The first season of the Dragon Ball Z anime series contains the Raditz and Vegeta arcs, which comprises the Saiyan Saga, which adapts the 17th through the 21st volumes of the Dragon Ball manga series by Akira Toriyama. The series follows the adventures of Goku. The episodes deal with Goku as he learns about his Saiyan heritage and battles his older brother Raditz, Nappa, and the Saiyan Prince Vegeta, three other Saiyans who want Goku to join them and help them destroy life on Earth.
The season initially ran from April 1989 until March 1990 in Japan on Fuji Television. The season was then licensed for a heavily edited dubbed broadcast by Funimation Entertainment. Their adaptation first ran from September 1996 through September 1997 in first-run syndication, primarily on affiliate stations of Fox, The WB and UPN (United Paramount Network). The 39 episodes were cut down to a mere 28. Their edited adaptation was syndicated to television by Saban Entertainment, and was released by Geneon Entertainment (then known as Pioneer) on VHS and DVD between 1997 and 1999. Eventually, Geneon Entertainment lost the distribution license to the first 67 episodes and Funimation began redubbing the series for an uncut broadcast. The unedited version was released on DVD in 2005, but later cancelled and Funimation eventually began releasing season box sets of Dragon Ball Z and they re-released their first season on February 6, 2007. In late 2013, the company released the first season box set on the Blu-ray Disc format. In June 2009, Funimation announced that they would be releasing Dragon Ball Z in a new seven volume set called the "Dragon Box". Based on the original series masters with frame-by-frame restoration, the first set was released November 10, 2009.
Two pieces of theme music were used throughout the season. The opening theme, "Cha-La Head-Cha-La", is performed by Hironobu Kageyama and the ending theme, is performed by Manna. The theme for the original 1996–1997 English dub is "Rock the Dragon", performed by Jeremy Sweet. The uncut English redub from 2005 uses "Dragon Ball Z theme" by Dave Moran. The remastered season one boxset uses "Dragon Ball Z movie theme" by Mark Menza.
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Development and release The series serves as a sequel to the prior Dragon Ball anime and manga, which primarily focused on Goku's childhood experiences. It has been speculated that creator Akira Toriyama did not originally intend for the series to stretch past the Saiyan Saga when he began working on the Dragon Ball Z portion of the manga. In an interview from around the time of the last Dragon Ball arc, Toriyama said that the series would only continue for a "little while longer". Shunsuke Kikuchi, the composer for the Dragon Ball anime, continue to compose the score for Dragon Ball Z. Goku's Japanese voice actress Masako Nozawa also continued to voice the character in adulthood, unlike in many foreign dubs, which often use female actresses for Goku as a child before switching to male actors when the character becomes a teen during the final arc of Dragon Ball.
English dub The first English dub of the episodes was produced by Filipino company Creative Products Corporation, airing on RPN 9 in the Philippines during 1993. In 1996, Dallas-based company Funimation began working on their first season of a North American dub for Dragon Ball Z. By this point, parts of Dragon Ball Z had already been dubbed for non-English audiences, in regions such as Latin America and Europe. Funimation company had previously produced an English dub of Dragon Balls first 13 episodes and first movie, which aired in first-run syndication during 1995. Plans for a second syndicated Dragon Ball dub season were cancelled due to lower than expected ratings, and Funimation partnered with Los Angeles-based Saban Entertainment (known at the time for shows such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and X-Men: The Animated Series) to syndicate their Dragon Ball Z adaptation to television stations, including on Fox, UPN and WB affiliate stations. While Saban had a history of acquiring the rights to various anime series to be dubbed, Funimation still controlled the American license to the property during this period."FUNimation and Toei Animation own copyrights and trademarks. The Company has exclusive U.S. distribution rights on a year-to-year basis through 2001." 1996 fiscal report for Saban Entertainment. September 27, 1996. When this dub was running in syndication, both the Funimation logo and the Saban logo appeared in the closing credits, with the Saban logo coming immediately after the Funimation logo. Like with the prior Dragon Ball dub from 1995, a group of Canadian voice actors from Vancouver, British Columbia were used. However, this time voice work was done at Ocean Studios, rather than at Dick & Rogers Sound like with the prior Dragon Ball dub. This has led to some fans referring to this dub as "the Ocean dub". Funimation producer Barry Watson would regularly fly out from Dallas to Vancouver to coordinate the voice actors at Ocean.
This dub aired during early morning time slots in most U.S. markets. It was part of the "Saban Network for Kids", a 1996–97 syndicated programming block which included other Saban anime dubs, such as Eagle Riders and Samurai Pizza Cats,Indiana Gazette, Apr 27, 1997, p. 53 as well as Masked Rider, Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist and The Why Why Family. When Dragon Ball Z aired on this block, it had live action introductions and commercial break bumpers with children on bungee jumping ropes. These live action segments were also used on the other shows from the "Saban Network for Kids", and some of them had Power Rangers actor Greg Bullock, who played Lt. Stone on that series. The first season was a success, which led to Funimation creating a second dub season, that aired in syndication between late 1997 and mid-1998. When the first season was still airing in early 1997, Saban announced they would be airing the upcoming second season in its own two episode hour-long block, due to the first season's strong ratings. For the second season, non-live action bumpers replaced the live action ones from the first season.
This dub edited down the first season to 26 episodes in order to make it fit within a standard American television season. Due to broadcasting regulations of the time, Saban forced Funimation to remove all references to death, often replacing it with a euphemism for death known as "the Next Dimension", and digital paint was utilized to alter content that was deemed unacceptable, such as blood. The word "Hell" was also digitally removed from two characters shirts in the eighth dub episode, and edited to say "HFIL", which in the dub stood for "Home for Infinite Losers." The tenth dub episode "Escape from Piccolo" never aired in syndication, due to concerns from Saban over its content. It was first released via Pioneer Entertainment's VHS release of the dub in late 1997. Regarding this episode and Saban's censoring of the dub, Funimation president Gen Fukunaga remarked in a 1999 interview, "we had a lot of arguments with them, saying they were going way too far with the censorship, but they would refuse to air it unless it was cut to their liking. In fact, I recall one show that we censored a little less than usual, and they just refused to air it. That was the only actual episode that didn't make it to the airwaves, but there were a lot of other instances in which we felt they crossed the line."
According to Fukunaga, Saban initially wanted Funimation to cut out a scene in episode 17 where Nappa blows up a helicopter with journalists in it. They only allowed the scene to be kept after Funimation wrote a line where Tien says "I can see their parachutes, they're okay", immediately after the helicopter explodes and the journalists are killed. In other scenes, lines were added which implied that buildings destroyed by Vegeta and Nappa were empty or evacuated. Vegeta actor Brian Drummond's reading of the line "It's Over 9000!" in the episode "The Return of Goku" later became a popular internet meme in 2006, nine years after the scene originally aired on American television. This line was a mistranslation in a scene where Vegeta reacts to Goku's power level, and did not appear in the Japanese version, with the original line being "It's Over 8000!"
Funimation decided to replace the original Japanese score by Shunsuke Kikuchi so they wouldn't have to pay him music royalties, and outsourced the role of music to Saban Entertainment. Saban in turn hired their former in-house composer Ron Wasserman, who went uncredited so Saban's executives could collect the music royalties.Mighty RAW (a.k.a. Ron Wasserman) just finished Monty Python's Holy Grail CD-ROM and the Ace Ventura, Pet Detective CD-ROM. His music can also be heard on Pythonline on the WEB. He is also doing music for the Saban show titled "Dragon Ball Z". "The Power Rangers Zeo Newsletter" grnrngr.com, July 31, 1996. In an uncredited capacity, Wasserman had also previously composed the music and theme songs for shows such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and X-Men: The Animated Series, and had already left the company in September 1995 since he was being overworked and was refused a pay rise. Saban let Wasserman compose for Dragon Ball Z from his home in Los Angeles, and he was allowed more creative freedom, giving it a darker sound than previous shows he had worked on. He later claimed that Saban didn't care about the show, and that the only instructions they gave him was to make sure that it had continuous background music playing, so they could earn maximum music royalties. He said "I got to do whatever I wanted, so I went with this really heavy, weird stuff", remembering that he would never receive any creative notes after sending the music to Saban. Since Wasserman was no longer employed by Saban at this point, they paid him on an episode by episode basis to score Dragon Ball Z, instead of giving him an annual salary like when he was still part of the company.