MangaUK Licenses Dragon Ball Z Kai for DVD & Blu-ray

[Solidus]

Preorders to be up soon according to their twitter.

Boxart:

Spoiler:

[Lord Beerus]

IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME!!!

[DBZ_Lee]

Finally! I take it they are doing this over 4 seasons, like FUNi?. Though I do know Madman made an error on some eyecatches.

Still well overdue though, good news.

[90sDBZ]

Cool! I was hoping they'd finally announce the movies but it'll be good to finally watch Kai Uncut and in HD.

[Theophrastus]

The timing of this kind of feels like there was a sudden realization of "Oh crap, a NEW Dragon Ball series? And we haven't even released Kai on disc here yet?! fuckfuckfuck ANNOUNCEMENT TIME GO, SOMEONE GET ON THE PHONE WITH FUNIMATION AND TOEI."

[ShadowDude112]

So, I saw this on twitter and got really confused. I thought it was a retweet from years ago, but this is just happening? Isn't MangaUK like, 5 years late on Kai?

[LostTimeLord]

When I just saw this announcement I though they were talking about The Final Chapters... then I remembered that we never actually got Kai on DVD over here. It's nice that this is finally coming out though. Hopefully Manga will just be porting over FUNimation/Madman's discs, as recently they've had a lot of problems authoring their own stuff.

[Vegard Aune]

Hopefully Manga will just be porting over FUNimation/Madman's discs, as recently they've had a lot of problems authoring their own stuff.

From what I can tell, it's not exactly a recent phenomenon either. Literally every Manga UK release I own, except Summer Wars (which was a direct port of the US-release only with the region-code changed), has some sort of flaw that was not present on the US release. Mostly it involves the subtitles being messed up in some fashion. Naruto? Really bad and inconsistent translation. Freedom? Dubtitles + the audio being completely out-of-sync for episode 4. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time? The occasional lines that just aren't subtitled at all. Not just inconsequential background-chatter, mind you, actual important dialogue that we are clearly supposed to hear. Attack on Titan is probably the worst case though, where the subtitles are just consistently showing translations that are either somewhat accurate but get the nuances wrong somehow, or are just flat-out not what the characters were saying at all. I can't even bear to watch AoT with the subtitles turned on, because they are so glaringly terrible that they completely take me out of the experience.

...Bottomline is I have absolutely zero trust in Manga UK's ability to deliver a quality project on their own. It's gotten to the point where I now basically refuse to buy anything from them unless it's a direct port of the US/AU-releases. Which is really inconvenient because the Australian releases are considerably more expensive...

[Baggie_Saiyan]

Hmm, well I only really need S3&4, so I guess I will wait for Manga to release them. I do wish they would have announced the movies instead. But this is progress at least.

[LostTimeLord]

From what I can tell, it's not exactly a recent phenomenon either. Literally every Manga UK release I own, except Summer Wars (which was a direct port of the US-release only with the region-code changed), has some sort of flaw that was not present on the US release.

True, back in 2006 Manga gave us Naruto subtitles which directly referred to instant ramen as "Pot Noodle". I think the problem recently though is that Manga have started authoring their own discs more and more; I think that in the past Manga would have just copied FUNi's discs for Attack On Titan. Did the UK Battle Of Gods have have FUNi's subtitles or Manga's own?
It odd that Manga wouldn't just take the existing PAL discs. Then again, Manga authored their own discs for One Piece Movie 8 years after FUNi/Madman had their release (albeit originally as part of a set with movies that weren't released in the USA/AU).
If Manga do use Madman's masters would they be the Yamamoto soundtrack or the Kikuchi soundtrack? Did Madman ever re-author their discs with the replacement score?

[Vegard Aune]

Did the UK Battle Of Gods have have FUNi's subtitles or Manga's own?

I tried to ask about this a while back... didn't get a definitive answer on the quality of the subtitles, but Manga apparently did their own translation. This, coupled with the fact that they pulled that nonsense about removing on-disc extras just so that they could then put them on a separate disc that's only available in the more expensive special edition (and the Japanese audio supposedly being stereo only, even for the theatrical cut) has led me to conclude that their release of Battle of Gods is not worth my money. Oh sure, for all I know the subtitles could be just fine and I'll probably only watch the extended cut which didn't have a Japanese 5.1 track to begin with anyway, but just on principle, I can't bring myself to support any release of theirs that pulls this sort of thing. AoT just destroyed any remaining good will I had towards the company.

As for the soundtrack, it'll almost certainly be the Kikuchi-score. They probably wouldn't even be allowed to use the Yamamoto one.

[Theophrastus]

...Why would MangaUK even go to the trouble of doing their own translation from scratch? I know American English and British English have various differences between them, which might warrant some minor tweaks, but I would think they aren't nearly major enough to justify scrapping the existing subtitle track entirely.

[LostTimeLord]

A part of me wonders if Manga might release the Yamamoto version by mistake through using Madman's masters.
I mean, I get the impression that something like that happened with 'Curse Of The Blood Rubies' turning up on the UK "season One" set; Manga didn't announce that they'd licensed movie 1 and only seemed to acknowledge that it was in the set until pretty near its release, and it was clearly only there as an artifact from Madman's release. They didn't even mention the fact that the first movie was included when they released their season by season breakdown. Or maybe I'm talking complete nonsense.
Apparently Madman's complete set in 2012 still had some of the Yamamoto stuff in it (http://www.kanzenshuu.com/forum/viewtop ... 20#p710240), but again that might be me jumping to conclusions. I'll be interested to see how this release turns out, although I'm definatly going to be waiting for reviews before I pre-order it.

[LostTimeLord]

...Why would MangaUK even go to the trouble of doing their own translation from scratch?

Presumably in the cases of 'DBZ: Battle Of Gods' and 'Attack On Titan' it was a case of wanting to release the sets before the US subs were available to them; Then again, AOT had a simulcast, so presumably they could have taken the subs from there, and the Netflix version seems to be FUNi's translation. That doesn't explain the One Piece example though, as the US DVD had been out for six years and yet they still chose to translate it themselves; they had the dub and English logo from FUNi's version and yet they used a totally different subtitle translation and even marketed the film under the Japanese title.
It doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

[Saago]

Out of curiosity: when you criticize those subtitles, are we talking about "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" levels of bad or "just" not particularly good translations with inaccurate lines here and there? The subtitles in the UK Blu-Ray edition of Innocence were oustandingly bad; I checked them for like 20 minutes of the movie and I think in that time there wasn't a single line that made sense. I hope that's not a recurrent thing?

[Vegard Aune]

Out of curiosity: when you criticize those subtitles, are we talking about "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" levels of bad or "just" not particularly good translations with inaccurate lines here and there? The subtitles in the UK Blu-Ray edition of Innocence were oustandingly bad; I checked them for like 20 minutes of the movie and I think in that time there wasn't a single line that made sense. I hope that's not a recurrent thing?

Wouldn't know, as I've never seen those particular subtitles. For Attack on Titan though, the subtitles would probably make sense... it's just that they're constantly saying the wrong thing. The problems range from minor nuance-differences to "Okay I'm hearing one thing here and the subtitles are saying something entirely different." One example that stands out to me is in one scene in episode... 9, I think, where

Spoiler:

Eren, having been recently discovered to be able to transform into a titan, is asked what he really is... He responds that he's human, but the guy asking orders him executed anyway. What he actually says is "I see... Don't think badly of me. After all, nobody can actually prove that they're not the devil." What Manga's subtitles say is, "When push comes to shove, we're all monsters."

That's not actually the worst thing I've seen either though, just the first one that came to mind. Now, if this was just an occasional thing that would be one thing, but no, whenever I try to turn the subtitles on, I find that like every other line is off to some extent, and there seems to be at least one major mistranslation a minute.

...That said though, this is just for Attack on Titan. I don't know if Manga's own subtitles for Battle of Gods were this bad, and for all we know they might just repackage Madman's sets for Kai in which case the subtitles would be perfectly fine I guess. I'm basically just saying... tread carefully. I would not be the least bit surprised if they mess this release up somehow. (And heck, even with Dragon Ball, where they did just repackage Madman's discs, that still resulted in a blatantly flawed release... because Madman's release of the Uranai Baba episodes had that encoding-glitch that of course neither Madman nor Manga ever bothered to correct... Generally though, Madman's track-record seems to be considerably better than Manga UK's.)

[dbboxkaifan]

Manga UK is only late 5 years. Sure they were also late to get Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT out in UK but Kai shouldn't have took so freaking long given that they were handling the DB franchise so quickly.

I'm sure there'll be customers who'll buy it but most already watched it ages ago and if they purchased then it was the Japanese edition or FUNimation's releases.

[90sDBZ]

Manga UK is only late 5 years. Sure they were also late to get Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT out in UK but Kai shouldn't have took so freaking long given that they were handling the DB franchise so quickly.

I'm sure there'll be customers who'll buy it but most already watched it ages ago and if they purchased then it was the Japanese edition or FUNimation's releases.

They couldn't exactly release Kai right after releasing Z. For one thing they first had to prove to Toei that the franchise could sell here after so many years. And releasing the same portion of the story twice in too short a period of time would be repeating Funimation's mistake of saturating the market.

And Z sold really well over here despite being largely imported beforehand. I remember it consistently topping the anime charts, beating out the likes of One Piece and Naruto. And you have to remember that Funimation's DVD release of Kai is Region 1 only, so people would either have to have imported it on Blu-ray or got a multi-region DVD player. And it's pretty surprising how few people have a multi-region player. And the Japanese release lacks subtitles and a dub track.

[dbboxkaifan]

The whole purpose of watching Kai is to see it in HD so DVD defeats the point of it.

[Puto]

Adding onto the 'Manga subtitle trainwreck' thing, Manga's subtitles for the One Piece movies, while being for the most part accurate (as far as my limited Japanese can tell, anyway), suffered from a very serious lack of consistency. Most movies had Zoro, but one of them had Zolo. For the main character's Devil Fruit, some of the movies use Rubber-Rubber, some use Gum-Gum, and some leave GOMU GOMU NO untranslated, in all caps. And their translations of We Are, Believe and Memories were also completely inconsistent with their sets for the series (which had just recycled FUNi's translations).