Dragonball franchise is getting too complicated for its own good

[Zephyr]

This isn't really addressing anyone in particular, but just to help further drive home Kunzait's point of how needless more DB material is:

Like he said: "42 manga volumes, 555 anime episodes, 17 anime movies, and enough video games to fill a small home across just about every single platform in existence from the 8 bit era on down". That's a fucking lot.

Dragon Ball's hardly the only thing of remote quality worth exploring in its medium or genre. There are plenty of things besides Dragon Ball worth paying mind to. There's already more Dragon Ball material, pre-revival, than anyone really needs to spend time on. Outside of nostalgic brand loyalty/addiction, which isn't really that good of a reason. Enjoy Dragon Ball, and then move on and experience other things. It doesn't need to be the focal point of your life. The world is definitely not so lacking in worthwhile stuff to delve into that you have to revisit Dragon Ball's continent of material often enough to get bored with it, to the point that you need more Dragon Ball. If you're getting bored of old Dragon Ball, then move on to something else. Don't let an addiction-born craving for new Dragon Ball influence your judgement. Be rational, don't let your appetite dictate your aspirations and actions.

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.

[Kunzait_83]

So that was my point then, I know you don't care about the dub, so why are you so angry about it? If you have stored in rage going back more than two decades to the 90's and early 2000's that's not exactly a good thing for something you have no interest in either way.

No one ever said I was angry, besides you just now.

I expressed puzzlement and confusion as to why fans from the dub years would still care about the dub being "salvaged" by Kai so many years after the fact. I don't get the kinds of fans who stay and remain invested in the dub and its cast so much, a cast who took the better part of 15 years (almost 20) just to slowly and at a slug's pace, inch by micro-inch their way from "unlistenable" to "kinda halfway resembling tolerable almost".

Even the very best and most improved of the old voices today is still not really very good. Kai's dub remains, at best, the furthest they've come in spit-shining a VERY old and now petrified turd. The absolute mountain high BEST of all the voices are easily the ones they recast from scratch. Which should've been what they'd need to hunkr down and do with ALL the voices across the board, with few to no exceptions. Schemell and Sabat are only "iconic" in that they're what people are used to from when they were little, that doesn't translate to the same thing as "good".

All these voices were and remain at their core bad knockoffs of voices (Ocean) that were problematically miscast themselves to begin with. This stubborn clinging to mistakes of the past and "continuity" that FUNimation continues to stubbornly believe anyone should give a shit about, is what will always and forever hold back the dub from being something that's at a baseline level of good. As it is, its been this painstaking, gruelingly agonizing and tediously sloooooooow burning process of trying to fit a round peg into a square hole and KINDA technically getting it to finally if only because you've struggled and mashed at it so much that much of the wood on the edges has chipped off.

My long held view on the dub has ALWAYS been: just start the whole goddamn thing from scratch, with ZERO care given to mistakes and wrongheaded approaches made in the past. Recast EVERYONE ala Freeza/Ayers, have the scripts be even MORE closer faithful (with all the old dub names going away in favor of the accurate ones), and just be as minimally invasive as possible. A HUGE factor in casting new voices is that they can actually Kiai properly and make convincing martial arts fight noises. This is a damned Kung Fu series, and we still have characters who fight with these strained WWE-esque grunts like they're taking something up the ass. These are characters who spend a LOT of their screentime fighting and thus making Kung Fu Kiais and battle cries. You simply NEED voice talent who can actually DO that, and if you don't have that then you make the fight scenes utterly tedious and annoying/grating to sit through.

Cast the dub like you're casting a Kung Fu movie basically, not like you're casting the next iteration of G.I. Joe.

As it stands now, NONE of the old voices will EVER sit right, because they were chosen entirely wrongly for entirely the wrong reasons in the first place. The dub isn't just bad, its FOUNDATIONALLY bad, as it was approached not as a martial arts series but as a dorky Saturday morning Xtreme Kool Action to the Max cartoon. The whole thing has to be scrapped and restarted from scratch like it was never dubbed prior in order to truly be rid of all remaining shreds and vestiges of that.

Obviously I know that that's never going to happen, and I fundamentally disagree with fans who insist that a lot of these voices are actually acceptable to flat out good now. Some are better than before (which leaves plenty of room to be bad) others have barely improved much. I'm saying that I find this whole process of "Its coming along and we'll get there, one inch at a time, even as whole decades fall off the calendar!" to be needlessly stupid and tedious and something that NO other fanbase BUT this one would accept or welcome as "the way shit gets done".

None of this means I'm "angry" though. That's you playing armchair psychic with me as all I've done is use salty language (which I do all the time anyway) giving zero indication of being mad.

What it DOES mean though is that I find dub fans and their continued loyalty to a fundamentally broken work as well as their infinite patience and willingness to put up with piecemeal, gradual improvement (to a fucking CARTOON SHOW, FUNi and their fans make it sound like they're trying to reform healthcare here) to be utterly innexplicable and impossible for me to grasp. The obvious answer to me is "Its never going to get completely fixed as they refuse to commit to it, just fucking give up on bothering with it already".

But I know that for a LOT of fans today, mainly in dub fandom, they LIKE that the anime was made to more resemble less a martial arts show (cause they often have no experience at all with martial arts films) but rather a cheeseball Saturday Morning Action Cartoon in the Transformers/G.I. Joe mold. To them THAT'S what Dragon Ball is, and to me not only is Dragon Ball VERY far from that, wanting it (or anything else really) to more resemble that kind of show is as antithetical to enjoyment or fun as one can possibly get (I find that stripe of kids action show to be among the very worst sort of media sewage there is).

Is that better now? Was that thorough enough for you to understand my rationale?

This isn't really addressing anyone in particular, but just to help further drive home Kunzait's point of how needless more DB material is:

Like he said: "42 manga volumes, 555 anime episodes, 17 anime movies, and enough video games to fill a small home across just about every single platform in existence from the 8 bit era on down". That's a fucking lot.

Dragon Ball's hardly the only thing of remote quality worth exploring in its medium or genre. There are plenty of things besides Dragon Ball worth paying mind to. There's already more Dragon Ball material, pre-revival, than anyone really needs to spend time on. Outside of nostalgic brand loyalty/addiction, which isn't really that good of a reason. Enjoy Dragon Ball, and then move on and experience other things. It doesn't need to be the focal point of your life. The world is definitely not so lacking in worthwhile stuff to delve into that you have to revisit Dragon Ball's continent of material often enough to get bored with it, to the point that you need more Dragon Ball. If you're getting bored of old Dragon Ball, then move on to something else. Don't let an addiction-born craving for new Dragon Ball influence your judgement. Be rational, don't let your appetite dictate your aspirations and actions.

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.

Someone encase this post, word for word, in bronze and hang it up on my wall as a mantelpiece. This is EXACTLY what I've been trying to say for a LONG while now about ALL of this shit. Word for fucking word, beat for fucking beat. From now on, I'm just gonna copy and paste this post everywhere I can. Spot on, to the letter.

Thank you Zeph.

[Kamiccolo9]

stuff

"That's like, your opinion, man."

[ABED]

I expressed puzzlement and confusion as to why fans from the dub years would still care about the dub being "salvaged" by Kai so many years after the fact.

I don't know why you wouldn't want it. It isn't as though it's neccessary for our very existence, but if some property that you enjoyed wasn't done well, but years later was given the treatment you wish it had gotten, would you say "No" to that?

Kai's dub remains, at best, the furthest they've come in spit-shining a VERY old and now petrified turd. The absolute mountain high BEST of all the voices are easily the ones they recast from scratch. Which should've been what they'd need to hunkr down and do with ALL the voices across the board, with few to no exceptions. Schemell and Sabat are only "iconic" in that they're what people are used to from when they were little, that doesn't translate to the same thing as "good".

I couldn't disagree more. Okay, I agree that the best voices are generally the ones that were recast, but Schemmel and Sabat have upped their game and I would put them firmly in the category of "good voice actor". They may have started off as knockoffs but they eventually made the characters their own. They don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are a number of good actors from the previous dub that have only gotten better over the years. What they lacked in 99 was experience.

None of this means I'm "angry" though. That's you playing armchair psychic with me as all I've done is use salty language (which I do all the time anyway) giving zero indication of being mad.

The overall tone implies anger.

[Lord Beerus]

I've not really found the franchise all that complicated. The story begins and ends with the manga. That's the core story. Everything else is an adaption or expansion on the original work. If we're speaking in term of subjective quality of the adapted work of the original story and supplementary material. Then in no particular order you can also watch the original Japanese anime, both DB and Z, the original Funinmation dub for DB, the Kai dub for the Z portion of the story, Jaco The Galactic Patrolman, the 2008 OVA, Battle Of Gods, Resurrection F, Dragon Ball Super after the 28 episode mark and Dragon Ball GT.

[ekrolo2]

My friend, you've clearly never tried circumnavigating the world of western comic books

[Gog]

Like he said: "42 manga volumes, 555 anime episodes, 17 anime movies, and enough video games to fill a small home across just about every single platform in existence from the 8 bit era on down". That's a fucking lot.

42 manga volumes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. 555 episodes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu + filler, and a battle that takes up 3 hours! 17 Anime movies that only had two good movies, and enough video games retreading the same plot! And people wonder why we want new dragon ball stuff, that isn't Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. Because that's boring.

[Payne222]

42 manga volumes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. 555 episodes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu + filler, and a battle that takes up 3 hours! 17 Anime movies that only had two good movies, and enough video games retreading the same plot! And people wonder why we want new dragon ball stuff, that isn't Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. Because that's boring.

The first 17 volumes of the manga don't have any of those guys.

[Gog]

42 manga volumes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. 555 episodes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu + filler, and a battle that takes up 3 hours! 17 Anime movies that only had two good movies, and enough video games retreading the same plot! And people wonder why we want new dragon ball stuff, that isn't Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. Because that's boring.

The first 17 volumes of the manga don't have any of those guys.

You mean the original OG Dragon Ball? I've read it, it was a good ole' fun ride.

[Payne222]

You mean the original OG Dragon Ball? I've read it, it was a good ole' fun ride.

If you're talking about the manga, it's all "Dragon Ball". The Z was an anime differential that stuck in the West because we got the anime before the manga.

[Gog]

You mean the original OG Dragon Ball? I've read it, it was a good ole' fun ride.

If you're talking about the manga, it's all "Dragon Ball". The Z was an anime differential that stuck in the West because we got the anime before the manga.

Yeah I'm talking about Goku's years before Raditz showed up. Which was honestly only a fun enjoyable ride, it just wasn't as memorable, as everything else

[FoolsGil]

No, The Series' rules on Time Travel (already worth a headache before Super) is too complicated for its own good. This isn't too much of a problem to get, at least for me.

[Zephyr]

Like he said: "42 manga volumes, 555 anime episodes, 17 anime movies, and enough video games to fill a small home across just about every single platform in existence from the 8 bit era on down". That's a fucking lot.

42 manga volumes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. 555 episodes of Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu + filler, and a battle that takes up 3 hours! 17 Anime movies that only had two good movies, and enough video games retreading the same plot! And people wonder why we want new dragon ball stuff, that isn't Vegeta, Freeza, Cell, and Buu. Because that's boring.

If a series this densely packed with content ranges from unmemorable to boring in your eyes, then that means that the series isn't for you and you move onto something you might actually enjoy instead. Nobody's locking you in a cell and forcing you to consume nothing but Dragon Ball related media.

For comparison, I find a video game series like Madden NFL to be incredibly boring and dull. If they suddenly stopped making games, I would be fine with that. I wouldn't be clamoring for them to start making more, on the off chance that some of it might be less boring. I wouldn't care precisely because, upon realizing that Madden NFL isn't my cup of tea, I moved on and played games I liked instead.

If the series bores you, there's no reason to latch onto it and have this thirst-inducing attachment that can only be quenched by more. If what's on your plate doesn't appeal to you, then more of it isn't going to either. If what's on your plate does appeal to you, cool, eat it, and then eat something else. You can't eat the same thing for every meal of every day, unless it miraculously covered every corner of a human's dietary needs, in just the right amount. There's no food or meal that does this, but if there was, Dragon Ball would be very far from analogous to it. It doesn't delve into every genre, every type of story, every type of character, every medium, every trope. But that's evidently beside the point, since what you already had in abundance wasn't appealing.

[Kunzait_83]

Zeph's now got me reflecting on the continued, sad decline of post-dub U.S. Dragon Ball fandom.

Back in the late 90s, with the arrival of the first wave of dub fans, up through the original Toonami wave and its immediate aftermath in the early 2000s, I remember my thinking back then was "Man all these folks would really do well to check out the original Japanese version."

Then around the mid/late 2000s, with the birth of this very forum here and its Shonen-fixated community, up to fairly recently my thinking has been "Man all of these folks would really do well to check out some Wuxia films, books, or shows."

Never, ever in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd end up at this point now, with the release of the first new Dragon Ball media in almost 20 years, where my thinking has finally devolved to "Man all these folks would really do well to check into a good rehab clinic."

[Gog]

If a series this densely packed with content ranges from unmemorable to boring in your eyes, then that means that the series isn't for you and you move onto something you might actually enjoy instead. Nobody's locking you in a cell and forcing you to consume nothing but Dragon Ball related media.

The series isn't boring, its actually incredibly memorable, and a fun time, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I'm sorry that I didn't write it up properly, and express my views for what they really are. But I actually enjoy this franchise, I enjoy Dragon Ball in its entirety with its high's and its low, lows. Your right nobody is, and I'm into plenty other media, but Dragon ball is literally my Child Hood.

For comparison, I find a video game series like Madden NFL to be incredibly boring and dull. If they suddenly stopped making games, I would be fine with that. I wouldn't be clamoring for them to start making more, on the off chance that some of it might be less boring. I wouldn't care precisely because, upon realizing that Madden NFL isn't my cup of tea, I moved on and played games I liked instead.

Except your comparison's are hilariously wrong, and I'm still sorry that I didn't express myself properly. But I love the works of Akira Toriyama, I love Dragon ball. This part of the post I don't need to respond to as you've misrepresented me to the point, where I'm sure it was my fault for not expressing my point well enough.

If the series bores you, there's no reason to latch onto it and have this thirst-inducing attachment that can only be quenched by more. If what's on your plate doesn't appeal to you, then more of it isn't going to either. If what's on your plate does appeal to you, cool, eat it, and then eat something else. You can't eat the same thing for every meal of every day, unless it miraculously covered every corner of a human's dietary needs, in just the right amount. There's no food or meal that does this, but if there was, Dragon Ball would be very far from analogous to it. It doesn't delve into every genre, every type of story, every type of character, every medium, every trope. But that's evidently beside the point, since what you already had in abundance wasn't appealing.

The series never once bored me, it made me upset when freeza had the worst end, but that's it. The reason why I want new content is that I've seen the same stuff a thousand million billion times before. Raditz, to Vegeta, to Ginyu force, to Freeza, to androids, to Cell, to Buu. I've enjoyed all of it, its just that, I want new stuff, that's done well, and that's it.

I'm not eating the same thing every meal, I've got tons of other interests. I'm just bored of another retread game, I'm bored of another movie with an identical villain, or a identical plot. That's why I'm glad with Dragon Ball Super, which is on par with Dragon Ball Z.

[ABED]

Never, ever in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd end up at this point now, with the release of the first new Dragon Ball media in almost 20 years, where my thinking has finally devolved to "Man all these folks would really do well to check into a good rehab clinic."

That's awfully condescending of you.

For comparison, I find a video game series like Madden NFL to be incredibly boring and dull. If they suddenly stopped making games, I would be fine with that. I wouldn't be clamoring for them to start making more, on the off chance that some of it might be less boring. I wouldn't care precisely because, upon realizing that Madden NFL isn't my cup of tea, I moved on and played games I liked instead.

Terrible analogy as the games aren't radically different from year to year. It's still a football video game. Dragon Ball can go in a ton of different directions and do more with its characters and stories than a football video game can.

[Kunzait_83]

That's awfully condescending of you.

Fine you win.

"Man, a lot of these folks would really do well to go look into getting a sense of humor."

[ABED]

That's awfully condescending of you.

Fine you win.

"Man, a lot of these folks would really do well to go look into getting a sense of humor."

Not doing any better. Get off your high horse.

[Doctor.]

Zeph's now got me reflecting on the continued, sad decline of post-dub U.S. Dragon Ball fandom.

Back in the late 90s, with the arrival of the first wave of dub fans, up through the original Toonami wave and its immediate aftermath in the early 2000s, I remember my thinking back then was "Man all these folks would really do well to check out the original Japanese version."

Then around the mid/late 2000s, with the birth of this very forum here and its Shonen-fixated community, up to fairly recently my thinking has been "Man all of these folks would really do well to check out some Wuxia films, books, or shows."

Never, ever in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd end up at this point now, with the release of the first new Dragon Ball media in almost 20 years, where my thinking has finally devolved to "Man all these folks would really do well to check into a good rehab clinic."

You're blowing this way out of proportion. You're acting like Dragon Ball dictates the life of its fans. It doesn't. Dragon Ball is a hobby. Hobbies are supposed to be entertaining, to make you forget about your worries and relax. If you can get more of your favorite hobby, why say no?

Wanting and enjoying more Dragon Ball doesn't mean people don't check out other stuff or that they can't let go when it's time. You seem to be forgetting that Dragon Ball is a series that crosses generations. You and Mike have been a part of the fanbase for longer than I've been alive, and likewise the same thing will happen with me and newer fans in a decade or two. This desire to keep Dragon Ball going from the production crew over at Japan doesn't stem from a desire of wanting to keep older fans. Keeping older fans would be nice, but I'm sure everyone responsible for the brand knows people will eventually outgrow it. They're Keeping Dragon Ball going because it appeals to the lowest common denominator, kids.

[SaiyanGod117]

Wow this thread is just terrible, the stuff I'm reading is just plain arrogant and dumb.