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