Sonic X Licensed by Discotek Media

I have no idea what the masters are like, but I imagine they're Standard def with 2.0 Stereo. Pretty sure that's what's on the old Funi DVDs.

 

Not for nothing, but did 53-78 ever come out on DVD in Japanese anywhere? Or even at all uncut?

 

Hmm, unsure. did they ever release a complete boxset in their territory? don't recall ever seeing dvd releases of those episodes.

 

I'd imagine getting almost anything from now-defunct ADV is a pain. Even Cromartie High School is getting up there now.

 

FUNi's DBZ did NOT capture the tone of the series well. You could say they're two different shows. Instead of Goku being a pure hearted hick who loved to fight, instead he was changed to just Japanese Superman who's apparently the light in the darkness and ally to good, nightmare to you. Completely mis-translating things. Like Goku saying that Vegeta destroyed the tournament grounds when he was a kid.

The dub DOES have the dub track in mind. An example would be the recap music in Episode 29. The music stops after we see Goku gut punch Nappa. Instead of being silent, Kyle Hebert just keeps steamrolling through his narration. The dub is not meant for the Japanese music. The music is meant to add tension, and that gets destroyed when there's added lines of dialogue when characters aren't meant to be speaking.

FUNi did a bad job with DBZ. In fact, I hate that the dub is so popular. If it were released today, it would be destroyed for it's poor quality. But no, instead we have people complaining that the original music sucks, or that Goku sounds like a girl, or that the dub music is what made DBZ.

Also, 4Kids didn't want One Piece. An interview with ANN confirmed that. Here's what wikipedia shortened it to since I don't have time to listen to that whole podcast.
"On July 22, 2010, an interview was conducted between Anime News Network and Mark Kirk, the Vice President of Digital Media for 4Kids Entertainment. In this interview, Kirk explained that 4Kids acquired One Piece as part of a package deal with other anime, and that the company did not actually watch any of the series before acquiring it. However, once 4Kids realized One Piece would not work with their intended demographic, the company decided to edit it into a more child-oriented series until they had an opportunity to legally drop the license. Kirk said the experience on producing One Piece "ruined the company's reputation." Since then, 4Kids established a more strict set of guidelines, checks, and balances to determine what anime the company acquires."

FUNimation wasn't like that. They knew they were ruining the show. Not only that, they still act like they're dub is a good product. Of course it's a lot of money to go back and dub 291 episodes faithfully, but acting like what they have is okay is just awful.

I'm a big Dragon Ball guy. I love the original manga and watching the anime, other that Kai, I have to watch the original, Z, and GT subtitled. Z especially since it makes me cringe so much. 4Kids One Piece and FUNi DBZ are of the same quality. They had completely different tones than the original. The only thing they both got right was telling the basic story. Everything else was completely different.

 

Changing one set of corny dialog to a different set of corny dialog does not dramatically change the tone of the show. Sure, one version may be a superior execution than the other, but quite frankly the "ally to good" speech, while not carrying the same words and arguably the same personality, pretty much the same shit to Freeza - and the audience - the original "I am the Super Saiyan" speech did. And it was executed with the same general quality of that scene. There's a reason that's one of the more contested and debated changes, compared to various other changes done to the show that are more universally accepted as "bad".

DBZ was a show targetted for young boys that mixed violent action with comedy, and FUNi adapted it as show targeted for young boys that mixed violent action with comedy. In comparison, One Piece wasn't even being adapted for it's original target audience.

Also, mixing Ocean-dub-isms with latter FUNi-dub-isms is hardly a fair comparison considering they're such different products that FUNi literally sells them separately. The uncut dubs removed all the glaring Saiyan-arc dub plot holes. (I wish they did the same for the Android arc, but eh.)

Still better than the droning Ultimate Uncut tracks which sound like they're triyng to desperately imitate Haim Saban's score for some incomprehensible reason.

To be fair to the comment about "if it were released today", we now live in an anime world that shits on ANY dub. Naruto's dub and many of Disney's Ghibli dubs were ripped apart by so-called fans even though those are leagues above the standards we're discussing here. Only works produced by Shinichiro Watanabe are exempt from dub criticism, more or less.

skipping over what Mendinso already covered. 4Kids wouldn't have done what they did to One Piece if they didn't want the licenset. Fox licensed Rayearth just to sit on it and never put it on TV. 4Kids could've easily done the same to an unwanted license. And does anyone SERIOUSLY think a multi-hundred episode anime would be park of a PACKAGE DEAL with another anime? Heck no, anime companies prefer splitting big-ep-count anime into subseries and licensing them separaely, not combining them into package deals. That entire argument is nonsensical.

This entire argument depends on ignoring the existence of their dub of Z Kai, and it's getting to the point where you're sounding more delusional than anything.

 

Actually, it was common back in the day for big or expensive anime to be packaged with lesser wanted anime. The idea was that you would try to make back your investment on the bigger shows and hope the others broke even. Pioneer/Geneon fell into a lot of this before their demise.

 

Their Z Kai dub is great. But you can't deny them constantly pushing Z on people and acting like that dub is okay is bad. I love Z Kai. It's a breath of fresh air to get an accurate Dragon Ball dub. But even then, people still don't know the difference. You'll see people shitting on Kai's dub and calling all of Z's dialogue better. Like instead of Gohan being silent in Z Kai, they prefer his inner monologue about shit we already know before he becomes Super Saiyan 2. FUNimation doesn't advertise that Z Kai is what Z was meant to be like. You acting like I think Kai doesn't exist is just nonsensical since it was clear I thought it was clear that I was only focused on their early treatment of the franchise. The FUNi DBZ dub and 4Kids One Piece dub have the same quality. Even if you want to deny that, it's true. They both changed story aspects for their target audience, replaced the musical score, added unnecessary dialogue, had atrocious scripts to them example: "Yeah, more like burnt toast." That's a line Piccolo says in the dub. Or, to go further. Lets look at Yamcha's infamous "Cat loves food yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." There is no way around this. Deny it all you want, but these two dubs share the same level of quality.

Edit: Actually two more things. How about from 1999-2009, FUNimation had Freeza voiced by a woman. Or, adding on to Freeza, the fact that before he transforms into his second form he states that he needs a countdown, followed by Vegeta literally going "Okay, fine. 10987654321." Very fast. How is that not dumbing down DBZ at all?

 

What do you mean by "general tone"? It adhered to the general plot outline and it was adapted sufficiently to appeal to its target demographic, sure. But if by "general tone" you mean it comes off as a natural continuation of a martial arts action adventure story, then no, it really doesn't. It comes off as a campy, Americanized anime WWE/Monster Truck Rally soap opera. That's the tone that Funimation's DBZ has. The fact that they made DBZ as a standalone product, rather than a mere continuation of the five story arcs that preceded it, enabled that greatly. They didn't have to conform consistently to the tone of what came before it. As a result, what we got was a very different beast in terms of "general tone". Or at least, how I'm understanding "general tone".

And yes, the dub was produced with the replacement score in mind. They produced the music, the script, and the performances. They combined them into one cohesive product. Sure, we could go back and forth saying "it would have been exactly the same script and performance without the music" and "no it wouldn't have", but the fact of the matter is that it was all produced together to form one cohesive product, and to say that they didn't have any bearing on each other comes off as implying that Funimation didn't put any thought into things like this. Whether or not the dub is improved by one score or the other is more subjective than not, and isn't entirely relevant to the point I'm trying to make.

 

I think people have low standards for dubs, very low. The current dub for the 2014 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime is god awful, it's another show I prefer in Japanese. Only shows I can watch in English are Dragon Ball Z and YuYu Hakusho.

 

Gotta say, the news of dub only for this release is immensely disappointing, mostly because we ALREADY GOT that release out of the way a few times. This just feels entirely pointless without a subbed release being in place.

I do understand that it's not impossible, but I honestly am not sure if they're either...

A. Assessing the sales properly (I think subbed Sonic X does have an appeal to a market beyond this forum) and potentially underestimating how well a subbed set could sell. Afterall, it's not like there's a Blu Ray release in japan or some superior version available to hold out for. A good Sonic X subbed boxset would be the definitive version to buy for any anime/Sonic fan who wants it.
B. The license holder is, bluntly put, overcharging for the property and locking themselves out of the ability to make a profit off of it internationally.

I suspect it's the latter, and while I understand the business approach of wanting a release to be successful before getting out a better version of it, any method that expects a large portion of their viewers to double dip is unrealistic at best, and manipulative at worst.

Now, I like Diskotek a lot, so I don't want to be too harsh. You typically get stuff that NEVER has a large market, and you paired this with the amazing Giant Gorg announcement, so I can never dislike them. The company as a whole ranks an A+++ from me. We've also started seeing more and more license holders releasing more shows that previously never were considered to be releasable lately, so the Japanese are starting to get the reality that they can still make money here if they're flexible. It's just too bad that Sonic's yet again another victim of that.

Oh well. Hopefully it sells well enough to justify a subbed release after all. I expect the release will still do reasonably well though, so I wish you the best of luck.

 

Your argument depends on the idea of this being fact, but let's get this straight - It's not "classic" Z that's on network TV anymore, it's Kai. FUNi may still sell Z DVD and Blu-ray sets with the old dub track, but that's more to sate a demand to cater to Toonami nostalgia than anything else and is not nearly the same as "pushing on people" .Heck, if it was actually true that they were over-pushing their dub track, The stupid-ass dub-only and edited "Rock the Dragon" box set which was tailored to Toonami fans would not have jumped $30 in collector's value after being released with significantly less advertising than the Dragon Box sets. In case you don't realize, that usually means "the item was too limited in quantity to sate the actual demand". Y'know, like that Amiibo situation. And since theoretically FUNi can print as many copies of that as they want, there's probably a reason they're intentionally keeping it limited. Maybe it's because - gasp - they AREN'T so proud of that product?

Some people like shitty things. This should be heavily apparent to anyone at a Sonic the Hedgehog fan community especially. If I was like you, I'd probably never forgive SEGA for SatAM. (and oh dear, the parallels between DBZ fans preferring the old dub and SatAM fans are probably more than I'd want to admit.)
Holding the old dubs against FUNi after all these years when they're a completely different company now isn't exactly healthy.

I find it pretty silly how the best counter-examples you can think of to my argument are a few bad lines, considering the comparison is against a show that removed the whole arc that explains why Luffy got the Grand Compass, then introduces into the show with Luffy claiming he had it the whole time and just forgot. Or a show that cut whole arcs that would have caused plotholes hundreds of episodes down the line if they actually got that far along with it.

(Also hurhur, God forbid any humor isn't 1-to-1 direct from Toriyama's source material, even though comedy doesn't work like that. What the heck is your beef with the "Cat loves food" line otherwise, that you'd bring that one up over several actual "stupid" lines like most of what else is in Season 3? It wasn't like it was a mood-breaking line in a tense moment like some other theoretical examples to post - it was just loser Yamcha being loser Yamcha, at a point where the show was literally having a Seinfeldian moment where nothing was happening. The worst I could say about that particular line is "I don't see how that's funny". The Vegeta line you edited in after the fact should've been put up before that, because that was a tension-ruining line, but treating "Cat loves food" as a grave offense just sounds like "I don't want Dragon Ball to be funny".)

Let's face it, the original version dropped most of the martial arts the moments the Saiyans came in, and it's REALLY obvious when you compare ANY fight in classic DB to even the friggin' RADITZ fight (even THAT EARLY IN, nearly all the actual martial arts was dropped in favor of sudden power rises and abruptly-introduced new ki techniques, which would go on to pretty much dominate the entirety of Z afterwards). DBZ was all about power growth in a way classic DB never was. And this wasn't just some thing FUNi did - this shift goes right into the source material. Also, most of the foes introduced in Z would make absolutely no sense in actual martial arts (both villains and heroes alike gain RIDICULOUS amounts of muscle that definitely look more in line with pro wrestlers than martial artists, and on top of that villains like Cell and Buu have multiple physical traits that would be highly impractical for actual martial arts, which they can ignore because the show basically doesn't do martial arts anymore.)
So tough luck, DBZ was a campy "Hot-blooded muscle show" soap opera from the onset, so the worst you could say was that there was some additional Americanization (and it's a stretch to call it even that, considering how "Americanization" is done on other hackjob shows - DBZ didn't have remove all references to asian culture whatsoever or changed important locations to "American" locales. It didn't even change most of the very-obviously-Asian-names. Well, besides Tenshinhan and Chaozu's weird case. The most distinctly "American" qualities about DBZ are probably the Bruce Faulconer soundtrack contributions (which are now gone with the press of a button) and FUNi's in-house voice actor choices, and that was after dealing with two "seasons" of CANADIAN voice actors and CANADIAN-produced music which nevertheless otaku whine about as being "too American".)

"Cohesive product?" Hahahaha, no. The dub score isn't even a consistent flavor between Seasons 1-2 and the rest of the series, or between the series and the dubs of the movies. The score jumped around between Saban's signature droning atmospheric stuff, Faulconer's synth-electric-rock, Menza's attempt-to-do-a-AAA-gaming-soundtrack-entirely-in-synths, and the Ultimate Uncut let's-copy-Saban's-tone-against-all-logic-without-any-of-the-experience, and that's BEFORE getting into Dragon Ball GT's HIP-HOP CRAP. FUNi practically used the DB soundtracks as some sort of playground for random experimentation to see what worked and what didn't, ESPECIALLY with their movie dubs where they did really weird shit like getting b-tier grunge bands to plaster their songs over the soundtracks. There's a reason why it took until friggin' BUU SAGA for people to really think a Faulconer track actually FIT one of the scenes it was used on. With all this in mind, I'd be the FIRST to propose that "Funimation didn't put any thought into things like this." And do you know WHY they may not have? Probably because they were ready in advance to offer their dub track with the original Japanese score.

I don't know how the Jojo dub is but there's no reason for me to believe it's somehow worse than either of those two. Dragon Ball Z's dub is pretty much widely accepted as low-tier crap (although once you get into that area, as you can see, it starts becoming debatable what the worst of the worst is.), and YuYu Hakusho's dub is smack dab in FUNi's transitional phase from when they went rewrite-heavy to doing more faithful adaptations, and it shows in it's mixed but interesting qualities.

 

On the subject of dub...Yeah the Japanese version for me would be great, but I would really love to understand what everyone is saying, so I'll put up with Chris' voice despite the fact that he sounds like he's trying to strain to drop a dookie all the time. But yeah. I really want to understand what they're saying. Would be neat to see this on Blu-Ray though...

 

It's an early 2000s anime series, meaning it was animated digitally only for 480p/Standard Definition. There's no physical film reel to scan for higher resolutions because the show was never animated in any higher resolution to begin with. It may be possible to upscale it for a blu ray, but it'd only barely look slightly better at best because of a higher bitrate for encoding the video. And even that's not a guarantee.

In short, the show already looks as good as it's ever going to. There's no real need to do a blu ray release.

 

All of that flying around you see people doing? Bukujutsu. All of those energy blasts? Ki. That's martial arts through and through. Goku dies and gets trained by a god of the gods, a martial arts master. Oh, and he answers to another martial arts master. Everyone's able to move so fast, have such quick reflexes, etc. because they're adept at using ki, a martial arts concept. Martial arts fighting with aliens, robots, and bubblegum monsters is still martial arts. Also, the bulk of the main characters are wearing martial arts outfits all the time. The power growth seen after the 23rd TB is just the same song and dance of what came before, only on steroids. And please, please stop pretending "Z" is some isolated series, and proceeding to use that as support. It wasn't.

As for your second paragraph, my point is that the voices were very evidently cast in a way to make them seem "HARDCORE BADASS FUCK YEAH" which goes along with the musical score, and a lot of the dialog alterations.

I'm not sure if you've watched the Funimation dub and the original Japanese version of the anime in their entirety. I have, several times, and that shit is like night and day. Toei didn't make "Z" feel like a "separate show". They made it feel like exactly what it was, simply the next part of the single story that Toriyama was coming with. Funimation? That shit definitely feels like a different show.

 

.... hahahahhahahaa. Going by ANY of this logic Superman would be considered more a marital artist than Goku would be.

Sorry, but plopping random fantasy elements into a martial arts show doesn't make those fantasy elements martial arts, no matter how much you or the show would insist that it's "Martial Arts Masters" performing the acts. Flying and ki blasts are hardly distinguishable from Comic book superhero fantasy superpowers, which frequently involve, well, flying and shooting beams. They are not based on real-life martial arts nor are they logical fantasy-based extensions of actual martial arts abilities.
There are plenty of other examples of both anime and western animation that have many scenes better resembling ACTUAL martial arts combat, including Classic Dragon Ball. I'll even give DBZ credits for whatever scenes actually do those sorts of things, but flying around and shooting energy beams at aliens is NOT MARTIAL ARTS, no matter how much you want to argue that it is. There is absolutely nothing more to debate on that.

On the voices: It isn't exactly like the Japanese voices were all high-pitched schoolgirls. Well, technically, Goku and his kids were a grandma, but that was a holdover from classic DB. I mean, are you trying to convince me Norio Wakamoto ISN"T "Hardcore badass fuck yeah"? Anway, I would say that most of the voice acting issues were ironed out by Kai, and in most cases all that needed to be done was removing an annoying rasp or two.

Considering Faulconer's score, I'll let you have that. But I do wonder how the heck "Cat Loves Food Yeah Yeah Yeah" makes Yamcha sound badass. >.>

I've seen plenty of the original Z and plenty of FUNi's DBZ and plenty of significantly shittier dubs of DBZ. You know what else I've seen? The 4Kids dub of One Piece, which apparently no one else here remembers.

As for what Toei did to DBZ... well, they're the ones that slapped the "Z" on it in the first place, and they definitely did that for a clear and obvious reason when you see the shift in tone between the stories.

 

Lemme guess, the original source files for this animation's been lost forever, or that they've been done in such a way that they animated it without the use of vector graphics.