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

[Scsigs]

2. FUNi & Ocean-produced DB dub episodes 1-13.

Ocean had nothing to do with BLT, that dub just uses the same cast associated with Ocean Studios but all the actors are freelancers. It was recorded at Dick & Rodgers Studio with post production done by Josanne B Lovick Productions but Ocean Studios first came on the scene when Funimation teamed up with Saban and began working on Dragon Ball Z.

15. FUNi & Sentai Filmworks-produced dubs of Super.

Sentai didn't dub Dragon Ball Super, your thinking of Bang Zoom Entertainment.

Didn't mention the Speedy dub, but that was produced for Malaysia & was worse than the Big Green dub.

Theres also the Animax dub of original Dragon Ball that was recorded in Hong Kong and broadcast in Southeast Asia in 2006. Sadly all 153 episodes are lost to time though.

Also forgot to mention the Creative Corp Products dub of episodes 1-122/132 of original Dragon Ball and the first 49 episodes of Dragon Ball Z. That was recorded and aired exclusively in the Philippines during the 90s.

The first 3, I got partially wrong. The last 2, I had no idea existed at all.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

2. FUNi & Ocean-produced DB dub episodes 1-13.

Ocean had nothing to do with BLT, that dub just uses the same cast associated with Ocean Studios but all the actors are freelancers. It was recorded at Dick & Rodgers Studio with post production done by Josanne B Lovick Productions but Ocean Studios first came on the scene when Funimation teamed up with Saban and began working on Dragon Ball Z.

15. FUNi & Sentai Filmworks-produced dubs of Super.

Sentai didn't dub Dragon Ball Super, your thinking of Bang Zoom Entertainment.

Didn't mention the Speedy dub, but that was produced for Malaysia & was worse than the Big Green dub.

Theres also the Animax dub of original Dragon Ball that was recorded in Hong Kong and broadcast in Southeast Asia in 2006. Sadly all 153 episodes are lost to time though.

Also forgot to mention the Creative Corp Products dub of episodes 1-122/132 of original Dragon Ball and the first 49 episodes of Dragon Ball Z. That was recorded and aired exclusively in the Philippines during the 90s.

The first 3, I got partially wrong. The last 2, I had no idea existed at all.

I made a thread detailing everything we know about the Animax dub. But yeah, there are 3 full dubs of original Dragon Ball, that one is by far the rarest though, as no recordings have surfaced other than a brief clip of Russell Wait's General Blue.

The Creative Corp Products dub aired on RPN9 in the Philippines, it was the second dub of original Dragon Ball (after Harmony Gold) and the first English dub of Dragon Ball Z. Very little of it is out there, but theres more than the Animax dub at least. For original Dragon Ball I heard one or two brief lines from promos, with Dragon Ball Z there are a couple of episodes out there if you know where to look.

Oh, and there is also the Speedy dub of all the original Dragon Ball and 13 Dragon Ball Z movies in addition to the first 12 episodes of Dragon Ball Z that was released in Malaysia.

Think that's it for English dubs of Dragon Ball, unless the Frontier Enterprises dub exists. That is the dub of movie 1 that was allegedly shown on flights between Japan and the US in 1987. Only Richard Nieskens has claimed to have been cast in this dub, although he refers to it as "Dragon Ball Z" so it may be mandela.

[MasenkoHA]

Was the Dragon Ball english dub even that Americanized really? They changed some names but it was mostly like simplifications like Kuririn to Krillin, Muten Roshi to Master Roshi that sort of thing. The big changes were the attack names like Makankosappo to Special Beam Cannon or Kienzan/Taioken/etc., but even then there were ones like the Kamehameha or the Galick Gun that were mostly left alone.

Not “Americanized” as much as just whitewashed or westernized . Which I guess can be used interchangeably.


Funimation went out of their way to avoid or rewrite any aspect of Eastern Religion. Kami and the Kaio don’t fit in with the western Abrahamic concepts of “God” so it’s all done away with. Kami is just the vague “Guardian of the Earth” and the dub doesn’t touch on the Kaio being gods until the Buu arc basically forces them to address it and even then they don’t outright state that King Kai stands up the other deities until the Kai dub . Then you get stuff like rewriting Piccolo’s speech to Vegeta explaining the concept of reincarnation drawn from Buddhism when he does to a more Judeo-Christian concept of “Goku good so he met a higher power (King Kai) you bad so you’re going to hell”


And obviously Ki/Chi which Funimation notoriously avoided like the plague until stupidly recent with Daima and generally having the characters use “power levels” for both Ki and Battle Powers making the latter seem way more prominent to the series than ever intended. I don’t think they even used “energy” as their pseudo adaptation of Ki until Gohan needed to explain to Videl how normal humans like her could learn to fly and they realized power levels made no sense here.

One that's interesting is how they left Kami as Kami. They didn't have the characters call him "God" and they didn't totally change his name either, I guess cause kids wouldn't know that in Japanese Kami means God.

Weird spellings and misinterpretation of names aside (many of which probably originated from Toei’s sketchy translations) Funimation generally left names alone. Kami or God is his title not his name on his birth certificate. They made it his actual name and made it sound like that was his name before the split with Piccolo. It begs the question when they reunited why he didn’t continue to use Kami if that was his original name. The reunited Namekian “who forgotten his original name” choosing to continue to use Piccolo as his name makes sense because he’s no longer in the role of God and the evil half had been using that name.

Obviously they’d never get away with calling him God on kids television but they should have made it clear “Kami” is his title.

When I think of dubs that were really Americanized I think of some of the stuff 4Kids was putting out. Yugioh they changed the names to names that American kids would have. Jonouchi's not Jonouchi anymore he's Joey. Honda's now Tristan. Or in Pokemon how anytime they were eating a rice cake it was never a rice cake it was a jelly donut. When I think Americanization I think stuff like that, dubs that have an agenda of actively implanting American cultural stuff often in the place of the Japanese cultural stuff.

The Dragon Ball dub turned “Sake” in the Gourd episode into a “potion” or something. And while it’s tempting to say it was censorship they had no problem calling beer beer multiple times so it seemed more like they thought sake was too Japanese for its audience . And you also get reference to Easter which is a decidedly not Japanese holiday the characters have no business knowing about. And I think King Piccolo makes a 4th of July joke or something when talking about blowing up one district a year during his address to the world as their new leader.

And I know one of the episodes had them call onigiri “rice cakes” and that’s a hell of lot better than calling them jelly donuts it’s not correct and rice balls is a better translation

Do we know for sure if Goku was purposely made into this Superman kind of guy? Or was that scene of him giving the speech to Freeza just another instance of the Funi writers throwing away entire portions of the Japanese script and putting their own shit in over it, like Freeza making Vegeta give him a countdown before transforming? I guess that could be considered Americanization by my own definition but I'm not sure, I don't usually think of that scene as that.

The Hope of the Universe speech definitely feels more “He’s like Superman right?”

The real issue has always been Goku has no business talking about “the sword of injustice” or “your evil deeds are like a noose around your neck” he’s a fucking country bumpkin. These pseudo profound parables are out of character. They also tend to shy away from his obsession with fighting outside of tournament settings.

I wonder more about the score. Would DBZ still have done well if it's the Kikuchi score? And I want to say yes because DBZ Kai had the whole orchestral deal going on with Yamamoto and later Kikuchi and that turned out to be a big hit with people who had Nicktoons to watch it on. But it's hard to say for sure if kids in 2002 would have reacted positively to that super old sounding Kikuchi soundtrack versus the Faulconer studios stuff just cause we're so far removed from that time now to know for sure.

Dead Zone and World Strongest aired on Toonami from 1999 to the mid -2000s with the Kikuchi score all the friggin time.

And then there’s Kai not only airing on Nicktoons and Toonzai with the Kikuchi score but with horrible placed Kikuchi music and still doing gangbusters.

There is zero room for debate. Dragon Ball Z would have been just as popular with the Kikuchi score being kept as with a replacement score.

“They had to change it” is something fans who were accustomed to the replacement music lie to themselves to justify it’s existence instead of just acknowledging it only exists because Funimation wanted to profit off the royalties of their original score and bought into the same nonsense all these other companies believed that American kids start breaking into hysterical tears if the show they were watching didn’t have wall to wall music

[DanielSSJ]

Oh, I didn't know the dub finally started referring to ki by name. That's pretty cool. Feels like very new property since DBS Broli has revised at least one old translated term.

[Scsigs]

Was the Dragon Ball english dub even that Americanized really? They changed some names but it was mostly like simplifications like Kuririn to Krillin, Muten Roshi to Master Roshi that sort of thing. The big changes were the attack names like Makankosappo to Special Beam Cannon or Kienzan/Taioken/etc., but even then there were ones like the Kamehameha or the Galick Gun that were mostly left alone.

Not “Americanized” as much as just whitewashed or westernized . Which I guess can be used interchangeably.


Funimation went out of their way to avoid or rewrite any aspect of Eastern Religion. Kami and the Kaio don’t fit in with the western Abrahamic concepts of “God” so it’s all done away with. Kami is just the vague “Guardian of the Earth” and the dub doesn’t touch on the Kaio being gods until the Buu arc basically forces them to address it and even then they don’t outright state that King Kai stands up the other deities until the Kai dub . Then you get stuff like rewriting Piccolo’s speech to Vegeta explaining the concept of reincarnation drawn from Buddhism when he does to a more Judeo-Christian concept of “Goku good so he met a higher power (King Kai) you bad so you’re going to hell”


And obviously Ki/Chi which Funimation notoriously avoided like the plague until stupidly recent with Daima and generally having the characters use “power levels” for both Ki and Battle Powers making the latter seem way more prominent to the series than ever intended. I don’t think they even used “energy” as their pseudo adaptation of Ki until Gohan needed to explain to Videl how normal humans like her could learn to fly and they realized power levels made no sense here.

One that's interesting is how they left Kami as Kami. They didn't have the characters call him "God" and they didn't totally change his name either, I guess cause kids wouldn't know that in Japanese Kami means God.

Weird spellings and misinterpretation of names aside (many of which probably originated from Toei’s sketchy translations) Funimation generally left names alone. Kami or God is his title not his name on his birth certificate. They made it his actual name and made it sound like that was his name before the split with Piccolo. It begs the question when they reunited why he didn’t continue to use Kami if that was his original name. The reunited Namekian “who forgotten his original name” choosing to continue to use Piccolo as his name makes sense because he’s no longer in the role of God and the evil half had been using that name.

Obviously they’d never get away with calling him God on kids television but they should have made it clear “Kami” is his title.

When I think of dubs that were really Americanized I think of some of the stuff 4Kids was putting out. Yugioh they changed the names to names that American kids would have. Jonouchi's not Jonouchi anymore he's Joey. Honda's now Tristan. Or in Pokemon how anytime they were eating a rice cake it was never a rice cake it was a jelly donut. When I think Americanization I think stuff like that, dubs that have an agenda of actively implanting American cultural stuff often in the place of the Japanese cultural stuff.

The Dragon Ball dub turned “Sake” in the Gourd episode into a “potion” or something. And while it’s tempting to say it was censorship they had no problem calling beer beer multiple times so it seemed more like they thought sake was too Japanese for its audience . And you also get reference to Easter which is a decidedly not Japanese holiday the characters have no business knowing about. And I think King Piccolo makes a 4th of July joke or something when talking about blowing up one district a year during his address to the world as their new leader.

And I know one of the episodes had them call onigiri “rice cakes” and that’s a hell of lot better than calling them jelly donuts it’s not correct and rice balls is a better translation

Do we know for sure if Goku was purposely made into this Superman kind of guy? Or was that scene of him giving the speech to Freeza just another instance of the Funi writers throwing away entire portions of the Japanese script and putting their own shit in over it, like Freeza making Vegeta give him a countdown before transforming? I guess that could be considered Americanization by my own definition but I'm not sure, I don't usually think of that scene as that.

The Hope of the Universe speech definitely feels more “He’s like Superman right?”

The real issue has always been Goku has no business talking about “the sword of injustice” or “your evil deeds are like a noose around your neck” he’s a fucking country bumpkin. These pseudo profound parables are out of character. They also tend to shy away from his obsession with fighting outside of tournament settings.

I wonder more about the score. Would DBZ still have done well if it's the Kikuchi score? And I want to say yes because DBZ Kai had the whole orchestral deal going on with Yamamoto and later Kikuchi and that turned out to be a big hit with people who had Nicktoons to watch it on. But it's hard to say for sure if kids in 2002 would have reacted positively to that super old sounding Kikuchi soundtrack versus the Faulconer studios stuff just cause we're so far removed from that time now to know for sure.

Dead Zone and World Strongest aired on Toonami from 1999 to the mid -2000s with the Kikuchi score all the friggin time.

And then there’s Kai not only airing on Nicktoons and Toonzai with the Kikuchi score but with horrible placed Kikuchi music and still doing gangbusters.

There is zero room for debate. Dragon Ball Z would have been just as popular with the Kikuchi score being kept as with a replacement score.

“They had to change it” is something fans who were accustomed to the replacement music lie to themselves to justify it’s existence instead of just acknowledging it only exists because Funimation wanted to profit off the royalties of their original score and bought into the same nonsense all these other companies believed that American kids start breaking into hysterical tears if the show they were watching didn’t have wall to wall music

I'll add to this.

The Z anime already had a Western Judeo-Christian-inspired take on the afterlife since Toriyama didn't properly establish what it was supposed to be like in DB until Resurrection F, which is more Buddhist-inspired. Hell, even after Toriyama had Piccolo explicitly explain that bad people are supposed to have all of the evil in them filtered out before their spirits go on to live forever in the afterlife, Toei kept their version of Hell going (even in Kai: TFC where they previously cut it out because Kai was supposed to be closer to the manga for some stupid reason, to which they would've been working on Resurrection F, so they should've went & deleted those scenes as well because it's a plot point that Freeza's in his own specialized Hell rather than the one from Z). It was even featured in Fusion Reborn & GT in the arc that rips off Fusion Reborn. So, Toei already Westernized part of DB from the off there. So, FUNi just rolled with that.

I mean, by then, Kami's title WAS his name. I don't know what else you call him. Piccolo just continuing to go by Piccolo after re-fusing with Kami is a solution to the same problem. He might as well continue to go by Piccolo & I think that's his own thought on the matter.

Goku WAS turned more into a traditional Western idea of a hero. Admittedly, Toei started to do it first in Z with subtle changes to his characterization from the manga, but then the FUNi dub did more by actively scripting Goku to be more eloquent & goody good than he was in the Japanese dub. Hell, they got rid of his fear when he & Piccolo were going to face down Raditz. For some reason, they couldn't have him express a bit of fear when facing someone stronger than him. This even persisted a bit in Kai for the same scene. The "Hope of the Universe" speech was just the icing on top of the shit sundae that is Goku's more heroic personality in that dub. They actively didn't give a shit that Goku was supposed to be less overtly heroic than a traditional hero. He became a paragon of good because they wanted him to set a good example for the kiddos at home who they thought couldn't comprehend or like a character if he was in the least bit selfish or abnormal. Even later on in Z where they started to be slightly more accurate to the Japanese dialogue, they mostly kept this. Hell, even in GT they did this shit. Doesn't help that they had him talking down to Omega Shenron like he's fucking Christ up on the cross. As you said, Goku has NO business talking like that.

Yep, completely agree. The Kikuchi score would've been loved along with the rest of the show. It fit the tone & style of the show, which was a wuxia-inspired action adventure comedy. Kai proved that without a shadow of the doubt. Hell, they even kept the original music in the dub of OG DB & it did just fine. The same when they dubbed the first 3 movies uncut with the Ocean cast like you said.
Another example of the Japanese music being kept in a dub & it doing just fine; Naruto. I watched that shit as a kid & I LOVED the Japanese music in that show. It was memorable & iconic. And it was Japanese as FUCK! No mistaking where the show came from at all. The Kikuchi score was this for DB. It's a shame that they felt that they needed Ron Wasserman, Bruce Falconer's team, Nathan Johnson, & Mark Menza to make all new music that wasn't as good just to appeal to Western kids.

[MasenkoHA]

The Z anime already had a Western Judeo-Christian- inspired take on the afterlife

But not really because Gozu and Mezu, mountain of needles, the river sanzu, and the blood pond are all concepts from the Buddhist version of hell. And of course the stuff already established by Toriyama like King Yama and the Kaios being the Toriyama version of the Four Kings of Heaven being carried over.

Z). It was even featured in Fusion Reborn & GT in the arc that rips off Fusion Reborn. So, Toei already Westernized part of DB from the off there. So, FUNi just rolled with that.

Fusion Reborn where Janemba is born from a Teenage Oni falls into the soul cleansing machine.

[Vegard Aune]

Another example of the Japanese music being kept in a dub & it doing just fine; Naruto. I watched that shit as a kid & I LOVED the Japanese music in that show. It was memorable & iconic. And it was Japanese as FUCK! No mistaking where the show came from at all. The Kikuchi score was this for DB. It's a shame that they felt that they needed Ron Wasserman, Bruce Falconer's team, Nathan Johnson, & Mark Menza to make all new music that wasn't as good just to appeal to Western kids.

The perception often seems to be that, aside from being foreign-sounding, Kikuchi's music just felt too old in a way that stuff like Naruto or One Piece didn't. Of course, they then replaced it with the most aggressively 90s thing ever so... rather than having an 80s show with an 80s-sounding score you have an 80s Japanese show with an aggressively American 90s style soundtrack. Yay...?

But ultimately, yeah, if the show had always aired with Kikuchi's music, this perception that Kikuchi's score is dated and weird and what have you would likely not exist. It has never seemed to hurt the popularity wherever it was kept. American kids of the 90s and early 2000s just got used to Bruce Faulconer & Co. being what DBZ was "supposed" to sound like and thus found Kikuchi off-putting as a result. Probably.

[kemuri07]

The problem, as I often mention in these threads, is that no one knows anything. Thats true of the people who were adapting Dragonball, and that’s especially true of the people in this thread. We are all operating within the power of hindsight. We know that DBZ would go on to be a cultural phenomenon. Could you say the same for some producer in 1998? When easily the most popular anime at the time was Pokémon, a heavily edited anime?

Not a matter of whether or not Funimation was in the right for doing what they did, but acknowledge the context that dub was in. Yeah anime was popular, but it certainly wasn’t what it is now. Where the expectation is a near 1:1 translation of the original dub. And considering how much of the “dubisms” still persist with even the Bruce Falconer score being largely accepted a part of “DB lore”, I don’t think it’s as simple as “well DB would have done well if they kept it true to the Japanese source.”

To quote an over wrestler that participates in a wrestling program not WWE when it comes to whether or not DBZ could have still succeeded without the Bruce Falconer score:

“Okay, How you know?”

[Scsigs]

The problem, as I often mention in these threads, is that no one knows anything. Thats true of the people who were adapting Dragonball, and that’s especially true of the people in this thread. We are all operating within the power of hindsight. We know that DBZ would go on to be a cultural phenomenon. Could you say the same for some producer in 1998? When easily the most popular anime at the time was Pokémon, a heavily edited anime?

Not a matter of whether or not Funimation was in the right for doing what they did, but acknowledge the context that dub was in. Yeah anime was popular, but it certainly wasn’t what it is now. Where the expectation is a near 1:1 translation of the original dub. And considering how much of the “dubisms” still persist with even the Bruce Falconer score being largely accepted a part of “DB lore”, I don’t think it’s as simple as “well DB would have done well if they kept it true to the Japanese source.”

To quote an over wrestler that participates in a wrestling program not WWE when it comes to whether or not DBZ could have still succeeded without the Bruce Falconer score:

“Okay, How you know?”

Pokemon as a show needed to be edited to meet American broadcast standards since it had things like Japanese text on screen & things like guns & James having inflatable boobs in 1 episode. The early episodes 4Kids did back then as well ran in syndication, so they were less edited compared to later on in their run when they had their block on Fox Kids, then CW, where they had stricter standards. Pokemon is also aimed at a younger demographic than Dragon Ball, as well as aimed at the kids who played the games whereas Dragon Ball is aimed at the pre-teen to teen demographic primarily. Pokemon also, even though it had SOME changed music in the early days of the dub, also kept certain pieces of music from the Japanese score early on. From what I understand, the dub scripts were also decently accurate to the Japanese. Not without changes or additions, but closer than Dragon Ball Z's were. And I'm not saying that they needed to go out of their way with swearing or anything, but the dialogue in Z ain't that cerebral, but Toriyama put the dialogue he did in the manga on purpose & the Toei staff kept that dialogue to make sure nothing was lost in the adaptation, even to a fault as sometimes it'd contradict their filler stuff they'd made beforehand.

To ME, though, what makes DBZ's dub worse than Pokemon's is that every time I watch anything from it, the dub comes off not only amateurish & slapshot at best, but also downright disrespectful to Toriyama's intentions as well as any intentions the Toei writers had. Not only that, but I get the distinct feeling that the writers at times thought they could "improve" the story or characters by changing some of the dialogue, or adding some that they THOUGHT sounded good, but comes off as tryhard & REEKS of amateur scriptwriters who think too highly of their shitty ass dialogue. And, yes, I can without a doubt say that kids in the 90s could've easily handled more faithful localizations of the dialogue because not only do we have Kai as a litmus test since it's the same shit with less fluff only separated by 10 years (as well as the video games that had more faithful scripts, tbh), but the alternate language dubs of Z made BEFORE the English dub even got into production that kept the dialogue more faithful to the Japanese scripts & did just fine. I see almost every change in the dialogue as pointless & worthless. There was certainly a way to make the dialogue faithful as well as actually GOOD & clever in the Z dub back then as well as good for the networks, but they didn't do that. Speaking as a kid who grew up in the 2000s with the shows WE did, trust me when I say that kids back then could've handled characters who weren't goody two shoes or more traditional heroes.

As for the music, kids don't need constant blaring Rock music or unending dialogue to pay attention to something. As long as you give them something entertaining, they'll watch it. Saban was the one to introduce the never ending Rock music into the dub, then FUNi kept it when they moved production down to Texas for consistency. If they kept the Japanese music from the off, no one would think twice about it.

A dub ain't Power Rangers when adapting Super Sentai where the producers can make whatever changes they want. A dub needs to get the same information across in the dialogue as well as carry over other things that made a show popular in other places. A dub that failed because it wasn't faithful to the Japanese: The 4Kids One Piece dub. A dub that's been successful because of how faithful it is to the Japanese: The FUNimation One Piece dub. This is tried & tested again & again & it's stupid to argue otherwise.

[MasenkoHA]

The problem, as I often mention in these threads, is that no one knows anything. Thats true of the people who were adapting Dragonball, and that’s especially true of the people in this thread. We are all operating within the power of hindsight. We know that DBZ would go on to be a cultural phenomenon. Could you say the same for some producer in 1998? When easily the most popular anime at the time was Pokémon, a heavily edited anime?

Not a matter of whether or not Funimation was in the right for doing what they did, but acknowledge the context that dub was in. Yeah anime was popular, but it certainly wasn’t what it is now. Where the expectation is a near 1:1 translation of the original dub. And considering how much of the “dubisms” still persist with even the Bruce Falconer score being largely accepted a part of “DB lore”, I don’t think it’s as simple as “well DB would have done well if they kept it true to the Japanese source.”

To quote an over wrestler that participates in a wrestling program not WWE when it comes to whether or not DBZ could have still succeeded without the Bruce Falconer score:

“Okay, How you know?”

The problem I have with this is we DO KNOW it would have succeeded without the Team Faulconer score because it did and it has. This isn’t some silly hypothetical.

It was a huge hit on Toonami with the Ron Wasserman score. And again Dead Zone and World Strongest aired on Toonami with the original Shunsuke Kikuchi score fully intact


Kai’s actual target demo on Nicktoon and Toonzai was a completely different generation of kids who had zero attachment with Funimation’s reversioning of Z and it succeeded with the Yamamoto score and the horribly utilized limited selection haste job rescoring of Kikichi’s old Z music.

So how do we know that? Because it literally happened multiple times.


And let’s stop pretending Funimation replaced the music because they thought American kids wouldn’t respond. It was always “if we replace the music we can charge royalties every second it’s heard”

Pokemon as a show needed to be edited to meet American broadcast standards since it had things like Japanese text on screen & things like guns & James having inflatable boobs in 1 episode. The early episodes 4Kids did back then as well ran in syndication, so they were less edited compared to later on in their run when they had their block on Fox Kids, then CW, where they had stricter standards.

Japanese text on screen was removed because of 4kids absolutely insane xenophobia and not because of any American broadcast standards. I can never stress enough this is a company that thought fucking ramen noodles was too foreign for American children and would have characters dress in blatant Japanese clothing and still take time to erase any Japanese kanji from the screen and try to sell you on the idea these characters are All American



“If we call her Jeanette Fisher nobody will think this cartoon is from Japan” - 4kids logic



And surprisingly guns were mostly left alone in earlt Pokemon except that one banned episode and that was mostly the context of said gun owner in the episode being a nutjob pointing the gun at children and firing nilly willy.

And really other than the whole “We still think it’s the 1940s and America hates Japan” mentality there really wasn’t a whole lot of editing done. Mostly because there wasn’t much to edit.

As for the music, kids don't need constant blaring Rock music or unending dialogue to pay attention to something. As long as you give them something entertaining, they'll watch it. Saban was the one to introduce the never ending Rock music into the dub, then FUNi kept it when they moved production down to Texas for consistency. If they kept the Japanese music from the off, no one would think twice about it.

More accurately Funimation requested a new score they can charge royalties to for and Saban hired their usual work for hire guy and told him to do whatever he wanted and said composer just did his Power Rangers schtick.

Like Gen Fukunaga fully admitted it was a business decision of Funimation’s even when given the opportunity to throw Saban under the bus, which they were readily willing to do by that point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081120203 ... rview.html

Seve: Was the replacement of the soundtrack in the first two seasons a Saban decision?

Gen: The replacing of the music, was a FUNimation desicsion. With our own soundtrack, we could charge royalties for every second it's heard.

Steve: But the music itself? Who's responsible?

Gen: Oh, that was Saban. After we opted to go with our own music, we left the decision of how it was done to them.

The Faulconer score exist because Fukanaga and Watson hated the Wasserman music. Pretty sure one of the Faulconer studio guys even said they were told specifically Not to repeat the Wasserman music. The only thing that was consistent was the dollar signs in Fukanaga’s eyes. We went from a rock score to a electronic techno score. No smooth transition or consistency to be had in the music department

And there had been a precedent of the dub using the Kikuchi score with the Pioneer dub of the first 3 Z movies
keeping it, the first two airing on Toonami all the time. They had the proof the original score wasn’t a detriment to the show’s success in the States and doubled down on needing their own music to charge out the ass.

[Shiningboltsurge]

I mean, we all know why this is even a conversation in the first place in that of what the Americanized fan base of this series in particular did for years and continues to do. And if you’re wondering what that is it’s the Kai dub backlash and everything that lead into it what implies and outright confirms

[Scsigs]

The problem, as I often mention in these threads, is that no one knows anything. Thats true of the people who were adapting Dragonball, and that’s especially true of the people in this thread. We are all operating within the power of hindsight. We know that DBZ would go on to be a cultural phenomenon. Could you say the same for some producer in 1998? When easily the most popular anime at the time was Pokémon, a heavily edited anime?

Not a matter of whether or not Funimation was in the right for doing what they did, but acknowledge the context that dub was in. Yeah anime was popular, but it certainly wasn’t what it is now. Where the expectation is a near 1:1 translation of the original dub. And considering how much of the “dubisms” still persist with even the Bruce Falconer score being largely accepted a part of “DB lore”, I don’t think it’s as simple as “well DB would have done well if they kept it true to the Japanese source.”

To quote an over wrestler that participates in a wrestling program not WWE when it comes to whether or not DBZ could have still succeeded without the Bruce Falconer score:

“Okay, How you know?”

The problem I have with this is we DO KNOW it would have succeeded without the Team Faulconer score because it did and it has. This isn’t some silly hypothetical.

It was a huge hit on Toonami with the Ron Wasserman score. And again Dead Zone and World Strongest aired on Toonami with the original Shunsuke Kikuchi score fully intact


Kai’s actual target demo on Nicktoon and Toonzai was a completely different generation of kids who had zero attachment with Funimation’s reversioning of Z and it succeeded with the Yamamoto score and the horribly utilized limited selection haste job rescoring of Kikichi’s old Z music.

So how do we know that? Because it literally happened multiple times.


And let’s stop pretending Funimation replaced the music because they thought American kids wouldn’t respond. It was always “if we replace the music we can charge royalties every second it’s heard”

Pokemon as a show needed to be edited to meet American broadcast standards since it had things like Japanese text on screen & things like guns & James having inflatable boobs in 1 episode. The early episodes 4Kids did back then as well ran in syndication, so they were less edited compared to later on in their run when they had their block on Fox Kids, then CW, where they had stricter standards.

Japanese text on screen was removed because of 4kids absolutely insane xenophobia and not because of any American broadcast standards. I can never stress enough this is a company that thought fucking ramen noodles was too foreign for American children and would have characters dress in blatant Japanese clothing and still take time to erase any Japanese kanji from the screen and try to sell you on the idea these characters are All American



“If we call her Jeanette Fisher nobody will think this cartoon is from Japan” - 4kids logic

And surprisingly guns were mostly left alone in early Pokemon except that one banned episode and that was mostly the context of said gun owner in the episode being a nutjob pointing the gun at children and firing nilly willy.

And really other than the whole “We still think it’s the 1940s and America hates Japan” mentality there really wasn’t a whole lot of editing done. Mostly because there wasn’t much to edit.

As for the music, kids don't need constant blaring Rock music or unending dialogue to pay attention to something. As long as you give them something entertaining, they'll watch it. Saban was the one to introduce the never ending Rock music into the dub, then FUNi kept it when they moved production down to Texas for consistency. If they kept the Japanese music from the off, no one would think twice about it.

More accurately Funimation requested a new score they can charge royalties to for and Saban hired their usual work for hire guy and told him to do whatever he wanted and said composer just did his Power Rangers schtick.

Like Gen Fukunaga fully admitted it was a business decision of Funimation’s even when given the opportunity to throw Saban under the bus, which they were readily willing to do by that point.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081120203 ... rview.html

Seve: Was the replacement of the soundtrack in the first two seasons a Saban decision?

Gen: The replacing of the music, was a FUNimation decision. With our own soundtrack, we could charge royalties for every second it's heard.

Steve: But the music itself? Who's responsible?

Gen: Oh, that was Saban. After we opted to go with our own music, we left the decision of how it was done to them.

The Faulconer score exist because Fukanaga and Watson hated the Wasserman music. Pretty sure one of the Faulconer studio guys even said they were told specifically Not to repeat the Wasserman music. The only thing that was consistent was the dollar signs in Fukanaga’s eyes. We went from a rock score to a electronic techno score. No smooth transition or consistency to be had in the music department

And there had been a precedent of the dub using the Kikuchi score with the Pioneer dub of the first 3 Z movies keeping it, the first two airing on Toonami all the time. They had the proof the original score wasn’t a detriment to the show’s success in the States and doubled down on needing their own music to charge out the ass.

Yeah, that makes sense as well. 1 of the reasons 4Kids didn't keep any Japanese music after a while in any of the dubs they produced as well was because they didn't wanna pay any royalties to the Japanese composers, I believe. Especially since a lot of alternate language dubs of the animes they licensed were based on theirs. Also, I think, 1 of the reasons they stopped the uncut Yugioh & Shaman King dubs.

I mean, sure, they would remove Japanese text because of that, but they also had to deal with broadcast standards when producing their dubs. They had many local affiliates here in the States in various places that would also dictate changes they needed to make when dubbing anime because THEY were also xenophobic or too over protective of kids. One only needs to look at the early Pokemon episodes they dubbed, where they kept a cross in & called it one, or the Pokemon or Yugioh movies they dubbed. Yugioh the movie shows this very well because they were able to have more violence, references to alcohol, & even an abbreviated swear with Kaiba saying "bull" in reference to bullshit. While 4Kids DID have their own dumb standards of which they dubbed anime to, the local affiliates didn't help. The ramen anecdote IS funny, though.