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Harmony Gold's Dragon Ball Dub

Last posted Jan 18, 2017 at 08:40AM EST. Added Jan 17, 2017 at 06:46PM EST
4 posts from 3 users

While this is fairly well-known among the Dragon Ball fanbase, here's a brief summary for the uninitiated.

Back in the 1980's, Harmony Gold was one of the bigger distributors of anime in the west, with one of their more notable projects being "Robotech", a combination of several other Japanese shows (including Macross), but that's a different story for another time.
In the late 80's, they acquired the rights to produce their own dub of Dragon Ball.

The dub changes the names of several characters, with one of the more infamous being Goku's being changed to…

Curiously enough, the dub had several fairly well-known voice actors attached to it, with Wendee Lee (who has over 200 voice acting credits) voicing Lena (Bulma), Cheryl Chase (Angelica from Rugrats) as Squeaker (Puar), and Barbara Gordon (Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers) voicing Zero (Goku).

Supposedly, only five episodes of the dub were ever produced (the first and third movie were also dubbed and edited together as a special, which is the most available form of any part of this dub), and the series only ever aired on independent stations in the U.S. at a very early time in the morning, so it never caught on and was quietly cancelled. Because it was never released on VHS or any other home video format, it has become quite rare, and very little footage of it exists online.

But still, this is a very interesting period in Dragon Ball's history. If it caught on, it's entirely possible that Dragon Ball would be much different in the west than it is today.

>Squeaker (Puar)

Well, they weren't wrong.

Watching the last video, dub actors sound pretty good. Actually impressed.

continues

>King Guru

Aww fuck, I knew he was the evil half.

Anywhoo, this brings back memories of when Ocean did DBZ in Toonami before it was Funimation and the switch happened right after Goku beat up Recoome. The most noticeable change in voice acting was Krillin's, whose previous voice was tolerable, but then changed into a woodchipper. Goku's Ocean dub voice was actually 1980s Megaman's actor. Vegeta's Ocean dub actor is better than the vegeta we all know, yes it's Christopher Sabat, but I'll fight you on it. He actually sounds like a devious snake like he was supposed to:

Last edited Jan 18, 2017 at 03:06AM EST

Freakenstein wrote:

>Squeaker (Puar)

Well, they weren't wrong.

Watching the last video, dub actors sound pretty good. Actually impressed.

continues

>King Guru

Aww fuck, I knew he was the evil half.

Anywhoo, this brings back memories of when Ocean did DBZ in Toonami before it was Funimation and the switch happened right after Goku beat up Recoome. The most noticeable change in voice acting was Krillin's, whose previous voice was tolerable, but then changed into a woodchipper. Goku's Ocean dub voice was actually 1980s Megaman's actor. Vegeta's Ocean dub actor is better than the vegeta we all know, yes it's Christopher Sabat, but I'll fight you on it. He actually sounds like a devious snake like he was supposed to:

I never grew up on the original Ocean dub, but I think Brian Drummond's Vegeta is on-par with Sabat's. Both for their own reasons.

Mostly because Drummond can SCREAM

Skeletor-sm

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