Is anyone still holding out for a new HD remaster from TOEI?

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

I'm not, and while this may come as a dissapointment to some on these forums I think it's important to consider why it doesn't feel likely at this point.

When the TOEI movie Blu-Rays were being released in 2018 rumours were rampant that the series would get similar treatment, even moreso when we had that new beautiful HD remaster of the TV specials. Many fans, myself included waited, and waited for this mythical remaster of the series we never had definitive proof was in the works.

Here we are in 2021, and TOEI has still never done a HD scan of any of the three original anime series, let alone the money printing Z, which they missed two golden opportunities for.

While I love Kai for what it is, it is very clear that other than Toriyama refusing a new series at the time it was a great excuse for TOEI to not give Z a full HD remaster and to simply pass it of as a new show for the generation of kids watching Fuji TV in 2009. Of course we all know how that turned out. Merchandise failed, the new score was trashed because TOEI were initially oblivious to it being plagiarized, original Z continued to air, and as such Kai failed to become what it was meant to be.

Fast forward to 2019, anticipation is high for TOEI to create a new remaster from their own film prints that would blow every home release the west has had, including the level sets and Dragon Boxes out of the water, and once again they couldn't be bothered. Instead resorting to promoting the announcement of Funimation's 30th anniversary collector's edition. It's like in TOEI's mind anything Funimation does is "good enough" because it will make them money regardless.

Now nearly two years on from the Z anime's 30th anniversary and nothing has come of it from Japan. I personally don't see a new Blu-Ray or UHD remaster coming from anyone other than Funimation. Even if TOEI miraculously changes their ways for the 40th anniversary in 2029, will anyone still care? Hard to imagine anyone would other than a small minority of collector's, like many of us here. Even then with declining sales of physical media every year I don't want to think what will new releases cost then.

In saying all that I don't blame anyone who will just purchase any release of the series from now on. The 30th anniversary remaster, which can be found on the Manga UK Blu-Rays, Funimation Steelbooks, and the upcoming Madman releases are really your best bet when it comes to supporting the series. If you don't own any releases go for it because whatever people say about the quality you will be voting with your wallet that we want the series to be in 4:3, let's hope all companies that release Z henceforth will remember that.

[jjgp1112]

After the debacle that was the movie Blu-Rays, I don't even trust Toei to do a good release either...unless they release it untouched on netflix and Amazon first

[Sin]

The 'HD remaster' rumours have been around for a while, I believe the specific rumour you're talking about ended up being baseless as always, as long as releases keep coming each one will be hyped by certain folk as being 'THE ONE', the elusive actually half-decent release. When it wasn't the Funi 30th anniversary release it was the Selecta Vision release..

Ultimately I think there will be an HD release from Toei, but I expect it to randomly pop up on a streaming platform when nobody is expecting it, and that it will not have much remastering about it.

[Matches Malone]

I don't care about Z, as I prefer Kai over it, but at this point I'll take any HD remaster of the original DB. GT would be a nice bonus afterwards.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Yeah, the censorship on the movies was really disappointing.

One of the reasons we thought the 30th anniversary Z remaster would be "The One" is because TOEI hadn't released anything old since the Dragon Boxes and the movies and specials have some hope they were on some sort of trajectory.

As for Selecta Vision, we know they were negotiating with TOEI for better masters, but of course that's no guarantee of anything more than an upscale. I still like how they look, and I'd gladly support if Manga UK imported it. Then again I'd take anything when it comes to OG DB or GT Blu-Rays.

I generally prefer Kai to Z too, but the latter in the best quality would be nice to have too.

[Char Aznable]

The time for them to do it would’ve been 2019 for the anniversary of Z, if it didn’t happen then it’s probably not happening. They probably feel ‘Well, we did Kai...and then we actually managed to finish it, so that’s good enough! Does anybody even remember Dragon Ball? That’s okay, we covered it in the first episode of Kai!’ I’m legitimately shocked they haven’t done an SD Blu-ray release of the Dragon Boxes, though. It would be the laziest thing ever to take what you have, throw it on some Blu-ray discs, it would probably be four or five volumes at most for Z with how much you can fit on one disc, throw it out there and call it a day. It would probably do well! Physical media is more of a boutique item in 2021, though.

In saying all that I don't blame anyone who will just purchase any release of the series from now on. The 30th anniversary remaster, which can be found on the Manga UK Blu-Rays, Funimation Steelbooks, and the upcoming Madman releases are really your best bet when it comes to supporting the series. If you don't own any releases go for it because whatever people say about the quality you will be voting with your wallet that we want the series to be in 4:3, let's hope all companies that release Z henceforth will remember that.

I agree, and I don’t see how this can be a controversial take at this point. Is the 30th FUNi remaster less than adequate? Yes. However, if your choices are between the DNRed and cropped season sets or the slightly better but with fake grain 4:3 steelbooks, get the steelbooks. They’re better in every way from the season sets. I’m not a big fan of steelbooks personally and I think they’re overpriced so that’s a con for sure, if these ever get a standard release it’s a no-brainer at that point.

[Jord]

I'm really glad I have the Dragon boxes. But to think this is the best home release of perhaps the most popular anime ever is a pretty sad thought.

[Damned]

If Toei can't even bother doing 17 movies correctly, I highly doubt they will do 508 episodes properly. If they do a release at all, it will just be upscaled DNR'ed footage with, at best, spit polished optical audio.

[Kendamu]

I stopped waiting and I ordered all the Steelbooks.

I'm done waiting. I just wanna watch DBZ in 4:3.

[Asmo]

I gave up and ordered the 30th Anniversary set when available (it was unusually cheap at one store here before its release) and I'm pretty happy with it, save the dnr. With that said, I do hope they do a remaster at some point even if I'm not counting on it happening.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

If Toei can't even bother doing 17 movies correctly, I highly doubt they will do 508 episodes properly. If they do a release at all, it will just be upscaled DNR'ed footage with, at best, spit polished optical audio.

As in something like Selecta Vision's Blu-ray sets of OG DB from a year or so ago? Given that was effectively the Dragon Box masters upscaled and filtered with noise reduction in a similar fashion. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if they went that route.

[JEFFMAN219]

Nope I gave up a long time ago lol. Toei is just like FUNimation, they don't treat this series with the respect that it deserves.

[Robo4900]

Toei's work on the movies amounted to a great transfer with some acceptable (but flawed) colour correction and some industry standard but unideal filtering for the Blu-ray release.
As much as we hardcores complain about the Blu-ray version being a significant downgrade from the streaming version, to my recollection, Z movie 5 is the only one that actually looks bad. All the others actually look really good, even if the streaming versions are better.

On top of this, there's also the TV specials that got remastered in HD a little while ago for TV and streaming; those look very good, despite the DNR definitely being too strong (not in the obscene Funi sense, more in the usual "it looks good, but it would look better without DNR" way, like basically every Blu-ray of an old show/movie out there, including the majority of the Toei Blu-rays).

So, if Toei did remaster the series, the result would be good. Not great, not Level-quality, but good. Akin to the HD version of the TV specials we've seen going around for the past few years.

... But they won't.
Toei has shown a pattern of not bothering to do HD transfers of their 16mm shows, instead preferring upscales. Even though Dragon Ball is their flagship franchise, Kai is the most we will ever see Toei do in terms of remastering the old shows.

And even if Toei did, by some miracle, decide to remaster all of DB/Z/GT, Funimation wouldn't import Z because they're too proud of their own shitty job with it, and they simply wouldn't bother importing DB or GT.
At best, they would do exactly what they did with the Dragon Boxes: Import the Z sets in a series of massively overpriced volumes with very low printing numbers and almost no marketing beforehand, leading their prices to go insane on the second-hand market for years afterward.

[coola]

Just thinking about all three series with green tint...

[Big Boss]

It would take a miracle for Toei to make a new Dragon Box esque release on Blu-Ray. As robo said, Toei have a history f not bothering to make HD transfers of 16mm shows and I can't imagine that will change for Dragon Ball. That being said, if my memory is correct, the Bardock special was also 16mm and Toei made a brand new scan of it in 2019 (?) to be shown in theaters for a limited run, but this was most likely a one-off event because of the short length and the fact it was meant for a cinematic release. I might be wrong about that last point, though.

[ArmenianPepsi]

I seriously doubt Toei will do anything about the dire home video situation for DB anytime soon. I imagine that if they really cared about giving DB / Z the HD treatment, they would've done it long ago instead of holding out until the twilight years of physical media, where it's not viable to sell outside of specialty collector's editions.

As for Funi, that ship sailed and sank 10 years ago when the Level Sets flopped.

Dragon Ball is sadly just going to always be the odd one out. While plenty of it's contemporaries have long gotten their sleek definitive HD releases, Dragon Ball is still a generation behind the times, stuck in the DVD days.

If we hear anything again about a new DB release, it'll be around 2024-2029, maybe 40 years is the magic number?

[Robo4900]

As for Funi, that ship sailed and sank 10 years ago when the Level Sets flopped.

The Level sets didn't flop, that was always fan assumption with no basis in facts. The reality is, it's far more likely they sold so much better than they were expecting that Funi's higher-ups decided to re-strategise and do a proper successor to the Orange Brick DVDs rather than sell the Levels, which were marketed as being a high-quality collectors' product more akin to the US Dragon Boxes.

Long explanation:

Spoiler:

Even if the Levels had flopped (there is no evidence to suggest this, however), Funi could be blamed for sabotaging the sets from the outset by pricing them far higher than they needed to if they expected them to sell as well as the Season BDs or Orange Brick DVDs did. Because if they seriously did expect to do big numbers, there's no other explanation for why the Levels were priced so high for their contents, and why so much of the marketing seemed so geared towards the more serious fans/collectors/enthusiasts.
But, I don't think Funi would do that. It's bad business to deliberately sabotage a product like this; think of all the money that goes into transferring, cleaning up, marketing, authoring, manufacturing... It's huge costs, not the kind of thing you piss away to deliberately sabotage anything.

If the Levels had flopped, why would Funi have immediately done another Blu-ray set just two years later, with the exact same expensive remastering process as the Levels but with awful filtering, manual shot-by-shot reframing/cropping, and loads of additional marketing on top?
If the Levels had sold poorly, there's no way they'd have repeated it two years later at a quarter of the price, with a far more aggressive/quick release schedule. So, it's more likely they expected the Levels to sell poorly, so they set the price high and gave long delays between releases so as to keep it profitable for the low sales expected for a high-definition collectors' set (in other words, they expected it to be like the Dragon Boxes except in high-def), only to find they were aiming at entirely the wrong audience and could make far more money if they re-assessed and aimed for a broader audience.

The Season BDs could have continued where the Levels left off in terms of style of remastering but with better marketing, cheaper per-box prices, etc., Funi simply elected to filter the shit out of the grain and crop it to widescreen after doing a slightly more rigorous Level remastering process (the Levels had some issues with tape marks being badly painted out such that details at the bottom of frame are weirdly distorted and have bits of the next frame that shouldn't be there; the Season BDs, 30th sets, etc. don't have this issue). By all indications, Funi's bigwigs simply think that look is better, and/or that it appeals to some imaginary grain-hating audience (there's no evidence such an audience exists, but it's entirely possible Funi's high-ups think it does; same is true of many studios).

So basically, the only problem with Dragon Ball's home video is that Funimation have, at every turn, resisted doing it properly when given the opportunity to do so. The higher-ups prefer to do something that we, the hardcore fans, utterly hate, and this point of contention would only be resolved if Funi's higher-up structure was completely replaced.
So, really the ship didn't so much sink as it was never really built. They started work on it on the Levels, but then decided to just throw it out there and let it sink so they can build a new ship that fits their own preferred specifications -- yes, it has no barracks for people to sleep in, and yes the food is literally the shit of their livestock, but people used the old ships that did that too. Of course, it never enters their minds that, in fact, the customers have no other choice if they want a ship that goes this way, so unless they go board a pirate ship, which most people won't do, their only choice is one of these god-awful insults to the very idea of a boat.

... I may have gone a little far with the metaphor there, but you get the idea!

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

Spoiler:

As for Funi, that ship sailed and sank 10 years ago when the Level Sets flopped.

The Level sets didn't flop, that was always fan assumption with no basis in facts. The reality is, it's far more likely they sold so much better than they were expecting that Funi's higher-ups decided to re-strategise and do a proper successor to the Orange Brick DVDs rather than sell the Levels, which were marketed as being a high-quality collectors' product more akin to the US Dragon Boxes.

Long explanation:

Spoiler:

Even if the Levels had flopped (there is no evidence to suggest this, however), Funi could be blamed for sabotaging the sets from the outset by pricing them far higher than they needed to if they expected them to sell as well as the Season BDs or Orange Brick DVDs did. Because if they seriously did expect to do big numbers, there's no other explanation for why the Levels were priced so high for their contents, and why so much of the marketing seemed so geared towards the more serious fans/collectors/enthusiasts.
But, I don't think Funi would do that. It's bad business to deliberately sabotage a product like this; think of all the money that goes into transferring, cleaning up, marketing, authoring, manufacturing... It's huge costs, not the kind of thing you piss away to deliberately sabotage anything.

If the Levels had flopped, why would Funi have immediately done another Blu-ray set just two years later, with the exact same expensive remastering process as the Levels but with awful filtering, manual shot-by-shot reframing/cropping, and loads of additional marketing on top?
If the Levels had sold poorly, there's no way they'd have repeated it two years later at a quarter of the price, with a far more aggressive/quick release schedule. So, it's more likely they expected the Levels to sell poorly, so they set the price high and gave long delays between releases so as to keep it profitable for the low sales expected for a high-definition collectors' set (in other words, they expected it to be like the Dragon Boxes except in high-def), only to find they were aiming at entirely the wrong audience and could make far more money if they re-assessed and aimed for a broader audience.

The Season BDs could have continued where the Levels left off in terms of style of remastering but with better marketing, cheaper per-box prices, etc., Funi simply elected to filter the shit out of the grain and crop it to widescreen after doing a slightly more rigorous Level remastering process (the Levels had some issues with tape marks being badly painted out such that details at the bottom of frame are weirdly distorted and have bits of the next frame that shouldn't be there; the Season BDs, 30th sets, etc. don't have this issue). By all indications, Funi's bigwigs simply think that look is better, and/or that it appeals to some imaginary grain-hating audience (there's no evidence such an audience exists, but it's entirely possible Funi's high-ups think it does; same is true of many studios).

So basically, the only problem with Dragon Ball's home video is that Funimation have, at every turn, resisted doing it properly when given the opportunity to do so. The higher-ups prefer to do something that we, the hardcore fans, utterly hate, and this point of contention would only be resolved if Funi's higher-up structure was completely replaced.
So, really the ship didn't so much sink as it was never really built. They started work on it on the Levels, but then decided to just throw it out there and let it sink so they can build a new ship that fits their own preferred specifications -- yes, it has no barracks for people to sleep in, and yes the food is literally the shit of their livestock, but people used the old ships that did that too. Of course, it never enters their minds that, in fact, the customers have no other choice if they want a ship that goes this way, so unless they go board a pirate ship, which most people won't do, their only choice is one of these god-awful insults to the very idea of a boat.

... I may have gone a little far with the metaphor there, but you get the idea!

That and they crammed them into a short window of time in late 2011 when the schedule was stuffed full of releases, because at the same time the Dragon Boxes had just finished their release about a month earlier and Kai was coming out on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously not to mention the OB's were still out there. It was a really good product which aside from the prices per volume suffered poor timing due to this, and i still say had FUNi waited another two or three years on releasing them and given things some breathing room to settle then the Levels may have had a better chance in 2013/2014 or so.

Even still, they could've had the Season BD's be done using a similar process rather than making them effectively the Orange Bricks 2.0 but not as bad in some ways but still not good either.

[Robo4900]

Spoiler:

As for Funi, that ship sailed and sank 10 years ago when the Level Sets flopped.

The Level sets didn't flop, that was always fan assumption with no basis in facts. The reality is, it's far more likely they sold so much better than they were expecting that Funi's higher-ups decided to re-strategise and do a proper successor to the Orange Brick DVDs rather than sell the Levels, which were marketed as being a high-quality collectors' product more akin to the US Dragon Boxes.

Long explanation:

Spoiler:

Even if the Levels had flopped (there is no evidence to suggest this, however), Funi could be blamed for sabotaging the sets from the outset by pricing them far higher than they needed to if they expected them to sell as well as the Season BDs or Orange Brick DVDs did. Because if they seriously did expect to do big numbers, there's no other explanation for why the Levels were priced so high for their contents, and why so much of the marketing seemed so geared towards the more serious fans/collectors/enthusiasts.
But, I don't think Funi would do that. It's bad business to deliberately sabotage a product like this; think of all the money that goes into transferring, cleaning up, marketing, authoring, manufacturing... It's huge costs, not the kind of thing you piss away to deliberately sabotage anything.

If the Levels had flopped, why would Funi have immediately done another Blu-ray set just two years later, with the exact same expensive remastering process as the Levels but with awful filtering, manual shot-by-shot reframing/cropping, and loads of additional marketing on top?
If the Levels had sold poorly, there's no way they'd have repeated it two years later at a quarter of the price, with a far more aggressive/quick release schedule. So, it's more likely they expected the Levels to sell poorly, so they set the price high and gave long delays between releases so as to keep it profitable for the low sales expected for a high-definition collectors' set (in other words, they expected it to be like the Dragon Boxes except in high-def), only to find they were aiming at entirely the wrong audience and could make far more money if they re-assessed and aimed for a broader audience.

The Season BDs could have continued where the Levels left off in terms of style of remastering but with better marketing, cheaper per-box prices, etc., Funi simply elected to filter the shit out of the grain and crop it to widescreen after doing a slightly more rigorous Level remastering process (the Levels had some issues with tape marks being badly painted out such that details at the bottom of frame are weirdly distorted and have bits of the next frame that shouldn't be there; the Season BDs, 30th sets, etc. don't have this issue). By all indications, Funi's bigwigs simply think that look is better, and/or that it appeals to some imaginary grain-hating audience (there's no evidence such an audience exists, but it's entirely possible Funi's high-ups think it does; same is true of many studios).

So basically, the only problem with Dragon Ball's home video is that Funimation have, at every turn, resisted doing it properly when given the opportunity to do so. The higher-ups prefer to do something that we, the hardcore fans, utterly hate, and this point of contention would only be resolved if Funi's higher-up structure was completely replaced.
So, really the ship didn't so much sink as it was never really built. They started work on it on the Levels, but then decided to just throw it out there and let it sink so they can build a new ship that fits their own preferred specifications -- yes, it has no barracks for people to sleep in, and yes the food is literally the shit of their livestock, but people used the old ships that did that too. Of course, it never enters their minds that, in fact, the customers have no other choice if they want a ship that goes this way, so unless they go board a pirate ship, which most people won't do, their only choice is one of these god-awful insults to the very idea of a boat.

... I may have gone a little far with the metaphor there, but you get the idea!

That and they crammed them into a short window of time in late 2011 when the schedule was stuffed full of releases, because at the same time the Dragon Boxes had just finished their release about a month earlier and Kai was coming out on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously not to mention the OB's were still out there. It was a really good product which aside from the prices per volume suffered poor timing due to this, and i still say had FUNi waited another two or three years on releasing them and given things some breathing room to settle then the Levels may have had a better chance in 2013/2014 or so.

Even still, they could've had the Season BD's be done using a similar process rather than making them effectively the Orange Bricks 2.0 but not as bad in some ways but still not good either.

I think you missed the point of my post there.

Again, I really don't think the Levels flopped. If anything, they probably performed quite well in that late 2011 slot, and as I've shown in the past, the Season BDs were done with the same process as the Levels, they just threw some shit filters on after and cropped it. The raw Level-style cleaned-up-but-not-destroyed-with-filtering version most likely still exists in their vaults, they've just elected not to release it. (Even though the 30th anniversary box set would have been the perfect format for that)

Anyway, that said, probably the Levels did quite well in late 2011, so the attitude was "If they're gonna do pretty well now, imagine how well they'd do after two years cooling off?" And then an exec decided "Sure, and we can crop it and remove all the grain to make it look nicer so people will buy it more!" And naturally, idiocy won, and that's the approach they went with.
As I note, there's no evidence the Levels flopped, and thinking through it logically, if it flopped, the Season BDs would make no business sense. Funi would probably not have tried again for several years. But they tried again in 2013, after the cancelled Level 2.1 was to release in mid-2012... That's not a cancelling of their plans to do Blu-rays because of poor sales, that's them restrategising, especially since the Seasons and 30th sets show clearly that their cleanup process was even better, rather than being at all worse than the Levels, but they ruined all that work with shitty filtering and cropping (and again, the cropping was manually done by a person who had to be paid to do it for every shot in 291 episodes)...
And they did all this, which definitely would have been a more-involved, more expensive process than the Levels... But the Season BDs ended up being a cheaper release. This indicates to me that market research for the Levels made them think they would sell to a small audience who would pay high prices for a high-quality product, only to re-strategise later on and do the Season BDs for a mass audience at a lower price.
Regardless, even if you don't agree with my conclusions, the established reasons why the Levels were cancelled are most definitely just the fans making up shit in the face of a lack of information, and running with this assumed story even though there's no evidence to support it, and it doesn't make sense when you actually look at the facts.

--

So, to recap: The crowded 2011 release didn't kill the Levels like many assumed (in fact, there's no evidence to suggest the Levels sold badly, despite baseless widespread fan assumption), and we know for a fact that the Season BDs already did use a Level process, just with shitty filtering and cropping on top which ruined all the actual good work.

The Season BDs were sold at a lower pricepoint than the Levels for a likely larger workload and production budget than the Levels. That is not how a company handles a total flop of Blu-ray sales.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

The Level sets didn't flop, that was always fan assumption with no basis in facts. The reality is, it's far more likely they sold so much better than they were expecting that Funi's higher-ups decided to re-strategise and do a proper successor to the Orange Brick DVDs rather than sell the Levels, which were marketed as being a high-quality collectors' product more akin to the US Dragon Boxes.

Long explanation:

Spoiler:

Even if the Levels had flopped (there is no evidence to suggest this, however), Funi could be blamed for sabotaging the sets from the outset by pricing them far higher than they needed to if they expected them to sell as well as the Season BDs or Orange Brick DVDs did. Because if they seriously did expect to do big numbers, there's no other explanation for why the Levels were priced so high for their contents, and why so much of the marketing seemed so geared towards the more serious fans/collectors/enthusiasts.
But, I don't think Funi would do that. It's bad business to deliberately sabotage a product like this; think of all the money that goes into transferring, cleaning up, marketing, authoring, manufacturing... It's huge costs, not the kind of thing you piss away to deliberately sabotage anything.

If the Levels had flopped, why would Funi have immediately done another Blu-ray set just two years later, with the exact same expensive remastering process as the Levels but with awful filtering, manual shot-by-shot reframing/cropping, and loads of additional marketing on top?
If the Levels had sold poorly, there's no way they'd have repeated it two years later at a quarter of the price, with a far more aggressive/quick release schedule. So, it's more likely they expected the Levels to sell poorly, so they set the price high and gave long delays between releases so as to keep it profitable for the low sales expected for a high-definition collectors' set (in other words, they expected it to be like the Dragon Boxes except in high-def), only to find they were aiming at entirely the wrong audience and could make far more money if they re-assessed and aimed for a broader audience.

The Season BDs could have continued where the Levels left off in terms of style of remastering but with better marketing, cheaper per-box prices, etc., Funi simply elected to filter the shit out of the grain and crop it to widescreen after doing a slightly more rigorous Level remastering process (the Levels had some issues with tape marks being badly painted out such that details at the bottom of frame are weirdly distorted and have bits of the next frame that shouldn't be there; the Season BDs, 30th sets, etc. don't have this issue). By all indications, Funi's bigwigs simply think that look is better, and/or that it appeals to some imaginary grain-hating audience (there's no evidence such an audience exists, but it's entirely possible Funi's high-ups think it does; same is true of many studios).

So basically, the only problem with Dragon Ball's home video is that Funimation have, at every turn, resisted doing it properly when given the opportunity to do so. The higher-ups prefer to do something that we, the hardcore fans, utterly hate, and this point of contention would only be resolved if Funi's higher-up structure was completely replaced.
So, really the ship didn't so much sink as it was never really built. They started work on it on the Levels, but then decided to just throw it out there and let it sink so they can build a new ship that fits their own preferred specifications -- yes, it has no barracks for people to sleep in, and yes the food is literally the shit of their livestock, but people used the old ships that did that too. Of course, it never enters their minds that, in fact, the customers have no other choice if they want a ship that goes this way, so unless they go board a pirate ship, which most people won't do, their only choice is one of these god-awful insults to the very idea of a boat.

... I may have gone a little far with the metaphor there, but you get the idea!

That and they crammed them into a short window of time in late 2011 when the schedule was stuffed full of releases, because at the same time the Dragon Boxes had just finished their release about a month earlier and Kai was coming out on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously not to mention the OB's were still out there. It was a really good product which aside from the prices per volume suffered poor timing due to this, and i still say had FUNi waited another two or three years on releasing them and given things some breathing room to settle then the Levels may have had a better chance in 2013/2014 or so.

Even still, they could've had the Season BD's be done using a similar process rather than making them effectively the Orange Bricks 2.0 but not as bad in some ways but still not good either.

I think you missed the point of my post there.

Again, I really don't think the Levels flopped. If anything, they probably performed quite well in that late 2011 slot, and as I've shown in the past, the Season BDs were done with the same process as the Levels, they just threw some shit filters on after and cropped it. The raw Level-style cleaned-up-but-not-destroyed-with-filtering version most likely still exists in their vaults, they've just elected not to release it. (Even though the 30th anniversary box set would have been the perfect format for that)

Anyway, that said, probably the Levels did quite well in late 2011, so the attitude was "If they're gonna do pretty well now, imagine how well they'd do after two years cooling off?" And then an exec decided "Sure, and we can crop it and remove all the grain to make it look nicer so people will buy it more!" And naturally, idiocy won, and that's the approach they went with.
As I note, there's no evidence the Levels flopped, and thinking through it logically, if it flopped, the Season BDs would make no business sense. Funi would probably not have tried again for several years. But they tried again in 2013, after the cancelled Level 2.1 was to release in mid-2012... That's not a cancelling of their plans to do Blu-rays because of poor sales, that's them restrategising, especially since the Seasons and 30th sets show clearly that their cleanup process was even better, rather than being at all worse than the Levels, but they ruined all that work with shitty filtering and cropping (and again, the cropping was manually done by a person who had to be paid to do it for every shot in 291 episodes)...
And they did all this, which definitely would have been a more-involved, more expensive process than the Levels... But the Season BDs ended up being a cheaper release. This indicates to me that market research for the Levels made them think they would sell to a small audience who would pay high prices for a high-quality product, only to re-strategise later on and do the Season BDs for a mass audience at a lower price.
Regardless, even if you don't agree with my conclusions, the established reasons why the Levels were cancelled are most definitely just the fans making up shit in the face of a lack of information, and running with this assumed story even though there's no evidence to support it, and it doesn't make sense when you actually look at the facts.

--

So, to recap: The crowded 2011 release didn't kill the Levels like many assumed (in fact, there's no evidence to suggest the Levels sold badly, despite baseless widespread fan assumption), and we know for a fact that the Season BDs already did use a Level process, just with shitty filtering and cropping on top which ruined all the actual good work.

The Season BDs were sold at a lower pricepoint than the Levels for a likely larger workload and production budget than the Levels. That is not how a company handles a total flop of Blu-ray sales.

True i misread it a bit, and thinking about the whole thing again it seems they actually did sell decent enough overall despite the multitude of releases surrounding them but then the suits in the home video department at FUNi decided somewhere at that point to reverse course after shelving the Level sets in 2012 two volumes in and go with a cheaper Orange Brick style presentation for the second try (only slightly less bad i.e. no disappearing lines and selective crop over 20%-25% dead center) with the same overall process as them more or less though they surely could've kept a similar non DNR'ed/fake widescreen remastering even if not identical. A version of the Season Blu-ray's with the same episode counts but a better if not quite as extensive process without the filtering surely would work just as fine as you say. The most recent versions are a step in the right direction, though they couldn't go without running the filter over it yet again when there's really no need to.

But of course, in their misguided heads the grainless smeared to oblivion look seems just fine to them even if in reality it's complete garbage and a needless butchering of something that can be released and appear really nice as the raw screenshots on their near insulting blog post about the 30th anniversary set is any indication. They just choose for whatever reason to ruin it visually because of the ludicrous idea that grainless and heavily saturated to the max video quality is better in their eyes.