Hello, and welcome to my edit list for the Dragon Ball TV series. Here, I track the edits and changes made to Dragon Ball when it airs on Cartoon Network in the US, in comparison to the original Japanese episodes.

Certainly, it is no longer a secret that the series would be edited for TV. People were made familiar with the edits to Dragon Ball Z many years ago, after all. I am not necessarily on a mission to show "the truth", nor do I want to rant about the "evils" of FUNimation. I honestly don't care much about those things. I don't hate FUNimation at all, really, even if I might complain about some of their dubbing work. But there are plenty of other people out there who do, if that's your cup of tea.

However, the fact is, the series is edited for TV, and in my insatiable curiosity, I decided to keep track of it. I used to keep my findings to myself, but then I thought, "Hey, maybe someone else would be interested in this stuff." Thus, I've been incorporating my findings into the various incarnations of my website over the past few years.

The general consensus may be something along the lines of: "There's no need to worry about the Dragon Ball edits! They just cut out the sex stuff, but it's otherwise perfect! The scripts are much closer to the original than DBZ was, and they use the original music!" Sure, the original music is there (well, most of it, anyway); I'll never stop praising the presence of KIKUCHI Shunsuke's beautifully, and fittingly, simplistic score. But with the exception of the first season, the DB dub scripts are not much better than the DBZ dub scripts. I could probably spend many hours ranting about the stupidity of the dialogue. But, I will leave that for someone else, too, because I just don't care enough about it. Additionally, the editing also got worse with the later seasons. There are some ridiculous inconsistencies. Personally, I really can't stand inconsistency.

I should note that while there are now uncut DVDs widely available, and everyone can see what's been cut out for themselves, they weren't always available. When I started doing this, the only DB DVD available was for the third movie. By the time the DVDs for the TV series started coming out, I had already tracked the edits for the first three seasons, which is two-thirds of the entire series. Back then, very few people had access to the original versions. Though actually, if you know me, I was always a very vocal (and maybe a bit annoying...) advocate of DVDs getting released.

Perhaps you don't own a DVD player. Perhaps you do own the DVDs, but don't watch the series on Cartoon Network. Perhaps you do own the DVDs and do watch the series on Cartoon Network, but you're curious about a more direct comparison without going through the trouble of doing it yourself. Perhaps you're just really into reading these sort of things. Perhaps you stumbled upon this page by accident, and I've managed to pique your curiosity. Perhaps you're just really bored.

If you are the least bit interested, feel free to read all of my findings! There's a lot here, though, so be warned. You don't have to read it all in one sitting, however!