Ocean and Funimation screwed this show up and made it confusing

This is something I posted on the Pojo.com boards, and figured I should post it here to see what people here think. Now the post isn't bashing the quality of the dubs such as voice acting and music, but just the multiple different dubs and redubs we got out of this show. I have to say, the dubbing of Dragonball Z is just so confusing. You just have a mess of all this dubbing and redubbing it's hard to keep track of what to follow.

When the Ocean group had the show, there was massive edits that resulted in the first 68 episodes to be reduced to 53. Funimation then took over the dubbing from the Ocean group after the 53/68 episodes. Funimation would then go back and redub the first two seasons and they would also go about redubbing some of their own episodes following episode 68 which would be all of Season 3 I think. Frankly I found the whole thing to be pointless anyway. Sure, the Ocean dub had it's share of edits and episode reduction and Funimation wanted to fix that but hey, the episode reduction sped the story up a bit so I had no real objection to that. Funimation was following from that dud, so to go back and basically kick it out of dub continuity was stupid. Now what I mean by "dub continuity" is basically what is followed in the official dub airing of an anime. So you have Pokémon for example. When TAJ Productions took over from 4Kids after Season 8, they simply followed on from the 4Kids dub with the name changes and casting voice actors who could voice the characters the same way the 4Kids cast did for consistency. Until all of Seasons 1-8 are redubbed, the 4Kids episodes will remain part of the dub canon in the English language.

Anyway, Funimation redubbing Seasons 1 and 2 now meant the Ocean era would never be available on sites airing the Funimation dub of the show and it also means the early Funimation episodes that were redubbed themselves would also not be available. Funimation doing the redubbing would also would cause continuity problems with their own dub continuity. At the start of the Funi portion, the voices were undeveloped. So to watch in order from the newly dub episodes with developed voices and then transitioning to the portion where they aren't so developed is awkward. Plus, some of the voice acting in the Funimation redub was rather too developed that it came off as a bit bad. Chris Sabat was also replacing quite a few people here and it would be awkward hearing his Vegeta voice in several other characters. Funimation was best just leaving the show the way it was even if the episode count was greatly reduced.

Now my beef with the Ocean group is them deciding to touch the show again after Funimation replaced them. I heard it had to do with Canada not being allowed to air the American dub version. Well if that's the case, oh well. There dub was already being continued off of and they would skip lots of episodes when they did return anyway and they never went back to fill in their gap so I can see it being quite weird if they were to ever rerun that show and then skip episodes entirely. It should have just been Ocean dub of Seasons 1 and 2, then Funimation for the rest, then the Funimation dub of the Dragonball Z Kai series. The KAI series made it even more confusing since now you had yet another Dragonball Z dub to add here. Ocean planned to make their own dub but they never got around to that. GOOD. How many different dub versions of Dragonball Z do we need? I kind of wish the show was never made. With the original DBZ alone we have the dubs by Ocean, Funimation, and the Season 1-3 redub by Funimation. I'm curious, did Funimation also REDUB Seasons 4-9?

The franchise was pretty screwed up to begin with. Harmony Gold originally had Dragonball in the 1980s, but cancelled it. They made some pretty stupid changes to the show like with the names. Goku as ZERO really? Then when Funimation got a hold of it they canned it after thirteen episodes only to finish it YEARS later after Dragonball Z did so well. Then when GT came out, you had the first fifteen episodes skipped and aired later. WTF? On top of that I hear there was ANOTHER English dub of GT by some group called Blue Water Gate. Okay, and did they happen to dub Dragonball and Z as well? If not, why the hell did they even bother touching GT?

The airing and handling of these shows is as messed up as could be. The shows should have been aired properly and IN ORDER and only having ONE company handle a show. For it to be okay with me for a show to be handled by two different companies, it would have to be like the Pokémon situation where one company is simply continuing the work of the dub from another company after they lost the rights, and the second company having consistency with the previous company's work to produce ONE dub. I do not like two companies producing their own whole separate dubs. What do you guys have to say about all of this? Do you feel the same way I do?