How would you have run things with FUNi's limited resources?

[ABED]

Are American children so different from the rest of the world that they can't enjoy a orchestral score for an action show? As to your point that people will notice, is that a bad thing? Sometimes contrast is a great thing.

And I'm not talking to Beji like he's crazy, I simply disagree with the assessment that American children have a preconceived notion that an action series should have cheap sounding techno music.

I know they made money off of royalties, but if that was enough, why'd they stop replacing scores?

You ignored the part where I said region and time are irrelevant. People are keying on "American children" because that was FUNimation's audience, but any company in the world could have done the exact same thing they did for the exact same reasons. In fact, they did. Check out the UK Ocean dub. Which leads me to ask once again, why did Toei do the exact same thing FUNimation did if people don't respond to certain audio-visual couplings in certain ways, whether they're conscious of it or not?

Lots of action cartoons utilize "cheap techno music" as well, including the original version of DBZ itself! Battle Power Infinity and Solid State Scouter respectively. With this in mind, why is FUNimation giving DBZ the score they did such a stretch? Why is what they did such an abstract concept? There are countless other examples of other cartoons with similar scores as well, regardless of wherever they happened to come from. One would be Yu Yu Hakusho, a series that came out around the same time. While I personally find Yusuke Honma's work on Yu Yu Hakusho far superior to that of Faulconer Productions, both scores have enough of that atmospheric, synth guitar driven sound in common. I can't speak for any of their other licenses at that time, but FUNimation probably didn't replace Hakusho's score for that very reason; DBZ was popular having the score they made for it, and Yu Yu Hakusho's already suited their market just fine. Had Yu Yu Hakusho had a similar score to the Japanese version of DBZ, I wouldn't have been surprised at all by FUNimation changing that as well.

It's pretty easy to see why subsequent licenses from FUNimation didn't have replacement scores. The general anime audience shifted dramatically after the Toonami era as online fan subbing boomed and more and more fans began developing reverence for the original source material.

I don't know what you mean by time and region aren't important in this context. I don't think I said no one notices music, simply that it's hardly the deciding factor in why anyone watches a show.

I don't think battle Power Infinity sounds cheap, and that was one song in a nearly 500 episodes that sounds synthesized. Faulconer's entire score sounds synthesized and more than that - cheap. It sounds like he made it in his basement.

Yu Yu Hakusho's score sounds nothing like Faulconer's. YYH had atmosphere and emotion and beauty. Faulconer's droned on and on. And the reason YYH kept its score isn't because it sounded like DBZ's. They kept it because people like Justin Cook went to bat to keep the show true to the original and not give it the "mass property" treatment. Mass property really meant talking down to the lowest common denominator. Why do you presume to know that synth music suited the target market? You know why the market changed? More and more shows kept the original score because they bucked the irrational trend. I don't know if you know this, but TV execs tend not to be creative and a tad on the dumb side. They constantly think their audience is dumber than it really is. Until then it was common practice to change things based on assumptions which I'm not sure were ever entirely backed up. And YYH didn't get released until 01/02, at least a full 2 years after DBZ season 3. In that time they had gotten a few series and most, if not all the others got better treatment. Let's forget music for a sec. As much as I dislike Faulconer's score, my biggest beef is the god awful scripts from that time. No other show they had got that treatment. The biggest difference between DBZ and a show like Blue Gender was DBZ was a mass property. Everything about DBZ during that time came off as amateurish, from the music, the writing, the acting, the home video releases... To me that says DBZ works pretty much regardless. The only way they could screw it up is by putting it in a terrible time slot.

You've only said that the UK dub changed the music but that's one out of how many places that kept it?

You once said my use of Batman The Animated Series wasn't a good example, could you elaborate?

[Beji]

They weren't talking to me like I am crazy but to Kuwabara I'd say it isn't worth your breath. I left as soon as I saw the extreme bias with
ABED's view on the "cheap techno" Falconer score.

Faulconer's entire score sounds synthesized and more than that - cheap. It sounds like he made it in his basement.

I prefer the Japanese BGM just like most people on here. But there is no hope in suggesting keeping the US BGM to the people who despise it. If saying how well it did and feeling that that music was right for kids in the 90's. Then it's my opinion. How would I know? Besides saying I was a kid of the 90s I thought it matched with the culture, i felt it was also a good rock feel with all the guitar than cheap techno. It did very well and we've been getting releases with the original score which should make everyone on here happy myself included. How would it have ended up if the original score? I think it would have done well! But not as good. We can both agree to disagree but I see the thread as "I'm glad a lot of you didn't get to run things with FUNI's limited resources" . That and for personal reasons that I enjoy the contrast of the two dubs telling the same story. If i want to hear the real thing I'll watch it in Japanese or even watch Kai though I didn't think it did justice.

Though this surprised me,

If you (that being a general "you", whomever it is suggesting this) want to say that it was necessary to replace the music because of American kids and whatever, I'm then saying you might as well take it all the way and go out and just flat out call them idiots and suggest that it wouldn't matter if it was random noise filling up the space

A person saying the FUNI dub did better because of a American's preference to the Falconer music. Since you said you aren't implying the kids are dumb, you are saying the music is "dumb". That replacing the music is dumbing it down for the viewer... Right? Otherwise I don't know what you are getting at.

[Kuwabara]

I don't know what you mean by time and region aren't important in this context. I don't think I said no one notices music, simply that it's hardly the deciding factor in why anyone watches a show.

I don't think battle Power Infinity sounds cheap, and that was one song in a nearly 500 episodes that sounds synthesized. Faulconer's entire score sounds synthesized and more than that - cheap. It sounds like he made it in his basement.

Yu Yu Hakusho's score sounds nothing like Faulconer's. YYH had atmosphere and emotion and beauty. Faulconer's droned on and on. And the reason YYH kept its score isn't because it sounded like DBZ's. They kept it because people like Justin Cook went to bat to keep the show true to the original and not give it the "mass property" treatment. Mass property really meant talking down to the lowest common denominator. Why do you presume to know that synth music suited the target market? You know why the market changed? More and more shows kept the original score because they bucked the irrational trend. I don't know if you know this, but TV execs tend not to be creative and a tad on the dumb side. They constantly think their audience is dumber than it really is. Until then it was common practice to change things based on assumptions which I'm not sure were ever entirely backed up. And YYH didn't get released until 01/02, at least a full 2 years after DBZ season 3. In that time they had gotten a few series and most, if not all the others got better treatment. Let's forget music for a sec. As much as I dislike Faulconer's score, my biggest beef is the god awful scripts from that time. No other show they had got that treatment. The biggest difference between DBZ and a show like Blue Gender was DBZ was a mass property. Everything about DBZ during that time came off as amateurish, from the music, the writing, the acting, the home video releases... To me that says DBZ works pretty much regardless. The only way they could screw it up is by putting it in a terrible time slot.

You've only said that the UK dub changed the music but that's one out of how many places that kept it?

You once said my use of Batman The Animated Series wasn't a good example, could you elaborate?

It's more of a deciding factor than you and guys like VegettoEX give it credit for; just go on YouTube and type "dbz soundtrack" and tell me what you see. For tons of people, that is the score for DBZ. I never knew about Justin Cook's fight for a faithful representation of Yu Yu Hakusho in such detail, I'm glad he did because they made a sublime product in my mind. I'm not going to post a long list of shows with scores similar to Faulconer's, if you've watched lots of children's animated series you should already know of these and know why FUNimation changing the music based off this shouldn't be strange at all.

I was going to mention another dub that changed the music as well, but kei17/his brother (I forget which) doesn't seem to have the clip up on YouTube any more. If either of them read this, I'd love for it to be re-uploaded.

I don't think Batman: The Animated Series is a good example because once again, it's drastically different from DBZ (And much better off for it ). Obviously they're both children's animated action shows, but Batman has a considerably darker tone and aesthetic without even being as violent as DBZ is. DBZ is also more light hearted and adventurous. Even in it's most serious moments, I don't think DBZ ever vied for the subtlety and nuance most Batman episodes exude practically without even trying. The score was perfectly appropriate for the type of stories told, which goes back to what I've been saying all along; The Animated Series followed a precedent set by the Tim Burton film, any other type of music would have felt ill-suiting to viewers. At the time, FUNimation must have felt the same way about putting DBZ out with the original score. They instead opted to follow the precedent set by typical children's action series with similar scores, which I don't count things like Batman or Exosquad a part of. Would DBZ have done just as well or even better with the original music? Maybe, I have no idea for sure. But I more or less agree with Beji that replacing the score benefited FUNimation in terms of appealing to their core audience at the time. Again, I don't want to seem like I advocate or glorify their decisions, but to me it makes perfect sense why they did what they did.

[ABED]

I'm not going to make this all about the music because it's one part of their entire thoughts on who they were targeting. I don't think it's a coincidence that shows with scores kept in weren't dumbed down with terrible dialog, and horrible casting decisions. They wanted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. So what if something is what people expect? If all you do is give people what they expect, how can you do anything new or surprising? For crying out loud, the same people who decided Yamcha was a surfer, Bulma was a valley, and Freeza was overly sexual were the one's making decisions about what the music was. Unfortunately I can't find it, but there are interviews where FUNi execs talk about their approach to writing for children and it's very patronizing.

I've read comments in some dark corners of the internet that amount to the same arguments in favor of the techno/rock music, that by changing the dialog, they made it more accessible for kids and thus mroe successful. I'm not arguing that the score wasn't a success and people didn't like. Sure they did, but is that why they watched? It's not about having more revenue streams, it really is about the product as a whole and DBZ was less because of the changes. It's arguable that the music Faulconer wrote was what 90s kids were looking for (I was a 90s kid as well), but the show suffered as a result of all the changes made. In some ways the music fit the show they had created but it was a mangled version of the show. While the voice cast would still be green, if the director was good and the scripts were accurate, it wouldn't take that long to get the performances up to snuff. If the rest of the show had been accurate, I think the music would've been a huge clash with the rest of it.

Also, internet message boards, especially youtube's, aren't indicative of anything. You can find just about anyone who likes anything. There are people out there who actually enjoyed the horrible dialog FUNi wrote.