Are There Any Updates On The Harmony Gold Dub Of Dragon Ball?

[MasenkoHA]

And of course the “Bulma finds her panties, figures out what Goku did and shoots at him” scene is completely removed. I think the 1995 (and probably edited 2001 dub) kept some of the footage and had her annoyed he put some ants in her drawers to save for later.

The Toonami airing in 2001 cut the scene entirely. I remember people commenting how it looked funny that Goku mysteriously appeared with bullet holes in the next shot.

I know they removed Bulma discovering her panties, showing Goku being carefree about it and then Bulma shooting at him was cut but didn’t they keep some of the footage of her being mad and Goku being pleased with himself? The BLT dub worked around it so Bulma found ants in her drawer and Goku was saving them for later or something and they removed the panties and machine gun bit and I figured the Toonami edit did the same.

[DrBriefsCat]

Also, i looked and Yamcha/Zedaki clawing Goku/Zero with the Roga Fu Fu Ken (Wolf Fang Fist) and him getting eye poked by Goku's Jan Ken Pon attack a bit later was left intact unlike the BLT dub and maybe the edited version of the 2001 dub where those scenes were cut out.

While I can't say for certain, I have a vague memory the edited Toonami airing in 2001 left in the shot of Yamucha getting poked in the eyes. I recall a lot of the violence that had been previously edited in the BLT version had been put back in for the Toonami airings of the first 13 episodes. However, scenes with blood sprays (like when Goku kills the sword-wielding bear) were still edited.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

Also, i looked and Yamcha/Zedaki clawing Goku/Zero with the Roga Fu Fu Ken (Wolf Fang Fist) and him getting eye poked by Goku's Jan Ken Pon attack a bit later was left intact unlike the BLT dub and maybe the edited version of the 2001 dub where those scenes were cut out.

While I can't say for certain, I have a vague memory the edited Toonami airing in 2001 left in the shot of Yamucha getting poked in the eyes. I recall a lot of the violence that had been previously edited in the BLT version had been put back in in the Toonami airings of the first 13 episodes. However, scenes with blood sprays (like when Goku kills the sword-wielding bear) were still edited.

I know it's been a long time but i also do recall the Rock-Paper-Scissors bit being there in the Toonami broadcast, however the other scene where Yamcha strikes Goku a few times before knocking him into the rocks was still cut apparently.

[DrBriefsCat]

Also, i looked and Yamcha/Zedaki clawing Goku/Zero with the Roga Fu Fu Ken (Wolf Fang Fist) and him getting eye poked by Goku's Jan Ken Pon attack a bit later was left intact unlike the BLT dub and maybe the edited version of the 2001 dub where those scenes were cut out.

While I can't say for certain, I have a vague memory the edited Toonami airing in 2001 left in the shot of Yamucha getting poked in the eyes. I recall a lot of the violence that had been previously edited in the BLT version had been put back in in the Toonami airings of the first 13 episodes. However, scenes with blood sprays (like when Goku kills the sword-wielding bear) were still edited.

I know it's been a long time but i also recall the Rock-Paper-Scissors being there in the Toonami broadcast, however the other bit where Yamcha strikes Goku a few times before knocking him into the rocks was still cut apparently.

That's possible.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

While I can't say for certain, I have a vague memory the edited Toonami airing in 2001 left in the shot of Yamucha getting poked in the eyes. I recall a lot of the violence that had been previously edited in the BLT version had been put back in in the Toonami airings of the first 13 episodes. However, scenes with blood sprays (like when Goku kills the sword-wielding bear) were still edited.

I know it's been a long time but i also recall the Rock-Paper-Scissors being there in the Toonami broadcast, however the other bit where Yamcha strikes Goku a few times before knocking him into the rocks was still cut apparently.

That's possible.

Again, that was many moons ago when i saw it (around late 2001/early 2002) but it seems some bits which had been previously cut out from the BLT dub were put back apparently.

[DrBriefsCat]

And of course the “Bulma finds her panties, figures out what Goku did and shoots at him” scene is completely removed. I think the 1995 (and probably edited 2001 dub) kept some of the footage and had her annoyed he put some ants in her drawers to save for later.

The Toonami airing in 2001 cut the scene entirely. I remember people commenting how it looked funny that Goku mysteriously appeared with bullet holes in the next shot.

I know they removed Bulma discovering her panties, showing Goku being carefree about it and then Bulma shooting at him was cut but didn’t they keep some of the footage of her being mad and Goku being pleased with himself? The BLT dub worked around it so Bulma found ants in her drawer and Goku was saving them for later or something and they removed the panties and machine gun bit and I figured the Toonami edit did the same.

I don't remember the ants in her pants line being in the Toonami version. This post on AnimeSuperHero has a detailed edit list for the first three episodes of the Toonami airing: https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threa ... s.4240041/ and describes what was cut from that scene.

[Planetnamek]

After seeing all those edits for episode 5, i'm starting to think it wasn't just low ratings that made HG give up on DB, they might've just balked at the content of future episodes and decided not to continue.

[KBABZ]

After seeing all those edits for episode 5, i'm starting to think it wasn't just low ratings that made HG give up on DB, they might've just balked at the content of future episodes and decided not to continue.

I agree. With the editing tools at their disposal (ie, reworked script and video cuts only), I don't blame Harmony for feeling that Playboy Lena would have been impossible to edit (ESPECIALLY with all of Episode 6's antics) that would have meant cutting her character out entirely for a whole episode, or making an episode so short the ad breaks were half the length of the show's timeslot, which is unacceptable except for Oscars and Olympics broadcasts.

[Robo4900]

Really happy the episodes are available period, so I can deal with the quality not being top-notch.

Yes, you personally are okay to enjoy them in this format, but again, you would probably also be okay if the broadcast audio had been 96kbps MP3 files. Still not even close to being an acceptable format to preserve these things in. In fact, it's about the worst it could be, sadly.

Handbrake can be a useful tool and it does not always make things look bad, i've used it myself with pretty good success to rip Knights of the Zodiac episodes onto the Internet Archive from the DVDs and it looks pretty good IMO.

It's a useful tool for making big files smaller if you don't know how to use more sophisticated encoding software. But it should not be even vaguely involved in any kind of preservation effort; if making files small is a priority in preserving something, you don't understand what preserving means.

Though, I did PM Tom Servo, and he told me Handbrake is not involved; the guy captured it via an EasyCap to OBS at 800x600, then used Adobe Premiere to split it up into parts... Which is pretty much just as bad as what I thought tbh... Hopefully this can be resolved with a better cap at a decent bitrate, and either not split up, or split up losslessly with something like MKVToolNix.

^We're still missing Episode 71 from the Blue Water dub, DB Big Green Movies 1-3, and the Big Green GT Special. Apparently there's an Animax dub of DB as well.

Correct.

I suppose I should say at this juncture that I was told by a certain member of this community that they had located Big Green DB 1-3 and the GT special, recorded from DVDR, and they provided evidence enough for me to believe them, and gave me permission to share these with some efforts once they'd sent it along to me (in particular, I told my friends in GTeam that I'd be providing them with this stuff), but this person has yet to deliver, and it's been a few weeks, and they're barely acknowledging my messages anymore, so... Make of that what you will.

But, assuming they deliver eventually, you'll have them to thank when you enjoy this stuff.
DB 71... I know of one collector who may have it, but they refuse to share anything, so... We'll just have to hope some other collector got a copy.

Animax DB... I really hope that turns up one day, but I've never found a single lead on it. Tian of these forums said they'd try to search foreign torrent trackers to find uploads, but it's a pot shot. We'll see what happens.

As reminder for capturing VHS footage: you need a VCR with S-video output so as not to further compress the video. Capture the video raw to your hard-drive, and then attempt an inverse telecine on the raw video. Make sure the audio tracks with the video. Last of all encode it to your target format for playback.

Underlined the good part. Yes, this is solid advice.
The red bold part -- HELL NO! NO! BAD IDEA!! Leave the video RAW. An '80s tape like this won't have completely straight telecine, and it will have elements that were created at native 30i (which should be deinterlaced to 60p), and because of general instability of the video, inverse telecine would yield horrible results, even if the pattern is straight 3:2 pulldown. You SHOULD NOT do ANY deinterlacing on this video. And you most certainly should not encode it. Upload it as raw as possible to minimise quality loss. Keep an encoded copy for yourself if you want it in a small, convenient file for playback, but preserve the raw, big, untouched file.

Really happy the episodes are available period, so I can deal with the quality not being top-notch. Handbrake can be a useful tool and it does not always make things look bad, i've used it myself with pretty good success to rip Knights of the Zodiac episodes onto the Internet Archive from the DVDs and it looks pretty good IMO.

It may have something to do with the quality of the source. A recording of a 30 year old TV broadcast, possibly done in EP/SLP speed, is not going to encode as well as something off a commercial release.

The quality of the source is not very good, but the capture is fucking atrocious, man. It's so low-bitrate, every frame looks like a JPEG, and the audio has been lossy encoded twice, both at low bitrates. This is pretty much a worst case scenario for a capture, excluding outright failure.
Again, this would most certainly just be an honest mistake, but it's a big mistake. The results are very poor.

[MasenkoHA]

After seeing all those edits for episode 5, i'm starting to think it wasn't just low ratings that made HG give up on DB, they might've just balked at the content of future episodes and decided not to continue.

That’s what I was thinking. Honestly, it never made any sense that they determined the show wasn’t good for ratings when they only showed it in a few cities.

Episode 6 probably would have been too much for them. Even the edited Funi dubs had to keep some of the content for it make sense.

[jjgp1112]

Yeah 9 year old me was surprised by how raunchy all that stuff was when I first saw it on Toonami, knowing it was edited down too. Episode 6 kept quite a bit of those antics...I honestly think the only things removed were naked Bulma, the part where Yamcha mistakenly squeezes her boobs and then they edited the shot of Yamchas eyes to look less like nipples.

[MasenkoHA]

Yeah 9 year old me was surprised by how raunchy all that stuff was when I first saw it on Toonami, knowing it was edited down too. Episode 6 kept quite a bit of those antics...I honestly think the only things removed were naked Bulma, the part where Yamcha mistakenly squeezes her boobs and then they edited the shot of Yamchas eyes to look less like nipples.

That reminds me of how Toonami managed to somehow keep the whole Roshi wants to spy on Bulma taking a piss in the bathroom using her shrinking wristband bit mostly intact.

No clue what Harmony Gold would have done or BLT for that matter.

[10gigtriforce]

haha yikes an ez-crap... that explains a lot...


Gonna echo the statements above and say yeah they probably dubbed 5 episodes + the movies for their pilot, looked ahead, then threw in the towel at episode 6, since just a few episodes away is/was bunny lena. And really I think I'm ok with that, since these were more heavily edited than FUNimation's 1995 original run, or the stuff they put on toonami(and maybe madman edited vhs?). So I'm not too upset these didnt continue, but I'm still curious how the whole series woulda gone and would have enjoyed an uncut version with these voices. At least they didnt fuck it up like funi did after their 13 episodes....


Still curious why they skipped move 2 though

[Zestanor]

Underlined the good part. Yes, this is solid advice.
The red bold part -- HELL NO! NO! BAD IDEA!! Leave the video RAW. An '80s tape like this won't have completely straight telecine, and it will have elements that were created at native 30i (which should be deinterlaced to 60p), and because of general instability of the video, inverse telecine would yield horrible results, even if the pattern is straight 3:2 pulldown. You SHOULD NOT do ANY deinterlacing on this video. And you most certainly should not encode it. Upload it as raw as possible to minimise quality loss. Keep an encoded copy for yourself if you want it in a small, convenient file for playback, but preserve the raw, big, untouched file.

Sure, keep the raw stuff as an archival copy on your hard-drive and watch it that way (if your video card can handle it). But you have to encode it or else it cannot be widely shared. Non-interlaced material always encodes better. I should have specified that the inverse telecine would be the hardest part, requiring lots of human control to detect hiccups in the 3:2 pattern. But for five episodes, it’s worth doing, since every frame of animation is in that tape somewhere, and it may as well be extracted. It’s not really interlaced material. And even if the fields don’t perfectly line up because it’s old VHS, it will still look better played back on an LCD monitor this way, and the encode will be better to boot.

Unless you all think there is something of value to be preserved in the particular telecine method that HG used 30 years ago?

[Robo4900]

Sure, keep the raw stuff as an archival copy on your hard-drive and watch it that way (if your video card can handle it). But you have to encode it or else it cannot be widely shared. Non-interlaced material always encodes better. I should have specified that the inverse telecine would be the hardest part, requiring lots of human control to detect hiccups in the 3:2 pattern. But for five episodes, it’s worth doing, since every frame of animation is in that tape somewhere, and it may as well be extracted. It’s not really interlaced material. And even if the fields don’t perfectly line up because it’s old VHS, it will still look better played back on an LCD monitor this way, and the encode will be better to boot.

Unless you all think there is something of value to be preserved in the particular telecine method that HG used 30 years ago?

You're completely missing the point of every part of this. The point is to preserve this, therefore the raw file should be shared. Failing to share the raw file would be either an act of malice or ignorance.
How would you feel if this had got out in 2003, and been encoded to the popular tastes of encoding of those days? We'd have a 320x240 DivX encode, maybe 50MB in size, MP3 audio?
All because, in 2003, someone would've thought "Why would I share the raw? I'll share this encode that's easier to watch and is nice and conveniently small." and probably just a few years later, maybe even a few weeks later, they'd delete the raw, because the person who ripped it doesn't care enough to use up that much space on their hard drive. And then all the people out there who do care are hung out to dry because this guy decided it wasn't worth sharing the raw.

When you're preserving something, you share the raw.
Obviously, it's good to share an encoded copy for people to casually watch, but there is no reason to hoard the raw. These days, people have hard drives in the terrabytes, and Dragon Ball fan projects are popping up everywhere; tons of people would be able to make use of the raw; the raw audio means you can sync and filter it without dealing with a layer of loss already inflicted, and the raw video means you're more able to make out stuff that's barely there for recreation/remaster efforts.
Even if you don't agree with these use cases being valid, the point is that the most obvious reasons not to share would be "It's too big" or "It's not useful", both of which are bullshit in 2020. Ultimately, it's not a question of "Why should the raw be shared?", it's a question of "Why shouldn't it?"
Because when you're sharing something rare like this, and you're sharing it in 2020, there is literally no reason to not share the raw.

As for deinterlacing vs IVTC; first off, the manual effort required to fix the IVTC phase would be ridiculous, second off, "if the fields don't perfectly line up because it's old VHS" is not a thing, never has been a thing, and never will be a thing, the only possible way the fields wouldn't line up is if something went wrong during capturing, or if you're capturing a PAL broadcast of something poorly converted from NTSC (or vice-versa). This is not that. Third, yes, it's not native interlaced for the main bulk of the episodes, but you'd honestly get better results just running a straight deinterlacer, and maybe decimating it. For an encode intended purely for casual viewing, that might work okay (and, if we're encoding, then that's ALL this will EVER be. An encode is NOT a preservation), but you'd have the problem that the title cards, eyecatches, etc. are most certainly native interlaced, so you'll be throwing out the only unique visual information this dub created.
Finally, progressive (non-interlaced) material encodes better because it's usually effectively half the framerate (or less) of interlaced material. But "encoding nicely" just means "it gives smaller/less-macroblocky results for the bitrate"... Which isn't something you're looking for in a preservation. A preservation shouldn't make a huge compromise like that just to save a tiny bit of disk space; again, that's for an encode for casual viewing.

To cap this off, ultimately, at the heart of this, there is a massive misunderstanding in your post that I feel should be pointed out:
There is literally no reason why there can't be a raw and an encode. The raw for collectors, faneditors, encoders, etc. etc., and an the encode for casual viewing for the next few years (until someone does a significantly better encode and/or a nice remaster, basically). Your post implies it's one or the other, which is a ridiculous mindset, and works completely counter to any idea of actually preserving the past. We can have it both ways, but you're saying it's a bad idea to do that, and we should limit ourselves. In 2020, for five episodes of this thing, that's completely crazy.

[Zestanor]

Yeah, I guess I just disagree that there’s a significant difference between a good encode and a raw transfer. Maybe 15 years ago encodes were a problem, but now they are good enough. (I never said dump the raw transfer though).

The substance of the HG dub is the audio and the cuts made to the video. The peculiarities of a particular wobbly VHS recording someone made on a VCR 30 years ago are accidental. If you want a ELP VHS quality copy of the first few episodes of Dragon Ball you don’t need to watch this to get it. That’s not what’s interesting about this.

[Robo4900]

Yeah, I guess I just disagree that there’s a significant difference between a good encode and a raw transfer. Maybe 15 years ago encodes were a problem, but now they are good enough.

The thing is, people 15 years ago thought things were "good enough" too.
And again, it's only "good enough" if your only intentions are to just watch it. For people who want to, say, do a fan "remaster", these encodes are a fucking nightmare to deal with, especially a few years down the line, when encoding has got so much better, and these old, shitty encodes are left in the dust.

(I never said dump the raw transfer though).

Having it sit on some guy's hard drive for all time is the same as dumping it, for all intents and purposes. Especially since, when a file like that is sitting on a hard drive with intentions of distribution, it WILL be dumped eventually.

The substance of the HG dub is the audio and the cuts made to the video. The peculiarities of a particular wobbly VHS recording someone made on a VCR 30 years ago are accidental. If you want a ELP VHS quality copy of the first few episodes of Dragon Ball you don’t need to watch this to get it. That’s not what’s interesting about this.

Correct, but the wobbly VHS is the format that this exists in. The original 60 fields per second are all distorted and messed-up from the broadcast and its recording. Yes, a lot of those fields that are sourced from the original animation are essentially redundant, but good luck recovering the original animation from that, especially since the poor quality of the tape and capture means we really want all the redundant information we can get so we can actually see the unique visuals like the OP/ED text, the eyecatch animation, etc.
If you're doing an encode, better to just deinterlace it to 60fps and present it in its fully wobbly glory rather than deal with trying to manually IVTC it and/or figure out weird decimation stuff. And again, you're completely missing the title cards, eyecatches, etc. which were most definitely natively interlaced, and thus should deinterlace to 60fps, rather than either be decimated or IVTC'd to 24fps. Much like the cuts and the unique dialogue and performances, these eyecatches and title cards are completely unique to this dub. And they exist as native interlaced content. And yet you're acting like they somehow don't matter at all?

I'm not saying I demand a higher quality tape of this appears out of thin air (though if someone has that, great!), and I'm not expecting it to look like a pristine ELP tape of the first few episodes recorded in 2000, that's entirely you putting words in my mouth and completely missing the point of what I'm intending to say; I'm saying that if someone has this tape and is willing to share, they should capture it in the highest quality possible so as to minimise damage to the footage, and they should share the raw capture for preservational and fanedit/fan remaster purposes. And when someone who claims to be trying to preserve this stuff fails to carry this out, I'm naturally going to advise them to do it right. Especially when the "preservation" is an honestly really shitty encode.

[Zestanor]

You overestimate how hard it would be to semi-automate an inverse telecine of the raw VHS capture back to 24p without frame duplicates, assuming its a straight 3:2 pulldown on there without any blending.

[eledoremassis02]

Since it seems that he only has an EZcap (yes it's better than nothing) why don't we put together some money so he can take it to get professionally digitized? I wouldn't be against another fan doing it, but given the rarity of the tapes themselves you don't want them to go missing or someone hoarding either the tapes or the files (as it would have to be a condition of doing the tapes, but it might not necessarily be followed) I'd even be up to giving Sabat or someone the files too so he can store them, not for use but preservation with the BA audio.

At the end of the day, I'm just glad I got to see the episodes and he took the time to give them to us to view, granted my excitement for the dubbed started to wane by mid-episode 3 lol

[Zestanor]

Since it seems that he only has an EZcap (yes it's better than nothing) why don't we put together some money so he can take it to get professionally digitized? I wouldn't be against another fan doing it, but given the rarity of the tapes themselves you don't want them to go missing or someone hoarding either the tapes or the files (as it would have to be a condition of doing the tapes, but it might not necessarily be followed)

At the end of the day, I'm just glad I got to see the episodes and he took the time to give them to us to view, granted my excitement for the dubbed started to wane by mid-episode 3 lol

It’s not hard to digitize a VHS properly using good amateur equipment (VCR with S-video out), and it’s that not hard to inverse-telecine telecined anime. Certainly the second thing anyone with a computer and some experience in video editing can do.

It would probably be a better idea to buy him a nice VCR and capture card than send it (dubious legality) to a professional,