From this week’s pages of Jump we have received confirmation that Hironobu Kageyama’s classic DragonBall Z TV first opening theme, “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA”, will be used as the opening theme for Ultimate Blast in Japan. As reported a few days ago, the game will also feature new 2D animation in its story mode, now revealed to be over 30 minutes worth of footage.

With a couple minor exceptions, both Atari and now Namco-Bandai have consistently kept in Kageyama’s vocal theme songs for the game localizations since approximately 2007 with the international release of Sparking! METEOR (“Budokai Tenkaichi 3”) — incidentally, one with a replacement theme song was Super Dragon Ball Z on the PS2, which originally used the 2005 remix of “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA” in Japan.

The standard version of “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA” was also used as the opening to 2006’s Sparking! NEO on the PS2 (later ported to the Wii), as well as back in 2003 for the first Dragon Ball Z on PS2. Dipping even further back, it was also used with the original TV opening’s animation re-envisioned as 8-bit art in 1994’s Idainaru Son Gokū Densetsu for the PC-Engine.

Namco-Bandai has been promoting “original Japanese music” from the start for the new game’s international release as Ultimate Tenkaichi, but we will of course follow-up for solid confirmation.

FUNimation’s Clarine Harp (Director of DVD, Blu-ray and Video Production) and Matt O’Hara (Manager of DVD, Blu-ray and Video Production) were interviewed this week on Anime News Network’s ANNCast, where some new tidbits and discussion regarding the company’s upcoming Blu-ray release of the Dragon Ball Z TV series were dropped.

Also included as a part of the discussion were a series of screen shots comparing the last few releases of the TV series (presented below in a series of three in order as: orange bricks, Dragon Box, upcoming Blu-ray).

Unfortunately, while a pretty good estimation of the quality comparison, all examples were provided as JPGs instead of a lossless format. Never fear, as a crack team of our forum’s international fanboys and fangirls are on the case, with folks across the globe tossing up PNG examples from all of their localized DVD sets.

It is great to see the company take a new approach to remastering the series (with the understanding that, particularly with 16mm film, grain is an inherent part of the image and removing it will also remove detail from the image), but we still have plenty of outstanding questions. What will the Japanese audio source be, and what type of encode can we expect? Since it is a film source, will the title cards remain in their original Japanese? How about the recaps, previews, and eyecatches? Stay tuned as we keep tabs on this new remastering as we head toward Level 1.1‘s release in North America on 08 November 2011.

Namco-Bandai EU has been on a roll with promotion for the upcoming Ultimate Tenkaichi (Ultimate Blast in its home country of Japan) — yesterday, the branch put up yet another trailer for the game, this time focused on a portion of the story mode, which features new 2D animation:

While I am personally hesitant about another DBZ fighting game with a mode that starts against Raditz and moves through the story verbatim from what I have already seen, read, and played for approximately 15 years… the allure of new animation is quite a draw for even someone like me.

So far it appears to be frame-for-frame accurate to the original version of the show (with a few minor differences here and there due to the new framing and size, of course). With all of the other aspects being tossed against the wall for this game, hopefully there are enough that will stick for fans of all types of gameplay.

Namco-Bandai EU recently uploaded a new trailer for Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi (coming out as Ultimate Blast in Japan) which showcases the game’s character creation mode:

Unsurprisingly, the custom designs shown off all fall squarely in the typical Saiyan-overload promotion the games receive internationally, many even fitting in with the Dragon Ball AF-style of over-design. It will be interesting to see just how extensive this mode is — we see a few hints of additional templates available (such as Oob), but to what degree the player can control things like clothing style and voices will be the real clincher for many fans.

Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi is due out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 in North America on 25 October 2011, Europe on 28 October 2011, and later in Japan (as Ultimate Blast) on 08 December 2011.

The website for Ultimate Blast (the new and finalized name in Japan for what was previously called “Game Project Age 2011”, being released internationally as Ultimate Tenkaichi) has been slightly updated, most significantly with the pre-order bonus:

Pre-ordered copies of the game will come with Sūshinchū, the four-star Dragon Ball, which sizes up at 4 centimeters.

A couple days ago, observant fans noticed a listing on the British Board of Film Classification website that contained four bits of Dragon Ball Z material, all with names and run-times similar to the DVD extras present on the first DBZ “season set” FUNimation released in North America back in 2007. The materials were attributed to the UK-branch of anime distributor Manga Entertainment. Was a legit release of the series finally on its way to the starving British fans?

Alas, Manga UK has confirmed in multiple tweets that fans should not bother getting their hopes up, with quips such as:

@ukanime Love how u guys add 1 and 1 and get 3. Just some DVD trailers on a Madman PAL disc we r using. (source)

@desmondbale Madmans DVDs. We sometimes get their trailers and extras. They r the Aust disti for DBZ. (source)

Sorry, all you folks across the pond — looks like you are still best off importing the Dragon Box sets from North America!

Oh well. You’ll always have Big Green.