Dragon Ball (English, BLT)

Dragon Ball is an English adaptation of ドラゴンボール. It was dubbed by BLT Productions at Dick & Roger's Sound Studio in Vancouver, featuring various freelance Canadian voice actors from Ocean Group who would later dub Dragon Ball Z.

Broadcast
Funimation acquired certain rights to the wildly popular Japanese television series Dragon Ball and its sequel Dragon Ball Z in 1995. At the time, Funimation was a relatively new company (founded the year before) and did not have the financial wherewithal to produce a dub entirely on their own, and instead collaborated with other production companies.

They immediately began work on an English dub for Dragon Ball and completed the first 13 episodes of the series in the same year, and the series was shown in syndication. This dub had some censorship, although not to the extent of the later Saban/Funimation-produced Ocean dub. Seagull Entertainment handled distribution for the show. They also dubbed and edited the first Dragon Ball movie for home video release. The network ratings for Dragon Ball were very poor due to Seagull Entertainment being unable to get the show a good time slot, so Funimation cancelled work on Dragon Ball and opted to focus on the more action-oriented Dragon Ball Z instead in hope of better ratings. They concluded that Dragon Ball was "not a good fit for the US market."

Eventually, in 2001, after the deal expired, Funimation tried again with a new English dub, utilizing their own pool of actors within or near the Dallas–Fort Worth area in Texas, where the company was situated.

This dub was released on VHS in 1996 by KidMark (a division of VidMark, a subsidiary of Trimark Entertainment), and was later released in a DVD boxset in 2000. Just as Trimark's license was planned to expire in 2004, it was acquired by Lionsgate, and so the license for the episodes and feature of Dragon Ball were transferred to them and extended further. As a result, Funimation was unable to release their in-house English dub of the first 13 episodes of Dragon Ball until the first season box set release in 2009 (as Lionsgate's rights to those episodes had expired by then).

Cast

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