DB30YEARS Page 6
How did they do that!? How did they use pen, ink and paper to create what I would contend is an honest-to-goodness time machine for my senses?
Those who’ve mastered the art of storytelling have earned a place in history. Their characters will entertain us from one generation to the next creating new memories, forging new friendships and inspiring readers to rise to great challenges. Thirty years is just the start for Dragon Ball and it will continue as long as we dream of wishes.
Greg has run popular DBZ and One piece websites. He writes for Shueisha’s V-Jump magazine in Japan.
You Don’t Forget Your First Love
Making the Transition from Dragon Ball to One Piece
By Alex Kazanas
It’s no secret that I love One Piece. As much as it is a Japanese pop-culture juggernaut, as well as a story that has captured my own heart, it wouldn’t be possible without my first love:
Dragon Ball.
Dragon Ball has occupied my attention, admiration, and affection since the very early days of the Internet. I’d constantly peruse the World Wide Web for all the information I could find, and when the DBZ anime went on hiatus in the United States I had to double my efforts. I needed to find out what happened next! I became a sponge, soaking up everything DB-related I could fine. I’d print out pages upon pages of manga summaries and buy bootlegged fansubbed VHS tapes in an attempt to satiate my never-ending Son Goku-like hunger. In those days, Dragon Ball-related anything was still slim pickings in the States, so I took what I could get. I imported soundtrack CDs and snatched up what I could of the Ani Mayhem Collectible Card Game. I attempted to emulate Toriyama’s art style. I would practice Ryusei Nakao’s iconic Freeza laugh when nobody was around. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I loved Dragon Ball.
I would also watch Dragon Ball whenever I visited family in Greece each summer. The show came on at 7:00 a.m. on ANT1, and sported a rockin’ Greek dubbed version of “Makafushigi Adventure.” It was neat following my favorite show in another language, and I continued to do so whenever I visited. This brings us to the summer of 2002. After Dragon Ball, my cousins continued to watch their morning rounds of cartoons, which was mostly Greek dubbed versions of other shows that were popular in America a few years prior...except for one in particular that stood out. The first thought going through my head was, “Is that guy using THREE swords?” This particular series, called “Drake and the Search for the Treasure,” (which I found out a day later was actually called “One Piece” after some Internet sleuthing) would soon become what Dragon Ball was to me.
Seeing as Dragon Ball had long ended by the time One Piece came into my life, it wasn’t such a jarring transition. I figured it was a good time to get into something new, and what better way to do it than with something that, for some weird reason, still reminded me of Dragon Ball. It was partially the art style, but mostly it was the tone. It was lighthearted as a whole, but serious when it needed to be. And it was funny! It hit that perfect blend of comedy and action I had come to love with Dragon Ball, while also impressing me with how well the story itself was told. It wasn’t long before I had found out that Dragon Ball was indeed an inspiration for One Piece. Eiichiro Oda cited Toriyama as his hero, and even had an extensive interview with him in the One Piece art book, Color Walk 1. It was suddenly clear to me why I had loved One Piece so immediately: it was the spiritual successor to Dragon Ball!
Since One Piece was nowhere to be found in the U.S. at that time, I began to repeat the motions of when I had gotten into Dragon Ball during that time when it wasn’t easily accessible. Parroting the methods of my younger self, I snatched up whatever One Piece merchandise, soundtracks, art books, and information that I could, and strangely enough, it was even tougher than the earlier days of Dragon Ball. One Piece had virtually no American audience, even when it became published in Viz’s Shonen Jump later that year! I must admit it was nostalgic to hit all the same beats as before: a resident badass character catching my eye (for DB, it was Piccolo; Zoro for OP), Oda’s art style influencing my own, doing whatever I could to acquire more of it, and even running into the same source for some of my information. I had been a longtime fan of Greg Werner’s “Ultimate Dragonball Z Information Site,” and over the years we had developed a friendship. I was pleasantly surprised that he too was very much into One Piece. It was like history was repeating itself, but this time was different. I was into what was already the “new” Dragon Ball in Japan, and I wanted to be proactive about it. I wanted to help others get into this amazing series, just as others before me helped me grow to love Dragon Ball so much.
Since then, I’ve been active in the One Piece community, watching it blossom. I’ve met some of my greatest friends through our love for One Piece, which echoes the series’ overarching theme of friendship pretty well. However, one similarity is a constant between every One Piece fan I’ve met: we were all Dragon Ball fans first. I’d like to think that we all know good storytelling when we read it, so naturally it makes sense that both series would share fans cut from a similar cloth. And when Toriyama and Oda collaborated with each other for the special one-shot Cross Epoch, it not only brought each series’ characters together, but the fans as well. A defining moment, if there ever was one.
So yes, by now you must know that I love One Piece. But know whenever I say that, I’m also saying, “I love Dragon Ball.”
ALEX (“The Dude”) is a longtime Dragon Ball fan and regular contributor to the Unofficial One Piece Podcast at: onepiecepodcast.com
In the Mood for a Melody
A transformation into BGM superfan
By Kenneth Locke
It was 2000, and I was finally starting to get into this anime series on Cartoon Network that my sister and her gaggle of girlfriends wouldn’t stop talking about. Dragon Ball Z wasted no time digging its claws into me, even though I had only caught a handful of scattered episodes—from different story arcs—effectively stifling whatever hope I had of figuring out context or continuity. I happened to catch the tail end of the Cell Games arc as it was first airing, and at last real curiosity took hold and motivated me to hit the Internet, not only to find out which parts of the series I had seen, but also to see if fans had anything to say about the Japanese version, and how the FUNimation dub compared to it. I had already stumbled upon Dogasu’s English-to-Japanese Pokemon Page (now known as Dogasu’s Backpack) some months earlier when I was first getting into Pokemon, and immediately became fascinated by the concept of comparing a dubbed, imported series to its original-language version.
It was through this fascination that I came upon Chris Psaros’ DBZ Uncensored. Here was a fan whose passion for the source material shone through in his episode comparisons, and some of my favorite moments were those where he’d gush lovingly over the original Japanese version’s background music (known to many anime and video game fans as BGM, for short), which was composed by Shunsuke Kikuchi, and how this score measured up against the replacement one created by Shuki Levy for FUNimation’s first stab at the dub (and later the Faulconer Productions score).
To make a long story short, in his eyes, the Kikuchi score won, no contest. Where both of the U.S. scores were fully electronic and had a tendency to meander, only occasionally producing something resembling a melody (an opinion I didn’t entirely share, though later I would personally hold to the notion that Faulconer’s team at least gave their work much more thought and heart than Levy did), the Japanese score had a grand, sweeping orchestral presence, with only limited amounts of synth. At least that was the impression I came away with after reading Uncensored; I had never heard the original for myself, aside from a handful of quick snippets in the form of video clips offered for a short while on what was then known as Daizenshuu EX. The more I read of Psaros’ compelling thoughts, the more I ached to experience the vintage DBZ in its entirety.
Some months later I got my hands on a massive fansub set that contained everything from the Captain Ginyu arc clear to the end of DBZ. Thi
s gave me my first fleshed-out experience of what the music was truly like. It may come as a huge surprise to those who know me online, but the Kikuchi score actually wasn’t “love at first sound” for me. It was instead an acquired taste. I’m not sure what I was expecting after reading everything Psaros had to say about it, but it wasn’t something that sounded to my ears like it belonged in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Talk about old-school! There was so much emphasis on blaring, in-your-face brass, with frenzied strings placing second...er...fiddle, backed up by the high-pitched squeal of a flexatone here or the conspicuous BOING! of a Jew’s harp there, and bringing up the rear was the near-omnipresence of a rattling vibraslap, reminiscent of classic spaghetti westerns. I found the whole ensemble odd. Not altogether unappealing, just odd.
However, I simply could not deny the man’s talent for catchy earworm melodies, and the more episodes I watched, the more the score grew on me, until it eventually became—for lack of a better phrase—music to my ears. I remember one scene in particular: that of Piccolo’s first encounter with Cell. Having read so many of Psaros’ comparisons and noticing a certain recurring theme, I went into this episode expecting the entire scene where Piccolo walks through the eerily deserted Ginger Town to feature no music whatsoever, at least until the big reveal of Cell. As it turned out, I was only half-right. There was some presence of silence, but not before an unusual, threatening electronic piece with wah-wah pedals underscored the first moments of Piccolo’s investigation, then built up to a big, dramatic orchestral finish. That was when the silence seeped in, and of course when Cell began to step out of the shadows, another music cue kicked in. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the former cue at first; it seemed a little loud for the scene, especially since I was more used to the Faulconer score’s use of the subdued-yet-amply-creepy latter half of “Ginyu Transformation” here. But it didn’t take long for the Japanese cue to grow on me, and some time later I learned that it had been tracked (recycled) from the opening scene of the third Dragon Ball movie.
There were other cues I grew fond of, most of them used very prominently during the Freeza arc. One was used as the go-to battle theme, which after starting with a chime and a short build-up with strings, featured an electric guitar churning out a portion of Piccolo’s leitmotif in repetition, as a bass kept the beat. Frantic strings and brass punctuation rounded out the whole thing. Another great cue was typically used whenever Freeza came close to doing in the heroes, with a return to the electric guitar and desperate percussion all throughout. And who could forget the piece that so brilliantly illustrated the surprise and shock of Goku’s first transformation into a Super Saiyan? It began with a low-key, threatening piano that gave way to unsettling synth until the wind and strings took over, shrieking in horror one moment and spinning in a cyclone the next, the percussion thundering its way through two minutes of sheer confusion. Now that was memorable.
Finally, there was the inspiring theme signifying a slow rise to victory or a hopeful moment, usually involving Goku’s arrival after the other heroes had been mauled. It began very softly, with two muted instruments—what sounded like a piano backed up by percussion—stating three notes, which were collectively repeated twice in succession then quickly swallowed up by the silence. A second later there was a reiteration, then the two instruments were joined by a guitar, then the wind section. Everything combined to build to a heroic crescendo, ever so gradually, until an almighty sounding of trumpets wrapped it all up on a fist-pumping fanfare, filled with triumph. Every time this cue came on, I got chills. I needed this music in isolated form.
After I was done with the fansubs, I learned about the legendary 5-disc music box set, three discs of which were dedicated to BGM from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Whenever I saw this particular piece of merchandise brought up on forums and fan pages, it was always with the air of one of two attitudes: either it was spoken of in a sort of written equivalent of hushed, reverent tones...or a maniacal explosion: “HOLY @#$% THIS SET IS A MUST-HAVE! YOU HAVEN’T LIVED UNTIL YOU OWN THIS THING!” So I tracked down a copy and found, to my dismay, that it was a far from complete collection. Sure, it had all three of the aforementioned cues used as Freeza arc staples, but the heroic piece was noticeably absent, as was the ominous “Piccolo meets Cell” cue described above. There was also a beautiful violin theme associated with Chiaotzu that I had been aching for, and my heart fell into my stomach when I heard merely a quick statement of the leitmotif, but not the full-length cue.
All the same, I spun those discs (especially 4 and 5) religiously, for months. Indeed, it wasn’t long after getting the set that I took a few sheets of scrap paper and wrote for myself an outline of every track on each disc (breaking down the contents of each suite), how long each cue lasted (as near as I could figure anyway, as tracks 2-13 on Disc 2 had the cues crossfaded and it was sometimes difficult to tell where one cue ended and the next began), and their accompanying slate number as listed in the CD booklet. I also made up my own names for the cues, as the only real names available applied to the suites as a collective instead of the individual recordings.
When I finally bought a DVD player in 2002, one of my first DVDs was the first DBZ movie, which gave me more to chew on. Now I had discovered that a large handful of the more iconic music pieces from the TV series had actually originated from this film. What was more, I noticed that all of the Dead Zone cues that happened to be on my beloved CD set were indicated in the liner notes with slate numbers marked “M8--.” There was a pattern! Immediately my OCD took hold and I charted it all out to find that the numbers corresponded with the order in which each cue “appeared” in the movie.
A few months later I left home to serve a religious mission. Mormon missionaries are expected to refrain from seeking “worldly” entertainment—to stay away from television, video games, lively music and the like, except in special circumstances—so my Dragon Ball merchandise had to stay behind. I quickly found, however, that the music I had grown so fond of over the past year had stuck with me, in my head, and continued to haunt my gray matter until I thought I would go mad for want of a “hit”: I was officially a Kikuchi junkie, and my drug felt as distant as the moon. Six months later, the first thing I did after visiting with my family was run to my CD player, pop in Daizenshuu Disc 5 and listen to M1002: the “shocking horror” piece that announced the appearance of Shenlong in DBZ Movie 3, and one of my most frequent disembodied earworms while out in the mission field. Nothing was sweeter to my ears after hearing this cue only in my head for six months.
I went on to buy all the DBZ DVDs I could, as well as the other few BGM CDs Columbia had produced (finding to my delight that one of them—Ongakushu volume 1—included the heroic theme I so adored and sorely missed from the 5-CD set), and after a while I became thoroughly fed up with how much music it turned out had never been released on CD. By late 2005, I was taking names, so to speak; I was charting out all of the music I could identify, starting with that fateful episode bearing Cell’s first on-screen appearance, and making note of where on the CDs to find the released material, and how much was unreleased.
I kept my newfound hobby to myself until Columbia announced that they would be coming out with a new CD set after all these years. The online store listings cruelly referred to this upcoming release as the “Dragon Ball Z Complete BGM Collection,” but I knew something was amiss when I saw in the product details that it would be merely a three-disc set. I didn’t yet know just how many discs it would require for a complete DBZ music collection, but three was definitely too low a number. I posted what I had finished of my BGM episode documentation on the Daizenshuu EX forums so that others could get a larger scope of how much unreleased material we were looking at, and eagerly awaited February 2006, when this new set would hit and I’d finally know the truth about its contents. Sure enough, the word “complete” in its title turned out to be some kind of fluke in the marketing, because nowhere on the packaging did it claim to be all-inclusive, and for good rea
son. Not only was more than half the set a rehash of Discs 4 and 5 of the Daizenshuu collection (most of the tracks being the exact same suites), but Columbia had also bogged down disc space with movie-size versions of each film’s end credits song.
Of course, if we’re being honest, the Daizenshuu set had a misleading title as well; even though I’ve seen daizenshuu translated as “anthology” (a legitimate way of putting it in English), the literal meaning is “big complete collection.” While it is true that the 5-disc set came out before the series was even finished being produced, it still could have included so much more pre-1994 material.
All in all, the BGM Collection wound up containing 198 cues in total, only 64 of which (less than a third) had never been released before. Had they placed a specific focus on unreleased DBZ cues, it could have included well over 150 and still had room left over for iconic repeats from previous albums, or maybe even some unreleased stuff from the original Dragon Ball as bonus tracks.
The history of Dragon Ball BGM releases is confusing and woeful. The CDs that focus on one movie (Ongakushu vol. 2, as well as the movies 10 and 11 soundtracks) are great, and there’s very little to complain about those...but each new release that’s structured in the “every track is a suite of cues” format is bogged down with problems. Even the very first release, the Dragon Ball Ongakushu vinyl, had a problem of its own which would thankfully never be repeated outside of its 12 recycled tracks on the 5-disc set: the aforementioned crossfading together of the cues, a practice I simply could never get behind, as it renders it impossible to cleanly separate them. There are even worse issues to explore, however, such as the fact that on the CDs, each title card fanfare, and the Next Episode Preview theme that uses “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA,” are all fabrications (presumably, the masters for the true recordings are lost somewhere, but the recent surfacing of the preview theme in the Ping Pong anime for a parody suggests otherwise).