Scsigs wrote: Mon Jan 19, 2026 6:00 am
MasenkoHA wrote: Sat Jan 17, 2026 4:47 pm
It’s true Toei gave them translations that were, in Barry Watson’s own words “The English is sketchy at best.” However fans overstate the hell out of how much it affected the scripts. Even from the beginning the scripts were capable of being faithful to the Japanese. The Raditz episodes were surprisingly very faithful to the Japanese with any change done either for the sake of adding a joke or done to sound cooler to American kids. And really not much changed from Funimation’s Toei translation days and “we hired our own translation” the whole “we rewrote so much because we couldn’t understand what Toei was saying” excuse doesn’t hold up when those practices continued into Cell and Buu and GT and original Dragon Ball.
I have no idea where the “translated from other dubs” thing comes from but there isn’t proof of that. I do remember the “it was based on the Mexican Spanish dub” excuse used to get trodden out but that was thoroughly debunked when it turned out the Spanish dub was very accurate to the original Japanese. At best it was maybe a telephone game explanation that Funimation originally got their video footage and M&E tracks second hand from Cloverway (licensee for the Spanish dub) as those match up at least.
This might be pedantic but Saban really didn’t change anything themselves. They basically just acted as the network for Funimation telling them what they and couldn’t do and it was up to Funimation to decide how to handle those guidelines. The infamous “I can see their parachutes their okay” came about because Saban told them to cut the scene of Nappa blowing up the helicopter with people clearly inside and the line was Funimation’s compromise so they didn’t to cut the scene. Saban themselves were not directly involved with the scripts or actual editing process. They even rejected Escape from Piccolo as not fit for air either because they didn’t like the subject matter or because it wasn’t edited enough to their liking.
I agree with the scripts having the potential to be faithful to the Japanese dialogue. Saban was adapting Super Sentai into Power Rangers at the time, which would've required them hiring their own translators to watch the episodes & write down the dialogue to allow the writers of PR to adapt the Sentais into PR more effectively. I also assume there were no shortage of translators in either Canada, California, or Texas that they could've hired if that's not so. So, any excuses made from Toei sending them badly-translated scripts is moot. Hell, Toei's own translators are also good, so they could've just called them up or emailed them & said they needed the scripts to be redone, but that would've taken time to do & ship them overseas. Even after FUNi split from Saban, that remains true.
Yeah, the translating from other dubs thing was something I'd heard a while ago that I now realize doesn't make any sense because the Mexican Spanish dub was actually really good & faithful, so even if they had to translate from the Spanish dub, they would've had a pretty faithful one themselves.
I mean, Saban acting as a network for them dictating what they should censor is something I get, but I also think that they definitely had something to do with the scripts at times, given how early Power Rangers & their later anime dubs like Digimon went. The Z Ocean dub would've began production in either 1995 or early 96, which was only 2-3 years after MMPR Season 1 started & before the franchise would get more self-serious & I say that as a Power Rangers fan. Yeah, other writers definitely had their input, but I doubt they would've done as much as they did if Saban weren't calling the shots on the censorship & the like, especially because they aired the series in broadcast syndication initially, which has less strict standards than network TV. When it came to the later episodes after they moved the dub down to Texas as well, they started censoring or cutting only what they needed to to meet Cartoon Network's standards & practices which were more lax.
MasenkoHA wrote: Sat Jan 17, 2026 4:47 pm
I don’t know if Steve Simmons was a fansubber but he did run his own fansite and was hired because he knew the series. Your timeline is also a bit off.
* The announcement that Funimation was working on 50 episodes for season 3 happened circa February 1999. The Captain Ginyu saga episodes debuted April 1999 on VHS in English only Uncut and edited formats.
*The edited version made its broadcast debut on Toonami around the fall of 1999 when most of the season 3 episodes had already been available on Home Video (I believe up until Vegeta died).
* The first bilingual DVDS weren’t available until October 2000 when broadcast season 4 was airing. It’s safe to say season 3 was probably also based on Toei’s translations and the Trunks saga is when they first started using Simmons translations instead. There was Pioneer’s release of the first 3 Z movies of course that were available dubbed and subbed but those translations were handled by their own go to translator Rika Takahashi.
So, I assumed he was a fansubber because that's how I heard FUNi heard of him & then hired him. They were clearly looking towards the fan community back then, as several fan-only non-canon names for certain forms of characters made their ways into the promotion & merchandise for the series that have stuck around to this day. Hell, that seems to be where FUNi got the "GT takes place 10 years after Z" thing, as that only came from a fan who watched GT as it aired misunderstood something somewhere when the series came out in Japan back in '96. Steve went on to be a full time translator & subber for FUNimation for a bunch of things & has worked on everything Dragon Ball since he came on board, so he speaks & reads Japanese, so it's not hard to see him being a fansubber.
Ok, so if I have my timeline messed up, then it is. I was only 2-3 when Z began airing on Toonami & being dubbed in-house by FUNi, so I literally have no memory of that time & didn't know what Dragon Ball was until a few years later. I think I got some of my info from a YouTube video going over some of this history several years ago, so that video probably had some misinformation, or I'm remembering it wrong.
MasenkoHA wrote: Sat Jan 17, 2026 4:47 pm
So from pretty much day one Funimation used a mix of USA and Canadian writers. Ian Corlett (Goku), Terry Klassan (Krillin) and Ward Perry (Kami and Turles) were involved with the scripts from the beginning but so were Chris Forbis (Texas Dodoria and Dr. Briefs) and Chris Neel (who was involved with other Funi projects like Case Closed). After Funimation moved ADR work to in-house the writing staff basically stayed the same sans Corlett just with new Funimation voice actors coming in later. The scripts were always Funimation because they were written to their specifications. Ian and Terry and them were writing for Funimation not for Ocean.
From what I understand, Chris Sabat was also in charge of some of the writing, as he said to Geekdom101 that he put certain things in the Z dub for his characters that he thought were funny. It's also funny how when some of the old guard either left FUNi, or were at least no longer scripting their dubs eventually, the quality of the DB dubs shot up immediately.
MasenkoHA wrote: Sat Jan 17, 2026 4:47 pm
The Orange Bricks were the debut of that “revised dub” there was no cancelled released of those episodes. The full redub of those first 67 episodes were cancelled partway with the remainder not making their home video debut until the Orange Bricks release of season 1 and 2. Hence you would have to seek out Toonami recordings to find episode 28-67 as they were originally presented.
The Ultimate Uncut sets were where they started redubbing episodes 1-67 (as well as airing them on Toonami) & doing the partial redubbing they did of their earliest episodes dubbed in 1999 as far as I understand it. Then they used the revised & redubbed episodes on the Orange Bricks because it was all set to go, which is why they've used that audio for every release afterwards.
