Back in August, Manga UK had an “interesting” (for lack of a better phrase) back-and-forth with fans when listings for a Dragon Ball Z DVD release attributed to them was discovered on the British Board of Film Classification website. The company denied the rumors even up through this past October when a flyer for their release— citing a December pre-order date — was leaked online.

Toei Animation themselves seem to have broken the news in a much more official capacity, however:

Manga Entertainment has acquired the licensing rights to release, for the 1st time, the Dragon Ball Z series in DVD (291 episodes of 26′) in the United Kingdom.

The new licensee is planning to release the 1st of the 9 boxes this summer and to support the launch with a complete cross-media promotion campaign.

As expected, it seems to be the orange brick “season” releases originally produced by FUNimation for North America over the span of 2007-2009.

Thanks to TestDemo for the heads-up.

We know that this month’s “Part 7” of the “refreshed” Kai series is definitely still on its way from FUNimation, and we now have confirmation that the eighth and final “part” is due out 05 June 2012:

At this point, all that is left for FUNimation to do is continue back with the “season” format to replace these two-disc sets.

“Part 8” is confirmed to include the 98th episode of the “refreshed” series, which was also a DVD/Blu-ray exclusive in Japan due to last year’s preempted TV programming due to the earthquake and tsunami disaster followed by Toriko taking the series’ time slot.

We are a little late on this, but the numbers are finally interesting to us, again!

Namco-Bandai has posted a ¥8.275 billion (approximately $101.7 million) profit for the third quarter of fiscal year 2012.

Unlike the last several quarters, the Dragon Ball franchise actually performed well enough to show up in the top five-to-six franchises to allow for more extensive figures, with net sales of ¥6.7 billion for the three quarters, up from ¥4.9 billion the same period in the prior year. The company is forecasting a full year net sales total of ¥10.5 billion for fiscal 2012, up from the ¥8.3 billion net sales total in fiscal 2011 — this is all compared to the ¥12.5 billion total net sales in fiscal 2010, and the ¥15.8 billion in fiscal 2009.

In terms of general toys and hobby merchandise (non-video games), the franchise jumped in net sales from ¥1.7 billion the same three quarters of fiscal 2011 to ¥3.2 billion this year, and the company is forecasting a total of ¥4.0 billion for the full year, compared to ¥2.7 billion in Fiscal 2011.

No individual Dragon Ball video game sales were noted in the report — the cutoff for unit sales that are reported in the top five was One Piece Gigant Battle 2 at 350,000 units in Japan, which means that Ultimate Blast/Tenkaichi sold less than this amount.

There was a bit of concern among fandom a little over a month ago when FUNimation announced that the first four “parts” of their Z Kai release (on both DVD and Blu-ray) were being discontinued in favor of “season” sets. “Part 7” was still on the books for a late March release, coming in a whopping six months after the prior two-disc set… but would it ultimately see the light of day?

Our forum member Travis Touchdown popped in today to reveal that RightStuf is already shipping out their orders for the discs (officially due out 27 March 2012), and his arrived today:

Furthermore, the release contains a teaser for “Part 8”, which will wrap up the series with episodes 89 to 98 — that also means it will include the “bonus” episode that never aired on Japanese television due to the earthquake and tsunami disaster.

We really dropped the ball on this one. Despite receiving the issue about a week ago and flipping through it briefly, we totally missed something pretty neat.

The April 2012 issue of V-Jump was set to receive a reprint of Episode of Bardock, Naho Ooishi’s spin-off sequel manga to Bardock’s TV special from back in 1990 (itself tied in with various Dragon Ball Heroes updates and other merchandise). Originally published in the August, September, and October 2011 V-Jump issues, the three chapters came, went, and led in to an anime adaptation.

What we were not expecting was the fact that the manga reprint would receive new material! An additional two pages were added to wrap things up; instead of closing almost directly with the defeat (and likely death) of Chilled and the passing-down of the Super Saiyan legend, similar to the anime adaptation, these new pages cut back over to Bardock and the residents of Planet Plant that he just saved (and, for some reason, Bardock heroically walking off into the sunset):

The April 2012 V-Jump issue is currently sold out on Play-Asia, but is still available via Amazon Japan.

We have a full review of the original version of the manga over in our “Reviews” section here on the website, and we also gave it a shake-down back on Episode #0271 of our podcast — we also reviewed the anime adaptation back on Episode #0282.

Though we mentioned this in the most recent podcast episode, we neglected to make a proper news update about it! FUNimation’s May solicitations confirm “Season 1” and “Season 2” collections of Kai from the company, which would not be strange were it not for the fact that “Season 1” has already been released.

The first set had a strange history, initially announced back in July 2011 for an October release, and then being pulled and re-stocked from online retailer shelves at least two times. It was assumed each time that such an abrupt pull and re-release would have to do with the musical score replacement, but each time it seemed to still have the original Kenji Yamamoto broadcast score. Will this (re?)re-release feature the Shunsuke Kikuchi score? It seems as though we will just have to wait and see (well, listen) once May hits.

These sets come on the heels of the first four individual sets officially being discontinued, all four of which featured the Kenji Yamamoto score before the possible-infringement scandal broke in Japan, resulting in a replacement score for all international productions of the show.

Following up on the initial report and rating board leak of an upcoming Dragon Ball Z game for the Xbox 360’s Kinect, now the British Board of Film Classification has rated a title simply called “Dragon Ball Z For Kinect” (rated for ages 12 and up), but also with a release date: 15 June 2012.

The rating notes a “special movie” with a run-time just under 20 minutes included as a part of the game.

This one is coming right up on the horizon, so we should be receiving some solid confirmations (such as more international release dates) pretty soon, it would seem.