Ocean Studios' "Dragon Ball Kai" Dub Turns 16; Still Unreleased

[GS7X7]

The new Kai dub is good but Schemmel as Goku always seemed off to me.

Hopefully it won't turn out to be a disaster like the Blue Water dub of GT was.

[oXdanXo]

The big question. All dubs aside, will the UK receive a dub of Dragon Ball Kai on the TV???

[SSJSteve]

The big question. All dubs aside, will the UK receive a dub of Dragon Ball Kai on the TV???

Still waiting to hear something...

Kix! haven't said anything about what they’re doing with the "Screener". It's so frustrating, so many countries are getting DBKai.

[Dark Vegeta-Sama]

Not that it excuses the practice, but Terry Klassen (Ocean's Krillin) remained one of FUNi's head writers through the end of season 4, and was involved with the scripts of the later Ocean dub, which means that when Ocean was dubbing season 4, Klassen was essentially reusing his own scripts. This was probably deemed necessary became A) it was cost-effective, and B) the rushed production schedule of the Ocean dub didn't allow for script-rewrites when they had to get through so many episodes in such a short amount of time.

Not for nothing, but how badly were they rushed? Everyone says this but it's not like Funimation had all the time in the world. I don't see why they couldn't write there own script like Funi did and still put them out at a similar pace.

By the time that Ocean resumed dubbing in mid-to-late 2000, FUNi had already dubbed all of season 4, which, you may recall, was a whopping 79 episodes (the entire Cell arc). Fans at the time were actually concerned that FUNimation themselves had rushed through dubbing just to have a lot of product to sell to Cartoon Network that year. Either way, it presented Ocean with a problem; they didn't bother to try to dub season 3 as FUNi's version had already aired internationally in its entirety. They could, however, try to match FUNi's output for season 4, which is what they set about to do as quickly as possible (albeit starting with episode 108/123, rather than episode 103/118. Ocean had to catch up very fast for there to be any hope of them being able to sell their product to international TV stations, lest those networks "fall behind" by not airing new episodes within a certain amount of time after they'd aired in America. After all, North American TV stations were already airing early season 4 episodes by the fall of 2000 (with YTV, the Canadian network, being one of them; as a result of this, episodes 108-167 of the Ocean dub were never aired in Canada despite having been produced there). So it was a very quick, and cheaply-made production. It worked the other way, however, in that it allowed them to compete and sell the Ocean dub for significantly less money than FUNi's dub to those networks as a result of it being a fairly cheaply-made production. Once Ocean "caught up," production slowed down a bit; the show's production values did noticeably improve later in the Buu arc. And ironically, they actually finished dubbing the last 4 episodes of the show before FUNimation did.

[Ashura]

By the time that Ocean resumed dubbing in mid-to-late 2000, FUNi had already dubbed all of season 4, which, you may recall, was a whopping 79 episodes (the entire Cell arc). Fans at the time were actually concerned that FUNimation themselves had rushed through dubbing just to have a lot of product to sell to Cartoon Network that year. Either way, it presented Ocean with a problem; they didn't bother to try to dub season 3 as FUNi's version had already aired internationally in its entirety. They could, however, try to match FUNi's output for season 4, which is what they set about to do as quickly as possible (albeit starting with episode 108/123, rather than episode 103/118. Ocean had to catch up very fast for there to be any hope of them being able to sell their product to international TV stations, lest those networks "fall behind" by not airing new episodes within a certain amount of time after they'd aired in America. After all, North American TV stations were already airing early season 4 episodes by the fall of 2000 (with YTV, the Canadian network, being one of them; as a result of this, episodes 108-167 of the Ocean dub were never aired in Canada despite having been produced there). So it was a very quick, and cheaply-made production. It worked the other way, however, in that it allowed them to compete and sell the Ocean dub for significantly less money than FUNi's dub to those networks as a result of it being a fairly cheaply-made production. Once Ocean "caught up," production slowed down a bit; the show's production values did noticeably improve later in the Buu arc. And ironically, they actually finished dubbing the last 4 episodes of the show before FUNimation did.

This is fascinating to hear, though I assume by Ocean you mean AB Group(?), right? I mean, Ocean's just a company that is contracted to do the dubbing.

Is there an article anywhere unraveling what went on behind the scenes there? I mean, the impetus was obviously more money in some way. I always figured that AB Group just didn't want to either pay music royalties to Funimation (which is one of the reasons I always assumed /they/ changed all the music, a lesson they learned from Saban) or thought it would make them more money to produce their own dub for some reason.

One of the things you might notice is that the AB Group dub uses the same exact title cards as the Funimation set (which I always assumed were created by Funimation), and I'm almost certain the video edits are the same as the Funi TV edits. There's usually clauses in licensing contracts where the rights to everything the licensor produces (in this case, Funimation) reverts back in ownership to the original creator (Toei.) In fact, a lot of the time the cost of dubbing is billed back to the original creators in such a way that it helps chip money off of the licensing fee. I'm not certain how the DB license shakes out, though.

Funimation -- I don't think -- can actually distribute DB outside of the US, since I think the rights are specifically for the US when it comes to at least TV?

[GS7X7]

It'd be interesting to see massive "DBZ OVA"-style article on here all about the Ocean dub. There's so much stuff to it. (and all the crap about England not having DBZ Vhs's/dvd's for sale back in the day- I remember ukdb.net did an editorial wondering about that)

[dbzforeverUK]

It'd be interesting to see massive "DBZ OVA"-style article on here all about the Ocean dub. There's so much stuff to it. (and all the crap about England not having DBZ Vhs's/dvd's for sale back in the day- I remember ukdb.net did an editorial wondering about that)

The only Vhs's/dvd's i can ever remember us having were the AB group ones with the Bridge Dub/Big green.Dub

[Daimo-Rukiri]

It'd be interesting to see massive "DBZ OVA"-style article on here all about the Ocean dub. There's so much stuff to it. (and all the crap about England not having DBZ Vhs's/dvd's for sale back in the day- I remember ukdb.net did an editorial wondering about that)

The only Vhs's/dvd's i can ever remember us having were the AB group ones with the Bridge Dub/Big green.Dub

I'm curious. Why didn't Ocean dub the TV specials but have a completely different cast for the movies?

[Dark Vegeta-Sama]

This is fascinating to hear, though I assume by Ocean you mean AB Group(?), right? I mean, Ocean's just a company that is contracted to do the dubbing.

AB Groupe had very little to do with the Ocean dub aside from overseeing its televised distribution in Europe. They did provide the video tracks from the French dub for the last 4 episodes of DBZ because FUNi's video tracks weren't yet available, but that's it. Westwood Media, which is based in Vancouver, is the company behind the later Ocean dub, so it's more accurate to refer to it as "the Westwood dub." However, we tend to say "the Ocean dub" for the sake of simplicity, even though yes, The Ocean Group is a voice acting studio in Vancouver and was not a production company at the time. The voice work for the later dub wasn't even done at Ocean; it was done at Airwaves Studios, a sister studio in the same city.

FUNi's involvement in the dub is unclear; Westwood did pay to use their video tracks since the dub did use FUNi's edited video footage (which obviously included the title cards), as well as their scripts (with only slight modifications made to them), but they were still technically competing with FUNi in the international market. Likely, it was a win-win situation for FUNimation; either they sold their dub internationally, or Westwood paid them for their video footage so they could sell their own dub. We're still a little unclear as to how that all worked, but given that Terry Klassen (Ocean's Krillin) was still one of FUNi's head script writers until the end of season 4, despite resuming his voicing of the character in Vancouver at the same time, it's likely that FUNimation and Westwood had a good working relationship behind the scenes. It's funny; Gen Fukunaga denied any sort of knowledge about Ocean's later dub when it began production in 2000 (a news story that was posted on this very website at the time, though under the original web domain), but that is just not possible. FUNimation is the ultimate overseer of all things Dragonball in North America. If something is going on in Canada, they're going to know about it. Indeed, Sean Schemmel posted about Ocean doing their own version of Kai months before Kirby Morrow first mentioned it.

Unfortunately, there is no article about the behind the scenes stuff that I am aware of. My knowledge of the dub comes from the (long defunct) UKDB and Ocean-DB fansites of the early 2000s. The guys who worked on those websites are the ones who got a majority of the info about the dub, as well as several interviews with Ocean voice actors. Some of them might still be found on the Wayback Internet Archive if you're inclined to look for them.

It'd be interesting to see massive "DBZ OVA"-style article on here all about the Ocean dub. There's so much stuff to it. (and all the crap about England not having DBZ Vhs's/dvd's for sale back in the day- I remember ukdb.net did an editorial wondering about that)

The only Vhs's/dvd's i can ever remember us having were the AB group ones with the Bridge Dub/Big green.Dub

I'm curious. Why didn't Ocean dub the TV specials but have a completely different cast for the movies?

Ocean had absolutely nothing to do with those movies. AB Groupe, likewise, had very little to do with those "Big Green" movies. They were apparently distributed by Warner International, and although AB probably received some royalties, being the top European rights holders for the franchise, they did not release that dub themselves, nor were they involved in the making of...whatever awful dub that actually was. AB Groupe has always catered almost exclusively to the market in its home country, France, which is the biggest reason why Europeans (specifically the British) have never gotten any proper releases in many of their respective countries. Spain seems to be one of the sole exceptions.

Apparently there were releases of all 12 of the movies in "Big Green" format in Scandinavia (not sure about the TV specials), but the UK only received movies 2, 3, and 4. The most probable reason for this? Poor sales, because that dub was an awful joke.

[GS7X7]

I remember on PN.com years ago that there was a report from someone at an anime convention that when someone from Funi was asked about the upcoming competing Ocean dub that the person called it "an inferior dub that'll disappear in 3 months."

Okay, I don't remember what the person said- it was still derogatory but a lot more diplomatic than this.

It's a shame Ocean (I'm calling it that for simplicity's sake) didn't try to engineer a completely superior dub that would blow Funi's out of the water instead of just trying to copy them. Imagine a dub of Seasons 4 to the end just as good as the first 3 original movie dubs!

[Paradox295]

I remember on PN.com years ago that there was a report from someone at an anime convention that when someone from Funi was asked about the upcoming competing Ocean dub that the person called it "an inferior dub that'll disappear in 3 months."

Okay, I don't remember what the person said- it was still derogatory but a lot more diplomatic than this.

It's a shame Ocean (I'm calling it that for simplicity's sake) didn't try to engineer a completely superior dub that would blow Funi's out of the water instead of just trying to copy them. Imagine a dub of Seasons 4 to the end just as good as the first 3 original movie dubs!

They could have, if they didn't rush it. Ocean had already dubbed quite a few anime before DBZ, and it was FUNi's first.

[Daimo-Rukiri]

We don't know the details behind season 4-9, it's very possible FUNimation was involved and it's aslo possible that FUNimation gave them a deadline.
Even though Blue-water did DB/GT (A sister company from ocean) I was surprised on well how bad some of the voice acting was, while the writing was decent it still didn't match movies 1-3.

Like the tootsie pop commercial, the world may never know.

But if ocean does come it's going to be after FUNimation finishes their dub, for all we know ocean could be half through and not planning on airing or releasing until it's finished.

[Piccolo Daimaoh]

Apparently there were releases of all 12 of the movies in "Big Green" format in Scandinavia (not sure about the TV specials), but the UK only received movies 2, 3, and 4. The most probable reason for this? Poor sales, because that dub was an awful joke.

I've only ever seen Movies 1-9 and the TV Specials in online stores. I think the rest of the movies were in fact dubbed; they just weren't given a release.

[Ashura]

*interesting but long stuff snipped*

This is fascinating, but I don't know if it adds up exactly. The Canadian crew -- 'Ocean' if you will -- can't just decide to dub the show on their own and compete with Funimation. They were, as far as my knowledge goes, just a production facility. Some rights holder has to go to them, say 'we have the right to produce this show and moneyhats for you, dub this for us,' and they do.

It can't be as simple as Funimation having all of the North American rights; Funimation wouldn'tve paid to do a completely separate dub of the show. The whole reason they pulled production from Canada is they wanted to produce everything cheaper or somehow make more money for themselves.

From how things have been released, I infer from this that Funimation's contract is set up in such a way that;
-They have the North American home video rights.
-They do not have all of the North American TV rights.
-The ownership of Funimation's production goes back to Toei in the end.
-This however does not cover music royalties in whole or in part I assume, which are a very complicated thing. As I understand music royalties, unless you buy out the original composer, they will still get some kind of money back whenever their songs are played, as does the rights holder.

Initially it seems like Canada and the UK were playing the Funimation dub of DBZ, and then they swapped over to the newer 'Ocean' one. Someone up the chain who does have the Canadian and UK rights to DBZ must've been paying some sort of fee (in my theory, music royalties) to use Funimation's version and did the math and realized that it would be cheaper if they created their own version instead.

Part of what I think happened is that Funimation learned a lot from Saban. Saban dubbed a lot of TV shows in the '90s, and their stock go-to production method was to completely replace all of the music in their shows with their own music. This happened to Digimon, this happened to Dragonball Z. Why did they do this? Because Saban made a lot of their money due to music residuals, and continued to do so even after they sold their shows to Disney. Here's some interesting tidbits:

-When Disney remastered MMPR last year, they were not allowed to replace the music in the show due to how the contracts played out. Saban et. al. received royalties for even that airing.
-This is part of the reason Disney XD stopped airing older Power Rangers episodes.
-When Disney dubbed the fourth season of Digimon onward, they created completely different music, especially the theme song. When they went back and dubbed the movies, they didn't go back and use the common 'Digimon' theme song either; they ended up using their own songs so they didn't have to pay royalties back to Saban.
-When they did the ranger teamup 'Once a Ranger,' every old ranger who appeared had their show's theme song play EXCEPT for the Saban era's ranger. No Go Go Power Rangers, because they didn't want to pay the royalties.
-When Saban tried to replace the music in Escaflowne for the TV broadcast, Bandai got mad because, yeah, they weren't going to get any residuals. That's why the music in TV edit of Escaflowne is a weird mish-mash-half-and-half sort of deal. That's how they appeased the rights holder.

So I think what happened is that when Funimation parted ways with Saban, they realized that for the first 53 episodes of Z that Saban was still banking cash. They didn't want Saban to keep making a buck off of something they weren't really even involved in anymore, and that the music royalties would make them a bunch of extra money. So when they produced their own episodes of Z they went to Bruce Faulconer and had him create all new music. I don't know who owns what there, but I assume that Funimation was savvy enough to work out a contract with Bruce that got them some kind of residuals on the music. Why wouldn't they? DBZ was burning hot at the time, playing like mad on Cartoon Network. It would've been dumb not to try to rake in even more money due to how often they were running it.

The easiest way to check this is to have someone check the copyrights in the Faulconer CDs. If the verbiage is written out in a certain way, it'd probably help either prove or disprove my theory.

So then you have the people who own the broadcast rights in Canada and the UK. Whenever they aired the Funimation produced episodes, they must've figured that Funimation got a kickback of some kind. They did some cost analysis, and figured that it would be cheaper for them to produce their own dub using music they owned, and they instead would either not have to pay back to Funimation, they would get the kickback themselves since they owned the stock Megaman/Monster Rancher music employed in the production, or both.

I think this is also likely why Canada didn't use 'Rock the Dragon' but created their own theme song. So they wouldn't have to pay money back to Saban/Ron Wasserman. It's also likely why Funimation phased it out for their own theme song as well.

Mind you, this is wildly speculative. It comes only from what I've read about music royalties and how these companies operated back then. For some reason, Funimation decided to use the original music when they placed DBZ up onto Hulu, so who even knows if I'm right or not.

Honestly, I'm unsure who owns the rights for TV in Canada and the UK from what you've said, but I always assumed it was the AB Group, since those are the guys whose production credit is at the very end at least on clips from the UK I've seen.

God, I feel like such a nerd. I've thought way too much about how this played out. Business practices fascinate me though.

[Levlik]

Your theory actually makes a lot of sense. In fact I recall an old interview off DBZ Uncensored where Chris was interviewing...I think Gen Fukunaga (I might be wrong on both counts, it's been years) in which he said something along the lines of FUNimation collecting royalties from Bruce Faulconer's music.

If anyone can shed more light on this or correct me outright if I'm wrong I'd appreciate it. My mind is really hazy about this.

[GS7X7]

Chris P interviewed the first 2 Goku dub actors (and one extremely minor Funi one) but no Fukunaga. You're thinking Steve Harmon.

http://animecauldron.com/dbzuncensored2 ... rview.html

"Steve: "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.""

Oh, and just ignore my fanboy outrage from nearly a decade ago, I'm going to redo everything on this site later to reflect my changing views.



What's interesting about the interview was that beforehand Funimation had crafted endless different excuses about the music. If you read Psaros's goodbye editorial, even he doesn't know the exact reason for the music being replaced (though he rightly strongly suspects that Funi could use the original music). Steve somehow managed to get Gen to answer honestly.

My re-printing of the interview- and harping endlessly on that quote- helped produce mass-awareness of it. Although the interview had been online and seen by some people beforehand the Gen quote wasn't really infamous or well-known until I reprinted it and kept talking about it.

Steve Harmon, of course, references this on pojo.com and he also references it on Ramza's old fansub site.

There he reprints an interview he did with Monika Antonelli ages ago. She actually told him that she was "really offended" by how tough some of the questions he did and his response was, "if you think that's bad you should have seen some of the stuff people wanted me to ask him!"

He references controversy that people thought he went "too easy" on Gen but he notes that if he was too tough/hostile in the interview that Gen might not have opened up as much.

[Ashura]

Aha. Some proof! Thanks for posting about that, you two.

Thing is, I can't begrudge them for replacing the music like he did. (And you can't blame one person for it; it's a company, more than one person has input.) You have to look at the perspective of the company at that point in time; DBZ was their one big thing that was red hot and on fire. It's easy to forget that back then they had pretty much nothing else bringing in money at the time, and even DBZ was knee-deep in reruns at that point.

They didn't have the money to dub it in Canada anymore, which is why they did it for a lot cheaper, in house. I imagine that they had to buy a lot of start-up audio equipment at the time and fund the voicework, and the music royalties are probably one of the things they figured would help offset the debt incurred moving forward.

They didn't have Saban co-financing anymore, and money wise they were under a lot of pressure -- probably make-it-or-break-it pressure -- at the time. They may not have had any other financial choice BUT to replace the music as they did. If I was in the position where I had an easy way to help a moneymaker peform double for me, though, I likely would've done the same thing without the pressure. It was a smart business move which paid off in the long run, even for fans.

This was likely was the building blocks to what we have now, and you have to wonder if they didn't replace the music if we would be getting cool stuff like the Dragon Box and all sorts of other cool anime at all. Food for thought!

[GS7X7]

Although Gen only mentions the money-making aspect here, I think it was more than just that. Like with Americanizing many aspects of the show they didn't trust fans to really "get" the original music or like it that much. However, DBZ's been a world-wide phenomenon everywhere- with the original music. It was still a hit even without the music but I'll always believe that the original music (and more accurate scripts- maybe at least a more YYH-style scripting) could have helped DBZ do better here.

[Dark Vegeta-Sama]

FUNimation didn't use the original music because they didn't want to. It was much more financially beneficial for them to create their own than to pay Toei to use the original music. This is the sort of thing that drives anime purists nuts, but they're not the ones in charge of multi-million dollar businesses. Just as it makes sense for whichever Canadian company has the rights to produce their own dub of Kai to make money by doing so even though FUNi's dub already exists, it always made sense for FUNi to produce and sell their own music tracks for Dragonball Z.

Yes, Faulconer's music was terrible, and as fans most of us hated that decision back in the day, but none of us can deny that it was a good business decision on their part.

On the Ocean side, they went with the even cheaper route of recycling music from other series that had been dubbed in Vancouver over the years, most notably Mega Man, Monster Rancher, and Hamtaro. They did produce some original music tracks for Dragonball Z near the end of the series, as production values had noticeably improved by that time, but they still kept costs as low as possible, and understandably so. Incidentally, the music from Monster Rancher actually fit Dragonball Z really well.

[GS7X7]

People are really anal about music rights and overcharging for them.

Daria dvds had all their old ending songs cut and Dawson's Creek on dvd had it's iconic intro song removed because whoever had the rights demanded too much cash.

And Kodocha? had it's ending/intro? song removed for that reason too.

In any case, thankfully Funi's chose to keep the original music for DBZ Kai or at least offer dual-options on dvds.