Dragonball Kai (FUNimation English) Dub: General Discussion

[obiwan23s]

new episode is up on nicktoons site

http://nicktoons.nick.com/videos/clip/d ... -full.html


just to help you guys out, the new episodes are always on the site half an hour - 1 hour earlier than on tv, you just need to type in the link yourself because it doesnt show it on the actual site itself. its not hard, you just type in the name of the episode excluding a, the, of, etc, and then type in full, and there you go

Good to know! I don't get Nicktoons with my cable package so I have to watch online. Thanks for the tip.

[MetalMadness]

Here are the edits I noticed:

-Obviously all blood removed, and Freeza's horn going through Krillin was also painted over. Anything that showed Freeza impaling Krillin was removed, but it was still sorta implied
-Krillin says distructo disc now even though he said kienzan before. He also says solar flare
-Not a single image of Freeza standing on Gohan's head. It's not even implied. There's even a scene where Vegeta is overlooking Gohan, and normally it is supposed to show the reflection in his eye of Freeza crushing Gohan's head, but they edited it so that the reflection in Vegeta's eye was just Gohan lying down on the ground panting.


I thought Sabat's Piccolo sounded great in this episode, really cool and natural. Ayres Second form Freeza seems to keep fluctuating from a deep tone, to a higher pitch, and a deeper tone, at least to me. Its still absolutely amazing though, shits all over Young's performance.

[nathantheguitarist]

new episode is up on nicktoons site

http://nicktoons.nick.com/videos/clip/d ... -full.html


just to help you guys out, the new episodes are always on the site half an hour - 1 hour earlier than on tv, you just need to type in the link yourself because it doesnt show it on the actual site itself. its not hard, you just type in the name of the episode excluding a, the, of, etc, and then type in full, and there you go

That was fast, and I had no idea Nicktoons streamed it online before last night. ehehh... I'll watch it later tonight.

[MR.Mark]

Ayres is so fucken menacing as Freeza, and his evil chuckles are delivered so naturally, this dude doesn't even have to try to be awesome. It made my ears bleed to hear destructo disc again, stop wasting time and effort on catering to nostalgia Funi, damn.

Sonny's delivery was pretty funny as he reacted to Freeza and running through the caves.

[Tsukento]

Well that's weird. They showed in the last episode preview Gohan kicking Freeza, punching him in the gut several times and cutting out the face blast.

Meanwhile, the face blast is kept, but everything else was cut. They also cut out Freeza kicking Gohan in the preview, but the episode showed it as well as the face blast. What the...?

[Suupaa Gohan 2]

-Krillin says distructo disc now even though he said kienzan before. He also says solar flare

I was just coming to note that. He said Destructo Disc, twice, even though he's said Kienzan more than once in previous episodes. Augh, I hate the lack of consistency :/ Though I think it's been consistently Solar Flare, at least on Nicktoons, right? I don't remember hearing a Taiyouken once, though I don't know what's on the DVD's.

Piccolo and Vegeta's little exchange was also embarrassingly amusing. I'm sorry, but Sabat's Piccolo has gotten fantastic, while his Vegeta remains as annoying as ever (much better acted, yes, but the voice itself). It seemed a little too obvious to me that it was Sabat talking to himself, and it felt awkward.

[penguintruth]

Love Chris Ayres' Freeza. It almost sounds like Mark Hamill doing him at times. You can tell Ayres is enjoying himself.

Colleen Clinkenbeard's Gohan is doing really well. There are times it's a little awkward, but still miles ahead of Stephanie Naldony's. I really like how she sounded when Gohan was really enraged.

Chris Sabat's Piccolo is fantastic. There are times it's as good or better than Scott McNeil's. His Vegeta is doing okay, too, but I daresay his Piccolo is even better at this point.

Only downside was hearing Sean Schemmel's awful Goku. So cheesy sounding.

[Tsukento]

Yeah, it's been Solar Flare only on Nicktoons. Only Kienzan has been screwy.

-Kienzen
-Kienzan
-Destructo Disc

[DB_Fan1991]

Love Chris Ayres' Freeza. It almost sounds like Mark Hamill doing him at times. You can tell Ayres is enjoying himself.

Colleen Clinkenbeard's Gohan is doing really well. There are times it's a little awkward, but still miles ahead of Stephanie Naldony's. I really like how she sounded when Gohan was really enraged.

Chris Sabat's Piccolo is fantastic. There are times it's as good or better than Scott McNeil's. His Vegeta is doing okay, too, but I daresay his Piccolo is even better at this point.

Only downside was hearing Sean Schemmel's awful Goku. So cheesy sounding.

Here we go again seriously. We know you hate Schemmel, so quit telling us a thousand times. As for Ayres, Clinkenbeard & Sabat you took the words out of my mouth there.

Yeah, it's been Solar Flare only on Nicktoons. Only Kienzan has been screwy.

-Kienzen
-Kienzan
-Destructo Disc

Actually the second time it was "here goes".

[jjgp1112]

I look at it like this: If I can say I don't like Kai recasts a lot, then penguintruth can point out his disdain for Sean Schemmel a lot too.

[DB_Fan1991]

I look at it like this: If I can say I don't like Kai recasts a lot, then penguintruth can point out his disdain for Sean Schemmel a lot too.

He goes out of his way to piss off Schemmel fans like me whereas you don't piss me off with the Kai recasts because you don't harp on it (or you do and I don't see it) as much.

[penguintruth]

Here we go again seriously. We know you hate Schemmel, so quit telling us a thousand times.

And we all know you hate me saying I hate Schemmel, so quit telling me a thousand times. And then maybe I'll quit telling you how I hate when you hate me saying I hate Sean Schemmel, and you can quit telling me how you hate me telling you I hate when you hate me saying I hate when you say that you hate me saying I hate Sean Schemmel...

I don't do anything just to piss people off. But I'm not going to apologize if I should so happen to.

[DB_Fan1991]

Here we go again seriously. We know you hate Schemmel, so quit telling us a thousand times.

And we all know you hate me saying I hate Schemmel, so quit telling me a thousand times. And then maybe I'll quit telling you how I hate when you hate me saying I hate Sean Schemmel, and you can quit telling me how you hate me telling you I hate when you hate me saying I hate when you say that you hate me saying I hate Sean Schemmel...

I don't do anything just to piss people off. But I'm not going to apologize if I should so happen to.

Your arrogance is your weakness, and if you don't post your hatred for Schemmel's Goku I wouldn't have to tell you. Kaio I can sort of understand, but Goku is not that bad as remember Schemmel isn't the worst English Goku the Big Green one is.

[TripleRach]

Your arrogance is your weakness,

I don't even know what that's supposed to mean here, but I don't think I like it.

Let's not derail the thread into an endless sea of "I hate it when you..." nonsense, please. Just hate things about the show itself.

[ConfusedPhantom]

Ayres continues to be amazing. Boy, those laughs can get scary. Enraged Gohan brought me back to all the parts where Luffy gets enraged, and boy can Colleen do some cool battle cries over there. She's still ace as Gohan here. Sabat's great with Piccolo as usual, not bad with Vegeta too. And, Sean Schemmel's Son Goku is kind of overdoing it the point where Speed Racer comes to mind. Not as bad, but still pretty cheesy. But, that aside, Krillin's screams are hilarious.

[DB_Fan1991]

I would have said nothing if penguintruth hadn't started with his anti-Schemmel comments. As for the episode itself everyone preformed wonderfully especially Chris Ayres as Freeza I agree with penguintruth (for once) that it does sound like Mark Hammil at times. Everyone else preformed well too. The censoring was unnoticeable to me. Can't wait for next week.

[TheBlackPaladin]

I halfway agree with penguintruth here. Goku's lines were the worst part of this episode, but I wouldn't attribute that to Schemmel. I would say the lines themselves, even in their original Japanese form, are just kind of inherently corny, due in large part to their repetitive nature. I've listened to this scene in other dubs, including the awesome Mexican dub (well, for DBZ, not for Kai), and I felt it was cheesy and forced even there. I mean think about it, we basically get this repeated over and over and over and over:

"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"
"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"
"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"
"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"
"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"
"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"
"Oh no...a new power! What's going on!? I have to recover quickly so I can help them! But I can't leave yet...!"

So damn repetitive. For a show that's supposed to be faster-paced than it's original counterpart, I was really hoping they'd cut most if not all of these parts out. There's only so much variety you can add to such repetitive and corny lines.

[Suupaa Gohan 2]

Healing-Tank-Gokou annoys me in any language. English, Japanese, even Manga (yes, it's a language now). So yeah, can't honestly blame Schemmel for that. He really does just have to spend the whole time repeating the same things, blindly feeling this power grow, this one shrink, this new one show up, blah blah, wonder what the Hell is going on...it's one case where I can't really blame Schemmel's acting or any sort of directing, the scene's gonna come off a certain way no matter what.

[Lum-Chan~]

-Complaining about casts they don't like.
-Saying they don't match the characters.
-Doesn't understand why the music is different from what they're used to.

Gee, this sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it? Congratulations to those dub-only folk; you now know what we've been dealing with for 14 years.

...I hadn't even thought of that until reading your post. Excellent point. Only, we had it worse back then for a few reasons. Relating through my own experiences...

-Most internet was dial-up. Streaming Flash video? YouTube? Don't exist. Only way to watch DBZ in Japanese was to find a site that hosted fansubs...these were A) hard to find B) even when you found them, the collections usually were not complete (3 consecutive episodes, 2 missing in between, the next 5 episodes, missing the next 10, missing this entire story arc, no original DB at all, etc...), C) the fansubs were terrible translations that convinced us the original was riddled with swearing and gave us such infamous lines as, "you came all the way to Earth, halfway dead in a tin can, just to die"... D) the video quality was usually so bad that you could barely even read those terrible subs in the first place.

-Not everyone got the International Channel, which apparently showed the original series. Even if I had that channel, I didn't know a lick of Japanese at the time, and wouldn't really be able to understand what the Hell I was watching. So the only way to watch DBZ on TV was to watch the English dub. Pouring salt into the wounds, by this point, many of us had discovered through such sites as DBZ Uncensored what we were missing...and had little to no way to actually access it. It really, really sucks to find out what you're missing, and have no way to see it.

-Even if you had the money, and thought 'well, I guess I can see why they can't show this on TV, but the videos should be uncut, right?', you'd be shit out of luck. The VHS tapes were the exact same edited TV broadcast version. It wasn't worth the money when you could record the episodes yourself on your own VHS tapes. There was no uncut dub, and no subtitled Japanese release. You got what you got, and had to struggle and do illegal things (that people do much more casually nowadays but back then were kinda scary when the internet felt new) to access the series in Japanese, and terrible quality. I believe some people even paid for fansubbed videos. I myself only ever downloaded them, but I probably would have bought them had I known I could - since I could only even download and watch videos after school, where the internet didn't suck as terribly as it did at my house.

We sub fans had to fight hard to get what we wanted, because we knew the English version would never even attempt to be accurate. It became more and more of a farce as time went by (season 3, oh, season 3...), even when the censoring seemed to get more lax - okay, so I could see a little blood on Cartoon Network, and there were no more Next Dimensions, but at the expense of far worse voices, music, and even more of a lame joke-filled script...I preferred the more heavily-edited Ocean dub to what came then. The only way we could enjoy Dragonball was in Japanese, and for a long time, that was a very difficult thing to do, legally or otherwise. As far as I see it, Z dub fans have absolutely no right to be complaining. Their version of the series is still there. If that's what they want, they've got it. Kai isn't meant for them, because they're already satisfied customers. Kai is meant as a huge 'we're so sorry' to the rest of us, who were not satisfied. If you want the original Z dub, go out and buy the original Z DVD's. If you want to do it the illegal way, pirating is as easy as using Google these days, and you don't even have to struggle to find - let alone download - episodes like we did back in the day. The internet is fast and efficient, and you can find full episodes streamed in Flash of the Z dub if you search hard enough, or torrents of entire seasons of the original.

I don't give a shit if you don't like Gohan's new voice, or want Falconer's music back, or miss your tranny granny Freeza. You got all of those things already, and there are plenty of ways for you to continue watching that version. This version is for us, who have been waiting patiently for all these years to see if FUNimation would ever get it right. And while a lot of us can still find room for improvement, nobody's perfect, and this is such a huge step up that most of us can say we're finally getting what we've been after all along. Sure, it took so long that many of us are so settled into the Japanese version, that it doesn't matter as much as it may have 10 years ago...but I'll tell you something. I wandered over and reread all the old episode comparisons on Chris Psaros' DBZ Uncensored a few days ago...and they made me smile for more than just nostalgia or that oddball wit he had at picking apart some of the hilarious censors. Why? Because I've been watching Dragonball in English for months now, on my television, and enjoying it. It's censored, but when you read through those comparisons, it's hard to call the Nicktoons version 'censored'. If I didn't know what was supposed to happen in a gruesome scene, I wouldn't know what I was watching was being censored at all. And even though they might dance around overusing the words 'die' and 'kill', they do still say them, or synonyms, instead of avoiding the crucial concept entirely with something as absurd as The Next Dimension (even if the proper noun Otherworld makes me cringe). I've got an accurate script, passable (and in some cases fantastic - Bulma, Zarbon, and of course Freeza are all, IMO, giving their A-game and doing a dynamite job) voice acting, the 'original' music (sadly not the true original, but the feel is truly 'Dragonball').

So what if I miss a bit of blood, some mild cursing, or some dodging of the word 'die' on Nicktoons? I am freaking watching Dragonball on television, in English, and it is actually Dragonball!! I don't feel embarrassed like I used to when I watched the dub out of necessity, knowing what I was missing, and having to have my parents and brother hear some of the lame-ass lines and terrible voices and wonder why I was so in love with this show...now my mom will see me watch it and be like 'oh hey, I remember that', and I can be like 'oh yeah, they're showing it again, nostalgia, hehe' and not feel like 'oh God, I'm watching a kid show'. Because it doesn't feel like a kid show anymore. God, I remember VHS taping Inu Yasha and Yuu Yuu Hakusho from Adult Swim (anyone else even remember when YYH was still on AS?), and intentionally watch them when my parents were in the room as if to say 'see, they're not kiddie shows, listen to them swear, it's so cool'. That's how embarrassed I felt watching the Dragonball dub...I needed an Anime benchmark to hold it against and justify that 'these shows aren't for kids'. Now, I can watch Dragonball and Avatar back-to-back and feel like I'm getting the same type of experience (though it amuses me when some of the play-it-safe edits of Kai aren't necessary, because 'uh, they can do that on Avatar'). What's happening on my TV truly is Dragonball, and not just something that uses its footage and character names. And the best part? If I wanted to, I could buy the episodes completely uncut on DVD, with the uncut version of this dub, as well as the original Japanese. The whole experience is there. For everyone.

So yeah, there's some hilarious irony in the riots of Z dub fans on YouTube and lesser forums raging over the changes in Kai. But they don't have to struggle to access the version they prefer, like we did. What should matter the most to everyone is that for the first time ever, almost all types of fans now have access to the version of the series they want. Whether you want all of Z, or the trimmed-down Kai, whether you want it in English in Japanese, whether you want the butchered dub you grew up with because it's what you know, or have been waiting and welcoming an accurate English version for years...it's all out there, and you can obtain it, legally or otherwise. Welcome to the future, kiddies. Your version still exists, so if you don't like Kai, don't watch it. Let those of us who waited for the past 10 years to see Dragonball receive a respectable English production enjoy our long-deserved reward.

...I'm sorry but I hear this all the time and I disagree. I know the sub fans have had it hard for a long time but that doesn't mean you have to go on a tirade insulting the dub fans like that. It's just the way they prefer DBZ.

I know you don't think a lot of the voices match the characters but it's how they grew up listening to them and how they prefer the voices. I love Japanese DBZ and all but I prefer the English Goku voice for one reason alone, I actually think the voice matches the character design. Same thing with Piccolo and Vegeta's Japanese voices, I just like how they sound in English more.

- I hear the complaint that the English script wasn't accurate all the time when I lurk here...So what? I enjoy the japanese script for it's seriousness but the English script, like the different BG music used in both versions gives the show a different mood and makes the dub different from the original but IMO, special.

- I also see you were embarrased when you watched DBZ on CN because of all the differences, but let's face it, the show wouldn't even be popular in the states if it hadn't aired on there.

I know this post is gonna make a lot of people disagree (and probably cause some serious problems considering I'm a newbie) but that's just my opinion on this..

[penguintruth]

I doubt anyone will question that Toonami/Cartoon Network made DBZ the powerhouse it is in North America. The question would be if it was necessary to change what they did to make it popular or not, when in some other places in the world minimal changes were made and it's popular nevertheless.

But that has little relevance now, especially in a thread about the current DB Kai English dub.