Hello everyone! This page is for my completed Harmony Gold Dub Reconstruction, which aims to rebuild the footage of the Harmony Gold dub of Dragon Ball, the earliest English dub of a Dragon Ball anime to air on home television in the west! It aims to reconstruct the visuals while keeping the original audio, to provide a more visually appealing way to watch it (and trust me, it really works).
The Harmony Gold dub debuted with a combined edit of the first and third Dragon Ball movies that aired at 1pm on Boxing Day (Dec 26th) 1989, which was followed by the first five episodes of the anime itself airing at 3pm in the first week of 1990. For years, we only had the 1+3 Movie and the first anime episode, but in February of 2020 a tape emerged from Ryan Gavigan with the full set of five episodes. Thanks to the hard work of Tom_Servo and Brady Hartel, some fantastic audio transfers have been made to make this possible. The 1+3 Movie's audio is from Dave Merrill's audio.
The end result is a great transfer of the audio lined up with much better video footage, sourced primarily from the Dragon Box and the Amazon Japan upload of the movies! This makes the Harmony Gold Dub a much more watchable experience without doing anything the original footage didn't do, which was the primary goal of this project.
If you want to watch this, look for it in a popular anime tracker.
Below is a summary of my process of making it. If you want more info, check out this .PDF.
Spoiler:
The core footage for the anime is sourced from my own Dragon Boxes. This means that all the anime episodes (as well as the OP and ED of the 1+3 Movie) are in SD.
The Harmony Gold credits are overlaid on top of the opening, but since the HG Dub uses the second opening (which has no textless version), these occasionally clash with the Japanese credits.
The HG Dub's intro is also longer than the original by three seconds thanks to including three shots from the second movie, Sleeping Princess, which have been replicated.
The anime's unique title cards have also been replicated.
All censoring edits in the dub have been replicated. For historical purposes, these have been given their own section in the .PDF above to log all the changes made.
All six of the anime's eyecatches have been fully remade. DeviantART user HowXu remade the logo only seen in this series (which wasn't easy given the quality of available footage), while I animated the orange orb frame-by-frame to match the original animation. Tom_Servo added the sheen that moves across the logo.
The core footage for the movie uses the HD Amazon Japan footage, since it's 4:3 and not as heavily sharpened or DNR'd as the Blu-Ray versions. This does conflict a bit with the SD footage for the OP/ED, but I felt this was a worthy trade-off to have the Harmony Gold dub use HD footage for the remaining 98% of the feature.
The ad breaks in the movie, including the fade ins and fade outs, have been completely removed to provide a seamless experience, with the exception of the seam between movies 1 and 3 in the middle.
The credits have also been replicated, and the credits for the reconstruction team have been added in a convenient 10 second space at the end where no credits displayed. The Harmony Gold vanity plate at the end was added as well using an upload from Logical Smash on YouTube.
Wow, this the where Zero and the Magic Dragon comes from. Its LatAm dub is the earliest Spanish dub, meaning Harmony Gold basically introduced DB to both North and South America
Yes, I wrote an article about the History of the Harmony Gold Dub. It reveals where the Harmony Gold dub came from, who was involved in its production, and how hard myself and a few other anime fans here at Kanz worked to recover the episodes. Took over a decade of effort!
DerekPadula wrote: Fri Jan 08, 2021 3:49 am
Yes, I wrote an article about the History of the Harmony Gold Dub. It reveals where the Harmony Gold dub came from, who was involved in its production, and how hard myself and a few other anime fans here at Kanz worked to recover the episodes. Took over a decade of effort!
Yes, I really enjoyed watching it. The voice acting is top-notch, especially with the odd censorship and script changes adding a charm to it. And it's a pleasure to watch it without any visual or audio artifacts. You guys did such a good job. A tremendous effort!
Is it okay for me to host these videos on my site so more people can watch them?
DerekPadula wrote: Fri Jan 08, 2021 5:05 am
Yes, I really enjoyed watching it. The voice acting is top-notch, especially with the odd censorship and script changes adding a charm to it. And it's a pleasure to watch it without any visual or audio artifacts. You guys did such a good job. A tremendous effort!
Is it okay for me to host these videos on my site so more people can watch them?
Sure, so long as you retain proper credit and include a clear way for folks to access and download the .pdf file.
Great. I intend to create a Video section on my site soon, and I'll make a HG Dub page for the remasters and the originals, with the proper credit and a link to the pdf.
DerekPadula wrote: Fri Jan 08, 2021 5:12 am
Great. I intend to create a Video section on my site soon, and I'll make a HG Dub page for the remasters and the originals, with the proper credit and a link to the pdf.
Cool! Also make sure to be clear what it is; I didn't "remake" the dub, this is basically just me aligning the audio with the Dragon Box footage for the anime and the Amazon JP footage for the 1+3 Movie, with some extra flourishes to reconstruct the title cards, eyecatches and end credits. It doesn't offer anything new, and is not meant to replace VHS uploads of the dub, but instead expose audiences to it by making it much more presentable.
Thank you for the hard work, KBABZ. It's nice to have only the audio be low quality rather than both the audio and video. It makes it the Harmony Gold dub far more presentable. Till now it was impossible to show it to friends.
Scsigs: "Y'know, it actually makes sense that they waited till today to announce [the 30th Anniversary] set. It's Akira Toriyama's birthday."
Shaddy: "I too want my legacy destroyed as a birthday gift."
linkdude20002001 wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 10:31 pm
Thank you for the hard work, KBABZ. It's nice to have only the audio be low quality rather than both the audio and video. It makes it the Harmony Gold dub far more presentable. Till now it was impossible to show it to friends.
Hey no problem! I wouldn't call the audio "low quality", although that may be because I'm aware of what it originally sounded like a year ago.
Lemme know what you think!
