A specific picture problem of Dragon Ball Season 1 DVD set (UK/AU release only).

[GeigerCouncilman]

Hey, so I've just bought the original Dragon Ball season 1 set (UK/AU 'yellow brick' release) and stumbled upon this weird issue: in an episode, whenever there is a change of scene, for a split second, I get this fuzzy line, either on top or the bottom of the picture. This issue only plagues my season 1 set. Other seasons display changing scenes correctly, without this fast fuzzy line. The set is also an official release (not a bootleg). My question: Does anyone who owns this set has the same problem as me? Thanks.

[LostTimeLord]

Does it look like this screencap from the 1994 dub?

Spoiler:

Those are tape marks - physical damage where they've spliced two pieces of film together. They digitally erased these for the Dragon Boxes and Levels and (presumably) zoomed in the "Blue Bricks" as a zero-effort alternative.

[GeigerCouncilman]

Does it look like this screencap from the 1994 dub?

Spoiler:

Those are tape marks - physical damage where they've spliced two pieces of film together. They digitally erased these for the Dragon Boxes and Levels and (presumably) zoomed in the "Blue Bricks" as a zero-effort alternative.

Yes, that's what I get. It's like everytime a scene changes, this annoying line appears. What's funny, is that it only happens on UK 'banana brick' season 1 set; other seasons are fine. So, is this the definitive home video release of OG Dragon Ball in the west? + Are Dragon Boxes affordable and do they have english subs?

[Robo4900]

It's because the UK Season DVDs are based on Funimation's unrestored 1990s transfer of their film masters from Toei.

What this means is they didn't remove the marks that appear on the masters from physically splicing the different shots together, basically.
You didn't necessarily see this on broadcast originally because of overscan, so Funimation didn't bother to try any kind of proceedure to remove the splice marks back in the '90s, and they didn't bother spending the money to fix it when the early DVDs were being released in 2001-2002 either, and MangaUK's season sets of DB reuse those 2001-2002 masters (albeit they use the Australian PAL conversions), so the splice marks are still very visible on the UK DVDs.

Most modern releases (such as the Dragon Boxes and the US Seasons) have the splice marks removed as part of the film restoration process; even the infamous DBZ Orange Bricks removed them by dint of cropping the picture down to widescreen (a very bad decision, but one which means there are no visible splice marks). Unfortunately, the US Seasons of DB are generally poorer quality than the UK seasons as well (they tried to remove the grain by blurring the picture, so it looks shit), so you're really not better off with any other release, sadly (the Dragon Boxes are arguably better, and the splices were all removed, but the Dragon Boxes were only released in Japan, with no subtitles or dub).