Dragon Ball Z (English, Ocean Group)

Dubbing History
After failing to find an audience with Dragon Ball in 1995, FUNimation Entertainment opted to focus on dubbing Z in hopes that the more action-oriented series would draw in more views. For this project, FUNimation partnered with Saban Entertainment to bring the series to America. Saban utilized Ocean Productions in Vancouver, Canada which drew from the same cast as the BLT dub of Dragon Ball and had most of the cast reprise their roles. The dub featured an original musical score by famed television composer Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi (an alias for Haim Saban, founder of Saban Entertainment) along with an uncredited Ron Wasserman (known for his music scores on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers). The decision was mainly so FUNimation could earn royalties anytime the music was used.

Saban's dub of Dragon Ball Z was heavily censored and edited due to Saban's particularly draconian censorship guidelines. They forbid any explicit references to death, alcohol, or cigarettes, and even prohibited showing "children in distress", which meant that scenes of young Gohan crying had to be digitally altered to remove his tears. Their dub is infamous for their constant attempts to sidestep character deaths as them being sent to "the next dimension". Other times, death is written away via character exposition (An example being Tien being given the additional dialogue "Look! I can see their parachutes! They're okay..." in reference to a plane being blown up in one episode). In one episode, Goku visits Hell (in the show, simply a place in the afterlife) and meets two body-building demons wearing shirts that read "HELL" in block letters; Saban edited the shirts to read "HFIL" and referred to the location as the "Home For Infinite Losers".

Under Saban, 67 episodes were dubbed. However, they were edited down to 53 episodes as well as dubbing the movie The Tree of Might and editing it as a three-part miniseries, bringing the total episode count to 56. Their dub made its U.S. premiere on September 13, 1996, airing in first-run syndication on local WB and UPN affiliate networks. Though Saban managed to secure a better morning time-slot than Seagull Entertainment did for Dragon Ball, and managed to give it a two-season run, the dub was still cancelled due to both poor ratings and Saban scaling down their syndication operations.

Cast

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