I’ve been collecting DVDs of the Ocean Dub throughout the past couple of years whenever I could find them, but as of today, I now have all 53 episodes of the Saiyan and Namek sagas for that dub. Good timing considering this year marks the 30th anniversary of DBZ’s initial English dub.
Dragon Ball Z is one of my favorite shows, and the Ocean dub was my introduction to the series. My earliest memory of the show was watching Saiyan Saga reruns on FOX (along with reruns of Sailor Moon) sometime around 1998 (depending on where you lived, DBZ’s syndication run was either on FOX, The WB, or UPN). I loved it almost immediately, and my enjoyment of it grew once I started seeing it on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block shortly after. As most older fans probably know already, those 53 episodes were originally 67 episodes of the original Japanese series, but were cut down primarily due to censorship. When Funimation got the rights to the series, they collaborated with Saban Entertainment to distribute the series in syndication, but Saban had very strict guidelines when it came to the show’s content. References to death were mostly replaced with “another dimension”, blood was digitally erased, and shots of characters getting hit would be cut out or replaced with crudely drawn stars. You could find more info about these edits on the defunct DBZ Uncensored website, which documented most of the changes made for that dub (along with a few once Funi started dubbing in-house). Funimation eventually redubbed and released those original 67 episodes uncut, but I will always have a soft spot for this dub despite how corny and butchered it was. The Rock the Dragon intro would get me pumped whenever it came on.
This particular dub only got through the first 13 episodes before being cancelled due to low ratings. Because of this, Funimation decided to skip ahead to dubbing DBZ in 1996 (Funimation went back to dub OG Dragon Ball for Toonami in 2001 with their in-house cast and less censorship restrictions compared to when they were in syndication).
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