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I've read the well-thought-out essays posted on your web site, and I feel it's time to add a few of my own opinions.
First of all, about the music in DBZ. Perhaps you'll vehemently disagree with me on this, but the DBZ theme music is not the beginning and end of all cinematic works. It's not fantastic. For the most part, it's not even great. It is good. It is adequate. It works. The qualities that you bestow it with fit any decent BGM score. It is the standard among the Japanese TV industry. Have you ever watched live-action samurai shows like "Toyama no Kinsan" or "Abarenbo Shogun?" You'll find that the music is almost exactly like that found in DBZ. DBZ music is campy as heck. Perhaps it's deliberately
so, but that's beside the point.
If you want an example of what truly great background scoring is like, try watching "Vision of Escaflowne," "Neon Genesis Evangelion," "The Wings of Honneamise," "Macross Plus," or any of the Studio Ghibli movies. You will find far more effective uses of musical scoring.
Second, I hate to break it to anyone, but Dragon Ball is not a great work of fiction. It cannot be compared to the likes of "The Wings of Honneamise" or "Mononoke Hime." In fact, it was never really even meant to be a great work of fiction. It was a funny little idea in Toriyama's head. It was to be a gag story, like Dr. Slump, except with fighting and martial arts comedy, and it was absolutely hysterical. However, eventually the fighting took over, and DB became a "serious" anime/manga. If you look at it as a whole, yes, some
great things do happen in Dragon Ball and DBZ. But that's likely to happen in any really long-running series. Eventually, characters have to develop, and Toriyama, being a self-respecting storyteller, couldn't really stop that.
Dragon Ball is a monster. Toriyama himself has said that on occasion. It was created, and then ran out its usual life span, and then kept on going for mostly economic reasons. I feel sorry for Toriyama, having to keep on doing this one story when it had already been told. It's like having to explain to your kid what happened "happily ever after."
However, Dragon Ball is indeed a big deal, and should be treated as such. I agree with your cause, and think that Dragon Ball should be kept as pure as possible. I no longer watch the US DBZ dub, simply because it is just too painful. The world's most popular animated TV show deserves more.
An issue that hasn't been touched on as much, though, is the quality of the original Japanese voice-acting. Has anyone realized that DBZ voice actors are some of the best in the business? They had to be. It was that kind of show. As I said before, Dragon Ball is a big deal, and Bandai could afford to hire the best seiyuu they could find. Not only that, but because of the gargantuan length of the series, seiyuu who were only mediocre/good but who were on the series from the beginning had opportunity to develop their talents. Don't tell me you don't think Jonathan Frakes is exponentially better now than he was when he started as Riker in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The original DBZ had great voice actors, and the English dub deserves better.
One other thing I wanted to mention about the approach of your site in general. Because of your originating (although well-founded) rants in the "opinions" section, I doubt you are ever going to get a voluntary response from "The Powers that Be." What you have created is a rallying cry for an angry mob of loyal DBZ fans, and nobody in their right mind would like to stand in its path. There's simply too much adversity, and it has become clear that the maintainer (you) is by no means an unbiased judge. I personally
wouldn't want to be involved with a forum with a slant against me.
It's obvious that you want two things from this site: a forum in which opposing viewpoints can be measured against one another, and a soapbox for yourself. However, you can't have both. The existence of the editorial section makes your biases known, and that makes the forum itself hostile towards those who disagree with your opinion. I suppose the only way you could have both would be to create two separate sites, and make no apparent association between them.
Okay, so these rants are completely disorganized, but I don't care. It's about 3 a.m. and I just want to get this stuff off my chest. Thank you for your time!
- Mark Verrey |
   
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