Dragon Ball Z Kai (English)

The Majin Buu saga is titled Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters.

Dubbing History
Dragon Ball Z Kai was dubbed in the U.S. by Funimation Entertainment at Christopher Sabat's OkraTron 5000 dubbing studio. In contrast with the original Dragon Ball Z dub, their dub of Kai was largely more faithful to the Japanese script than their adaptation of Z. Less liberty was taken with the script, and episode titles were mostly literal translations of their original Japanese versions. Terminology such as "Kamehameha" and "Kaio-ken" were pronounced correctly, while certain character attacks retained their untranslated titles (i.e. "Makankōsappō" instead of Special Beam Cannon, "Kienzan" instead of Destructo Disc, etc.). The cast for Kai was mostly the same as Z except for a few re-casts for various reasons. For example, cast members such as Stephanie Nadolny (Gohan) and Tiffany Vollmer (Bulma) had just recently left Funimation, thus necessitating recasts.

The dub retained Kenji Yamamoto's musical score, however it was later changed to Shunsuke Kikuchi's cues (following Japan's example) after it was revealed scores by Yamamoto were plagiarized. Funimation's dub of Kai first aired on Nicktoons, beginning in May 2010. Censorship for the show was done for Nicktoons' broadcast to fit the intended audience, such as digitally editing out blood, blacking-out certain violent blows, and replacing profanity with milder phrases. The Toonzai/Vortexx kids block on The CW also aired Funimation's dub of Kai, beginning in August 2010. Their broadcast contained most of the edits of the Nicktoons version, as well as extra editing to fit the stricter broadcast standards. This broadcast has been notorious for its questionable editing practices (even compared to the Ocean dub of Dragon Ball Z), such as erasing Shenron from the opening theme in some episodes, colorizing Mr. Popo blue, changing halos into shining spheres, adding sparkles to Chiaotzu's fatal explosion, drawing an eye over Gohan's swollen face, renaming Goku's Spirit Bomb attack as "Spirit Blast", and replacing dialogue considered objectionable with sound-a-like voices. The uncut version of the series would later air on Adult Swim's Toonami block, beginning in November 2014, which has been the only version released to home video.

Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters
The dub for Kai: The Final Chapters was announced by Funimation Entertainment in December 2016 to be airing on Adult Swim's Toonami block in January 2017, following the completion of the first half of the series on Toonami, after much waiting from fans for the second half to be released. The Final Chapters premiered and aired concurrent with Funimation's dub of Dragon Ball Super in the U.S.

Sean Schemmel (Goku) and Kyle Hebert (Gohan) had previously stated that they were recording for the last part of Kai as early as April 2013, indicating that dubbing was completed for a long period beforehand. Sometime in 2015, it was confirmed at a convention that Tia Ballard would be voicing Marron in the dub. Australian anime distributor Madman Entertainment also stated that the Buu Saga should be released on November 8, 2014 on Cartoon Network, this, however, would not be the case.

Cast

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Music

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Trivia

 * Initially, Scott Frerichs (aka Kaiserneko), Nick Landis (aka Lanipator), Lawrence Simpson (aka MasakoX) and Curtis Arnott (aka Takahata101) were gonna have voice cameos during the "Cell: The Movie" scene as a nod to the fans of Dragon Ball Z Abridged. Toei Animation, however, wasn't fond of this idea and told FUNimation to pull it. Funimation re-used the audio from Dragon Ball Z instead.