Revisio-News #2: ‘Dragonball Z Abridged’ Kinda Returns

Plus: 'Battle of Gods' and my personal history with the anime

Sep 24, 2023

The following is a summary of and commentary on recent news pertaining to revisions in the media industry: it covers recuts, reissues, dubs, and other instances of film or TV alteration.

My Personal History with Dragonball Z

When I was growing up in the 90s, Dragonball Z was my - and I assume, a lot of other people’s - entryway into the world of anime, a work unlike any other cartoon aired in the US.* As I became a Z fan, I came to understand that the show was heavily revised from its original Japanese incarnation. The initial 67 episodes were heavily re-edited for violence and compressed into 53 episodes for US broadcast.

*If you’re not familiar, Dragonball is one of the most popular Japanese anime franchises ever made. Based on the manga by Akira Toriayama, it consists of four different series, numerous movies, and videogames.

Even after the extensive re-editing had stopped, episodes would still be censored for violence, resulting in them getting issued on video in both standard and ‘uncut’ versions. And that’s without counting the bad dubbing that really diminished the quality of the stories, and the removal of the original sound and music.

Thanks to DVD, I was able to collect the show uncut in subtitled Japanese versions, which were great! At least, until I grew up. Upon revisiting the old series in the later 2000s, I realized Dragonball Z wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was.

Never mind the holes. The plots were endlessly padded out with redundant animation and filler storylines. Even when a new and improved version of Z called Dragonball Kai recut the initial 200 or so episodes of DBZ into about 100 episodes to remove the ‘filler’ material and realign it with the manga I wasn’t all that impressed.

But then something interesting happened in the 2010s: I found two new, modern incarnations of Dragonball which were legitimately good. One was an unofficial fan edit of the series called Dragonball Z Abridged.* The other was an authorized continuation called Dragonball Super.

*Thanks to the availability of consumer-grade digital video editing software and the rise of video streaming, fans of different media properties became increasingly capable of fully re-editing their favorite movies and TV shows as well as distributing the resulting alternate cuts or ‘fan edits’ over the internet.

Now, there’s some revision-related news pertaining to them both.

Dragonball Z Abridged: The Buu Bits

For a while in the late 2000s, there was a trend of creating “Abridged Anime,” which essentially combined the practice of fan editing with that of the ‘mockdub,’ when a foreign work is deliberately mistranslated in the course of dubbing in an effort to make fun of the work itself. In this case, fans would recut overly long Japanese animated series, such as Pokemon and Yugi-Oh!, to be shorter before adding new dubbing that radically altered the ‘original’ text.

The resulting new ‘Abridged’ versions of anime were often comedic, self-aware, low-budget metaworks that pushed the boundary of what was acceptable as ‘fair use.’ Out of these, the longest and arguably most popular abridged series to this day remains TeamFourstar’s Dragonball Z Abridged (DBZA). Premiering in 2008, the series rekindled my interest in Dragonball by turning the show into a parody of itself and producing something legitimately different and exciting. Both reverant and mocking, it was one of the funniest animated re-workings I’ve ever seen, something that stands quality-wise alongside Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost: Coast to Coast or Sealab 2021.*

*Even if you’re not a fan of Dragonball, you should check it out: The First Episode has garnered 31 million views on YouTube since being reposted there in 2013.

After producing 64 amazing episodes, TeamFourStar decided to call it quits and so did not adapt the final arc of the original Dragonball Z series, which is often referred to as the “Buu Saga,” after the series’ last big villain, leaving DBZA feeling somewhat incomplete. After a five-year break, however, DBZA has made a bit of a comeback earlier this month with the premiere of the “Buu Bits” - little sketch comedy-style redubs of specific scenes and moments from the Buu arc produced by TeamFourStar for DBZ reviewer Totally Not Mark.

The ‘Buu Bits’ are rather funny - though you really do have to be a fan of the series at this point to get in the in-jokes and references - and can be seen as parts of Mark’s reviews or as a compilation by TeamFourStar itself (link below).

An interlude for Dragonball Super

Now, let’s talk about Dragonball Super, the other modern incarnation of Dragonball, which premiered in 2015. Super is not a parody - it’s a full-on official sequel to Dragonball Z. Like its predecessor, it’s an action-heavy adventure series, where much of the appeal is seeing powerful God-like martial artists battle other powerful God-like martial artists, who are sometimes literal Gods.

But Super is also an evolution - it took everything that was good about Z and removed pretty much everything that was bad. Gone was a lot of the redundant animation.* Gone was the filler and horrendous pacing. In its place was far more economical and consistent storytelling that allowed characters more emotional development.

*Not all of it, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as both shows sometimes use recycled animation to great effect visually.

If DBZA made Dragonball enjoyable in an ironic way, then Super made it cool to (kinda) take it seriously again. It really helped rejuvenate Dragonball as a brand, and I remem-ber when its episodes started to get so popular, they would crash the livestreams coming from Japan over platforms like Crunchyroll.

But what’s fascinating is that when it began, it really wasn’t well received. This is because the first 26 or so episodes had instances of really poor animation quality and were remakes of two Dragonball movies: Battle of Gods (2013) and Resurrection F (2015).

Imo, those early episodes aren’t exactly bad. But it wouldn’t be until the show’s third arc, which moved past the films into original territory, that the series began to carve out its own identity and show what it was really capable of.

Battle of Gods Extended Edition 10th Anniversary

Battle of Gods, as I recall, wasn’t a great Dragonball movie.

It was kinda boring and honestly a wee bit anticlimactic. Though maybe that was the idea. The tone I recall was perhaps a bit too humorous for me and its main ‘antagonist’ Beerus wasn’t much of a villain. In fact, I actually kinda liked how the plot of the movie was later re-adapted, revised and expanded in Super, making it more interesting and better integrated with the events of the preceding series, even as the TV episodes contained inferior animation quality. *

*The show for some reason couldn’t use animation or footage directly from the movie and instead retold/reanimated many scenes from it.

But I am grateful to the film, as I don’t think Super could exist without it. Dragonball Z: Battle of Gods, if anything, helped gauge market interest for more Dragonball animation and so began the process of rekindling public interest in it as a whole.

What I hadn’t known until just a couple of days ago is that there was an extended edition of Battle of Gods released on DVD and Blu-Ray back in 2014, just a year after the movie came out in theaters, with about 20 minutes of extra footage.* Now, for the 10th anniversary of the movie, the extended cut will be shown in US theaters for two nights next month: October 17-18.

*If you’re interested, here’s a link to an outline of the differences here.

Not sure if I’ll check it out, but I legitimately enjoyed the last two Dragonball movies when I saw them on the big screen (Broly and Super Hero), so who knows?

Perhaps Gods in its extended iteration could be worth revisiting.

Readers, what do you think?

Have you any thoughts on the many versions of 'Dragonball Z'? Have you seen the different cuts of 'Battle of Gods'? Do you like Abridged Anime or have you watched anything like DBZA or another mockdub?

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