There were a lot of odd things being changed in the 1st English broadcast of Dragon Ball Z so lets look at the funniest ones!
Dragon Ball Z: Top 15 Funniest Alterations & Censoring
There were a lot of odd things being changed in the 1st English broadcast of Dragon Ball Z so lets look at the funniest ones!
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Actually Phelous censoring immaturity is something that has been done in other English dubs of Anime. A couple examples I can think of where they to cover up immaturity is by changing the character’s age, for example in 4kids dub of Yugioh the character Rebecca was a immature 12 0r 13 year old(can’t remember which) so they made her 8 which ironically made the character Anzu/Tea immature because she’s getting jealous of someone almost half her age. Another time this whole changing the age of a immature character was in Cloverway’s dub of Sailor Moon Super S, one of villains Palla Palla was very immature in the original version but in the dub she was made slightly less immature and went from the second oldest of the Amazoness Quartet to the youngest. So there you go if a character is immature just deage them can’t let kids that some people act childish.
I keep imagining 4kids watched the episode of Season Zero where Atem soaked a guy in alcohol & set him on fire, & said “nope, we can’t work with this. We’re just going to have flashbacks that reference this season & skip it entirely” & chose the silly remake about card games that doesn’t even follow the manga. then gave it the worst voice cast ever.
Do you honestly believe Season Zero to be better than the Studio Gallop version? It had horrible animation, horrible voice acting,bad designs, bad music and very annoying characters (Honda, Niho). While it is true that Studio Gallop toned down the horror aspects of the manga, it was the uperior production in all but this one aspect.
Yeah, the voice acting was pretty bad…..but the manga was so good, I don’t see why the other animation studio needed to dumb it down for babies, drown the story & character development, giving Mokuba’s personality a complete makeover (making him useless), & focus on making it one big advertisement for card games.
The worst censorship I’ve ever seen in an English dub other than 4Kids has to be DiC’s and Cloverway’s dubs of Sailor Moon. When I think of that dub, I always think of them calling Sailor Uranus and Neptune (a lesbian couple) “cousins” because people in the 90’s apparently were homophobic. Glad that Viz is keeping them out of the closet!
At least the english dub seems to have been done competently. The french version wasn’t really censored, blood and death were shown but… The dubbers didn’t seem to know what they were doing most of the time : Dialogues making no sense regarding the context of what was shown on screen, dubbing completely contradicting what’s being said in japanese, characters often changing voices and sometimes names, etc. It was a mixbag of funny and tedious mess.
The worst dubs I’ve ever seen in my life are english ones from Hong Kong.
In college, a buddy in computer class gave me a DVD & said “it’s soooo bad, you HAVE to watch it.” Turned out to be Sonic X. so it was a bad anime with a tragic dub; a great recipe for a train wreck you can’t look away from. There must have been a different translator working on each episode, because they kept changing the characters names. Oh, Pinrat & Dilsus? Yeah, that sure sounds right.
Worst dub for me must be the original Finnish Digimon dub. Seriously, I’ve never come across any English dub that was as bad that Finnish one was. It was a group of adults trying to do kids’ voices and most of them sounded like teenagers going through puberty who didn’t give a fuck about their performances. There was literally no emotion in their delivery.
It was actually so bad that people complained about it so much that the group who did the dubbing got replaced after the first story arc and they have done very little stuff since then. Most of their dubs are incredible in their awfulness but that Digimon dub is probably the worst. And that whole group/company is still remembered by many people from my generation as epic in how bad they were.
Oh sweet jebus, you definitely win…… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxPsucXGkm4 It’s so bad it’s hilarious.
Personally I love really badly dubs of anime. Not like the bad lazy ones but stuff like Garzey’s Wing and stuff on that caliber. It’s a weird hobby of mine. Also watching really awful dubed anime is fun thing to do with a bunch of friends.
To be Fair, if The after life is place on another realm of existance, that could count as “another dimension”…
The Dimension of the spirits. Now, i could be wrong, and Heaven and Hell exist just in some place on the universe, but i think it isnt.
Why is the “cargo robot” a shuttlecraft from Star Trek (apparently from the Enterprise A)?
because of JJ Abrams?
LOL, I just noticed that as well. I guess for the same reason the Millennium Falcon was in Star Trek: First Contact.
Oh, and yes, it is from the Enterprise A. The uncensored footage has a closeup showing “NCC-1701-A”.
The stuff could have been seltzer water, though I doubt that seltzer foams that much or that it was intended to be. Root beer would indeed make more sense.
They could have made it brown & claimed it was hot coaco with whipped cream, but no…that would encourage kids to eat junk food.
Or add a scoop of ice cream so it definitely is a root beer float.
Just slap an A&W logo on the mug.
That would just make it product placement but root beer is love, root beer is life.
The best dub cast IMO is the Abridged cast. All these voices sound wrong in comparison, even if they are the originals.
I feel very similarly about TFS, considering they got me into DBZ in the first place. I still feel like Funimation’s Kai dub is very worthy, though (except for whomever they got to replace Meredith McCoy as 18, though; nothing wrong with her but McCoy was just so suited to it). Sean Schemmel can do me no wrong.
That’s a different dub altogether, though, so that’s neither here nor there; this is the dub that I most likely caught when I was 4 years old and watching Toonami. Nothing stood out to me then, but now that I know a little better…at least it’s a bit nostalgic?
Yeah, I have to agree. Team Four Star is probably the cast I think of when I think of the voices of the DBZ characters…so much so that it’s going to sound weird if I ever watch the original show/Kai and its dubs.
At least being sent to HFIL is more pleasant than the Shadow Realm. They don’t even let you play card games there!
yaaay, a new phelous and the moooovies =D
the best
The Vegeta voice from the first dub was much, much better. He went from a creepy evil voice to a bad-boy voice that didn’t fit.
I think my favorite DBZ dub thing was frieza’s voice because he sounded like a screechy old lady. When I was little I thought he actually WAS an old lady because of the voice and was crushed when I found out that was dub only. I rewatched dbz recently and I sat through the entire fucking 30 episode filler dub frieza fight so I could enjoy the stupid voice.
It’s really weird to edit death out of DBZ of all things as it means basically nothing in this series anyway. Maybe they were afraid of children not fearing death because you can just wish them back with the dragon balls
I find that kind of makes the same issue for kids because they’re saying all these acts don’t kill people it just sends them to the next dimension. So by making these things that actually kill people in the show seem less harsh it could have the same death is cheap impact.
well, I’ve seen editing from other anime tv series that were even worse. while 4Kids is notorious for this kind of thing (One Piece is a perfect example), I’ve seen Nelvana do the same thing for Cardcaptors. in fact, some of their earlier promotional ads tried to give Syaoran (Li Shaoran in the US dub) more attention. the only american dub for Cardcaptor Sakura that was legitimately good was the 2nd movie. and honestly, not only does the 2nd movie need to be released on Blu-Ray by Discotek Media, but I think it’s about time that series gets a decent & definitive american dub.
Am I the only one who actually likes the Animax English dub of Cardcaptor Sakura? In fact, that’s the dub I’m currently watching through on Crunchyroll as of typing this.
If I remember right, Goku also blames Vegeta for killing his grandfather and the other times he turned into Oozaru in the Dragon Ball manga.
It was a line meant to be played for laughs. It’s been about a decade since I was into DBZ, but I remember this part being legitimately funny and not some kind of silly dub mistake. They showed flashbacks to Dragon Ball to let new viewers know Goku could turn into a giant monkey too, and then… Goku himself doesn’t make the connection. Because he’s not very bright, you see, and it becomes a funny line.
Unless they changed it in the English release of the Manga(I have the VIZBig set) Goku does makes the connection that it was himself who killed his grandfather. Goku might not be bright but he’s not brain dead, I wouldn’t find the line funny(except for here as a dumb dub edition) because I find it insulting to Goku’s character, even in Dragonball’s early days Goku wasn’t dumb because he was stupid it was because he live alone in the mountain for years and then had to adjust to the outside world.
Well, at least it wasn’t 4Kids!
If 4Kids got a hold of DBZ, do you think it would be better or worse than the abomination that is their One Piece dub?
There wouldn’t have been much of a show if 4Kids had gotten their hands on DBZ.
4kids, DiC, & Manga Corps were the worst. Saban was pretty bad, but they did invent the Abridged Series. Well, them or Harmony Gold. Samurai Pizza Cats & Robotech were the Yugioh Abridged of their day.
hey don’t too hard on today being Sunday this was still pretty funny to watch defiantly something I wasn’t expecting to come out to day which happened to be my birthday so good on you Phelous. side note I did get I trouble today for thinking of an apple tree PLEASE FORGIVE ME AND NOT SEND ME INTO THE NEXT DEMENSION FOR INFINITE LOSERS!!! let’s all raise a glass of seawater to Phelous’ Health
It’s been a while since I’ve seen DBZ. I can’t remember if this was the dub I watched or not. The dimension part sounds familiar, but some of the others don’t. Then again, maybe they’re too stupid to remember. I guess this is proof that 4Kids wasn’t the only company completely bastardising anime imports to try and protect those poor children’s fragile little minds. When I saw the glass of foamy water, I too thought it would be easier just to make it like root beer or something, or take away the foam and say it’s juice.
I was hoping for a mention of Blue Popo, but you said this was the early dub and that one came later, partially in part I think to a certain Ms Carole Boston Weatherford who complained that Mr. Popo was racist towards black people (she’s also the reason why Jynx has been purple since Gen. III of Pokemon).
Hearing all these different types of executive meddling in shows, whether it be censorship such as this, or just altering stuff of something successful, like in your Ghostbusters reviews, it does get your fists clenching, but it also gets you something to make fun of down the line.
speaking of censorship and edits, do you have any interest in reviewing the most infamous banned episode of Pokemon featuring Porygon?
I’d possibly do a list for alterations in the early Pokemon anime episodes somewhere down the line too and talk about the cut stuff like that. AND GOOD OL JELLY DONUTS!
very cool. the other episode I would of recommended for you to talk about was the other infamous banned episode that had James with boobs. the first season was rather odd especially with Jesse & James. if you do make a video of the early alterations, I’d love you to add to that list the controversial line from episode 6 that James said: It’s Times Like This That Makes Me Wanna Go Straight. hmmm, I wonder if that means anything.
That’s the one which basically got Porygon and its evolutions blacklisted from the anime (even though the infamous flashing lights were caused by Pikachu), right? Yeah, that would be interesting to hear Phelous discuss…
Unpopular opinion: I don’t like the main Pokemon anime. I actually used to like it as a kid but when I re-watched it years later, I found out that it hasn’t aged well. It is very formulaic, childish, and just plain mediocre at best. Also, they never let Ash win the Pokemon League! Why? I know the main Pokemon anime exists just to sell the games and the merchandise but come on! Please let him win it for once (other than the Orange Islands League)! This is coming from someone who likes the Pokemon games (except for that one mobile app based on the franchise that shall not be named) and even has some Pokemon merchandise! Most of the Pokemon movies are great though but overall, the main Pokemon anime is mostly terrible and sub-par compared to stuff like Gundam SEED and B-Project: Kodou*Ambitious.
too bad it’s Sunday, because I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a Jill sandwich today.
I loved this.
I think the first one I saw was the Funimation dub, because of Vegeta’s voice actor, but I clearly remember the HFIL on the Oni’s shirts in the version I saw.
Oh well, This show got me into “fighter” shows like YuYu, Hajimo no Ippa, and early Bleach and Naruto
Yu Yu Hakusho was my favorite , but it wasn’t butchered and censored like this, or was it?
Having watched YYH in both languages, I was shocked..SHOCKED that I liked the english dub better. Perhaps it’s because the voice acting in the Japanese version was so horrendous. They did not take age, sex, or weight into account when assigning voices to characters. The anime itself was already censored enough for the dubbers to work off of, as Yusuke liked to smoke cigarettes in the manga.
Good to know.
I really enjoyed the English dub of YYH they showed on Adult Swim, and I’ve seen it in it’s entirely since. Still my favorite of the “escalating power fighter” genre…or whatever the correct term for these kinds of shows is.
You meant the “Shonen battle” genre of anime.
Saban eh? The first thing that always come s to mind in Samurai Pizza Cats, which I still haven’t seen in Japanese.
Roshi likes a nice foamy mana potion after every… (what does Roshi do again? ::Sees “sukebe” on his magazine) Oh yeah, he was a dirty old wanker.
The censors are clearly a bunch of control freaks who were denied jobs as animation directors & decided to take their revenge by making as many pointless changes to foreign shows as they could throw money at.
Glad I just watched Dragonball subtitled on International Channel in my teens. Did catch a few episodes of one of the dubs…Enough to know it shared a voice cast with Galaxy Express 999. Pretty sure the guy who voiced Harlock was one of the dub’s Piccolo. The voice acting isn’t bad or poorly matched, it’s just the badly rewritten scripts & cheesy dumbed-down dialogue that make it a bad dub.
Weird….When it gets to the “I can see their parachutes” & “too bad it’s sunday” parts, I got the most vivid sensation of deja vu…..
The parachutes line gave me a sense of deja vu as well. I specifically remember watching that scene on Toonami as a kid. When I saw the helicopter blow up, I came to conclusion that Nappa killed those guys. Then Tien said that line and I was like, “Oh, good, they’re OK,” because I was a kid and I was like, “why would the show lie to me?”
You forgot the hilarious beer scene with Goku in his spaceship. Btw I love your Vegeta voice, but you sound more like Chris Sabat’s early 1999 Vegeta than Brain Drummond’s Vegeta.
Oops! I mean Brian Drummond, not Brain Drummond. I’m surprised they didn’t cut out the part where Vegeta blows up Planet Arlia.
The beer scene in the spaceship plays out pretty much the same in Japanese so it wouldn’t really fit to include it.
I’m sure they loved that anti beer message though…
a bit off topic, but I’ve been thinking about asking this question to you for a while. since I made that dvd for you with the Mortal Kombat commercials & promotions on it, what would be your top 10 most favorite Mortal Kombat commercials? similar to your top 10 most favorite wrestling commercials, I was always wondering if there were some MK commercials that you really liked. some of the footage on that dvd also had some footage from some UK tv shows I’ve never heard of and behind the scenes features from the 2 movies. which is odd that Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema, & Threshold has yet to put on a current Blu-Ray since it would actually be worth buying the 2 movies on Blu-Ray if they included them. even the deleted ending for MK Annihilation would be worth it since as far as I know it was show but never shown to the public. of all the MK commercials out there, I personally liked the home port commercial for UMK3. sure it’s nothing special, but it’s one of the oldest commercials based on Mortal Kombat that I remember seeing on TV along with the live action commercial for MK4 (which is the final MK arcade game that has yet to be ported to current gen consoles).
I think the reason they censored that scene where Roshi rushes out of the bathroom at all was because of that nudie mag, as you can actually see some low detail nude pictures for a few frames. The knee was just a bonus.
They could have just censored the poster which is at least one that sort of makes sense even though it isn’t that clear. Going and doing the pants would have been a lot more time and money.
Phelous, what is your opinion on the new Dragonball series and movies? Do you like the new characters?
I really liked Battle of the Gods, haven’t seen any of Super or Resurrection F yet though.
A funny observation I made about the whole other dimension thing. Remember the movie the Last Star Fighter? The main character is talking to his alien co-pilot about all the comrades who had died and the co-pilot responds by saying, “I prefer to think of them as fighting evil, in another dimension”. I always wondered if that inspired this particular way around admitting characters died.
I recently watched “the jokesters” and, as I watched I thought “this must be how Phelous felt while watching “five across the eyes”.
In short, it’s the cast of an eli roth film filming an episode of jackass, and we get to see all the raw footage! Then in the last 5 mins the movie decides it wants to be a horror movie now.
Please do something with “the jokesters”?
I personally think that Phelous should only take requests from people who contribute to his Patreon. It only seems fair.
Why did that narrator want to sound hip for the cool kids?
probably because it was still the 90’s.
The Season 3 dub randomly threw ebonics into the script to try to appeal to the hip crowd. The Ocean dub liked to use ’80s surfer lingo a lot, so the ebonics were like a culturally updated version of it.
I remember Cartoon Network aired ‘Gundam Wing’ censored at 5:30pm and uncensored at midnight.
So, yes they cut out the blood and all the “damn” and “hell” but they also censored the word “kill.” At 5:30pm “kill” or “killing” or “death” were always changed to some version of “destroy.”
So even though there were on screen deaths no one was ever killed, they were “destroyed.”
‘Macron One’ probably had the funniest censorship of all time. In the future Earth is at war with invading aliens. However NONE of the aliens were ever “killed.”
It was made very clear that if an alien’s body suffered a serious injury they could not maintain their form in our universe and were therefore automatically transferred back to their home universe.
At least it was better than ‘Voltron’s excuse that all the aliens were “robots” and hence could not experience death.
If a human character died even if their grave was shown it was always explained that it was an empty grave intended to trick the villains into thinking a character was dead.
ALL THE MEALS on ‘Voltron’ were censored because God forbid American children be exposed to the horror of chopsticks!
Akira’s Streamline dub had some dubbing weirdness in that there was at least one scene that had dialogue added that wasn’t there before. Plus, it has the bonus of hearing 87 Leonardo swear.
you think this was funny, looking at the original Sailor Moon nowadays makes it outdated and laughable
Aww, no mention of my favourite censorship as a kid! And by favourite I mean the line that almost made me completely stop watching Dragonball Z because even as a 10 year old girl did I feel the censorship was both insulting AND stupid.
Where Gohan is burying the Namekians that Vegeta had killed and is seen making mounds of sand and putting sticks in them as makeshift graves. He gets up, wipes his brow and then says “Boy, I hope everyone got away ok.”
…..Gohan….. …I have only one question for you…. WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU BUSY DOING, THEN???
4kids rep: “We believe children should relive stress from trauma by making sand castles.”
I don’t think they kept the shots of Gohan making the graves, but I do know they left the graves in the scene where Gohan says that line, probably because they didn’t want to edit a scrolling background and they were hoping Saban wouldn’t know that those were graves that Gohan was looking at. If the dub wanted to create the illusion that Gohan didn’t make the graves, the final product makes Gohan out to be naive of what he’s looking at, which makes that scene hilariously dark.
So Phelous you say your ideal cast would be a mix of the two. I’m curious, what would it look like?
Thanks for making this video. This dub is flawed to a great degree, but in the right mood, it’s a fun ride.
I just noticed something about the Roshi-knee edit. When he opens the door, if you look around the area where the magazine used to fall, you can see the floorboards change. It goes from one lightly-colored floorboard to two floorboards with one having a darker color. You’d think they could’ve just taken the magazine-less section of the floor from earlier in the shot and paste it into frames where it was present, but I guess the digital painters really needed the money.
Speaking of needlessly spending money, what makes the removal of the “occupied” sign worse is that they had to completely reanimate that panning shot with Bulma just so they could make the edit. Considering the time it must have taken to make the necessary edits and how bad the final product looks (digital pans almost never look good), you really gotta wonder if it was worth it. It’s also funny that they made this edit in the same episode where Goku gets King Kai’s kanji symbol on his gi.
Heh, in Hungary, the show was not censored at all – neither was the regular Dragonball. parental complaints actually had the show moved to midnight airing, after some idiot kid thought he could fly on clouds and jumped to his death.
The one with the “still breating” cracks me up, but the apple tree is…. WUUUUUT?
And hey, did you notice, the Cargo Robot is actually a Star Trek TNG shuttle? 😀 Though why Earth uses helicopters if they have such craft…
Btw, in the original, how did Kirin’s arm grow back? Or he was one-handed after this episode?
Gah, I meant Tien. And btw, that reminds me of the line poor Dilgear says in Slayers when killed by Rodimus – “Just you wait until I come back to life!” before soundly expiring. Naturally, he never did… and it’s an odd edit, as they later had main villains and heroes killed off without sugarcoating it.
After Tien died he got his whole body back in the afterlife… DIMENSION.
It’s a shame about the parachutes line, since it ruins what is actually a pretty kickass sendoff line from Nappa just before he blows up the news copter: “So you want some news, do ya? Here’s your five seconds of fame!”
In Dragonball Yajirobe was useful. He managed to defeat one of King Piccolo’s henchmen by slicing him in two (then cooking and eating him). With DBZ he got more cowardly since the Sayans were way more powerful. Home For Infinte Losers is probably my favorite edit, it’s not a bad title for Hell.
Haha, yeah that was great in DragonBall!
Now i got the TFS Cargo robot joke
I’m not entirely sure, but I think the reason the apple tree was removed was because the producers thought it was redundant to both have the thought bubble onscreen and have Gohan think “But there aren’t any apple trees around here…” Similarly, I suspect that Gohan’s tears were removed because someone on the dubbing team thought that Gohan’s occular gushers were too comical for the scene where Raditz kidnaps Gohan.
Speaking of the editing…man, it’s hard to believe nowadays that it was difficult for the dubbers to edit even minor details. Especially when you consider groups like Team Four Star, who not only edit the footage regularly, but make larger changes than anything the original dub did (up to and including making new effects or editing characters out of certain shots).
It’s funny. When early dubs of DBZ didn’t heavily censor stuff, they would throw in bad jokes.
The change in the dialogue contradicting stuff from the show, some times come from the dubbers doing an improvitation.
I like that in the Mexican version of the show, when Picolo is fighting Raditz for the first time, Piccolo is scare on the scene, so he says “Mommy” when raditz is going to throw an energy ball at him.
And then the voice actors have being told by fans “Piccolo dont have a mom” and he realice he did a mistake.
so funny.
I can hardly even believe the things they’d censor sometimes, jeez X’D
Why did they even bother with half these things?? TEARS?!? REALLY?!?!
Very funny btw, Phelous. I was laughing my ass off during this–heck, my sister who really dislikes most internet review shows loved this one. I’d love to see you talk more on Dragonball. But then, I think you do your best work when talking about stuff from franchises you like, such as Mortal Kombat, TMNT and Ghostbusters anyhoo.
Still seems like a better dub than the Malaysian dub of the DBZ movies from Speedy Video where Vegeta has the voice of SpongeBob.
Now that I think about it, it DID bother me that Bulma & Vegeta married without ever dating. What an ass-pull. I know Goku & Chichi never dated either, but at least there was a notable one-way attraction & some degree of chemistry. I can only assume the anime completely derailed from the manga at some point & had to catch up to explain why Trunks existed. ::shrugs::