I bet you are wondering why I’m reviewing Kai again…
 

 
I decided since I have both on hand to not leave our DVD only friends hanging without proper caps and a review.  When it is appropriate I’ll be using text from the Blu-ray, but anything that is different for the DVD version (packaging, video quality, audio, etc) will be freshly written.  And as a small note: Any grades I give here will be specific to what is expected or wanted from a DVD, so if a video or audio grade is higher here than it was in the Blu-ray review, it does not mean the DVD is superior. And if you want to read the Blu-ray review first: Dragon Ball Z Kai: Part One (Blu-ray), Early Review Continue reading →

After doing the review of Dragon Ball Z Kai on Blu-ray I decided to check the DVD.  Very quickly I noticed a difference in colors in the remastered Z footage.  When I showed some screen shots to a friend to find out about the Japanese Kai Blu-ray, he actually ran it over right then so I could take a screen shot for a comparison.
 
I’ll let the image and my notes on it speak for themselves.  Feel free to share.  I didn’t include the Japanese DVD because I don’t know anyone who has it.  Click on it for full size.
 

 
Each version has its own odd quirks and I’m quite sure arguments over which of the three has superior colors will go on for years.  It’d also be interesting to find out who tweaked each version and why any tweaks were made (did Funi tweak their versions or did Toei? If so, why the Blu-ray and not the DVD?)
 
After doing that image comparison, I decided to check the intro, which has entirely new animation. Each one is different in the intro also, but in different ways than in the episode itself, which suggests each intro was tweaked separately from the episode. (Click to see full size)
 

 
For the remastered footage you could argue any of them could be better based on how you feel about color in general, but for the brand new animation, the American Blu-ray clearly seems superior.
 
It’s worth mentioning that a slight difference in brightness between an American disk and a Japanese disk is normal. Japanese and American TVs have different black levels, so tweaking of the brightness is normally done to make them match when being viewed, but this doesn’t appear to be the tweaking that caused these differences (especially since there are three clearly different examples instead of two.)
 
Think I should update the first image with other DVD versions of Dragon Ball Z for comparisons sake?
 
 
Update- I chose to leave the original comparisons up as they are more relevant seeing as they all have the same and proper aspect ratio, but I’ve made an updated version that adds the Japanese DVD into the mix.
 
Thanks to Hujio from Kanzentai for the lossless captures of the proper frames.
 

 
The show content itself is interesting in that there is a slight addition of footage on the side and that (once again) the colors are different.
 
Although frankly the shot of the intro is a bit crazier
 

 
Yeah… it’s pretty terrible. It is definitely the worst of the four in this case. It definitely makes it appear that DVDs from Toei were a late addition to the plan for Kai in Japan, as no care seemed to have been taken with the encode at all.
 
If you’d like to read a review of the Blu-ray of Dragon Ball Z Kai, we actually have one (it is actually what ended up leading to this article.) Feel free to have a read: Dragon Ball Z Kai: Part One (Blu-ray), Early Review
 

 

 
In 1999, Pioneer began releasing the edited TV version of the first two dub seasons of Dragon Ball Z on DVD. In 2000, FUNimation began releasing their own uncut, bilingual DVDs of the series, starting with the third dub season. In 2005, after the rest of the series was finished, FUNimation began releasing bilingual, uncut versions of the episodes that were previously sub-licensed to Pioneer (now known as Geneon). But those releases were quietly canceled before even the first dub season was finished, leaving a gap of forty episodes that were never released in this format. However, in 2007, FUNimation re-started their Dragon Ball Z DVD releases in a “remastered” format that was cropped to widescreen, and fully released every episode this way from beginning to end in boxed sets. Thus, there has only been one consistent release of all 291 episodes of Dragon Ball Z in North America, but at the cost of roughly one-sixth of the footage from every frame of every episode. Continue reading →

 
Introduction by Marc- We get to welcome a new staff member to FBR today.  Heath will be writing some editorials and reviews for us in the future.  Many Dragonball Z fans will know him as Hujio, from one of the premiere American DBZ sites, Kanzentai.  For his first article he wrote up a little history of DBZ DVDs, including some of his personal thoughts on the matter.  I actually asked him to do this prior to his first review because a lot of the more casual DBZ fans out there don’t get why the announcement of the American ‘Dragon Boxes’ are such a big deal to many of the more hardcore DBZ lovers.  So I’ll pass the dragonball over to Heath for his initial post at FBR.
 

Continue reading →

Some game news from E3 via press releases.
 
Looks like the new Dragon Ball related games will be published directly by Namco-Bandai and be Atari free.
 
Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans, for the Nintendo DS. This one is the Kai RPG (guess that tells us if Funi secretly has Kai yet or not.)
 
Dragon Ball: Raging Blast, for the 360/PS3. This is a fighting/action game that is in the style of Budokai Tenkaichi/Sparking.
 
Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo, for the Wii. This is a sidescrolling platform action game, that we first told you about here on FBR far far earlier in the year before it was fully known what the game was yet.
 
All three games are scheduled for release this fall
 

Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z – © 2009 BIRD STUDIO/SHUEISHA, TOEI ANIMATION. Licensed by FUNimation® Productions, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.