty weak on YouTube's DBZ stuff, but I wonder if I'll start reappearing there soon.
Lousy action on SubTV!
I find it interesting the last quote seems to imply the Funimation dub was aired, contary to the previous claim that USA dubbing was better than what aired on SubTV, although I assume that because Dragon Ball and Funimation are so closely linked that a lot of viewers had mistaken the Westwood dub for the Funimation dub, and Funimation changed the cast back around the time Trunks arrived on Earth.Subtv has shown episodes with dubbing from FUNimation, that series has episodes that 276 pcs. All the episodes that were part of that series have come, why not the last one?
It seems to be pretty unprofessional anyway when
a) lying to viewers (that there wouldn't have been a dubbed last episode in English -ridiculous... and of course they could get that episode from somewhere if they wanted to),
b) not checking the products ordered in advance (it is thought that even after the last period something would appear to show until February) and c) unreliable and
unprofessional suppliers are used.
That's all I've been able to dig up on Dragon Ball in Finland for now, hopefully some Finnish fans out there will be able to add to this. I'd love to hear more about these lesser known broadcasts.