Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me preface this. I'm in my thirties. I've got DBZ releases across Pioneer discs, Funimation single discs, Dragon Boxes, Orange Bricks, Funi Blu Rays and steelbooks of the movies, and now these new Blu Rays. I never got the Level sets, because the Dragon Boxes had just finished, it seemed kind of pointless at the time, but now I realize it's a shame that they cancelled full frame Blu Ray releases. But my point here, I'm going to try to make an argument FOR these Blu Rays, and I'm not new to this franchise, and I'm not an "accept everything and like it" fan. I may have bought some Orange Bricks, but I was not a fan of the cropping on those releases. I received my Blu Ray of the first season, and after watching it, I popped in the first Dragon Box, and then individual discs of the Captain Ginyu saga to compare the openings, and the colors. The Dragon Boxes essentially look like VHS releases next to this. They're certainly nice to own, but I'm willing to do my next rewatch of the entire series in the new Blu Ray format. Also, the cropping isn't NEARLY as egregious on these season sets. It is handled much, much better than the Orange Bricks. Obviously, you are still losing image, but the episodes now pan and scan up and down, left and right, and fill in areas being lost. The Orange Bricks were simply a crop, dead center. Yes, it's incredibly frustrating that the Dragon Boxes instantly went out of print. It's also almost a certainty that the uncut, full frame episodes will receive another release in the future, since we know Funimation will release the Dragon Ball franchise forever, and that's understandable, as it's the most bankable anime series of all time, arguably. There's also the bone that was thrown compiling all the Pioneer DVDs in the "Rock The Dragon" box set, which for many people fills their need to watch the (albeit edited versions of) episodes found on the first two Dragon Boxes, leading up to the Captain Ginyu releases on DVD, where many of us started buying the uncut DVD's many years ago, before the Orange Brick releases existed. However, as far as the new Blu Rays go, if you despise the way they look, you probably already bought the Dragon Boxes. It's not as though there was a shortage of uncut, full frame Dragon Ball Z releases in the past, it's just that it was the process of compiling endless four episode single disc releases. There was also the unfortunate gap of the 30 or so late Saiyan Saga/early Namek Saga releases that can still only be filled by the Dragon Boxes if you want an original full frame presentation, uncut, with both languages. (There's also the matter of not having consistent, full frame releases of every episode with Faulconer's music score, for those that want it. ) But if you're the kind of fan who hates what is being done with the new remastering/matting/cropping, you bought those. If you didn't, then you'll probably just have to wait another two years until the next re-release, or buy DBZ Kai DVD's/Blu Rays. Now, onto the remastering. It's become the accepted thing to do, if you're a hardcore fan, to say that they look awful. For me, the issue should just be aspect ratio, but not the remastering. I would have MUCH rather had these Blu Rays in 1:33.1, 4:3. But the new, bright colors? These are not the issue. Show the comparison screenshots of Saibamen going around to 20 people who are not members of a DBZ message board, and ask what looks better, and 19 out of 20 will pick the remastered shot. It's incredibly insulting to say that these people are "low information idiots" or "they don't know anything about film". People are advocating grainy footage with a gray haze over it, or arguing that excessive grain maintains the integrity of the original material. Yes, the new hipster-y thing to do is claim that film grain is detail. Film grain is inherent in the "canvas", so to speak, when something is filmed. Film is the canvas for the animated image. But grain is not painted onto the original film CEL. If you've seen a film cel from an anime such as this, it's bright, and it's clean. As remastering pushes things more to what a clean, painted film cel looks like, people have now begun to cry "Where's the grain?" Think back to when DVD came out. If you had shown the old Saibamen shot as a VHS picture example, and the DVD release looked like the remaster, everyone would say "Look how clear it is! Look how DVD makes the colors pop!" Why the shift to wanting everything to look like a twenty year old VHS? If you were worried about DBZ looking the way it did on 1989 on someone's TV in Japan, then you should be watching it on a tiny, standard definition TV. On VHS. In raw Japanese with no subtitles, since those weren't there for the original broadcast. And you wouldn't be watching an English dub, since that wasn't there for the original broadcast. Again, I get arguing for aspect ratio, but making something look bright and clean and giving the image new life is not a bad thing. The original masters exist. The VHS exists. The old DVDs exist. No one has thrown them all into a fire. This is like when a painting is restored. Look up the process of restoring old paintings, it's done to make them bright, clear, and make the image pop again. The point of the new Blu Rays is to make DBZ look like a brand new show, even though it isn't. And again, since we've seen it in its original form, more or less, then it doesn't hurt to look at it the way it's never been seen before. (It also helps to consider this as making all of the episodes look like the 14 movies that were shown in widescreen, 13 of which were animated in 1.33:1, but intended to be shown widescreen.) If DBZ aired on TV next year on Cartoon Network, it'd probably look like these Blu Rays, and a whole spate of new fans would find out about it, etc. This is also curiously like what was done with Seinfeld, which has aired in a widescreen HD version for the past 5 or 6 years on HD TV channels. (I think Seinfeld was actually filmed on 32mm film stock and cropped to 1.33:1 for TV, actually, though.) I have never heard anyone complain about watching HD Seinfeld, though. On a side note, a large % of the reviews here are from people who do not own this set, have not seen how this set looks besides a YouTube trailer, and many of them haven't purchased any DBZ. You'd be surprised how often you encounter message board posts where people keep "holding out for something better" every time DBZ is re-released, and admit that they own nothing of the previous releases. I really don't think Funimation is interested in the fans who don't spend money, and complain endlessly about every release.