It’s a great arc indeed. That arc and Frieza’s are my favorites. Overall, I prefer Dragon Ball arcs than DBZ, to be honest
Dragon Ball is so underrated. The beginning is sort of cringe-y until Goku’s crew meets the Ox King. After that it’s so enjoyable with the characters and action scenes we get. And I find it also gets better as it progresses, kind of like Super.
1 Like
Yeah, that’s where all of my Dragon Ball knowledge and perspective comes from. I didn’t read the manga (wasn’t really “into” anime yet back then; didn’t even know what “manga” was) and never watched the Japanese version or Kai.
It’s not very purist of me, but Funimation’s original dub for DBZ (with the Ocean dub for the first part of the show - go Austrailian Zarbon 
) will always be the “true” version of DBZ to me. Goku is heroic, Gohan doesn’t sound like Luffy, 16 doesn’t talk about protecting animals, Bruce Faulconer tunes abound, and Cell can regenerate from any surviving cell of his body 
Seriously though - 16’s “just…let it go” speech was waaay better than the true-to-the-original “protect the animals”. Especially with the Faulconer 16 theme playing in the background. At least for me
1 Like
I like Vegeta. He’s one of my favorite characters. I just thought that they could have fleshed him differently in the Majin story.
Heh, I had no idea about the FUNimation fix to some parts until you mentioned about Cell’s regeneration and I researched it. I read the spanish translation(which was uncensored and very loyal to the source) in the manga,and later watched the spanish dub for the anime, which plot wise was loyal, but super censored in terms of strong words. “■■■■■■■(stupid censorship, it was bastar…” was very common in the manga, never mentioned in the spanish anime dub.
I still prefer the whole “ally to good, nightmare to you” speech Goku gives Freiza when he first turns super sayian.
…That being said, I typically prefer that localizations keep a fine balance between maintaining the spirit of the material but are not so slavish to it to do things like not find suitable substitutes instead of not translating, such as Picolo’s Special Beam Cannon, or one that is an extreme pet peeve: Japanese Transformers translations calling Galvatron “Galvatron-sama” instead of his western title “Lord Galvatron” (this one is especially dumb because the source material for the character is the original English cartoon, so “Lord Galvatron” would be the proper title.)
So yeah, completely 100% faithful translations IMHO are BS. My opinion though, feel free to disagree.
Yeah, translations are interesting. A lot of things just don’t work when you take them out of the context of their language and culture, so I think it’s good for translators to account for that sometimes to find a suitable way to get the same spirit of the conversation or remark across. I think how closely something should adhere to the source a lot of times just depends on genre.
Humor in particular should almost never be directly translated - stuff that’s funny in Japanese tends to fall really flat on someone not versed in the nuances or style of their comedy/culture (and I’d imagine the reverse). Watching something like High School of the Dead or Panty & Stocking can be entertaining in either language, but I think I prefer the English dub for both. The English jokes and even whole topics of conversation often vary quite widely from the Japanese track, but they’re very well done dubs and the shows are genuinely funny in English, whereas they generally only provoked a smirk from me in Japanese.
For more serious shows, I tend to prefer language that more closely mirrors what was actually said in Japanese. Some allowances have to be made for lip-syncing and cultural gaps that would result in unintelligible nonsense if directly translated, but overall the spirit of what someone is saying (and how they’re saying it) at any given moment should be translated. Now that I’ve watched a ton of anime and am decently versed in the broad strokes of the culture, I tend to prefer they err on the side of keeping too closely to the source and culture than the opposite.
The big no-no is actually what Funimation’s first DBZ dub is, where character archetypes and motivations are wholesale changed, such that a character is actually a totally different person depending on if you watch the show in English or Japanese. Like I said above, I generally think a show should be allowed to stand or fall on its own, and don’t tend to think we should trust corporate overlords to know what we will like and force a creative work into a box that wasn’t intended for it. That said…I do think that Funimation’s doing just that made me enjoy DBZ a lot more than I otherwise would have. Their take on Goku genuinely is the one that I prefer, even if in general I frown on the practice that created him.
EDIT: my own pet peeve about translations is when someone changes a character’s name. In a lot of works a person’s name will be a pun (like Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu in My Hero Academia), and sometimes people will just flat-out change the name so that they can try to get the joke or pun across. I HATE that. Don’t change Tetsutetsu’s name to Ironbody Steelface trying to capture a small joke that doesn’t work outside its native language - just let the name rock as-is, and anyone not in on the joke won’t even know they missed anything. Don’t change someone’s name trying to get a play on words to come across…I don’t know why, but that irks me to no end!
3 Likes
I have a very good example of this. There’s a comedy show made in Mexico called El Chavo Del Ocho (in Brazil known as Chaves) and on one episode they talk about Mexican history in school, but in Brazil that wouldn’t have resonated at all. So the dub team completely rewrote the episode and the jokes in order to make it about Brazilian colonial history instead.
3 Likes
When I was a kid I was never aware of “dub changes” (besides obvious censoring) so I would always assume that was all dubs were the same as the Japanese version.
But then I got older and anime became more mainstream, I started to so see more anime in it’s original version, it’s true form, to the point where when I look back to see all the dub changes that happened during the early 2000s it now kinda… bothers me. I get why it happened but still
DBZ is no exception. Though it’s a bit of a special case cuz I never really cared for it when I was younger so I barely seen much of the old dub. I only truly got interested into the series because of it’s many video games. But by that time the old dub was long since over. But then DBZ kai came into the picture (as well as the manga) and I loved it. I loved voice work and importantly the accuracy the source material. It felt truly felt like dragon ball to me
When I finally had the chance to see the OG dub some time later, I thought it was cool (lines can be VERY cheesy sometimes tho) but at the same time it kinda grind my gears with some of it’s dub changes. Goku being turned into anime superman when that’s the exact opposite of who he is, significant dialogue often completely from what it was meant to mean like goku “I am” speech. (look I get that not everything can be translated exactly like humor but in the case of more serious/plot heavy scenes at least get some point of what they were meant to say across). And while I like a few of Bruce’s tracks but more often than not it kinda took away the actual feel of some scenes just for the sake it sounding cool and it would never. shut. up.
Apologies if I’m coming off sounding like a purist as that was never my intention. As I said I like both the OG english dub and japanese/english Kai. It just that when I watch dubs now I just prefer more accuracy in my dubs. But in the end we all have our preferences.
Lol. Well, you are a purist. It’s just that there’s nothing wrong with that. It really is a preference thing
I honesty tend to agree with you for the most part. I just find DBZ to be the one exception to that rule, largely because I find the main characters of the show bloody annoying in Japanese. Their voices grate on me, and Goku in particular ■■■■■■ me off with his attitude in the source material. I’ll take anime superman over punch-drunk manchild any day of the week.
As for the audio track, I just don’t really like DBZ’s in its original form. It has moments of competence, but the only “brilliant” moment it had to me was when Gohan went SS2. The series is just eerily quiet in its original form, so I feel like the tension simply isn’t there most of the time. I rather like how the English dub used music to ratchet the drama up or down for all those moments of characters just staring at each other, and it was dope to hear the individual character themes as each fighter got their time to shine.
As a random note - has anyone ever seen Yu Yu Hakusho in its original form? I’d be curious to know if similar audio changes were made between its English and Japanese tracks since it was localized around that same time 
I’m not just trying to highlight an irony of which you are clearly well aware, but I want to throw out there that the “corporate overlords” get a bad rap. This is probably not the right thread for the discussion but we all groan when we see bad examples of corporate interference that has ruined games, and it’s an intuitively relatable narrative to side with creative teams (that everybody loves) over faceless corporations (who take our money). But how often does corporate “interference” save games from the foibles of their creators? The video game space is filled with creative game makers who left the stifling world of their corporate overlords to set off on their own. And then create works vastly inferior to what they used to produce under the thumb of corporate overlords. Everything Rare touched when they were working for Nintendo turned to gold. It also took an incredibly long time to develop because Nintendo kept making them change stuff. As soon as Rare left Nintendo, the wheels came off. Ironically, everyone blames corporate interference from MS. But I suspect it was lack of corporate interference that was the problem.
Similar examples can be found everywhere. Tim Schafer makes awesome and funny games. But Double Fine struggles because he doesn’t know how to run it. Inafune, Itagaki - these guys left big corporations and went out to produce junk.
Sorry. Probably an inappropriate ramble but this is something I think about a lot.
1 Like
I will come later to expand what I’m going to say, but the “source” is not the Japanese anime, it’s the manga, which is very important to note.
In the manga, Goku is a hero “by luck”. He is far from being a hero, and Toriyama stated several times that Goku was altered and misunderstood when he came to life in the anime.
In the manga, Goku seems to be a good guy, but it’s ultimately motivated by his desire to fight powerful enemies. But in the anime he is shown as a very childish and irresponsible person. The change is very subtle, but deeper than one whould think
Manga Goku is shown as a well hearthed, loyal to his friends, and naive(which is understandable since thats the way he was educated). He is also a savant about fighting (with some clever strategies), but totally ignorant about everything else. He is barely capable to use maths, could even be considered “retarded” in terms of basic intelligence, and is extremely selfish, without noticing it. He doesn’t even know his sons birthday, and as Vegeta discovered, he never kissed Chichi in her lips, which also finds gross. This leads to a character who basically thinks only in himself, but he doesn’t notice it, he does it while being unaware of doing so, and since he is a good guy and is kind to everyone, EVERYONE lets him rock with it, because he doesn’t have malice in his actions.
Still, this Goku has no problem swearing, using strong words (“bastar#,sh#t, son of a…, fu##…”) quite often, barely spends time with his family unless for training (Even Vegeta enjoys having time with Bulma, and he, by his way, tries to be a good father, caring about the birth of his second son to even stop his training), and even manipulates people. The way he manipulates Zeno to kill Zamasu is very different in the manga, just using a recent example.
One could like or not this character for this reasons, but at least is easy to see that he is not an archetypal hero.
Anime Goku in the other hand, albeit shares a lot of this characteristics, is less rude, more childish(A LOT), and most of the time which is not facing an enemy, he is being a comical character.
It’s hard to me to explain it (even more with language barriers). But maybe a good way to name it is this:
-Manga Goku is a disfunctional adult, with good heart and good will in everything he does, but he doesn’t notice that he is being selfish and only really cares about what makes HIM happy, which most of the time is aligned with his friends and has good nature, but sometimes creates unnecessary problems.
-Anime Goku is a spoiled child with an adult’s body, who is almost always doing silly stuff and rarely takes nothing seriously. Albeit good hearted, he just thinks in the moment he is, and not in the consecuencies of his actions.
Seems the same, but it’s not.
2 Likes
Perhaps not, but none of that makes me think I’d like manga Goku any more than (Japanese) anime Goku. I don’t like selfish characters, and “good-hearted” doesn’t mean much to me personally. You are what you do, not what you intend.
If you don’t spend time with your family or know your son’s birthday because you just really wanna train and fight strong opponents, then you’re kind of a ■■■■■■ person. I don’t care how little malice you intend or how much your family just “rocks with it.”
No one has to agree with my perspective on that, but it’s very much my perspective.
FINALLY. someone is speaking my language!!!
SAY IT AGAIN for the people in the back!!!
Goku does spend time with his family…
Actually I agree with you. Goku is one of my most disliked character in the series. I dislike anime Goku, and I dislike Manga Goku, but not as much as the anime one.
The thing is that what annoys me is that Goku is widely loved and accepted as a hero, WHICH IS NOT, so I strongly disagree against anyone who likes him for something which he is not
how do you define a hero though? do you think its not enough to simply fight to save a life of an innocent or is important to you if the occasion ever arises in front of you? or do you actively have to search out evil to destroy them.
goku may not actively search out evil but he will certainly fight to save an innocent in front of him if put in that situation. i think thats good enough.
Yeah, but everyone could be a hero too, if that’s the case.
When’s the beta?
I want to destroy people with my Krillin/Android 18/Vegeta team 
2 Likes
September 16 - 18th … i think
They word this very oddly and it seems like for at least the PS4 version, there’s brackets of time the beta will be available. I’d imagine a lot of forum users are Xbox users so i don’t know if the PS4 schedule here is the same for Xbox as well…
2 Likes