Tian wrote:sangofe wrote:Dragon Ball might've not been bought to the States without him. Someone else would probably have, but i think he should be thanked for being behind that m
As matter of fact, he wasn't the only one responsible of that. There were other two people that made it possible too. The first one is Gen's uncle who worked as producer in Toei and approached the guy to distribute DB in the U.S and the second is Daniel Cocanougher, a co-worker of Gen's whose family was wealthy, he and his family gave the money to put FUNimation in operation (sorry, I didn't mean to rhyme

) so they could distribute DB in U.S after Harmony Gold's failed attempt.
Indeed, and honestly, Gen really isn't anyone to thank for Dragon Ball's presence in the English world; he just happened to be an opportunist in the right place at the right time. If he hadn't been around, one of various other companies doing anime at the time would have picked it up; Dragon Ball is huge in Japan, it's got all these marketable transformations and characters... Not only would it have definitely been picked up by someone, but they'd have probably done better than the botched job Funi did that involved them screwing up their initial deal, which lead to them not just stopping at 13 out of the initial 26 ordered episodes for the first season order, but skipping over 140 episodes of content, and they weren't able to release those first 13 on DVD themselves for years, and even when they got some success with Z, they had such a lack of respect for the fans and the creative guys, they junked their entire cast and their music guy, for some cheapo impressionists working out of Texas.
The Funimation of now is definitely a very different company than they were in the '90s and '00s, there's a real passion behind the dubbing crew of Dragon Ball now, and a real respect for the fans -- the reviews on that site linked earlier aside, people like Chris Sabat, Sean Schemmel, the entire team of scripting guys, everyone else in the cast, these guys all have a real passion for what they do, and have a real respect for the fans and for the work -- but back when Funi initially brought Dragon Ball over to the west, it was done with the utmost of apathy for the source material and its fans. Even if Gen wasn't directly responsible for this, anyone whose decisions lead Barry Watson to be in charge, and for the franchise and brand to be as badly-managed as it was in the '90s and '00s can't have been doing the best job.
So, much as I'm always one to advocate for the idea of "Just because someone was bad then, doesn't mean they're bad now" -- look at the Funi cast, even most of them aren't very proud of the early work -- and I think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking the grass is always greener, if we're approaching this purely from the angle of "We should be grateful for what he did in the '90s and '00s, bringing Dragon Ball to the west", I have to hard-disagree. Even if we'd been unfortunately saddled with 4Kids for Dragon Ball's dubbing, at least they'd've brought in one experienced dubbing cast from the beginning, kept them all the way through, and not skipped 150 episodes because of botched TV deals. Funimation's early history when they just got started and did their work on Dragon Ball's original 1986-1997 run was a mess from top to bottom, and the franchise's western presentation greatly suffered by being the medium through which Funi figured their crap out in the first several years of their existence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Gen did his best, and improved over the years, but acting like he's the reason Dragon Ball did well in the west... Well... Arguably, if Funimation hadn't been around, or if they hadn't done Dragon Ball -- at least not until much later, when they got better at doing anime -- the western presentation of Dragon Ball may have been significantly better than it ended up being.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.