Would Dragon Ball be successful in English-speaking countries if the old English dubs weren't Americanized?

[Dark Vegeta-Sama]

Where was this stated? I don't think the Saban dub would have been considered Canadian content since it only utilized a Canadian cast, some writers and a Vancouver-based recording studio, but otherwise it was wholly an American production.

At best it would have been a neat bonus but never a deciding factor, the latter seems to have always been about it being cheaper to record in Canada (which was a popular option at the time).

By Gen Fukunaga way back in 1997.

So is it you that picks who does the voice acting for the characters?
No, actually that's done in Canada. In fact, 35% of all cartoons shown in the US have the voice acting done in Canada. Partially because it's cheaper to do so there and also in order to show our cartoons in Canada a certain amount of work has to be done there.

https://dbzu.3gkai.com/opinions/gfukunaga.html

The cheaper rates and wanting their product to be considered Canadian Content to get on Canadian television were both the reasons

I don't know the exact timeline here since he didn't list years, but Peter Kelamis mentioned in that hour+ podcast he did with geekdom101 that they didn't actually get to see the saban dub air on Canadian TV until several years after the fact. In fact the in house dub might have been airing in America by that point.

It is true that here in Canada, especially back then, we often got stuff later than America did.

For example, the original FUNi/BLT dub of DB aired here in 1996 as opposed to 1995. Although I was a child at the time, I was lucky enough to catch some of the episodes when they aired, so I had some familiarity with Goku/Bulma/Roshi when DBZ aired later on.

Speaking from memory, the first 13 episodes (dub numbering) of FUNi/Ocean's DBZ dub began airing on YTV in the fall of 1998. And yes, that's all we got as our "season 1" essentially. 13 episodes airing over and over again for a year before episodes 14-53 would air in the fall of 1999. I remember the new school year beginning in September 1999 and my friends and I racing home to see the episodes of the Saiyan fight that we'd been waiting so long to see. By then we were getting 5 new episodes a week, so we cycled through the remainder of the Saiyan Saga and into the Namek Saga very quickly.

Kelamis started voicing Goku in episode 38, so his episodes as the character didn't air on YTV until October/November 1999, by which point the airing of the in-house dub of season 3 was already well underway in America. The VHS tapes of season 3 began releasing several months before that in America as well, whereas availability of official home releases of anime was spotty at best in Canada back then, not to mention extremely expensive. Incidentally, the in-house dub would begin airing on YTV on February 14th, 2000. As a kid, the wait for new episodes from November 1999 to February 2000 felt like an eternity, which is laughable looking back now, but it made the abysmal recasting of the characters sting that much more.

As far as DBZ movies 1-3, in which Kelamis also voiced Goku, those aired on YTV in the fall of 2001, which was also years after they'd aired in America.

[Scsigs]

So, I only JUST discovered this thread, so I'm gonna throw my hat into this right & I'm sorry if I hit on any points others have mentioned already, as I didn't read a lot of the posts beyond the first handful.

Yes, if Dragon Ball mad more faithful dubs back in the day, they would've succeeded and, I don't even think FUNimation couldn't have done so back then either had the right people been put in charge of them as shown with Kai & on where the current team has been doing very good work. The main problem with the old Z dub is that it was made to appeal to as many American children as possible, but also the dub team not understanding a lot of what either Toriyama or the staff at Toei's intentions were when creating & writing the show &/or thinking they could do "better" than them. A lot of the clips I've seen where people have directly compared the Z & Kai English dubs at the same moments genuinely come off like the Z dub writers genuinely thought they were making the show "better" by changing the dialogue or adding to the characters' motivations when it wasn't the intent of Toriyama & the characters aren't that emotionally complex in the ways the Z dub made them. The extra dialogue during scenes & moments that were meant to be quiet was also because of that, as other dubs made for kid audiences from Saban & 4Kids also had that since for some reason, it's thought that kids can't pay attention without constant noise going on or can't remember things that were said at least 10 seconds before.

In terms of the music, I think the Shunsuke Kikuchi music would've been fine to keep. The main reason it wasn't was because, like the script writing, it was felt that replacing the music was for the best to appeal more to US kids at Saban, who had Shuki Levy & Ron Wasserman do the music for it, then when FUNi went on their own, they contracted Faulconer Productions to pick up the slack.

And, considering the OG DB dub was less Americanized & kept the original music (minus the insert songs because...reasons) & the later home releases of Z, GT, & the movies & specials had the dub dialogue remixed with the Japanese music & that's the default audio track for them, I think this would've been the right choice. Considering other countries had more faithful dubs with the original music & THEY succeeded just as much as the English dubs did, I think this only shows my point.