Ocean Group

When considering the ‘Ocean Group’, a few negative words come to mind, but I am at a loss to figure out anything positive to say about their current performance.

For those of you who don’t already know, the aforementioned people are the ones who bring DBZ to England, and as far as I know, the rest of Europe. They have employed new voice actors, and portray different scenes in different ways such as varying dialogue to the American dub. They also cut out different scenes to the ones that FUNimation do too, which one would think, would be a major plus point. It isn’t though.

All this criticism of FUNimation it totally uncalled for, as they are infinitely better than the staff at the ‘Ocean Group’ who seem to do their utmost to destroy DBZ. You may remember that in the Saiyan saga the voices were different to the Frieza one. This is because the ‘Ocean Group’ were given the rights to it worldwide, and screwed up all of your television sets. The Saiyan saga was inferior to the rest in terms of broadcasting with lesser voice actors and more cut scenes.

In England we are stuck with these incompetent fools as they slowly destroy all hopes of DBZ becoming a hit over here. It is terrible; the characters have been butchered by poor voice acting, and for some reason occasional, mild scenes have been cut out of the American dub.

Take for example, the episode entitled ‘Deadly Beauty’. It involves the colossal fight between Vegeta and Android #18, as they meet face to face for the first time. I believe that the Ocean Group use the FUNimation episode as a template, and edit scenes around it to suit to their style. I have been fortunate, or unfortunate enough to see both versions, depending on which way you look at it. The most obvious scene that was cut was a very humorous one where baby Trunks ‘takes a whiz’ on Yajirobe’s face. Maybe this was done due to time restrictions, but the way they’re going, the episodes will only last 15 minutes, which is completely pathetic.

I can live with the mild scene cutting though, it may take out some of the better content, but it is forgivable, and not everyone will have seen both versions so therefore it won’t make any difference to them. The things that are really aggravating though are the voices. The only one that is acceptable is that of Vegeta’s, which is exactly the same as his sly, sneering one from the Saiyan saga. Goku’s isn’t too bad either, although it will take some getting used to. These are the only exceptions, and just barely.

Krillen’s constant cowering is just a part of his personality, but if he’s going to do this then couldn’t he at least have a decent voice of which to plead to the enemies with? It is high pitched and squeaky, terribly annoying. Trunks is another one suffering a bad voice, with no hint of emotion to anything he says, and that just doesn’t go in well with the character at all. Compared to Eric Johnson, the English voice actor is nothing.

Piccolo sounds kind of like Duo from Gundam Wing, with a resemblance of his old tone of voice. It isn’t bad, but we’ve all gotten used to the other one which makes the new one sound shallow and…well, just not right.

The worst voice though, despite Trunks’ close competition, is that of Android #16. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that he has the same voice actor as the cookie monster from Sesame Street! It sounds wrong, just horrifically wrong. It is too deep, and for his personality it just doesn’t match up at all.

If the DVD and VHS releases are handled anything like the dub over here, then they’ll be of a poor quality, and few in supply. That is if they come out at all. Dragonball Z may be stable and of a superior quality to the competition in America, but here it’s just a fad, barely able to hang on due to the poor way in which it has been handled. I hope that things improve soon, such as FUNimation retake it over, or its descending fall will continue until its demise, going down without a fight.