Whatever happened to Shunsuke Kikuchi!?

[paparapa!!]

Why did Shunsuke Kikuchi leave the series after DBZ? Why after composing the music to the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z TV series, movies and TV specials(not to mention Dr.Slump beforehand) did Kikuchi not go on to compose GT or Kai or anything else regarding the franchise? Inquiring minds want to know.

[DBZAOTA482]

Dragon Ball must've been past it's prime so he left the studio.

[Gaffer Tape]

From what I've always heard, he was busy composing the music for Shin Tenchi Muyo! so he was unavailable to do GT.

[Castor Troy]

From what I've always heard, he was busy composing the music for Shin Tenchi Muyo! so he was unavailable to do GT.

Shin Tenchi Muyo's pretty short, so he chose the lesser of two evils...

[penguintruth]

If only we could get Kikuchi to produce new music for say, a video game, or a TV special.

[dprez]

So he did the music for Tenchi in Tokyo eh? Very cool. I'm gonna listen for similarities to his Dragon Ball work the next time I watch that series.

[dbboxkaifan]

If only we could get Kikuchi to produce new music for say, a video game, or a TV special.

Even if he did, the international copies of the games could be likely to be replaced with some replacement soundtrack, at least for DBZ games as usual.

Ultimate Blast did have Kikuchi's remastered BGMs but the international version had none.

[SilverPlaqueVII]

If only we could get Kikuchi to produce new music for say, a video game, or a TV special.

Even if he did, the international copies of the games could be likely to be replaced with some replacement soundtrack, at least for DBZ games as usual.

Ultimate Blast did have Kikuchi's remastered BGMs but the international version had none.

Especially the Yamamoto controversy. Those guys need to release some games containing the Yamamoto score with Kikuchi's score typically Budokai 3 / DBZ3.

[linkdude20002001]

Even if he did, the international copies of the games could be likely to be replaced with some replacement soundtrack, at least for DBZ games as usual.

Ultimate Blast did have Kikuchi's remastered BGMs but the international version had none.

That would probably be due to not wanting to deal with licencing the music from Toei/Columbia. If it were all new songs composed for the game, there should be no problem.

[MCDaveG]

Cool question, I always wondered about this. And it's not only Kikuchi's case, but other composers who did music for some of the iconic franchise are replaced for newer series.
Like Seiji Yokoyama who did Saint Seiya scores. Yeah, he was in the Hades arc OAV's from 2002-2008, but thanks only to that he liked the series a lot and recorded music for the Hades arc in the 1990 based on the manga content, which wasn't adapted until 2000's, so he then did few additional tracks and scored the infamous Heaven Overture movie, which failed in the eyes of the fans and even original creator and then he wasn't in on Lost Canvas nor the new Omega series.
Same with Shigeaki Saegusa from Gundam franchise. He replaced previous composer from 0079 series and did all the UC era series from Zeta to Char Counterattack and then he was replaced for by one different composer for each series.

I like music a lot and so is the score one unremovable part of the franchise for me. When I hear something DB from Kikuchi, without seeing it's name, it's: ''Yeah, that's Dragonball!''
I missed him in GT a lot and altough GT don't have bad score, still, it's not the signature Dragon Ball sound for me and I always liked the Sparking Meteor, playing GT battles with Kikuchi score.
Sad he didn't do anything new. I was excited from Yo! Son Goku and his friend return, that it included Kikuchi's track, on the other side little sad, that not anything new, that I didn't heard before.
So I was dissapointed by Plan to eradicate the SSJ and more so by Episode of Bardock, that had reused tracks from the latter.

[dbboxkaifan]

I missed him in GT a lot and altough GT don't have bad score, still, it's not the signature Dragon Ball sound for me and I always liked the Sparking Meteor, playing GT battles with Kikuchi score.

Maybe it's just me but Tokunaga's GT music kind of felt like imitating Kikuchi's style a bit (perhaps to make the fans/viewers familiarize with the BGMs).