Dragon Ball Distilled (Or “Yet another recut of the show”)

[SaiyamanMS]

Dragon Ball Distilled is a fan edit of the original Dragon Ball, inspired by the One Piece fan project One Pace and Dragon Ball Recut by IAmTheMilkman.

While I love the work of the Milkman, I feel that his cut didn’t always go as far as it could have in shaving out the show’s filler. (As of the end of the 21st Tenkaichi Budokai, my cut is somehow a full hour shorter than his to that point.) I started this project using Seed of Might’s colour corrected footage a little over two years ago and have been working on it on and off ever since.

Shortly after I finished the Goku vs. Ma Junior fight at the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai, Seed of Might released their version 2 colour correction, leading me to want to update the footage. What was originally intended to be a cut and paste of switching one source of footage with the other, has ended up with me starting work on a full second pass of the series, making additional cuts (or occasionally reverting cuts) where appropriate.

This second pass has currently just completed the 21st Tenkaichi Budokai, and I feel that I’m at a point where I’m ready to release an initial batch to the public. Also included in this batch is a bonus episode comprised of the Pilaf Gang’s filler misadventures prior to their canon debut.

I’ve put a lot of effort into supporting both the original Japanese version and English dub for this cut, including replacing some dub dialogue (and occasionally even tinkering with the Japanese audio) with more accurate dialogue from other sources. (Such as The Path to Power, Revenge of King Piccolo and Kakarot’s 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai DLC.)

I’d like to thank Seed of Might for their color corrected footage and broadcast audio, Kenisu and Blade for their BGM documentation, AnimeMaakuo for their trove of high quality BGM and the Sounds Resource for some video game audio.

This has been a one woman endeavour, so if there’s anything that sticks out as an issue, please do not hesitate to point it out. (I’ve tried to be as careful as possible, keeping the original Japanese manga open throughout my editing to make sure I remain as faithful to the source material, panel by panel, as plausible.)

If you’re interested in checking out the project, feel to to send me a PM and I’ll hook you up with the first 21 episodes (plus bonus Pilaf episode) of the edit.

TL;DR

- New recut of Dragon Ball
- Dragon Ball Hunt, Kamesennin Training and 21st Tenkaichi Budokai available now.
- Dual audio, Japanese and English.
- Some dub dialogue is replaced with more accurate dialogue.
- Send me a PM for how to watch.

[Metalwario64]

Man we are eating good with Dragon Ball recuts. Milkman himself is making a v3 of his DB recut so just.. this is all so cool to see! So... were you able to fix the scene where kid ChiChi asks Goku to take her as his bride?

[SaiyamanMS]

So... were you able to fix the scene where kid ChiChi asks Goku to take her as his bride?

Yeah, I managed to improve that scene with a combination of dialogue from filler episodes and Budokai Tenkaichi 3.

[sangofe]

Sub version ? Will there be a new HD version using neo-raws and AB?

[SaiyamanMS]

Sub version ? Will there be a new HD version using neo-raws and AB?

Yep, it’s got subs. I retimed the stylised subtitles from Seed of Might’s release to match the edits. I might consider a HD version down the line, I haven’t seen Neo-Raws version. That said, I think the Seed of Might version is a sufficiently high quality source for the time being.

[SaiyamanMS]

I also posted this edit on the r/fanedits subreddit, and I’ve received a review of the first arc from one of my viewers already. Link to the original review here.

If you're a fan of Dragon Ball, particularly the OG, you need to see this ASAP.

Every once in a while, someone will try their own hand at editing Dragon Ball Z and the original Dragon Ball to cut down on filler. Dragon Ball Distilled is another such effort. What drew me to this project is that, unlike Milkman's Dragon Ball Recut, Arale-Chan went out of their way to use pieces from other Dragon Ball media, like the Path to Power movie or Revenge of Piccolo game, to make the English Dub dialogue more faithful to the Japanese script whenever possible. I can definitely tell you, having just seen the initial Dragon Ball Hunt arc, that it is a largely successful venture, with some very minor caveats.

The footage, as said in Arale's description of Distilled, uses the up-to-date Seed of Might revised editions of the episodes, which not only is higher in quality but comes with color correction applied to better match the original intention. Distilled comes with Japanese and English audio tracks, with english subtitles. This is the first time I've ever been able to directly compare the Dub to the Subtitles directly. As expected from the time, Funimation took liberties with the script, some of which were questionable in nature. I'll say that, at least compared to Z, the Dub script seemed to make more of an effort to keep to the spirit of the characters (though some moments like Oolong lamenting that Yamcha's too strong while smiling are definitely still egregious). I like this bit where Goku's all like "Grandpa said that magic should only be used to help people" and Bulma responds with "I am helping someone, she's pretty and has blue hair" that's not faithful to the script, but is a very Bulma line that I like. In my honest opinion some jokes, like the new running gag where Goku wants to help Bulma get a tail, are funnier than the sub. I should also mention that Arale-Chan's episodes also come with subtitles for the in-episode text as well, so that's great.

You can tell as early as the first episode that things are different. It's not just that Arale removed extra dialogue Funimation added for no reason, but the opening narration is different (no longer about Grandpa Gohan but a more vague "beginning of legend" speech), the fish is talking, and instead of Mai explaining the Dragon Balls, we have Bulma does it like in the manga using dialogue from Path to Power. The replacement dialogue is mostly integrated smoothly, like they had always existed. You can hear a subtle difference when it happens if you're using airpods, but this is not going to be an issue at all. Arale-Chan's episodes are irregular in length, some being 18 minutes and others nearly thirty, which is probably good for their pacing. A lot of Pilaf Gang to stretch the original episodes out, which is not inherently bad, but because of that Arale-Chan needed to readjust the pacing accordingly which I think they did great with.

I do have some nitpicks though. While Arale-Chan is generally good about preserving the pace of an episode, there are a couple of points where filler cutting causes some falters. I'm thinking of when Goku's leaving Gohan's house to look for fish in Episode 1, Arale-Chan cut out the Dragon Ball glowing but because there's no lingering or real exit the next scene is abrupt. Another instance, in episode 2 Bulma switches the TV channel from a man badly playing guitar to some kind of romance film. She initially gets into it demanding the leads kiss, by which point Goku switches channels to a monster movie that scares her. The edit keeps the romance movie, but removes Bulma's reaction, which messes up the joke. For Episode 10, while there probably wasn't a great way to handle Pilaf's recapturing the gang when they mess up the Dragon Balls, I feel like Arale-Chan could get away with removing 5:02-5:13, since leaving in Oolong and Puar running away with that music creates the impression there's a bigger scene coming up that simply doesn't happen. In terms of audio, there is a point in 11:07 Episode 1 where you can hear a cut since the Path to Power audio is directly from the movie rather than just the lines which is also there if not as pronounced in the Japanese version. It's weird, Arale-Chan showed they were capable of replacing dialogue in other instances but why not that scene?

Luckily, those instances were not all that common. Dragon Ball Distilled is a labor of love and effort any Dragon Ball fan can get behind. I can't wait to see every single episode of this project, please go see it now! Arale-Chan has episodes up to the 21st Tenkaichi Budokai arc, with more to follow so keep an eye out!

[Hydrus]

You should make a Discord server for this project!

[sangofe]

Sub version ? Will there be a new HD version using neo-raws and AB?

Yep, it’s got subs. I retimed the stylised subtitles from Seed of Might’s release to match the edits. I might consider a HD version down the line, I haven’t seen Neo-Raws version. That said, I think the Seed of Might version is a sufficiently high quality source for the time being.

Hopefully you do upgrade.

[PeteOfDawn]

This seems really promising. I've been meaning to find recut of Dragon Ball to watch with my partner. And I just can't go back to Milkman with his outdated Dragon Box footage. So I saw you make a post about this on the DBZ Recut discord.

The part about this that caught my attention the most was replacing some of the dialogue. Now I don't know how much you plan on replacing but I was a bit concerned this might cause too many differences in audio quality and mixing. So I skimmed to the clip of the Goku Chi Chi marriage scene. And yeah it's not perfect. Chi Chi dialogue doesn't exactly flow well with the stitching and the car sound fluctuates. If you need help with that kind of audio stitching I might be able to help out. As I would like a version of Dragon Ball in english with the really egregious changes like that gone.

I'm not sure how well Kakarot DLC audio will work since a lot of the actors either changed or sound different than they used to. And the whole audio quality thing but maybe it can work. But I guess we'll see when we get there.

[SaiyamanMS]

Most of the dialogue replacements are for instances where the dub completely rewrites the dialogue, unfortunately not every instance of bad dialogue is replaceable due to a lack of alternative dialogue to replace it with. I’ve also gone out of my way to cut most of the dialogue that is added unnecessarily in scenes where there was originally no dialogue.

Chi Chi’s proposal at the beginning of the series is one of the rougher dialogue replacements, as I didn’t have a straight up accurate source of replacement dialogue, so I cobbled her lines together from her later filler scenes.

It’s been a while since I did the first draft of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai, and I’m a while off from revisiting those episodes. But I’m pretty sure that all the dialogue I used from Kakarot was from characters who haven’t been recast and largely sound similar enough to their previous performances. (Schemmel’s Goku, Sabat’s Piccolo and Kami, Kent Williams’ Tao Pai Pai.)