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Daizenshuu EX - Updates from February 2011 |
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28 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 8:23 pm EST -- Sure, KaiserNeko from TeamFourStar stops by to be a pretty face and help get the show going, but the real meat this week is an in-depth crash course in Journey to the West, the Chinese story which served as the initial inspiration for DragonBall:
First up, our buddy Herms from Kanzentai details the influences in the earliest parts of the DragonBall story, then turns to the very end of the first TV series with the character of Annin. The Taoist philosopher named Lao Tzu makes a disguise appearance, and contraptions meant to seal away the Handsome Monkey King are put to use.
I then bring you all the way back to Episode 79 of the first TV series with two characters named "Ginkaku" (Silver Horn) and "Kinkaku" (Golden Horn), themselves and their magical gourd a direct reference to and re-telling of a story from Journey to the West:
Download the show now, or head on over to the podcast page for more information or to subscribe. We also have the inspiration for the podcast episode detailed on our forum. I have no doubt that many of you will want to run out and purchase a translation of the original story after listening! |
22 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 10:10 am EST -- We have a couple quick music updates for you all this morning. First up is an easy one: the full track listing has been revealed for this week's DragonBall Kai: Complete Song Collection, so we have added that in to its respective section.
Next up is another head-scratcher. The so-called DragonBall Kai: Original Soundtrack IV has a fun little release schedule going on, and its cover art really is not helping:
The disc's title seems to be in flux if you look around retailer sites, but the cover art seems to finalize it as DragonBall Kai: Original Soundtrack Shû (the same shû from daizenshuu, meaning "collection") — the number four is nowhere to be seen. So what on Earth is this going to be? Will it truly be music from the series that has not yet made its way to CD, or like this week's Complete Song Collection and its vocal tracks, will this be a last-gasp collection of previously-released material?
That all being said, it seemed like it was about time to break the series' various CD releases out of the "Miscellaneous CDs" page and into its own page: "DragonBall Kai CDs". Nine discs within two years or so seemed to warrant it. |
21 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 8:14 pm EST -- Beyond catching up on two weeks worth of news, we have a bunch of short segments for all you podcast listeners this time around. Our buddy and forum moderator Kaboom jumped on to talk a little bit about a little project some folks have been contributing to: splicing together a more complete view of the Saiyan history, in particular with the Bardock TV special. I also finally got in my copy of DragonBall Kai: Ultimate Butôden, so some initial thoughts on the game help flesh out the show (spoilers: it's pretty good). All your regular releases and e-mails round things out this time around. Download the show now, or head on over to the podcast page for more information or to subscribe.
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17 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 5:03 pm EST -- I have seen a couple rumblings that FUNimation may be dropping the price on all Kai releases in the near future, so some of the prices in a current sale going on over on Amazon may be an indication of this.
If you are interested in the home release and have not yet grabbed some of the volumes on Blu-ray, now is a good time. |
16 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 3:06 pm EST -- It has been a couple weeks since FUNimation debuted their online streaming initiative for our favorite franchise. No schedule was set ahead of time, but the company recently announced that DBZ TV episodes 16-27 (picking up where the first batch left off) will be available this coming Saturday via all their usual channels. It would seem that a batch of ~10 episodes every couple of weeks may wind up as the norm.
As a reminder, the episodes are indeed available in their original Japanese format, but are the video masters from the orange brick sets released from 2007-2009. An English dub (with the original Japanese musical score) is also available for the same episodes. The streams are available to US residents only.
Over in the realm of home releases, RightStuf has recently updated their online listings with "Part Five" of FUNimation's release of Kai. Due out on 03 May 2011, the prices have been substantially slashed from prior sets' MSRPs: $29.98 for the DVD set, and $34.98 for the Blu-ray set (with RightStuf's own prices being slightly lower than MSRP). No reason has been given yet for the reduced prices. |
11 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 2:22 pm EST -- I am actually somewhat glad I held off on updating about DragonBall Kai Original Soundtrack IV, since the updates keep coming one after another and negate whatever came prior!
Originally scheduled for release later this month, a fourth soundtrack for DragonBall Kai was delayed exactly one month until 23 March 2011. Within the last week or so, folks started noticing that its entry on retailer sites like CDJapan listed it as "canceled".
Soon after that, a completely new listing popped up for the soundtrack with a new catalogue number (COCX-36748) and the same March release date... but now as a two-disc set!
A prior description noted that the fourth soundtrack would contain around thirty pieces of unreleased music from the show, but our music sleuths have noted that there are not even twenty pieces from the show that have not yet made their way to disc. With a bump in disc-count, what is going to fill up this space? There are certainly some unused pieces and perhaps new "synth" versions of vocal songs like on prior soundtracks, but even that is a stretch when you consider two discs.
The DragonBall Kai Complete Song Collection still seems on-track for release on 23 February 2011, and the Raging Blast 2 soundtrack is also on tap for next month.
In video game news, DragonBall Kai: Ultimate Butôden was released for the Nintendo DS in Japan exactly one week ago, and the sales are in. In its first week of release (reporting from January 31st to February 6th), the game moved 31,108 copies, making it the fourth-best performing game of the week.
As a bit of comparison in the portable arena:
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DragonBall DS sold approximately 70-80,000 copies its first week in Japan back in 2008
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DragonBall Kai: Saiya-jin Raishû (also for the DS) did 73,915 copies its first week in 2009
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DragonBall DS 2 moved 17,494 copies its first week in 2010
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DragonBall: TAG VS on the PSP sold 19,080 copies its first week in 2010
Sales figures are all over the place when you compare portable to console games, but at the end of the day, there is an exponential downward trend going on — so much, in fact, that no DragonBall games were reported on Namco-Bandai's most recent quarterly figures, the first time in a while during their release window.
DragonBall Kai: Ultimate Butôden has still not been announced for distribution outside Japan. We heard rumblings of DragonBall DS 2 coming stateside about two months after its Japanese release last year, which still leaves a window of opportunity here, even with the 3DS on the horizon. It is interesting to note, however, that Ultimate Butôden was not shown off in any capacity at Namco-Bandai's recent "IGNITE" event in San Francisco last week, where other new announcements were made.
There is a bunch of European licensing news for us to catch up on, but it will have to wait just a little while longer! |
07 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 8:14 pm EST -- When you hear the phrase "TV Special" it is likely that you think of either Bardock or Trunks from the alternate future timeline (or perhaps even Goku Jr.). What about white tuxedos, though?
You may not know it, but DBZ Movie 7 had its own TV special in 1992 that recapped all of the movies up to that point. In addition to all of the news and other regular content with Julian this week, our buddy Hujio joined us to talk about (the confusingly-named) DragonBall Z: The Three Great Super Saiyans - Special. Download the show now, or head on over to the podcast page for more information or to subscribe. |
03 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 2:08 pm EST -- Namco-Bandai has posted a ¥5.6 billion (approximately $68.6 million) profit for the third quarter of fiscal year 2011.
For the first time in quite a while, the DragonBall franchise did not perform well enough to show up in the top five-to-six franchises to allow for more extensive net sales figures.
In terms of general toys and hobby merchandise (non-video games), the franchise dropped in net sales from ¥2.6 billion the first three quarters of fiscal 2010 to ¥1.7 billion this year, and the company is still forecasting a drop down to ¥2.7 billion (same as forecast last quarter) for the full year compared to ¥3.3 billion in fiscal 2010.
No individual DragonBall video game sales were noted in the report — both TAG VS / Tenkaichi Tag Team (PSP) and Raging Blast 2 (PS3/360) were released this past quarter (the latter having a first week that could be spun as either "good" or "bad", being the best-selling game that week, but selling 10,000 less copies than its predecessor).
VegettoEX @ 9:55 am EST -- For those that enjoy keeping up with this sort of thing (like us!), nothing of significance for DragonBall fans came out of Navarre's Q3 2011 earnings conference call, which took place this past Tuesday. FUNimation is still listed as a "Discontinued Operation" and is still up for sale, but no appealing offers have been made to Navarre. We had originally been told that a resolution by the end of calendar 2010 would likely happen, but Navarre now anticipates that if a suitable buyer (and thus offer) is not found before the end of next quarter, they will consider bringing FUNimation back into the standard-operational fold. Navarre management noted that they have been running FUNimation as if they were going to keep owning them all along, being a little more stringent with new licenses and monetizing existing heavy-hitters (such as DragonBall) pretty darn well to keep things going as fantastically as they have. Net income from discontinued operations (which includes FUNimation) was up, so while FUNimation does not necessarily fit in with the overall Navarre business plan moving forward (which is more about distribution than production), they do well enough that they may end up keeping them around to leverage the cash flow benefits that they bought them for in the first place!
Of more relevance to general fandom is the fact that FUNimation has dropped the MSRP of the first DragonBall "season" set to $34.98. Amazon is currently offering the set for $22.99 (with the other four sets in the same ball park), so fans that have not yet dipped their toes into the first TV series can now do so at a lower price. This is the current version of the TV series FUNimation has in-print, released over the course of 2009-2010; no "Dragon Box" version has been announced or hinted at.
Finally, DragonBall Kai: Ultimate Butôden for the Nintendo DS officially saw its release in Japan today (well, yesterday going by time zones):
There has still been no announcement for distribution outside of Japan on this one, so those looking to play it sooner than later might want to consider importing — the original Nintendo DS is indeed region-free, though the upcoming 3DS will not be. We have started up our official "Help Thread" over on our forum, so for all the information you need about purchasing and playing the game, look no further!
Ultimate Butôden is the only titled game currently on-schedule for release in 2011. ZENKAI Battle Royale is still in testing and is expected to be released in Japanese arcades at some point this year, and Namco-Bandai has announced that a DragonBall game is in the works for the Nintendo 3DS, but is unlikely to see the light of day until at least the second half of 2011. |
01 February 2011
VegettoEX @ 12:31 pm EST -- We noted just the other day that the third "Limited Edition" volume of the Bakuman anime in Japan would come with another bonus music CD, this time with a cover of "Romantikku Ageru yo", the closing theme to the original DragonBall TV series.
It turns out we missed another cover version of the song last year, though! The artist Clémentine released an album entitled Animentine ~Bossa du Anime~ back on 21 July 2010 (SICP-2770) which contained an eclectic mix of chill, jazzy, piano-based anime theme song covers. Among the mix was, lo and behold, another cover of "Romantikku Ageru yo". A sample of the song can be heard over on its CDJapan or Amazon Japan pages. The song is performed in English, and appears to be a very loose adaption of the original lyrics.
The song has been covered more times in recent years than any other song from the franchise by such artists as Haruko Momoi, Shoko Nakagawa, Yoko Ishida, Sherry, Kikuko Inoue, Hitomi Kitamura, and even a "self-cover" version by its original performer, Ushio Hashimoto. |
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