How I Found LOST Dragon Ball Dubs on VHS

back when i initially started collecting vhs tapes years ago it was for nothing more than the novelty of reliving a format that i have a lot of nostalgia for beyond that i didn't really see any value in keeping a dusty old vcr laying around however unlike dvd or blu-ray players vcrs gave the average joe the ability to record whatever they wanted and in 2015 when i started falling down the rabbit hole of lost media i couldn't help but notice that usually when something lost did get recovered it was typically in the form of a vhs recording though digging past the lost segments of preschool shows i found that what i personally became obsessed with was lost english dubs of anime and trust me there's a lot of them but what you may be surprised to learn is that even some of the more popular titles have lost dubs and this little franchise called dragon ball is no exception to that despite the fact that so many people can recognize goku without having watched a single episode of dbz there were several dubs that were shown to the public but almost disappeared forever it gets even crazier when you realize that there exists an entire community of dragon ball fans over at konzenshu whose sole purpose is to properly document every facet of this franchise and most of this stuff eludes even them so without further delay let's sit back and relax as i tell you how i along with some other lovely individuals tracked down and preserved some lost dragon ball dubs on vhs [Music] while most dbz fans may be under the impression that funimation were the ones responsible for first dubbing the show into english they were actually beat to the punch three years earlier by creative products corporation a company that was responsible for dubbing and distributing toei anime in the philippines the way it was broadcast in the philippines is a little confusing but in 1993 they began airing an english dubbed version which was abruptly put on hiatus after approximately 25 episodes this was supposedly done as creative products felt it would be better to air the original dragon ball before continuing z's story despite not even a fraction of z being shown before being put on hiatus it became very popular in the country to the point that there were several merchandising deals soundtrack cds were released and there was even a live musical creative products even gave a couple of dbz movies a theatrical run in the form of dragon ball z the greatest rivals which was the two cooler movies combined together it was this greatest rivals movie that would end up being the only part of their z-dub to ever receive any home video release however the vhs release is incredibly elusive and practically never shows up for sale anywhere and when i first learned of this tape's existence in 2015 i made it my mission to do whatever i could to hunt down a copy and get it properly preserved see here's the thing greatest rivals was never really lost media there was an encode floating around for a long time that was split into two real media files however the quality was hey you i'll get super burning my back ah i'm trembling with fear basically unwatchable not only that but there were certain segments completely cut out of this encode most notably the intro scene with bardock and frieza vhs quality isn't good at all whatsoever by today's standards but even then i knew that if i could get my hands on a tape and rip it using modern capturing compression techniques it would still yield vastly superior results than these two pixel real media files now thankfully the philippines is one of the few asian countries that uses ntsc so if i could find the tape i could take comfort in the fact that i wouldn't need to shell out for one of those rare multi-region vcrs so having the equipment to play back and capture the tape would be no issue at all actually finding the tape though that proved to be a bit of a tall order i went to ebay almost every day to do searches for this tape and of course found nothing even if i searched on ebay ph i wouldn't find anything this went on for a while weeks turned into months and months turned into years eventually i found out that some fan sub distributors in the 90s actually sold copies of greatest rivals here in the united states which is supposedly where those real media encodes originated but even searching common fan subtitles for the movies like battle of the strongest turned up nothing and if it did it would end up just being japanese fan sub copies eventually i also started looking on other sites like olx and carousel and of course nothing i was almost convinced that almost no copies were printed i honestly would have given up at this point however at the time i felt like i was the only person who cared about finding this tape and if i didn't make an effort then nobody else would eventually i was hit with a stupid stroke of good luck but to get to that we have to go back to late 2016 when i released a video called the many english dubs of dragon ball a video i made to compile almost everything i had learned about every single different dub into one place since nobody else had really done so naturally i talked about creative products corporation in this video which i think may have been the first time that anyone on youtube really talked about their dub at any length and as such this caught the attention of a few filipino fans who grew up watching that version and were stoked to hear somebody bring attention to it one man in particular who goes by the name of thunder trunks had a very enthusiastic reaction to my video to the point where we started talking to each other through private messages not only did thunder trunks grow up watching the creative products dub but he also owned a vhs copy of greatest rivals that he unfortunately lost a long time ago despite this he was able to give me a lot of insight into how dbz was shown in the philippines and was even able to vaguely describe what he remembered the cover art of the vhs looking like since at the time there were no images of it online now for all i knew he could have just been making stuff up but i chose to believe him despite there being nothing to prove that anything he was telling me was actually true our conversations reignited my passion to find the tape but of course i still wasn't getting any actual results then on june 17 2017 a consenshi forums user by the name of o ninjara responded to a thread i made in 2015 with images of two filipino dbz tapes that he owned one of them being the solar entertainment dub which has no relevance in the story and the other being my so-called holy grail the greatest rivals i was ecstatic when i first saw this post like i said before there were no images of this tape anywhere online and because of this i had almost started to doubt the existence of the tape at all but here it was plain as day and the cover art was pretty much exactly how thunder trunks described it to me so if i didn't trust his information before i most certainly did now so it would seem our story is almost to a close right here we are with someone who actually owns the tape so now it's a matter of either sending them the proper equipment to get it digitized or have them send it to somebody with the proper equipment whatever they felt more comfortable doing i had reached out to onan jarrah myself to kindly offer my assistance either way and ask if he could possibly send pictures of the cassette itself he responded about a day later saying that someone had already reached out to him about preserving the tape but he would send me the images i requested so i waited for a few days and days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months after nothing but silence from owning jarrah i decided to try contacting the person who reached out to him before whose identity will remain anonymous for the sake of this story shortly after contacting them they responded to me saying that they had sent onan jarrah all of the equipment necessary to digitize his tapes but unfortunately he went completely silent on both of us so everything went back to the way it was we knew this tape existed but there was no way for anyone to get their hands on a copy and we were essentially right back where we started at this point i had mostly given up i would still check sites like ebay regularly on the off chance it may show up but it never did it was pretty demotivating honestly but in october 2018 i received a pretty exciting message from thunder trunks with this image attached someone just so happened to be selling their greatest rivals vhs bundled with a dragon ball evolution dvd in a filipino yard sale group on facebook and this couldn't have happened at a better time as he explained to me that he and his wife were getting ready to move out of the philippines so needless to say it was just an incredibly lucky situation so now that i personally knew someone in possession of a copy we could finally move on to actually getting this tape preserved in decent quality originally the plan was for me to help thunder trunks capture the tape himself however he didn't own a functioning vcr and had moved to new zealand a pal country so him finding the proper equipment was next to impossible i was hesitant to do the capture myself because we had come this far and i didn't want to create the possibility of the tape being lost forever mid-transit to the united states so we held off on the project for a little bit just to make sure the tape was kept safe and eventually it was sent my way in february of 2020 once the tape was in my hands i immediately set up my vcr to capture the tape it was then that i was faced with a new set of challenges prior to this i didn't really have much experience with capturing vhs tapes i had a vcr and a capture card and you may be led to believe that's all you need but i later found out that isn't the case simply put this project led me down a rabbit hole where i learned about professional vcrs and equipment like time based correctors there are a lot of technical details that i won't go into here but for anyone interested in proper vhs capture i would recommend checking out this video by noteloo all that said though even with my subpar capture method at the time the result was still light years ahead of the prior real media files however i wasn't satisfied with simply capturing the vhs and calling it a day toei had recently released new remasters of the dbz movies in japan and released them on amazon so i wanted to match the audio of greatest rivals up with the newly remastered video footage only the best for something that used to sound like [Applause] the process of matching up the audio isn't as simple as it may sound as both of these movies were heavily edited in this dub but it was kind of fun saving a dub that was previously abandoned on slowly decaying magnetic tape i even went the extra mile and recreated the unique graphics and credit sequences once i was done editing everything i uploaded it for everybody to enjoy on the internet archive i know some people may see this as nothing more than piracy but i look at it like this creative products no longer holds any dragon ball license so there's no way they could ever re-release it and neither toei nor funimation would have any compelling reason to release it to any capacity and being that it's such a unique and heavily edited production i really don't see it as competition for any official releases currently on the market so as it stands i feel perfectly okay with uploading this to the public even if i have to take it down someday enough people have downloaded it by now that it will spread around somewhere and so my 5 year quest for this tape had come to an end and now anyone else who may have been curious about it won't have to go through the many hoops disappointments and periods of waiting that i had to if nothing else that thought alone gives me great comfort in the end [Music] in the middle of trying to find a copy of greatest rivals i came across an interesting blog post from jd rayas where he vaguely recalls renting a dragon ball vhs that he never saw again and was beginning to question if it was even real he recalled the cover art just being the key art for the third dragon ball movie mystical adventure with text that simply said dragon ball it's easy to dismiss a post like this especially when there's no way to confirm it being real but once i realized jd was actually from the philippines i made sure to keep the post in the back of my mind if i learned anything from hunting for greatest rivals it's that filipino media in general just isn't very well preserved dragon ball isn't the only anime that had an english dub exclusive to that country but there's no hard documentation for anything this isn't necessarily because nobody cares though for instance there was an old mecca anime from the 70s called volta's five and while it's mostly been forgotten in japan it's a huge deal in the philippines so much so that former filipino president ferdinand marcos spanned it from television for a while as he feared it would inspire rebellion so yeah was a pretty big deal but despite its place in pop culture the vhs releases are almost impossible to find so all of that goes to show that you can't simply dismiss a claim like this the blog post didn't give many specific details so i figured if it was real there were two possibilities either this was an obscure release of the harmony gold dub of movies 1 and 3 or this was a release of the rumored frontier enterprises dub i didn't think this was anything that would have been made by creative products as according to voice actor apollo abraham greatest rivals was the only vhs release that the dub received or at least that's what he told me of course time went on and about a year after finding greatest rivals i was notified by twitter users zebenko and nessie that they had not only stumbled across this mysterious vhs but also a sealed vcd copy these copies were found on a site called carousel which is essentially a filipino version of murkari nessie had an account on there and was trying to buy a copy of songs of a high spirited saga but asked the seller if they had any other dragon ball items and then they replied with images of the aforementioned vhs and vcd they didn't remember too many details about it other than it being dubbed in english so we still had no idea what this could be regardless what we did know was that the blog post from jd was indeed true and the company that distributed this vhs was regal video no relation to the american company of the same name that released horror films in the 80s nessie helped me communicate with the seller and we were able to easily work out a deal to send me the items so i could preserve them eventually after a long waiting period they arrived and i immediately popped in the vhs and it turns out this is the second and third dragon ball movies edited together and dubbed by creative products now they're not mentioned anywhere on the packaging nor is their logo ever shown but it's the same voice cast heard in greatest rivals and the opening song is get that dragon ball from the high spirited saga cd so i think it's a pretty safe bet that creative products was indeed responsible for this i have no idea when this was made as before that blog post there was absolutely nothing about this online not even a single bit of discussion on the consenshu forums but my best guess is it was some point between 1996 and 1998 anyways once i had both the vhs and vcd transferred i synced the audio to amazon japan footage and uploaded it to the archive and now this lost piece of dragon ball media that nobody even knew about is available for anyone to view [Music] well that pretty much covers everything i wanted to talk about i want to give huge thanks to thunder trunks jd rayas nessie and zebenko for helping me out with my venture into rescuing significant dragon ball media that could have easily been lost forever i hope that if nothing else this video instills the message that just because something was released on vhs a long time ago doesn't mean it's safe from being lost and maybe this will inspire people to archive even more rarities because in most cases companies aren't interested in doing so themselves this has been fumeycom and i thank you so much for watching this video and if you're interested in the overall dubbing history of dragon ball i strongly recommend checking out my two-part series covering the english dubs more extensively otherwise have a great day and god bless part of another swift mikey mickey adventure with dragon ball z join the greatest rivals in their fight to save the universe collect all 12 toppers again

Channel: FumeiCom

Views: 30,088

Keywords: fumeicom, dragon ball, dragon ball z, dbz, english dub, lost dub, lost media, vhs, vcd, filipino, philippines, creative products corp, creative products, harmony gold, funimation

Id: 9l0pM0ukOR0

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021