Metalwario64 wrote: Fri Aug 29, 2025 2:19 pm
Man.. I just wish TFC's remaster hadn't been cropped.... I REALLY like the look of it with Team Mirolo's white balance, despite some odd parts remaining from Toei's shenanigans.
I wish they hadn't cropped it, but I also wish more parts of the filler were cut out. I have NO idea why they kept the Hell filler scenes. It wasn't in the manga (&, thus, weren't in the first 98 episodes) & directly contradict Resurrection F, which shows Toriyama's depiction of Hell in DB proper. And that's just 1 instance. I personally think that TFC is the more watchable official cut of the arc in anime form, as they still got rid of the shittier (literally in a few cases) fillers, which is a godsend because when I watched through the arc years ago through the later DBoxes, I kept getting either bored or angry at the stupid filler episodes wasting my time because they don't mean a goddamn thing to the overall narrative, not to mention how overly childish &, frankly, stupid the humor of some of the later ones got. I don't really care about Gohan's early high school days if the pace is dragged on to fuck, I don't care about Goku & Vegeta fighting their way through Buu's body after being absorbed into him as Vegetto, & I don't care about Buu getting indigestion from that so he spawns a port-a-potty to take a shit after also eating a bunch of sweets, so I'm perfectly fine with them being gone from the recut. But at times, it seems really arbitrary what they didn't cut out that they should've.
Where I think TFC really shines is in the English dub. The English dub of it feels very much like a victory lap. It was recorded several years after the first 98 episodes wrapped, after Battle of Gods was dubbed, & about at the same time Resurrection F was recorded. To the point where Chris Sabat tried to let Team Four Star dub the filler scene of the Cell Games Reenactment, only for Toei to later force him to replace most of the audio for its release after that early promo used a clip of Lani & MasakoX from the scene.
But, even with that audio replaced, I think the dub is very good. Hell, they even went out of their way to be more accurate to the Japanese at times, I feel, than they had previously & since, which is just commendable. And, yes, the dub of the original Z arc wasn't
terrible per se, but it's not
good either. Most of the acting is passable, but several actors still suffered from either poor voice direction or inexperience with voice acting (Sean Schemmel being the worst of at least the main cast, imo). You only need to watch clips of the Ocean dub, which use the same scripts as a basis for their dialogue to see that for yourself, as those actors delivered the dialogue so much better. And the scripts just irritated me, as they weren't matching with the subtitles half the time, the added dialogue where you can tell there was originally none in the Japanese was irritating, & the fact that they repeatedly had Goku go "My gosh!" grated on me after a while. TFC's more accurate dialogue delivered actually well 100% of the time is such a godsend, even if they have the odd line that they actually translated well in Z that they needlessly changed in TFC for no reason that I'd like to fix by just subbing in the Z recordings since they're quick & weren't acted badly, or maybe recordings from 1 of the games where they were delivered well. I'm sorry, but I genuinely don't see why they needlessly changed Goku saying, in English in the Japanese dub, "Thank you, Vegeta" to "Thanks, Vegeta. Here we go!" That's 1 of the few places I feel the criticism of the dialogue in the DB anime dubs since Kai started being needlessly overly wordy actually ruins a moment in the show. It was simple & effective in the original Japanese & Z dubs (I assume the manga also had that line), so I don't understand changing it in Kai. The callback to it in Super's dub was ok, but it's still dumb otherwise.
At the same time I'd do a recut of the color corrected DBox footage, I'd also like to make a cut that eliminates all remaining filler (or at least as much that doesn't interfere with the storytelling of the anime's version of the arc) & redo the audio of certain episodes to, like I said above, replace the weird changed lines to their better-translated equivalents from either the Z dub, or the games if I can get isolated tracks of them. Granted, I don't know shit about audio editing, so I'd need help on that, but that'd be the dream. I could do an episode a week. There'd also be versions of the episodes from the first 98 that would keep the redone flashes from Kai, as those were done to make sure they wouldn't cause seizures, which I think is fair. The redrawn frames at other times, though, I genuinely don't understand why they did them. I've read it was to replace damaged frames, but that doesn't make sense to me in some instances. That'd be the plan, at least.
