Presenting you: The "Black Brick" A.K.A Dragon Ball Z Arabic Dub DVD Boxset
I didn't want to buy something from the horrible Arabic dub, but as a Dragon Ball fan, I had to buy it.
Maybe I should start with the backstory of the dub.
History of the dub:
The Arabic dub of Dragon Ball Z was done by Venus. A dub company located in Damascus specilaized in dubbing Japanese anime from it's original sourse instead of dubbing American or Europien versions. Their dubs usually get premired on an Arabic cartoon channel called "SpaceToon".
Dragon Ball first premired in summer 2002, and Dragon Ball Z in summer 2003, dubbed till episode 52 and concluded with an open ending...
Now, to the brick.
Packaging
The first I want say is... it's horrible. I mean, look at it!! It looks like a bootleged release!! I want to mention that the DVDs of the Arabian dub are distreputed by Al Wadi Co. and they don't use images from the series or from the Japanses companies, they draw it their self and choose wierd color pallets for it ((In this case, the neon skin)).
That's why it looks horrible, not to mention inconsistencies on it like the Red ShenLong, SSJ Goku with the halo ((remeber, they dubbed it till ep. 52)) and Gogeta in the bottom as they didn't dub GT nor the movies ((although they dubbed Dragon Ball movies, but not released))
As a side note, if you look closely at the back, you can see what resambles the American cover of Budokai 3.
This is a DVD case, it's the size of a regular DVD case, and as you can see, they used the same front cover as the box.
There are four DVD cases in the set with a total of 11 discs.
DVD 1:
-Disc 01: 01-05
-Disc 02: 06-10
-Disc 03: 11-15
DVD 2:
-Disc 04: 16-20
-Disc 05: 21-25
-Disc 06: 26-30
DVD 3:
-Disc 07: 31-35
-Disc 08: 36-40
-Disc 09: 41-44
DVD 4:
-Disc 10: 45-48
-Disc 11: 49-52
The problem is that the cases are not numbered. So, you have to open them to know what are the contents in it.
Menus
Nothing much, it's drawn buy the distributers, and it's the same in all the discs. It plays the recap music. "Play Movie" will let you watch all the episodes in order along with the opening and ending.
Don't get fooled by "Special Features" ((and Nappa's badly drawn picture)). It's just episode selecting, although it only plays the opening for the first episode in the disc, and the ending with the last one.
And now... to the really interesting thing about the set... the episodes themselves...!!
Contents:
The set have only the censored/edited dub version as it premiered on TV. It doesn't have unedited video nor Japanese audio.
As for the video, the first thing to mention is... it's 16:9.... But wait, that's not all, check out these images and you'll now when it's compared with the Orange Brick
Did you see? It's in Wide-Screen, but it's not cropped!! They stretched the sides and squeezed the top and the bottom!! have another pictures
A lousy splitscreen comparision
Personally, I liked this type of Wide-Screen better than the cropping. It's originally 4:3, but they didn't crop it for wide-screen TV. The whole original image is left intact as it was back in the day with 4:3 TVs.
Although some shots might appear a bit awkward like this shot of a bulky Goku
About the colors. I woudn't say it's bad, but it's not good either. It's dark like it's from a video from the early 90s ((even though DBZ is older than that)) but they kept the colors as they were as much as possible and you can see the "green sky" in the Goku VS Vegeta shot. And it still have the grains from the original videos. The Ratio is good. some microblocks might appear, but it's not bad.
The audio is Mono... the cover says Dolby Digital, but it's a lie!! It's not in Stereo. But the voices and the soundtrack is high quality and you can hear it clearly ((music track is the original Japanese one))
The set is region free ((I think)). It costed me 320 AUD = $ 87 which kinda expensive when it comes for the overall quality, but I bought it in case I wanted to and could not be able to find it.
Sadly, you won't be able to find that easily in the Internet. But if you are lucky, you might get it on Ebay. Or, you can try to send an Email to digimedi@emirates.net.ae and let's hope it's not a dead link.
I give the set a score of 7 out of 10 due to the packaging, the dark video, and the Dolby lie.
EDIT: I give it a 5 out of 10 thanks to a note by Kei17.
Appearently, there are some episodes that aren't included in the set!! I remember that the final dubbed episode ended with Vegeta's defeat by the hands of transformed Zarbon, and Kuririn & Dende arrived to Saichourou. In the set, the last episode here is Vegata and Zarbon's fight before he transforms.
My last comment is: Sadly, there is no offecial Arabic dub for the Dead Zone to send to Mike
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