Levlik wrote:Like, yeah, it's great that the Dragon Boxes are available in the US to begin with, but it's a spit in the face to anyone who paid a pretty fair amount of money on an inferior product without ANY knowledge that the superior one would be coming out mere MONTHS after its completion.
Look, I'm sympathetic to anybody who was bowled over with rage or confusion from the orange bricks. I was one of them. But anybody who bought them either knew or should have known what the product was, especially after buying one set, let alone all nine. So anybody who bought all nine volumes, that's really on them. We can blame FUNimation for putting out the product to begin with but we can't blame them for anybody's individual buying decisions.
I was probably more pissed off than anybody at the orange bricks. I never had the resources or the will to get all the singles. Even then, once the UUE was canceled there was up to that point no way to get the entire series, let alone in a consistent release. For
years I was settling with watching the series on TV, via shitty Real Media files (remember those?), and through crappy looking fansubs on VHS once in a while. I bought the DVD movie singles and a few VHS tapes based on the episode release schedule in the off season, but overall the episodes I actually owned were random and inconsistent. That was pretty much the entirety of my Dragon Ball viewing since 1995/1996.
Prior to the days when full season DVD sets were the norm I never expected to ever actually own the entire run, ungodly long as it is. Once season sets became commonplace I waited with hopeful anticipation for perhaps the day we'd see the entire series on inexpensive box sets. I figured
that was going to be when I finally got the series. Everything else was either incomplete, inconsistent, or just unwieldy and expensive. I couldn't do it any way outside of box sets.
Then the orange bricks hit. I saw the price for the first set and was floored by the value. My story is actually similar to GizmoKSX's here:
http://daizex.fanboyreview.net/viewtopi ... 32#p409232.
I actually picked up the box in Best Buy and read the back only for "widescreen" to jump out at me. I was pretty confused, did some research, watched the trailer, and got immediately pissed off. The crappy remastering process only furthered cemented what I was thinking: I was never going to own the series. The only consistent release was just too messed up and I figured it wasn't ever going to be fixed.
As somebody who was more willing to never own the series than buy a busted up version, I can't blame FUNimation for anybody who bought the orange bricks feeling cheated. That's on them. They knew what they were buying and settled for it, even if like me they didn't expect a better release to come out.
Maybe it makes me "less" of a fan for not settling for the orange bricks at the time when they were apparently the final ultimate release but I was actually somewhat annoyed that more people weren't avoiding them. I was afraid that the great sales would just send the message that this shit was ok.
. At best this means the singles will be released but somehow I doubt that what with the release of "Dragonball Z Kai" in the west. 
.
