Dragon Ball Z (English, Funimation)

Dubbing History
Without the financial support of Saban, the future of the dub seemed unclear. However, when reruns of the dub were picked up to air on Cartoon Network's weekday afternoon Toonami block just a few months after the dub was cancelled, Dragon Ball Z finally found the audience it was looking for in the U.S. As a result of its new success, FUNimation resumed production on the series' English dub by themselves, but could no longer afford the services of the Ocean voice actors due to financial constraints, though Ocean Productions still assisted with the scripting. This led to FUNimation forming its own in-house cast at their Texas-based studio. Toei did not supply FUNimation with the original master tapes at first, so the FUNimation crew had to get in touch with the Mexican dubbing studio Intertrack, who dubbed the show into Latin Spanish, in order to get dubbing copies. Bruce Faulconer and his team of musicians were hired as the new composers, with their soundtrack continuing the synth/rock style of music heard in the Saban score. The strict censorship guidelines of Saban were no longer an issue, allowing the renewed dub to feature less drastic censorship thanks to relaxed censorship guidelines on cable television. FUNimation would dub the episodes uncut for home media releases, while the edited versions would appear on TV.

FUNimation's dub premiered on the Toonami block on September 13, 1999. Though fans were pleased by the series' English dub continuing, it still received some harsh criticism regarding the sudden change of voices and background music. In order to maintain continuity between the two dubs, several FUNimation voice actors made an effort to imitate the previous Ocean voice actors, though they would slowly develop their own performances as the series went on. FUNimation dubbed the series to completion this time, with the dub ending its run on April 7, 2003, at 276 episodes.

Uncut Dub
With Pioneer's home video license for the Saban/FUNimation dub of episodes 1-53 (1-67 uncut) expiring in 2004, this allowed FUNimation to redub those episodes with their in-house voice cast and restore the censored content. With the inability to get Bruce Falcouner to return, the music was composed by Nathan Johnson instead. Their new uncut dub first began airing on Cartoon Network in the summer of 2005 at a late night time-slot (in order to air unedited content). In April 2005, Funimation released the first DVD of the Ultimate Uncut Special Edition line which would have contained all 67 of the Saiyan and Namek sagas upon completion. However, this DVD line would later be canceled after 9 volumes (containing Episodes 1-27) in favor of the Remastered Box Sets which would feature all 291 uncut episodes of the series.

FUNimation began to go back to their earlier dubbed episodes and began making revisions to their dub for quality and consistency. An example of the kind of changes done would be Dale Kelly's narration for episodes 68-194 being redubbed by Kyle Hebert, who narrated Episodes 195-291 as well as the new dub of Episodes 1-67. Another example, Christopher Sabat would redub most of his earlier performances as Vegeta as he originally voiced him in a similar manner to his previous voice actor, Brian Drummond. As time went on, Sabat's performance changed drastically in comparison, necessitating a redub for consistency. Other revisions included revising and redubbing lines that originally included awkward or immature-sounding lines. Most of these changes effected the initial Captain Ginyu, Frieza, and Garlic Jr. sagas since the cast was just starting out during that point.

The remastered dub was first released on their Remastered Box Set (a.k.a. "Orange Bricks") DVD releases from 2007-09 and their later Blu-Ray releases from 2013-14. In addition to the polishing of the dub performances, the new home video sets also included the dub with the original Japanese soundtrack by Shunsuke Kikuchi in addition to the Johnson/Faulconer score.

Cast

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Episodes

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