Dragonball Z

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Dragon Ball Z (ドラゴンボールZ, DoragonbōruZetto^?, commonly abbreviated as DBZ) is a Japanese animated television series produced by Toei Doga (now Toei Animation). Dragon Ball Z is the sequel to the Dragon Ball anime, which covers the first 16 volumes of a 42 volume Dragon Ball manga series created by Akira Toriyama, while Dragon Ball Z adapts the last 26 volumes of the original manga.

The Dragon Ball Z anime first aired in Japan from April 26, 1989, to January 31, 1996, and was dubbed in several countries around the world, including Latin America and in the United States. The American themes and soundtracks were composed and produced in part by Bruce Faulconer.

Plot

The series continues the adventures of Son Goku who, along with his companions, defend the Earth and other fictional planets against various supervillains. While the original Dragon Ball anime followed Goku through childhood into adulthood, Dragon Ball Z parallels his adult life with the maturation of his first child, Son Gohan. The series also gives focus to the evolution of his rivals, Piccolo and Vegeta, from evil to good, with the former's evolution ocurring early in the series and latter's spanning across the entire series. The separation between the series is also significant as the later series takes on a more dramatic and serious tone, with a number of villains either threatening or committing acts of mass murder or outright genocide.

Akira Toriyama's self-parody manga series Neko Majin satirizes many concepts introduced in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

American releases

After two unsuccessful attempts to release Dragon Ball in the US, FUNimation Productions Inc. (now FUNimation Entertainment) decided to create a dub of Dragon Ball Z, but was too poor a company then to distribute a series alone, so they teamed up with Saban (most likely due to the company's success in distributing another Japanese import, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) and hired voice actors of the Ocean Group to handle the dialogue. This dub started airing in September 1996 on the WB. However, the US had more emphasis on censorship than Japan did, thus resulting in extensive editing of the series (cutting out the equivalent of 14 of the first 67 episodes-- almost 21%), including the complete removal of blood, nudity, language and references to character death (\"sent to another dimension\"). To many fans of the series, these edits actually made the series worse as violence was always shown without consequence. Eventually it was canceled in May 1998, due to low ratings.

Read more at Wikipedia.org