© Derek PadulaBarbara said she remembered working on the dub, and thought Zero was “a real cutie.” But she said the recording was so long ago that she couldn’t recall how many episodes or movies they recorded. And they gave up the license to Dragon Ball so long ago that there’s no record in their systems.And until these first 5 episodes were recovered on March 1, 2020, only the first one had ever been seen by me and a few other die-hard fans.It’s unknown why Harmony Gold stopped production of Dragon Ball.The common theory is that ratings in their test markets weren’t high enough.
Aka Oolong, Bulma, and Goku.After all is said and done, who owns the Harmony Gold dub?Is it Harmony Gold? That is, Know going in that the Harmony Gold dub is not the definitive release of Dragon Ball.The Harmony Gold dub of Dragon Ball is incomplete, mashed together, censored, oddly translated, and has poor visual and audio quality.This is not what Akira Toriyama intended Dragon Ball to be.But watching this release is not about experiencing the perfect Dragon Ball dub.It’s about experiencing this lost artifact of Dragon Ball history and enjoying the series in a new light.There’s a lot of good fun to be had here, and you may even prefer the new voices.
I now present them to you for the first time since their original airing in 1989!The title screen of the Harmony Gold dub of Dragon Ball.The Harmony Gold dub is a rare English dub of Dragon Ball that only aired on two American TV channels from 1989 and into the early ’90s.It has a different voice acting cast than the voices in the official dub that many fans grew up with. And she didn’t own any of them.
So we either sent it back or it disappeared somewhere else.”He added, “When we lost the license and FUNimation had it, we probably either sent the dub’s back to TOEI or sent it to FUNimation because it was their license now. That’s what I’ve been thinking about all these years.But I also know that progress is built on the shoulders of other men. Be the first one to Harmony Gold USA made a dub of Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies and Dragon Ball: Mystical Adventure as well. I even called television stations across the United States to see if they had any tapes in their archive vault. So it’s possible that either of those companies is sitting on them without even realizing it.”Then on Feb 27, 2012, Tommy Yune told me that Harmony Gold had “a music reel for HG Dragon Ball” in their vault!I asked what was on it, and he said, “It’s a mystery as it is on a 4-track analog reel that can only be played back on a professional (circa ‘70s to ‘80s) reel-to-reel deck. Dragon Ball’s music reel was a 4-track reel.Tommy added, “Though the music rights are still owned by Harmony Gold, I can predict the company will be unlikely to authorize a digital transfer as the license to which it is attached is expired (i.e.
AB Groupe and Blue Water studios also made an alternate English dub for the UK/Canada around this time. After that version flopped, FUNimation would later redub the series in 2001 with their Texas voice cast.
Photo taken at Anime Expo, July 11, 2011, at the Power Rangers booth. In the 1980s, before Funimation acquired the rights to the popular anime series, a small studio named Harmony Gold produced five dubbed episodes of the series as a pilot test, as well as the films Dragon Ball: … I mean, while Dragon Ball movies 1 & 3 have been found, the Harmony Gold dub of the episodes (however many they dubbed) are almost impossible to find; no full episodes or even short clips, with the exception of one 30 second clip on YouTube. The story itself was also very clearly re-written to remove some of the more adolescent humor, which results in a much dryer show than what the original was.