Jerome Mazandarani pays tribute to Akira Toriyama and some words on Manga UK's legacy with Dragon Ball

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Jerome Mazandarani wrote:

RIP Toriyama-sensei. for all the fun, joy and excitement you and your creations have gifted so many of us.

This comes from the former head of marketing and acquisitions of Manga UK (now known as Crunchyroll) who was responsible for the company bringing Dragon Ball to home video in the UK and Ireland in 2012 after a failed attempt by Warner Vision in 2003, which was a VHS and DVD release of 3 Big Green dub movies. Since then the series has sold very well for the company, and following the release of Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, original Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Kai, Dragon Ball Super and all the movies followed.

Of course not everyone was happy with how Manga UK handled Dragon Ball, they rarely authored their own DVDs or Blu-Rays and generally repackaged Madman Entertainment or Funimation's releases, the exception for their Dragon Ball releases was of course Super Broly, which was outsourced to Visual Data London, although they did a great job putting together a disc with no green tint, hard on hearing subtitles amongst other things.

Nonetheless I'd like to take this moment to think about it from Manga UK's perspective as I understand why they might have played it a bit safer than we would have liked them to as fans by talking about some behind the scenes stuff I learned from a reliable source. For those unaware Manga UK's original plan when they were bringing Dragon Ball Z to home video was to include the Saban and Westwood dubs as additional audio tracks and use it as a major selling point, but they weren't aware these were edited products and because the higher-ups wanted a bilingual release for a flagship property so it never came to pass. Something Justin Sevakis mentioned in a blog we need to take into consideration when it comes to working in the anime industry is that new ideas and ambitious projects are seldom approved for various reasons including licensor restrictions and budgetary limitations and that approvals can take weeks or months if you get an answer at all.

In this respect I think Manga UK deserve the credit for considering the idea, and for Jerome being ambitious more generally, for his desire to take the company in new directions, like co-producing Cannon Busters and optioning the Wayward comic series for a potential anime or live action series. Suffice to say Jerome left Manga UK and since then with the rebrand to Funimation and later Crunchyroll we have not seen the same level of promise or initiative and even less has been released physically. I'm not saying Jerome was directly responsible for the company's string of more interesting projects being short-lived or that it was his idea for the Canadian dubs to be released (that I did not ask about, but I know there was plans nonetheless) but that Manga UK deserve respect for what they wanted to do with Dragon Ball.

Another factor to consider is that the physical media business is particularly challenging because of BBFC costs, even more so for relatively niche industries like anime. Dragon Ball Z cost Manga UK £6 per minute to even release for 291 episodes, and then there's extra costs like getting the license from TOEI, authoring, packaging and it all begins to add up very quickly.

Anyone who listened to the old Manga UK podcasts knows Jerome thought long and hard about the release process and the initial deal with TOEI, which took 5 years to work out was exclusively for Dragon Ball Z and the remastered, uncut DVDs. Jerome also admitted TOEI were a particular licensing partner with high standards and Manga UK had to prove they were the right distributor for them to trust. Manga UK's costs were also double for separate releases, which would need to be BBFCed twice, adding pressure for the first release to overperform (this was mentioned in relation to them doing sub-only releases and then re-releasing Blue Exorcist when a dub becomes available but it can also apply to the Canadian dubs as its a similar scenario with one dub/sub-only release being followed by an uncut one).

So in short I'd like to take this moment to thank Manga UK for finally making Dragon Ball available on home video in the UK and Ireland, and for Jerome's tribute in a long line of many in the past few days to the great Akira Toriyama.

[Vorige Waffe]

Interesting reading how much Dragon Ball meant for latter day Manga UK. It's hard to view Dragon Ball as being quintessential for Manga considering that company's "glory days" were more based off the early 90s and them licensing movies like Project A-Ko and Ninja Scroll or short OAVs like Dominion Tank Police and Cyber City Oedo. Hell, when Dragon Ball "truly" arrived in the states via Funimation and their first middling syndication attempt in 1995, Manga dropped what could be considered their last "big" magnum opus, Ghost in the Shell. After that, the company would slowly flounder (with both US and UK divisions basically splintering off as different companies, but not really) as other companies like Pioneer/Geneon, Bandai Entertainment, ADV, and even Funimation would gain traction. By the time DBZ was an international hit in the late 90s/early 00, Manga Video (and other companies of their ilk like Central Park Media) were no longer top dogs as fans were more invested in anime TV series as opposed to OVAs.

Luckily, the UK division did more or less build itself back up thanks to them licensing shonen hits like Naruto for the UK market, as well as Dragon Ball. It sucks Jerome couldn't get those Westwood dubs out, as I'm sure the UK/Euro fans would've appreciated it, instead of just having a PAL conversion of Funimation's Frankensteined modern dub track.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

Luckily, the UK division did more or less build itself back up thanks to them licensing shonen hits like Naruto for the UK market, as well as Dragon Ball. It sucks Jerome couldn't get those Westwood dubs out, as I'm sure the UK/Euro fans would've appreciated it, instead of just having a PAL conversion of Funimation's Frankensteined modern dub track.

Yeah, Jerome said Manga UK had their first meeting with Viz in 2006 and from that point were offered a deal for Bleach, which led to them being able to license many more of their titles for the UK market, such as Naruto, which you mentioned. Similarly Jerome said recently on Linkedin the initial Dragon Ball deal established a long lasting friendship between himself and the team at TOEI Europe, which also allowed Manga UK to connect with Funimation and become their exclusive UK distributor on many other popular titles. Prior to Dragon Ball, Naruto was a major seller for Manga UK though, as they were able to shift more than 350,000 copies of it in their first 6 years since licensing it, although Jerome said it was mostly younger customers who purchased it that weren't your typical Blu-Ray buyers so he didn't see them releasing the series as feasible (which they never did, but luckily Anime Limited are bringing the series to HD this year).

I'd be interested to know whether Manga UK's Dragon Ball releases skewed younger or older though. I'm guessing there was a lot of younger fans that purchased their orange bricks as the older fans had already imported, and their other releases had a greater share of adult buyers. They were confident enough to release Kai on Blu-Ray less than three years after Z, Jerome once said on Twitter that didn't sell well although I've often seen several volumes of it in Amazon UK's top 100 anime so I wonder if it was a slow burner, I noticed towards the end of their lifetime they were mostly releasing Blu-Rays with fewer and fewer titles being DVD-only, so authoring costs and format uptake must have improved dramatically over the years since they first licensed Dragon Ball Z in 2012.

Jerome mentioned in a Manga UK podcast 6 months after they released Dragon Ball Z season 1 that 5,000 copies were sold in that time, which I'd assume grew considerably over time. Various of the orange bricks have been in the Amazon top 100 selling anime from what I've seen over the years, so I feel they did incredibly well despite the US versions being heavily imported.

With regard to the Westwood dub I also suspect that the misconception it was produced by AB Groupe didn't help matters either since Jerome said at one point on his deactivated Twitter account Manga UK wouldn't release it because of "rights complications". I also know from someone that called Ocean Studios a few years back and was told by a senior figure that the company could arrange for whatever was needed rather simply if any distributor approached them with the intent of making their old dubs (which they still at that point still owned all the master tapes too, likely on digital beta) commercially available quite easily. There was never any red tape, rights issues, etc. So Manga UK could have negotiated with Ocean to acquire the Westwood dub (with approval from TOEI, which I doubt would have been an issue) any time it was seen as economically viable for them to do so.

It was also nice to hear that Dragon Ball is Jerome's son's all-time favourite anime and they were able to share a love of the franchise through various episodes, manga volumes, video games, cinema trips and convention visits. No doubt the loss of Toriyama has been challenging for them both.