penguintruth wrote:Dragon Ball Z is far from my favorite anime of all time, but my Dragon Box is absolutely one of the true treasures of my anime DVD collection, and was worth every single penny I paid for it.
I have to be honest, though. I never considered getting DBZ on DVD (DBZVD, if you will), until a few years ago when I was impulse buying and saw the orange box sets. I almost bought it, but then I decided to check Daizenshuu EX's DVD guide. I already knew that Funimation had been screwing with the colors in their DVD releases of DBZ for years, but I had no idea just how messed up they were, calling the orange sets "remastered" when they just continued to mess with the video in detrimental ways.
I held out for the Dragon Box, and I'm glad I did. I really feel sorry for the folks who think of DBZ as their favorite show, waiting for such a release for all these years. I haven't been. DBZ was always one of those nostalgic, but ultimately "take it or leave it" shows that was a low buy priority. Then Kai came. Inspired by nostalgia, I bought the Pioneer release of the first three movies out of a longing for Peter Kelamis' Goku. Then the DBox release was announced, and I had some spare cash lying around, and bam.
I think that's why I signed up for the forums, to get information on the Dragon Box, but really got into talking about a show I hardly reconsidered in years. I'd always listened to the podcast, but I never really longed to talk about the show until the Dragon Box announcement.
Oh god, I too find myself thinking about DBZ Abridged when I watch this set. Especially when I see Mr. Popo or exchanges between Gohan and Piccolo. I did the whole "We get it, you're from space!" in the episode where Gohan headbutts Raditz, too. I even find myself consulting those episodes again as I watch the show. Damn Team Fourstar.
Ugh, it really boggles my mind how anyone can prefer that awful Faulconer noise to Kikuchi's epic, martial arts movie-inspired, quasi-operatic score. It's not even music. It's just a bunch of synthasized noises strung together to sound similar to music. I even tried listening to a few of the soundtracks again to see if I was just angry about the replacement music and I couldn't bare more than a few tracks.
Yamamoto's music for Kai is little better, most of the time.
Bruces music is not noise to me. Some of his music serves to highlight key scenes in the series better than Kikuchis score does , in my opinion.
Gohans Masenko blast after having knocked down 2nd form Freeza with a flurry of attacks during the fight on Namek , Goku solemnly burrying Vegeta , A nearly defeated Goku flying out of the water , and firing the Kamehameha at a surprised final form Freeza ( who barely manages to stop the blast with his hands ) , after imagining what would happen if he were to fail to stop him , Goku turning Super Saiya - Jin for the first time , Vegetas powering up and blasting Cell with the Final Flash , taking a good chunk out of him. Bruce music perfectly frames these moments in a way that kikuchis score fails to do.
Dont get me wrong. My first encounter with DBZ were fan sub versions of the first three movies , and I love Kikuchis music , but when I rewatched the above mentioned scenes during the International Channels broadcast , the music that accompanied it was significantly less than exciting.
And now I am at a crossroad with this series.
A year ago I bought season 1 of Funimations cropped sets , and even though there were flaws ( Funimations music for these newly dubbed early episodes was as awful as their GT dub episodes ) , it did look a a lot better than the previous releases , and I was able to watch the admitingly questionable , but still relatively decent , English dub with Kikuchis original score , so it was a pretty good buy , in my opinion. But now the question for me becomes , should I continue with the cropped sets because I prefer Bruces music in certain areas over Kikuchis , or should I just drop it , and get this ultimate set presented visually the way it was meant to be seen?
My true fear is that in a year Vegetto EX will be discusing the pros and cons of a newly released domestic Blu - Ray version of this same set!
I dont even want to think about the domestic release of Kai. I've seen fan subs of that show in bits and peices , and even though the idea of a closer to the Manga version of the series with no filler appeals to me , what I have seen so far doesnt impress me very much. What I would have really liked , would be for them to have gone back and reanimate the episodes done by the third tier animation team. After every two excellently animated episodes , there would be an episode that was some of the worst Anime I have ever seen! These episodes stuck out like a sore thumb , and were so badly animated that I am surprised that team continued on through GT.
. It looks like you've gone in and added a lot more, though. And yeah, I have a link all ready to place within it as soon as it's live!
