Dragon Ball (Philippine Dub) Densetsu

At some point between 1995-98, the original Dragon Ball was dubbed in English in the Philippines by Creative Products Corporation after a partial attempt at dubbing DBZ. In-between producing DB they also made a theatrical DBZ production called “Greatest Rivals”.

FumeiCom, lost anime dub connosieur

While everyone is riding the “Rebuild of Evangelion” hype train (and no, I don’t hate Evangelion and I plan to watch the Rebuilds at a point in time), here I am deciding to cover a Dragon Ball movie compilation that I thought was lost at the hands of time. If you want to know what I am talking about, click here or here.

This is not going to be a review of the two Dragon Ball movies in this compilation as, I think, reviewing the storylines of these films will be a thing of its own and besides, I’ve seen movie 3 multiple times. I would say this though, Mystical Great Adventure is on my top 3 Dragon Ball movies of all time together with Dragon Ball Super: Broly and Fusion Reborn.

Also, on a side note, this compilation is how I’ve seen “Sleeping Princess in Devil’s Castle” for the first time it seems. See, this is why I remember “Mystical Great Adventure” more than “Sleeping Princess”.

First off, we’re going with some changes: some are necessary at the time (because Dragon Ball was marketed as a show for younger kids) like calling a porn magazine a “fitness” magazine even though it’s obvious with the visuals that it was a porn magazine. A whole scene with Buten putting his hands on where he shouldn’t put is totally cut from this compilation, and that’s on movie 3.

They’ve also seem to cut scenes of extreme violence because, you know, for kids. Although, removing the impaling of Bora kind of takes away the impact of his death as if his part in the story is not that important, and this is coming from someone who’ve read the manga multiple times. Also, General Blue doesn’t exist in the Creative Products timeline.

One of the dub’s hidden gems.

Good thing Creative Productions didn’t cut out the Dr. SLUMP crossover sequence (even though Dr. SLUMP and Arale-chan never aired in the Philippines before or since then).

Also, Creative Productions has excised some banter between Bulma and Master Buten (or Master Roshi or Mutenroshi for you Westerners) that’s expected with Akira Toriyama works in 1987 but not suitable for a kids show as per the MTRCB. Although a child’s penis is a-okay.

This opening scene made me think that I was watching Genocyber instead of Dragon Ball when I was a kid because I watched this on VHS.

Now time for some dub changes that I don’t seem to understand why they did this. Let’s start with the Devils’ Castle and the Devil’s Hand. I don’t seem to get why they need to change the name of Devil’s Castle to “the Castle of Evil”. I don’t think that it’s that redundant although “Castle of Evil” sounds cooler than “Devil’s Castle” and renaming “Devil’s Hand” to the “Hand of Evil” won’t make that much sense.

Also, neither the “Stretch Stick” nor the “Power Pole” aren’t accurate translations of the Nyoi’bo but in a literal sense, “Stretch Stick” makes more sense as yeah.. the Nyoi’bo does stretch and it’s a stick. Also, the name “Kinto’un Cloud” makes as much sense as the word “ATM machine” although Filipinos might spell “Kinto’un” as “Kinton” so in a roundabout way, “Kinton Cloud” makes sense.

That’s just with “Sleeping Princess in Devil’s Castle”, now with the movie that combines the Red Ribbon Army arc with the 21^st and the 2^nd Budokai arc in one movie without mentioning the Red Ribbon Army. In this part, I am quite confused because everybody else seems to call Upa “Little Feather” but they seem fine in calling Bora by his name instead of calling him “Big Feather” or something. If you’re going to change some names, which we will get to later on, they might as well go the Harmony Gold route and call Goku Zero or something.

There are some translation inconsistencies are in here. The Kame-sennin was is always called Master Buten which is okay since he’s the Mutenroshi and all but Tsuru-sennin is called Master Crane and not Master Tsuru and I don’t know why.

Also, I can’t make out how it’s named in this dub, but the Kikohou is not called the Kikohou but the Kamehameha and the Dodonpa are called as such (yes they translated “ha” and “pa” as “wave” but it doesn’t change the attack name so that doesn’t count as a translation error on my part).

The last part I’ll be saying about the dub changes is that they didn’t bother to create an English version of “Dragon Ball Densetsu” aka the ending theme song to the third movie.

It might have something to do with licensing rights or something as by the time this was released, no new Dragon Ball content was seen on Philippine TV until GMA (or Telesuccess) snatched up the rights some time in 1999.

For the most part, the dub voices are clear enough to be heard except for two scenes, Tenshinhan doing the Kikohou (hence the whole rant about I can’t seem to make out the translated name for the Kikohou) and Senbei Norimaki’s dialogue at the end of the Dr. SLUMP sequence.

The dub cast reminds me of the Tagalog dub cast because the voices of Goku, Bulma, Yamcha, Oolong and Kuririn do sound familiar. Kuririn’s and Goku’s voices being the most familiar ones in this dub because Kuririn here and Kuririn from the Saiyan arc dubs as he sounds more like his 1999 Dragon Ball Tagalog dub counterpart and that’s a good thing. I’d say this is nowhere as memorable as the 1999 Dragon Ball cast but it’s getting there.

You can get the dub here or get the two movies separately here. Special thanks for FumeiCom, Nessie, and ZeBenko for finding the VHS and putting the dub on a much clearer source to preserve said dub.