But seriously, how did the Falcouner soundtrack even make it to air?

[DragonBallKing]

So what I have been getting from this thread is the fans of the original score think faulconer fans are nostolgic kids that don't have taste in music and faulconer fans think original score fans are uptight snobs.

I say music is subjective, if you like it then that's great, if not then that's great. I think we can all agree that either way it helps bring us together for a series we all truly love.

You can say that, but music has a huge effect on the tone and pacing of the show and a replacement score has divided the fanbase not brought them together. Falcouner and Kikuchi are like night and day and create two different visions of the same show and a split fandom.

[GreatSaiyaJeff]

So what I have been getting from this thread is the fans of the original score think faulconer fans are nostolgic kids that don't have taste in music and faulconer fans think original score fans are uptight snobs.

I say music is subjective, if you like it then that's great, if not then that's great. I think we can all agree that either way it helps bring us together for a series we all truly love.

You can say that, but music has a huge effect on the tone and pacing of the show and a replacement score has divided the fanbase not brought them together. Falcouner and Kikuchi are like night and day and create two different visions of the same show and a split fandom.

Well I meant it brought us together for liking the show, we don't have to agree on everything.

[ABED]

But it's barely the same show.

Dragon Ball Z is Dragon Ball Z. The 70's sounding mythical dreary score does not suit a 90's Sci-Fi action show.

Of course it being a different show will mean it has a different score. Naruto and Naruto Shippuden have different scores. Super doesn't have the same score as the others either.

DBZ is just DB with a Z at the end. DBZ isn't a different show than DB. Anyone that believes that is flat out wrong. This isn't a matter of opinion.

Why do you think cheap synth music sounded so late 90s?

[Dbzfan94]

Honestly the only memorable theme from the Freeza saga was the ginyu theme. The rest was kind of forgettable.

Ginyu Force Theme, Ginyu Transformation, Heroic Goku, SSJ Transformation, Vegeta Powers Up and Vegeta's theme.

People forget those all started there lol.

[Dbzfan94]

But it's barely the same show.

I've seen it both dub and sub, and it's still the same show to me. Never understood this complaint.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

But it's barely the same show.

I've seen it both dub and sub, and it's still the same show to me. Never understood this complaint.

They use the same footage, but the Funimation dub with the Faulconer score loses a lot of the drama and intensity that the Kikuchi score creates. As has been said before the lack of silence takes away a lot of the atmosphere. Even during fights where people claim Faulconer excells you don't get the feel of an old samurai movie with two warriors staring one another down if the score gives no time to take a breather. In addition the dialogue is altered to the point that characters are not the same as they are in the original. The most striking example is that Goku is not an altruistic hero in the original. So yes, while you are getting the same overall story with the same fights there is a huge difference when it comes to tone and message.

[Bullza]

They were no longer martial artists by that time. They were martial artists back in Dragon Ball when fights were decided on skill, intelligence, experience and technique.

By Dragon Ball Z they were merely super powered fighters. Skill, intelligence, experience and technique no longer mattered. Now it was all about shouting and transforming so that the one with the high power level number would win. Again no longer anything like what you'd see in a mythical Chinese story.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling right now. Do you truly believe the things you're saying? Pretty much everythting you've said about this topic sounds like something some troll on youtube would say to piss people off.

Why would I not believe it? It's true. In Dragon Ball, fights were a matter of skill, Goku often using intelligence to fight against people like Roshi, Krillin, Tien and Piccolo etc. Experience played a part in why Roshi was able to beat Goku in the end. They gained all of that by travelling the world and training hard. They'd then test themselves in martial arts tournaments

That was martial arts. That had a Chinese feel.

Dragon Ball Z was nothing like that. In that show, characters getting angry caused them to reach new levels of powers and different haircuts. The Saiyans could get beaten to shit which would cause their power to multiply many times over, something that never once happened with Goku in Dragon Ball. Villains would transform over and over again. They'd fuse together to gain power.

Intelligence wasn't a factor and experience didn't help Goku when he fought Frieza a guy who had never even trained a day in his life. This was super powered fighters going up against each other in a battle for the planet and the one who had the higher power level would be the winner.

That is not martial arts. That is what you got in American comics.

[ABED]

And you still cling to the idea that the end of DB isn't the same as the beginning of DBZ. The comic is all just Dragon Ball. The two episodes aired a week apart and don't necessitate so radical a shift in the style of music.

[Bullza]

And you still cling to the idea that the end of DB isn't the same as the beginning of DBZ. The comic is all just Dragon Ball. The two episodes aired a week apart and don't necessitate so radical a shift in the style of music.

Well it's not really the same. It's just when the characters aged into their Dragon Ball Z appearance.

I'm not really even talking about it changing over the course of a couple weeks. The Pilaf saga which was based on the old Chinese story Journey to the West and the Android saga which would seem to have been inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster Terminator and Terminator 2 movies shouldn't be having the same sounding music.

Dragon Ball Super is a direct continuation of Dragon Ball Z (or Kai) which is itself a direct continuation of Dragon Ball.

Yet Dragon Ball Super is absolutely nothing at all like Dragon Ball. Like Dragon Ball Z it is not a mythical Chinese based story which is why Dragon Ball Supers soundtrack is more similar to Bruce Faulconers soundtrack than Kikuchi's soundtrack. Just like Battle of Gods and Resurrection F's soundtrack.

[PsionicWarrior]

But it's barely the same show.

I've seen it both dub and sub, and it's still the same show to me. Never understood this complaint.

The same scene with different music is not the same scene to me, just as Nozawa's Goku is not like any other dubbed Goku. Which you prefer is a matter of preference, but only one is the original.

[ABED]

I've seen it both dub and sub, and it's still the same show to me. Never understood this complaint.

It's not merely the different music which alters the show quite a bit, it's the different dialog and different characterizations.

I'm not really even talking about it changing over the course of a couple weeks. The Pilaf saga which was based on the old Chinese story Journey to the West and the Android saga which would seem to have been inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster Terminator and Terminator 2 movies shouldn't be having the same sounding music.

Says who? The story was able to mix a whole bunch of different elements together and makes it all feel like one world. Even in the beginning, there was a mix of sci-fi and mysticism. It's all the same story, just at different points, and yet once again, you're comparing the story at two very different points, so the contrast is going to be starker than say if you had compared the 23rd Budokai to the Saiyan arc.

You keep bringing up Super and while we've established that the scores ARE different, there's no reason why they SHOULD BE different.

[8000 Saiyan]

But it's barely the same show.

I've seen it both dub and sub, and it's still the same show to me. Never understood this complaint.

The Faulconer score alters the tone of the show.

Take this scene for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsalzwkykIg
It's not intended to be an awesome moment.

[Hellspawn28]

Sci-fi elements were perfectly consistently present everywhere before Z, and it was an action show before Z.

Not nearly to the extent that Z was. Dragon Ball still had the Chinese feel because it was much more focused on martial arts and martial arts tournaments. Something very popular in Chinese movies at the time.

The Z stuff in the series started to show up during the 22nd TB. Goku vs. Piccolo in the 23rd TB is more closer to Z than the rest of DB in my opinion.

[Zephyr]

Dragon Ball still had the Chinese feel because it was much more focused on martial arts and martial arts tournaments. Something very popular in Chinese movies at the time.

Again, if you actually read through Kunzait's Wuxia thread (which I linked to you, and is also the first thread listed in the stickied "Important Threads" thread), you'll see that Wuxia (essentially "fantasy mystical martial arts") media was already crossing over with all kinds of genres while Dragon Ball was going on, including sci-fi. For your convenience:
[spoiler]

On the literary end of things, one of the most important and influential contemporary Wuxia authors to come about at the tail-end of the 80s/dawn of the 90s was Huang Yi. An almost immediate sensation in Chinese Wuxia literature right at a time when literary Wuxia was seen as on its last legs due in part to the massive amounts of attention being drawn away from it towards other media incarnations of the genre (film, animation, video games, etc.), Huang Yi's biggest and most notable innovation was taking a cue from the then-Asian zeitgeist of the genre and further pushing the envelope by bringing science fiction elements and futuristic technology into Wuxia.

One of his more notable Wuxia/Sci Fi novels A Step Into the Past centers on Hong Siu-lung, an officer in the VIPPU division of the Hong Kong Police Force in the 21st century who is recruited to test a top secret government time travel experiment. He is sent back in time thousands of years ago to ancient Jianghu, and is accidentally stranded there due to a glitch in the procedure. As he desperately attempts to find a way back to his own time, he ends up embroiled in numerous battles and conflicts between warring kingdoms, and grows as a strong martial artist while attempting as best he can to avoid changing too many important events in history for fear of the potential damage and ripple effects across time.

Huang Yi's massive success in an at-the-time-dying Wuxia literary landscape (that has since been massively revitalized) can be seen as further evidence that in the late 80s and early 90s, one of the most surefire recipe's for success in the genre was blending more and more modern and foreign genre elements with it. Even to this day, Yi's sci fi/Wuxia puree novels remain some of the most widely read and widely recognized contemporary Wuxia novels throughout large chunks of Asian territories.

As the brazenness and wild abandon of contemporary genre-blending continued to grow ever constantly across Wuxia media throughout Asia, sci fi influences and usage would only continue to intensify, particularly during the early 90s. A good example of this is the 1991 Wuxia film Saviour of the Soul.

The film follows a pair of modern day mercenaries/martial artists Ching (Andy Lau) and May-kwan (the always incredible Anita Mui, easily and without question my all time favorite Hong Kong actress growing up), who use their powerful fighting skills as professional assassins, specializing in targeting the worst of the criminal underworld. May-kwan's last successful bounty happened to be Old Eagle, the master of Silver Fox (Aaron Kwok, no relation to Venom Mobster Philip), a powerful cyborg martial arts master and notorious criminal who makes it his mission to hunt down May and take his revenge for his slain master, killing anyone (particularly Ching) who happens to get in his way.

Armed with both advanced technology and mysticism, the movie follows the cybernetic warrior Fox's relentless, unyielding pursuit of May as she and Ching fight to stay a step ahead of his increasingly deadly and bizarre attacks and also work out their own tangled romantic feelings that have long been simmering between them.

Written by Hong Kong New Wave maestro Wong Kar Wai (and will hardly be his only foray into the genre) Saviour of the Soul is about as exactingly specifically early 90s Wuxia as you can possibly get. With a “throw all inhibitions to the wind” genre-mixing sensibility running deep into its core, Saviour of the Soul is a Wuxia film - featuring a pair of assassins attempting to escape the wrath of a powerful fighter seeking revenge for the killing of his master - that mixes science fiction (high tech gadgetry abounds and the part-machine Silver Fox proves to be quite Terminator-like in his largely silent persistence and unwillingness to stay down no matter how much brutal punishment is visited upon him) with a zany and farcical love story all set in a gothic, comic book/noir-like 20th century urban sprawl that is gorgeously, lovingly filmed almost like a vivid painting or dream brought to life.

Violent and strange mystical martial arts, modern gunplay, sci fi tech, silly romantic comedy, and an atmosphere that's as much Blade Runner-esque sci fi noir as it is the romanticized Chinese fantasy of typical Wuxia, all breathlessly swung from to and fro with boundless hyper-manic energy that makes the whole thing feel like a drug-induced fever dream: this is basically the epitome of what early 90s Wuxia was all about.

[/spoiler]

By the time they started traveling to different planets, introducing alien species, started time traveling and having epic battles where planets were getting destroyed it stopped being anything like a mythical Chinese story and a lot like something you'd be far more likely to read in a DC or Marvel comic. It was now less like Enter the Dragon and more like Terminator.

Your thinking is very black and white here. These concepts aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that they are.

These beams of light are established in Dragon Ball to be chi.

I know what they are. It doesn't matter. Goku firing a large blue beam of energy that can eradicate a planet does not make it feel like the whole thing is some mythical Chinese story. It's not any different from the many other energy beams you see in Western comics just because it comes from a fictional Chi.

And just because it bears surface level similarities to Western Comics™ doesn't mean that it isn't coming from fictional chi. And it coming from fictional chi is what makes it a mystical martial arts concept. Because using one's chi for massive destructive and superhuman feats is largely how people fight in mystical martial arts stories.

Remember when Roshi blew up the moon at a martial arts tournament? Remember when Cell threatened to blow up the solar system at a martial arts tournament? There's no meaningful distinction there. They're at different points on the destructiveness-scale, but they're both already well past the point of "human" feats. And if "insanely overpowered feats" are where you draw the line, then Dragon Ball stopped being about martial arts well before Z. Pre-Z Dragon Ball was never about real world martial artists doing real world martial arts. That's not what I'm arguing. That's not the point of contention. It was always absurdly over the top and larger than life.

Martial artists traveling through time and space are still martial artists.

They were no longer martial artists by that time. They were martial artists back in Dragon Ball when fights were decided on skill, intelligence, experience and technique.

By Dragon Ball Z they were merely super powered fighters. Skill, intelligence, experience and technique no longer mattered. Now it was all about shouting and transforming so that the one with the high power level number would win. Again no longer anything like what you'd see in a mythical Chinese story.

How were they no longer martial artists? They're still dressed like martial artists. They're still motivated by the same things that martial artists are (honor, self-improvement, testing one's strength, etc); why else insist on constant one-on-one fights, on not stopping threats in advance, on giving dangerous and powerful foes chances to recover and power up? An evil cyborg from the future made up of all of their DNA even insists on holding a martial arts tournament to decide the fate of the universe. And yelling, or a "kiai" is a common feature, whose purpose is:

[spoiler]

1) Catch your opponent by surprise and make them flinch/break their concentration (which is where the concept in Wuxia of a Kiai causing an opponent to be physically bound/locked in place/freeze up/stunned comes from: again all these supernatural techniques are "tall tale" exagerrations of real life martial arts concepts).

2) Help increase the force behind an attack. A quick shout can help give a rush of adrenaline that can give your strikes some added oomph. Again, partly where the idea of Ki increasing your strength to superhuman levels initially stems from.

When you shout, similarly to breathing, it all comes from the diaphragm/core muscles. The main source of where a lot of your power should be coming from in a strike. You're putting more power and force into those core muscles as you move. That's one of the key concepts behind the idea of Ki. In real life, "Ki" is basically breathing control, aka core muscle control.

[/spoiler]

And of course they were still using skill, intelligence, and experience. Vegeta was brought down with team work, and clever juggling of the Genki Dama. Freeza had to be stalled and distracted at numerous points. Cell is literally killed by a martial arts technique (the Kamehameha, if you don't remember), and only with Goku motivating Gohan and Vegeta (and others, in the anime) distracting Cell. Majin Buu is taken out in the most teamwork-filled kill in the series, with Goku gathering genki, while Vegeta and Buu stall, while Mr. Satan convinces the Earth's population to donate their genki, all thanks to Vegeta's idea to bring them back. Do you need to be reminded of how one-sided many of Goku's fights in pre-Z Dragon Ball were? Spoiler: there were a lot.

Forget whether or not they're martial artists anymore, it doesn't even feel like we've watched the same show.

And even if they won every fight through raw power, sheer brute strength.......that doesn't mean anything! A martial artist beating another martial artists by overpowering them with a stronger martial arts technique doesn't somehow make him not a martial artists. You have to ignore the kinds of abilities they use and what allows them to use these abilities and who teaches them these abilities, how they dress, and what motivates them. You have to mentally block out most of who and what the series is about, and instead focus solely on a really odd singular feature, that doesn't even apply in this case.

Your references to modern Dragon Ball as "not being about martial arts anymore" is especially odd, when you have Goku using Bruce Lee's One-Inch Punch on Freeza in Resurrection F, or Caulifla focusing her chi to a meridian in her back to become a Super Saiyan.

But maybe some visual aids from mystical martial arts films might help. Especially since "Enter the Dragon" is the kind of shit you apparently think I'm talking about:
[spoiler]Beam Struggle:


Ki Blast Spam while Flying:


Midair shockwave-creating beam struggle:


Instant Transmission:


"They're moving too fast for me to see Mr. Piccolo!":




Destroying the environment around them:


"Goku vs Majin Vegeta":
[/spoiler]
I can post more if you still need convincing.

[Kunzait_83]

But it's barely the same show.

I've seen it both dub and sub, and it's still the same show to me. Never understood this complaint.

The fact that this thread exist, that a million other threads just like it exist, the fact that we keep having these conversations and debates time and time again more than 20 years after the fact, all but solidifies the undeniable fact that we're all not watching remotely the same show in the least bit. The dub carved out an entirely different strand of audience that the series in its original form was never intended to have, and we've had the different "types" of fans of the different versions clashing over not just stupid pedantic details like name spellings, but even over fundamental core components of the very nature of the narrative itself (like what fucking genre this is even supposed to be and what archetypes of characters we're dealing with here).

When you have heated differences over things like "rural bumpkin hayseed mystical kung fu warrior vs do-gooder cosmic superhero" or "wacky fantasy martial arts mashup epic vs the vaguely maybe-Asian Justice League by way of intergalactic WWE", then its very likely that there are profoundly deep, deeeeeeeeeply rooted fundamental difference in the very uttermost fabric of what it is we're being shown and are processing between the different versions of the story in question here.

Pretty much everything.

For the record, these posts are like a case study in why it was I ended up making/posting the Wuxia thread, and why it was that I titled it "We Need to Talk About Wuxia" (apart from the fact that We Need to Talk About Kevin was also fresh on my mind at the time and is a damned awesome movie).

That is not martial arts. That is what you got in American comics.

Uhhh.... sir (or ma'am). If I may...

[spoiler]







































[/spoiler]

Just so's we're clear here, what you see within that spoiler tag (minus the couple DB comparisons)? Not at all remotely American/Western comics. Those are Chinese wuxia/martial arts comics. And from Zephyr's post you can also see the live action film/TV equivalent.

Or hell, here's a bunch more anyway:

[spoiler]











[/spoiler]

This isn't an attack or an insult on you personally, this is just stating it plainly: when you say "this is what is and is not martial arts" throughout your posts, you're simply factually incorrect and don't understand what it is you're talking about. Overwhelmingly so. This stuff in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, ALL OF IT, is as martial arts as martial arts gets. Fantasy, mythical folkloric martial arts, yes, but martial arts all the same. This kind of fantasy/magical kung fu (borne from thousands upon thousands of years worth of ancient Chinese folklore) has a gigantic swath of media that has been out there for literal centuries now: books, comics, TV shows, films, puppet theater, newspaper strips, stage plays, you name it, that contains virtually almost everything you see in DBZ. Yes up to and including the wacky sci fi blending, which had its heyday as a relatively brief but very impactful trend in the genre during the 80s and early 90s (right smack at the same time as DB's original run).

What makes Dragon Ball unique isn't its content (over the top superpowered, world shattering, million mile an hour hyper kinetic martial arts mixing Taoist folklore and sci fi and slapstick goofball comedy and high stakes tense drama): on the contrary, its content is nothing if not incredibly widespread and a dime a dozen. What makes Dragon Ball unique and sets it apart from its ilk is the personality infused into it by the dude drawing it. Its all in how well and how distinctively its all executed, much of "it" being fairly bog standard wuxia stories, characters, and trappings given a breath of fresh new life by Toriyama's immensely specific style and sensibilities.

But the meat of that content is, 1000%, to its bones, from heat to toe, mystical fantasy martial arts fiction. Or Wuxia. The presence of sci fi and other genre flavoring doesn't change this: tons of other wuxia was doing this at the exact same time. The presence of Chi/Ki as the source of incredible supernatural abilities (of a dizzying variety) doesn't change this: hell, they're in large part a vital part of the very definition of what Wuxia even is or consists of.



Everything you list off that makes DBZ "less martial arts" is exactly the reverse and what actually reinforces it as being indisputably a work of martial arts fantasy (distinctive from grounded, real world-intensive martial arts fiction and media).

And Super, for all its faults and flaws, is in NO way going against any of this in most of its content. We're still doing largely Wuxia stories with wuxia character types and dynamics (martial arts tournaments, wildly extreme and esoteric training methods, Eastern heavenly gods and deities engaged in soap operatic melodrama, evil tyrant warlords looking for revenge, etc.) as well as even bringing in Wuxia concepts and ideas that the original series didn't get to touch on (like God Ki).

Absolutely nothing has changed on ANY of these fronts. The only piece of Dragon Ball media that goes out of its way to try and NOT be martial arts/Wuxia-intensive is the FUNimation dub (in most of its various incarnations).

For the record, I don't dislike the Super music for not being a traditionally classic Wuxia score like Kikuchi's was. Plenty of other Wuxia media over the years have increasingly gotten away from that type of traditional Chinese score and tried more modern, pop-influenced approaches to the music. My issue with Super's score is mostly that its just bland, generic, boring, and forgettable in and of itself (ditto goes for Yamamoto's Kai score, and I'm someone who utterly ADORES and worship's Yamamoto's video game work about as equally much as I do Kikuchi's).

Kikuchi's music, beyond being wonderfully fitting for the material (and yes, ALL of the material, front to back), was also IMMENSELY well composed, arranged, and distinctive as all hell. Its just good goddamn music unto itself. That it wonderfully carries the weight of decades and decades of genre tradition like a champ for something that celebrates said genre as much and as hard as DB/Z does only adds that much more love to it.

And the OP is 100% correct on the point that the Faulconer music IS wildly amateurish, unprofessional, and unfit for public airing on a major TV show. I'll go a step further and say that oftentimes it sounds just plain tacky, chintzy, and at times - when its not invoking dumbfuck G.I. Joe/Transformers-esque action cartoons - it can also be disturbingly akin to the score for early 90s Cinemax softcore porn movie or show. There isn't even a contest between it and its Japanese competition (any of them, but especially Kikuchi's).

Like it all you want personally, but to seriously insist that it is on the same level of professional craft as its Japanese forebearer is absolutely invoking the use of nostalgia goggles. Its not a personal insult if you do like it: I don't care what anyone does or doesn't like, more power to you. Its just a matter of realistic perspective for what we're talking about here.

[shadowmaria]

IMO, Faulconer score > current BGM's

[DragonBallKing]

IMO, Faulconer score > current BGM's

Neither get the correct atmosphere, but I do have favorite tracks from both scores.

[shadowmaria]

IMO, Faulconer score > current BGM's

Neither get the correct atmosphere, but I do have favorite tracks from both scores.

Personal favourites of mine from the Faulconer score are Super Saiyan 3 and Ginyu Transformation. Trunks' Theme and Vegeta's Theme also hold soft spots for me.

I can honestly say without a shadow of a doubt that the only current BGM I've legitimately enjoyed was the NEP music from the Zamasu Arc, and the music that played during the glorious Spirit Sword sequence.

[Gaffer Tape]

As usual, I'm so glad Kunzait_83 stopped by this thread.

If I didn't have a decent handle on Bullza's preferences from time spent on the board, I would honestly wonder if, based on his descriptions here, if he even LIKED the "Z-era" material. I mean, don't get me wrong. I feel, from a quality standpoint, the series declines heavily not long after it gets to that point, and the characters lacking intelligence is one of my biggest gripes. But it surprises me that "the fights not having intelligence" would be used by someone to defend it. I'm not trying to be snarky. That honestly threw me for a loop.

[Kokonoe]

So what I have been getting from this thread is the fans of the original score think faulconer fans are nostolgic kids that don't have taste in music and faulconer fans think original score fans are uptight snobs.

I say music is subjective, if you like it then that's great, if not then that's great. I think we can all agree that either way it helps bring us together for a series we all truly love.

I don't care at all about nostalgia. If as I got older I thought the music was bad, I'd say so without any reservations. I continue to listen to the music this day because I think it's freakin' bad ass and the best anime music ever.

I think the only "snobs" are those who come up with reasons outside of, I don't know, people like something cause they actually like it and think it's good?