Mike, far be it from any of us to presume the lack of a podcast means you are not working on the site!
I recall one of the answers to the Kazenshuu Q&A was that Dragon Ball Z is so freakishly popular in the English-speaking world that it has different "markets", which is a polite way of saying FUNi can do whatever they want because it will sell to someone. Which as Mike acknowledges near the end, leaves this release with no legs to stand on because FUNi already has a complete and readily available Blu-Ray release of DBZ cropped and scrubbed to that standard. If we pretend that that is a necessary box that needs to be checked,
the box is already checked. They understood this with their version of the Dragon Boxes, with no overt visual changes and the closest thing to a "mass market" concession being the inclusion of the English dub at all. I really don't get why the decision-makers missed it now. I would believe that that the Level Sets were a mammoth effort and more time and money than FUNi was willing to put in, but that doesn't make more smearing the only alternative.
Ex-Dubbie369 wrote: Wed Apr 17, 2019 3:13 pmI guess this does fall on Toei though. They have not shown any inclination toward making an HD remaster of the older material other than the films. Honestly, if the Dragon Boxes were properly color corrected, I'd be happy with all of it in SD forever, but we can't even get that!
I do not think they see a need. Either that the buyer base isn't there, or that the Dragon Boxes single discs mean the series is already readily available on disc in pretty good quality, if probably a decade out of print. Though how they handled Kai Buu and rushed Dragon Ball Super to production tell us all we need to know, really. Mike posits that the Dragon Ball rights holders do not know what to do with the IP, and I just feel like Toei's response would be "Maybe, but for all that legitimate history, the IP is a dumb pulpy moneymaker for kids." In the wake of Super Broly, the Super anime's return could be most telling.
