The EMBARRASSING Failure of Dragon Ball Z Home Releases

what if I told you that the people who made Your Dragon Ball Z DVDs suck at their job and more than that they freaking lied to you over the past 20 years there have been so many different re-releases of Dragon Ball on DVD Blu-ray and whatever that you could fill in library with them and still not fit them all this show has been sold in so many different ways and the number one question is always which one is the best the answer no okay well that's not exactly right unfortunately if there was an easy answer to that this video would be 15 seconds long and I wouldn't feel the need to punch a war on the thought of having to break this all down because sadly the honest answer is actually 99 of them are completely terrible in one way or another and believe it or not that does include the Beloved Dragon Box that fans have coveted for so many years so buckle up because we are going through all the major English releases and breaking down the nitty-gritty details of what works what doesn't work and by the end you'll be just as mad about everything as I am ha ha ha okay so before we dive in I want to preface this by acknowledging that some people just want to own the show and I imagine many of you already do it sucks to learn something you've spent money on isn't great especially if you never realized that in the first place but this isn't an attack on you it's an exploration of how this Series has been mistreated over the years and why we should continue to demand better and hey if you get to the end of this video and you still don't care just know that you made blurry Android 16 cry and you must now live with your sins up first we are heading back to the simpler time of the late 1990s with what's known as the DBZ singles these bad boys were funimation's first attempt at releasing the series on DVD and in spite of their age they're actually not half bad you see all three Dragon Ball series were created using cells by which I mean the animators drawings were traced or scanned onto a transparent sheet and then carefully painted these were then photographed wrapped onto film to produce the final animation the big benefit of film is you can keep scanning it into higher resolutions despite its age but unfortunately the film is unstable and ages quickly if not stored properly Dragon Ball is Mega cursed and its colors have died a death over the years which is definitely something you'll see in other releases the DBZ singles however come from a tape Master created before this film degradation began so on the color side of things these are actually surprisingly faithful to the color design of the show the skies are actually blue the skin tones are neutral for the most part it does look okay enough while there are definitely stretches where colors don't look so great or the dark details are kinda crushed I think where this one falls on the most is in its actual video quality this is an old DVD so it's kind of crunchy and things will fall apart during a lot of movement and with it being sourced from a tape you also have to deal with things like rainbows on the lines with nasty alias missing this release was initially censored for the first few volumes but Was Then followed up by the ultimate uncut addition which is almost identical other than being a little less crunchy except now you're free of that evil censorship business if you're someone who loves the original FUNimation dub and wants to own it in a form that's reasonably close to its original broadcast then these are for you they're about a B plus in color a c minus in visual Fidelity maybe a c plus in audio and well unfortunately for you they're an F in availability because they are long out of print next up we have oh oh no it's the dreaded the orange bricks yeah where do I even begin with these so you know how FUNimation we're releasing the series uncut with reasonable colors and its original aspect ratio yeah so they scrapped those a few volumes in and decided that actually no what you need is their anti-quote it's originally intended unaltered State Edition chances are you've at least seen these on shelves before if not actually heard about how incredibly terrible they are these were everywhere and very quickly became the most sold version of the series in the west thanks to how cheap and easily available they were Unfortunately they get just about everything wrong that you could possibly get wrong when remastering video the first sin here is in the cropping with Dragon Ball Z being a TV show from 1989 to 1996 it was of course storyboarded and animated for the shape of TVs at the time a squarish aspect ratio called 4x3 it was always intended to be seen this way and yet FUNimation decided that because TVs had moved to widescreen they would just zoom in and crop 20 of the image off to make it fit so now you're constantly losing the top and bottom of people's faces often completely removing their mouths or ruining shots that specifically use that space in a creative way remember a couple of years ago when everyone was in an uproar because streaming services were Zoom cropping old TV shows which resulted in stuff like this or this well surprise because FUNimation was here cropping footage out of existence before it was even cool I understand that a small minority of people don't like black buyers on their 16x9 TVs when watching 4x3 content but I think these companies forget that people can just zoom in with their remote like people who want to watch it as intended can zoom out stuff you straight up removed man and next up on the orange bricks is the Abomination they made of the colors for some insane reason FUNimation boosted the ever-loving hell out of the contrast and saturation for these releases and as a result it now looks like ten shinhan took a solar flare to most of the show anything that's even remotely bright is now blown out completely eradicating any and all detail the worst part is that it doesn't end there like I mentioned earlier the three Dragon Ball series were all produced on film and part of said film is green it's an aspect intrinsic to the format and in fact in live action cinematographers and directors will carefully pick out film stock based on how its colors and grain look as a result removing grain from live action is a complete sin and leads to horrific looking wax monsters with animation there's a little more leeway and there are two schools of thought here you can go for a filmic approach and leave the green intact which is something you can see on a release like Cowboy Bebop for example on the flip side you can carefully remove the Grain and produce something that looks like an animation Cell come to life such as Cardcaptor Sakura both are valid but both need to be done correctly unfortunately FUNimation went with scrubbing the Grain and then did it terribly their cleanup is so bad in fact that their dust and scratch filtering actively removes lines throughout the series like so 20 of the image now gone shading blown out and the lines partially removed preposterously that's getting an F for visual Fidelity and a D minus for color if only because the Buu Arc is actually not half bad by the time you trudge your way through the disaster piece that were the prior three arcs on the bright side the orange bricks did at least finally introduce a new audio track that allowed fans to watch the English dub with the original Japanese score the falconer scores also there and both tracks have sections of their poor early voice acting redubbed so yay I guess have a B for audio I don't know I and well reluctantly I'll give this also an A plus for availability because these things just won't go away now let's take a deep breath regain our composure from the traumatic experience we just endured and give ourselves a little Whiplash as we are heading straight into a fan favorite it is of course time for the dragon boxes these bad boys originally came out in Japan in 2003 and then finally made their way to the US in 2009 at the time it was like the heavens had opened and our prayers had finally been answered the original 4x3 aspect ratio grain fully intact a fresh scan from toys original Masters next episode previews and Japanese title cards to boot it has everything people had been asking for and to this day it is widely considered the best way to watch the series but as we've already established no Dragon Ball release is perfect and unfortunately these came with two very big sins SIN number one their colors are terrible while FUNimation did too much to their release toei did too little and by too little I mean literally nothing remember how I said film degrades over time well Dragon Ball's Masters degraded awfully and that means the colors have dramatically warped over time so blue skies have turned teal orange geese have turned red skin tones have often shifted super pink and in some of the worst cases the image has started to lose huge amounts of detail in spite of everything it does right the release is painfully married by the show's original color design dying in absolute death at the hands of film rot and alas that's not all the dragon Box's second sin comes in the form of its audio while the Japanese audio track on every release mentioned so far sounds like you're listening to it through a speaker stuffed inside a pillowcase the cause of which I'll touch on later the actual audio sync here is off you'll be hearing everything slightly too late which isn't quite as distracting as it sounds but once you notice it it's impossible to ignore of course the true pain here is that despite being almost great this is another release that FUNimation no longer prints so it is nearly impossible to find racking up nearly three hundred dollars per set second hand online I wish I was joking I mean seriously 300 second hand online die overall this thing May well get an A for its Fidelity but with a pretty lackluster C minus in color and audio and an F in availability it's just impossible to recommend this to anyone who doesn't already have it jumping forward a little to 2011 and now FUNimation is back at it again with a brand new remaster in the form of the level sets after an agonizing orange bricks disaster this release was truly the second coming of Home Video Jesus Not only was this drag Dragon Ball Z's first Native HD scan but FUNimation really put effort into this thing by their standards the grain management was super light there was a reasonable color correction attempt and unlike the dragon boxes that removed the falconer score this had everything for every type of fan on paper this looked to be the answer to our prayers but of course Dragon Ball is cursed so there had to be a catch in well there were several the source for this new HD scan was funimation's own material which is actually a multi-gen master what that means is that it's a copy of the original toei film materials think of it like a film photocopy and well this new release is the equivalent of a photocopy of a photocopy I'm sure you could imagine that's not ideal and as a result this thing is extra grainy and the detail in the dark areas is mostly missing the overall colors are also quite muted and well the team were clearly far too afraid of repeating the orange bricks that they simply didn't do enough to restore this into something genuinely stunning the thing is I think almost everyone was willing to overlook these flaws because at least in the main areas such as Clarity it largely still felt like a step up over what had come before unfortunately these sets were expensive and with FUNimation selling so many Dragon Ball DVDs and Blu-rays at this point people just did not buy these ones and so they were canceled only two sets in in spite of sitting at a high B across the board it's F in availability makes it get another close but no cigar moment for Dragon Ball home releases believe it or not we have only two releases left so let's get to it and talk about the Blu-ray season sets released a measly two years after the level sets FUNimation decided to play a cruel trick in everyone in the lead up to this release they put out a survey asking fans if they'd like the next release to be 4x3 or 16x9 there was radio silence and then suddenly this new set dropped and it was orange bricks 2.0 time it was cropped the colors were obliterated and the degrading was astonishingly awful oh no we all thought the Casual viewers must have voted for 16.9 in the poll uh nope turns out 4x3 had overwhelmingly won and yet FUNimation ignored it internally because the orange bricks had sold the most so in other words rather than the lesson being cheap box sets make good sale it was no grain and color make money go Burr it's hard to overstay just how terrible this release is there's a number of people who believe this to be better than the orange bricks because it isn't quite as blown out and the degrading isn't making lines disappear in quite so obvious of fashion and that's definitely valid but actually this thing is just as bad if not worse in many areas despite claims they manually cropped it to 16x9 this time rather than just doing an automated Center crop it is very often and cropped far more poorly than having just left it in the center in the first place and yet that's actually the least of its issues the grain removal is back in full force and while it isn't deleting lines what it is doing is barely functioning properly so in other words it's blurring the ever-loving life out of the lines and the grain is still trying to creep back in leading to the entire image wobbling constantly around any hard Edge worse still they've then tried to sharpen it to death making the entire image look like a flat watery mess this thing is so bad that it genuinely has worse Clarity in areas than its DVD predecessors and also I've not even mentioned how horribly oversaturated the colors are everyone either looks like a lobster or like they've not seen sun in a thousand years there's no in between here just geez shame on FUNimation for this one F in colors F in visual Fidelity B in audio just by virtue of having everything and once again because FUNimation is cruel it actively hates us it gets a solid a plus in availability and so we reached the end of this nightmare see spy with FUNimation content to sell these nasty Blu-rays to all who are interested until finally for the series 30th Anniversary they decided to rise once again and do a limited collector's edition remaster of the series a definitive release they said one geared towards the most hardcore fans of the series so how did this collector's 30th Anniversary set fair yeah yeah yeah yes folks it turns out this definitive collection that they tried to crowdfund by the way was almost literally identical to the previous set surely there are some changes you might be asking and you 'd be right they removed the cropping and uh added a fake layer of grain is that really is now I don't want to let one of those go by unnoticed that's right rather than do a legitimate faithful remaster they pulled up their old one that everyone hated remove the crop and then stuck an artificial layer of grain over the top in the most hilariously half-assed attempt I've ever seen I really truly wish I was making this up of course fans were Furious and so they released a damage control blog post that only made things worse they showed off their untouched Masters next to the abomination in one of the biggest middle fingers in recent memory hilariously this limited release didn't even meet its sales goals and they then package it up in a bunch of Steel books you can now buy everywhere it gets the exact same rating as the last release with the most pitiful thumbs up for at least removing the cropping I guess what hurts so much is that this video only encompasses the Z part of the series I've not had time to talk about the original series and how it's most available release is tightly cropped and poorly encoded I've not been able to touch on how every GT release is so red tinted that it's convinced the worldwide fandom that GT looks as red as a British tourist in Spain I've had no time to praise the first few arcs of Kai for their near accurate color work in spite of its overly blurry Clarity and distracting redraws I've not even been able to scream about the final chapter's green tint and cropped Abomination Dragon Ball's home releases Encompass two decades worth of suffering and I hope this video in spite of its brevity has opened your eyes to how poorly such an iconic Series has been treated all of this time it really is just bad the whole way down but there is a ray of Hope a tiny possibility for a brighter future Looms on the horizon for deep in the jungles of an unknown region of this world known as far as an actual competent release of this series is starting to make its presence felt and if it does well enough who knows maybe its footage could make its way into the hands of a newly fused crunchy nation and we could be graced with its Glory let me introduce you to the ab group blue rays talking about these is technically cheating because they are only available in France don't even have English subtitles much less an English dub and they haven't even started on Dragon Ball Z itself yet but last year a French company by the name of a b group started putting out a new remaster of Dragon Ball on Blu-ray and the results well they're kind of nuts guys just about everything that could go right they did do right the colors are manually corrected to be far more faithful than any prior release the visual Fidelity is fantastic thanks to a groundbreaking upscale of the Dragon Box footage retaining all original elements such as the fine film grain and aspect ratio and perhaps most critically the audio this is genuinely the first a plus audio to ever be released in the entire world I mentioned earlier the Japanese dragon ball always sounds incredibly muffled which people often attribute to the age of the show when in actuality it's because every release before it has been using an aged format of it this release makes use of the original audio that was once thought to be lost but was then found and compiled by fans and finally gives us those original Japanese performances with the pristine Clarity it deserves it is crazy how good it feels to hear things so clearly to see the whole image with the colors and crispness that was intended all this time and while like I said it is currently only released in France the sets themselves are 100 easily available not a limited release and are priced ridiculously affordably this set is a plus across the board and maybe just maybe a b group can partner with the English rights holders at some point and get this incredible release into the hands of English-speaking fans across the world because as I've just spent this video painfully explaining Dragon Ball fans have had it rough we've had it rough for a long long time and despite being one of the most popular anime in the history of the planet there is still not a single release I can reliably recommend to anyone which just boggles my mind until another release surfaces from the depths of Hell in the future this video will stand as the complete guide to all English home releases of Dragon Ball Z and hopefully by now you have a bit better of an understanding as to why Dragon Ball Z is known as a curse series when it comes to DVD and Blu-ray releases unless a miracle happens and that a b group release makes its way to America we will all just have to pray to Kami that we will one day be graced with a non-compromised release of this show we all hold so near and dear to our hearts until then I'll keep watching it whatever way I can I've been totally not Mark thanks for watching [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Totally Not Mark

Views: 730,378

Keywords: dragon ball z, dragon ball, dbz kai, dragonball z, dragon ball collection, dragon ball z blu ray, dragon ball z kai, dragon ball z orange bricks, dragon ball z dvds, dragon ball gt, dbz dvd, dbz blu ray

Id: b3iqas8LHyM

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023