TheBlackPaladin wrote:There is, of course, no law saying that people have to watch anything, so it's not my intention to criticize other fans. Having said that, it has been my experience that a lot of people who don't like the Kai dub have two recurring commonalities:
A) They haven't watched Kai beyond some clips here and there. I've talked to a lot of people who criticized Kai and, when I asked them how much of it they watched, the vast majority of them gave me an answer to the effect of, "Enough to know," or, "Pfft, I watched a few minutes of one episode and just couldn't take it." I find that as people watch Kai more and more, they often come around. The problem is talking them into watch it.
B) This is partially FUNimation's fault, but a lot of them don't know that Kai is uncut on home video (and, more recently, on Toonami). I've lost count of the number of people I talked to online who thought the censored Nicktoons and CW4Kids versions were the actual versions of Kai. One person even thought I was lying when I said there's an uncut form of Kai. I'm not without sympathy on this one, though. Firstly because none of FUNimation's commercials for Kai's home video release ever advertised it as uncut, and secondly because with Kai cutting out a lot of the filler, I can understand why there'd be some confusion over what was "cut" and what was "censored." I've actually managed to convert some people by pointing out that there is an uncut version.
Yeah, it's easy to point out real Dragon Ball fans, who are open to seeing new things, & nostalgia brats, who, well, aren't.
You're right about their refusal to actually give it a try. However, this is due to a lot of them having watched the TV edit of Z & rewatching the uncut version of Z through the DVDs & Blu-Rays. Most of them, with the Bruce Falconer music.
I swear, if I could just punch every person I see who complains that there's not Falconer music in the dub of Kai, I would. The fact that they don't understand that them using the Falconer score was to make it cheaper to dub the show & broadcast it back in the day when they didn't have a lot of funding like they do nowadays. FUNimation only had replacement scores for Z, GT, & Z's movies. Every other movie & show they've dubbed never has an alternate score to it, unless they need to replace a song with another version of it, or another song in general due to licensing issues. Like, for Battle of Gods, they had to use the English version of 'Cha-la, Head Cha-la' Flow recorded, even for the Japanese audio, I believe. Also, on One Piece Film: Strong World, they had to replace the ending music, I believe with an instrumental from the film's score rather than the song that was there. They also did this for the endings for their season 4 of One Piece, being replaced entirely & they had to use a piece from the show's score due to licensing issues.
Other than that, they can't stand some of the recasts. I get it, but the fact that they can't accept Chris Ayres as Frieza utterly baffles me. He's so much better than Linda Young.
As for the uncut-ness of it, though, may not be in the advertising, but if you look on the back of the "season" sets, it's specifically noted that the episodes are, "uncut, unedited in full 4::3 format," which leads me to think that if Z ever got a full remaster in Japan for an HD release, but I don't see Toei doing that ever, they would've released t uncropped on the US Blu-Rays, similar to the Dragon Boxes, but I digress. If the advertising doesn't lend itself to noting that, then I guess they let people just assume that it was uncut & be proven right, since they dub all of their animes uncut. Anyone who doesn't think it's uncut clearly doesn't know FUNimation at all. It DID get less censored as it went on, however.