Are There Any Updates On The Harmony Gold Dub Of Dragon Ball?

[Tom_Servo]

Another update!

As promised, all five episodes have been uploaded to the Internet Archive under the same profile that the other files were uploaded under. Link will not be given for obvious reasons, but put 2 and 2 together, and you shall find them! Now that they are released, my source would like to come out and name himself. Name is Ryan Gavigan: "a long time fan and one of the hosts of Anime Hell!" Enjoy, guys! As a bonus, here are the episode titles:

• Secret of the Dragonball

• The Emperor's Quest

• The Nimbus Cloud of Roshi

• Mao-Mao the Terrible

• Zedaki the Warrior

[KBABZ]

Another update!

As promised, all five episodes have been uploaded to the Internet Archive under the same profile that the other files were uploaded under. Link will not be given for obvious reasons, but put 2 and 2 together, and you shall find them! Now that they are released, my source would like to come out and name himself. Name is Ryan Gavigan: "a long time fan and one of the hosts of Anime Hell!" Enjoy, guys! As a bonus, here are the episode titles:

• Secret of the Dragonball

• The Emperor's Quest

• The Nimbus Cloud of Roshi

• Mao-Mao the Terrible

• Zedaki the Warrior

Thanks so much to Ryan!! I'm currently in the process of "re-assembling" the footage using the Dragon Box. The tricky part is recreating the intro, eyecatches and credits, specifically making the unique Dragon Ball logo that appears in the eyecatches.

[eledoremassis02]

Covers finished (full size if you click it)


Thank you and Ryan so much for taking the effort to get these out! I never knew I'd like this dub as much as I do!

[KBABZ]

I wonder if all this will be covered in a podcast episode? I sure hope it will! I'll be making some more edit logs as I watch too!

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

Great to see that the other four dubbed episodes have been found, and boy this was definitely an interesting development seeing as these were considered lost for about 30 years aside from the movie 1 and 3 double feature.

[Robo4900]

So uhh...

Those rips of episode 1-5 are definitely not raw rips of the kind one would want for a proper preservation of this stuff.

It looks like they're rips from a DVD recorder (which is fine; far from ideal, but 100% perfectly fine!!), that have then been run through a shitty re-encoder like Handbrake to reduce the filesize.
For those unaware: Handbrake is a popular piece of software to re-encode video and audio. But no one who knows anything about video would actually use it, because the settings are too limited for serious use, and the quality is always really shit.

The real issue, though, is that the settings in this case were set all wrong.
It's been rescaled, but it hasn't been properly stretched out; DVDs save data in 720x480 resolution, which is then stretched on playback by the media player to 4:3 or 16:9. This encode has failed to account for this, so it pads it out to 4:3 by adding black bars to the top and bottom, and resizes the image to 800x600, which serves no benefit except that it makes it more obvious that it has been re-encoded; a very useful red flag that something is seriously wrong. (In a decent encode, you'd leave it at its original resolution, and give it a flag in the metadata to tell the player to play it back in 4:3)
It hasn't been deinterlaced, so the interlacing lines -- rescaled and blurred by the macroblocking and other distortion you get from a low-bitrate encode -- are irremovable, and the original interlaced fields are irrecoverable.

And the audio encoding is absymal.

Essentially, what we have here, as our only preservation of these last four episodes (as well as the accompanying rip of episode 1) is the equivalent of of the Japanese broadcast audio had been shared in the form of 96kbps MP3s with high-frequenty white noise added.

We need either the raw rips to be shared, or -- if those raw rips have been deleted -- for another digitisation to take place. The quality of these files is unacceptable, I'm afraid.

Don't get me wrong, I'm overjoyed that we finally have these episodes, but if they're going to be shared, they should be shared properly. I'm sure this was an honest mistake, which can most certainly be corrected fairly easily.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

So uhh...

Those rips of episode 1-5 are definitely not raw rips of the kind one would want for a proper preservation of this stuff.

It looks like they're rips from a DVD recorder (which is fine; far from ideal, but 100% perfectly fine!!), that have then been run through a shitty re-encoder like Handbrake to reduce the filesize.
For those unaware: Handbrake is a popular piece of software to re-encode video and audio. But no one who knows anything about video would actually use it, because the settings are too limited for serious use, and the quality is always really shit.

The real issue, though, is that the settings in this case were set all wrong.
It's been rescaled, but it hasn't been properly stretched out; DVDs save data in 720x480 resolution, which is then stretched on playback by the media player to 4:3 or 16:9. This encode has failed to account for this, so it pads it out to 4:3 by adding black bars to the top and bottom, and resizes the image to 800x600, which serves no benefit except that it makes it more obvious that it has been re-encoded; a very useful red flag that something is seriously wrong. (In a decent encode, you'd leave it at its original resolution, and give it a flag in the metadata to tell the player to play it back in 4:3)
It hasn't been deinterlaced, so the interlacing lines -- rescaled and blurred by the macroblocking and other distortion you get from a low-bitrate encode -- are irremovable, and the original interlaced fields are irrecoverable.

And the audio encoding is absymal.

Essentially, what we have here, as our only preservation of these last four episodes (as well as the accompanying rip of episode 1) is the equivalent of of the Japanese broadcast audio had been shared in the form of 96kbps MP3s with high-frequenty white noise added.

We need either the raw rips to be shared, or -- if those raw rips have been deleted -- for another digitisation to take place. The quality of these files is unacceptable, I'm afraid.

Don't get me wrong, I'm overjoyed that we finally have these episodes, but if they're going to be shared, they should be shared properly. I'm sure this was an honest mistake, which can most certainly be corrected fairly easily.

It's indeed really great that the other HG dubbed episodes have now surfaced, but the quality and encoding of the digitization does leave much to be desired even with being 30+ year old recordings.

[MasenkoHA]

Haven’t finished all of episode 2 but I can’t help but notice both Bulma and Goku errr Lena and Zero have called each other cute.

Guess Harmony Gold really wanted Goku x Bulma to be a thing?

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

Haven’t finished all of episode 2 but I can’t help but notice both Bulma and Goku errr Lena and Zero have called each other cute.

Guess Harmony Gold really wanted Goku x Bulma to be a thing?

Hmm that's really interesting, especially when in the Japanese version and later dubs it wasn't even like that. At least...i don't know if the BLT or 2001 FUNi in house dubs retained that bit or not.

[Robo4900]

It's indeed really great that the other HG dubbed episodes have now surfaced, but the quality and encoding of the digitization does leave much to be desired even with being 30+ year old recordings.

Yeah.

I mean, the recordings aren't gonna be great, but you'd expect to not have macroblocking that makes every frame look like a JPEG and weird jagged edges from the crappy rescaling algorithm, y'know?

I'm just disappointed with the ripper. Probably had the best of intentions, but made a mistake.
Hopefully he shares the raw recordings with Tom Servo, and we can have this all sorted.

EDIT: Oh dear. I think we might need a new rip, now that I've just listened to a bit. The gain problems Tom Servo referred to previously are very much alive here: The audio sounds horrendously clipped.

Hmm that's really interesting, especially when in the Japanese version and later dubs it wasn't even like that. At least...i don't know if the BLT or 2001 FUNi in house dubs retained that bit or not.

I think the 1995 dub might have retained a line to the tune of "She's pretty but she sure is strange", though I may be conflating memories.

[MasenkoHA]

At least...i don't know if the BLT or 2001 FUNi in house dubs retained that bit or not.

They didn’t. The 1995 dub has Goku tell Pocowatha (the native dressed girl that Oolong wanted to marry) that she was cuter than Bulma and that was about it. (Because they needed to explain why Bulma bonked him on the head since they cut out the whole crotch patting thing) the 2001 dub kept the whole “Goku doesn’t get attraction or differences between the sexes” thing at least until the marriage proposal to Chi Chi bit

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

At least...i don't know if the BLT or 2001 FUNi in house dubs retained that bit or not.

They didn’t. The 1995 dub has Goku tell Pocowatha (the native dressed girl that Oolong wanted to marry) that she was cuter than Bulma and that was about it. (Because they needed to explain why Bulma bonked him on the head since they cut out the whole crotch patting thing) the 2001 dub kept the whole “Goku doesn’t get attraction or differences between the sexes” thing at least until the marriage proposal to Chi Chi bit

Interesting, so it appears that Harmony Gold is the only one of the dubs for the early episodes to have that while the later ones didn't as was the case with the Japanese version probably because the whole thing with Goku not having a distinction between male/female or romantic stuff and all that either got lost in translation by HG or was written around. Obviously BLT's edited version had removed the bits of him feeling people's crotches (Oolong, Chi Chi.etc) they had to account for the aforementioned scene being cut somehow.

I do recall them also having Goku kicking Chi Chi's crotch edited out in the TV edited version of the 2001 dub as were pretty much most of the others, though with the uncut version it was retained pretty much as in the Japanese original.

[10gigtriforce]

Haven’t finished all of episode 2 but I can’t help but notice both Bulma and Goku errr Lena and Zero have called each other cute.

Guess Harmony Gold really wanted Goku x Bulma to be a thing?

I see hg are people of culture. But yeah that was unexpected. Kinda wanna see how they'd have handled the whole chichi thing

[KBABZ]

Just watched Episode 2! Here's my notes on cut scenes:

• 4:55: Zero standing around nude not understanding bathtime procedures has been cut. After Lena says “I guess I gotta show ya!”, we cut to her holding Zero’s tail in her hands. 40 seconds removed.
• 5:24: The wide shot of Zero drying his hair while Lena sits on her bed in shock has been cut for nudity. After the close-up of Zero’s wiggling tail with the white background, we cut to Lena’s shocked face. 10 seconds removed.
• 5:38: A nearly identical wide shot to the one above has been removed. After the shot of Lena in a “spotlight of revelation”, we cut to the close-up of Zero where he says “I figured you’d come around to believing that!”. 6 seconds removed.
• 6:06: The shot of Lena diving into the bathwater has been shortened at the start by twelve frames to remove her “top of the dive” animation frame where her Barbie-like breasts are almost fully exposed. Half a second removed.
• 8:41: The moment where Oculi farts has been cut. The dialogue has now been re-written so that Oculi is upset at Naughty Chao over not returning with a Dragon Ball.
• 14:44: The shot of Zero cooking the cartoon wolf has been cut, probably because Zero is cooking a cartoon wolf. After Lena runs inside, we cut to the shot of the moon. 9 seconds removed.
• 14:46: Similar to the above, the shot panning from the capsule house to the smouldering spit with the cartoon wolf skeleton has been cut. After the shot of the moon, we cut to Zero bouncing on the bed. 7 seconds removed.
• 16:07: Surprisingly, the sequence where Zero slips off Lena’s panties has been removed. After Zero stands up and yawns, we cut to the panning shot of the mountains where, instead of yelling, Zero now shouts “Sure could use breakfast!”. Lena’s terrified check on the Dragon Balls is re-contextualized as her being afraid that a kid who’d eat centipedes would eat anything. 22 seconds removed.

[MasenkoHA]

It seems like they’re not doing any paint edits and merely content to cut the objectionable stuff out entirely?

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

It seems like they’re not doing any paint edits and merely content to cut the objectionable stuff out entirely?

The tech as of 1989 was not to the point of where they could do those kinds of things until much later, at least i don't think it was quite there yet. They certainly had the means by which to digitally edit by the time FUNi started in '94 and the BLT dub entered production soon after.

[Valerius Dover]

It seems like they’re not doing any paint edits and merely content to cut the objectionable stuff out entirely?

The tech of 1989 was not to the point of where they could do those kinds of things until much later, at least i don't think it was quite there yet. They certainly had the means to digitally edit by the time FUNi started in '94 and the BLT dub entered production soon after.

Did Robotech never have paint edits? Haven't seen it myself, but I would think three shows that were altered that much would've required it.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

It seems like they’re not doing any paint edits and merely content to cut the objectionable stuff out entirely?

The tech of 1989 was not to the point of where they could do those kinds of things until much later, at least i don't think it was quite there yet. They certainly had the means to digitally edit by the time FUNi started in '94 and the BLT dub entered production soon after.

Did Robotech never have paint edits? Haven't seen it myself, but I would think three shows that were altered that much would've required it.

Really? I didn't think digital paint editing was even around in 1985/86 when the Robotech edited versions of Macross, Southern Cross and Mospeada were produced and aired. Who knows???

[Planetnamek]

Really happy the episodes are available period, so I can deal with the quality not being top-notch. Handbrake can be a useful tool and it does not always make things look bad, i've used it myself with pretty good success to rip Knights of the Zodiac episodes onto the Internet Archive from the DVDs and it looks pretty good IMO.

[10gigtriforce]

So glad these are here now, its so fun to watch them and see the first, more than just a movie, attempt at dragon ball dubbing in English.


So now all thats missing that we have confirmation of existing for a very good chance is the frontier airlines dub and the funi pilot dub of movie 1 with the HG names right? or am I forgetting more?