Trivia / Dragon Ball Z Kai

aka: Dragonball Kai

• Adored by the Network:
  • When Nicktoons had the rights to the series, it would be shown multiple times a day with some of the weakest excuses for marathons. 11/11/11? They showed 11 hours of the series. This is justified as the series was bringing in spectactular ratings for the network at the time. It got to the point where Nicktoons began airing the original Dragon Ball Z movies in an almost completely uncut format (with the only real edit being a rather infamous scene from Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn). All blood, violence, and profanity was kept, at a TV-Y7-FV rating no less.
  • While not to the extent of Nicktoons, [adult swim] loved this series during its run there, despite it completing its original run on other networks and being based on a series that finished decades ago. And until Dragon Ball Super took its slot in August 2020, on Saturdays, Kai was usually the first show to air after [adult swim] signed on.
• Blooper:
  • In the English dub, Dende in the Namek arc says he has hundreds of brothers and sisters… and moments later reveals that the Namekians are a One-Gender Race and he has no understanding of the existence of more than one genders. He should've said "siblings".
  • When Trunks and Krillin visit the bedridden Goku, Yamcha recognizes him as "Future Trunks", except Piccolo had revealed the Kid from the Future’s identity after Yamcha had left the battlefield with Goku, so he shouldn’t know his name.
  • Piccolo at one point randomly name dropped "Trunks" before his identity was revealed to everyone else. This wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that Piccolo doing exactly that later in front of Vegeta is an actual plot point, that helps Vegeta realize that the Kid from the Future is really his son.
  • In the English dub of episode 83, Vegeta tells Future Trunks, "Neither you nor Cell will be needed, actually." Obviously Cell is needed to defeat Cell; Vegeta should have said, "Neither you nor Kakarot will be needed, actually."
  • In episode 80, Krillin berates Vegeta for charging in against Cell after Cell kills Trunks: "Vegeta, what were you thinking?! Look, it's not like we can just wish Trunks back to life with the Dragon Balls!" This should have been the exact opposite: "it's not like we can't just wish Trunks back to life with the Dragon Balls!"
  • An important plot point of the Majin Buu arc is that Vegeta specifically asks Dende to wish back the people who died who are not evil, so that the people he killed as Majin Vegeta will also be revived, while leaving out the really evil beings like Dabura. In the English dub, they understand this and then Dende proceeds to wish back the people who were killed by Majin Buu and when the Elder Kai and Vegeta are revived, who died on their own, nobody expresses any confusion as to how they came back to life.
  • Early on in the uncut English dub, Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon is reverted to its original Japanese name, Makankōsappō, Krillin's Destructo Disc was called "Kienzan" (though mispronounced), and the Solar Flare was called "Taiyo-ken." However, later on in the show and later dubs of future DB anime materials would revert them back to the English names with no explanation. The edited TV version of the dub had them referred to by the English names from the start, though.
• Channel Hop:
  • The series was initially licensed by Nickelodeon and aired on Nicktoons with edits for content. After the show was taken off the air, due to Nickelodeon presumably losing the license, Kai moved to [adult swim] and aired once uncut on the revived Toonami.
  • A minor example for the show's run on broadcast networks. 4Kids Entertainment licensed the show for airing on Toonzai. When Toonzai ended and was replaced by the Saban Brands-run Vortexx, Kai remained as one of the holdovers from Toonzai (and was notably one of the few shows that continued to air on Vortexx until that block was replaced).
• Character Outlives Actor:
  • Daisuke Gōri, who was the Japanese voice actor of Gyuumao (Ox King), Lord Enma and Porunga, committed suicide partway through the initial run and his ongoing roles were recast with Ryūzaburō Ōtomo. Mr. Satan (whom he voiced in the original) was voiced by Unshō Ishizuka.
  • The role of Tenshinhan, whose voice actor (Hirotaka Suzuoki) died of lung cancer in the intervening years between Dragon Ball Z and Kai, and was replaced in Kai by Hikaru Midorikawa.
  • Tomiko Suzuki, Dende, Marron, and Bee's voice actress, died from a heart attack in 2003; she was replaced by Aya Hirano, Hiroko Ushida and Masami Suzuki, respectively.
  • Takeshi Aono, Kami-sama's Japanese voice actor, suffered a stroke in between the Frieza and Cell Sagas, so Bin Shimada took over for his final few appearances. Aono died in 2012 due to the complications of the stroke.
  • Kenji Utsumi, the voice of Shenlong, died from peritoneal cancer in 2013 during the three-year gap between the Cell and Buu sagas. Like with Daisuke Gori above, Ryuzaburo Otomo took over the voice for Shenlong when the series resumed and the Buu Saga began airing.
• Creator Couple:
  • In the first 98 episodes of the Latin American Spanish dub of Kai, Master Roshi was voiced by Jorge Roig, the husband of Bulma's voice actress Rocío Garcel.
  • Mariana Ortiz, the first Latin American Spanish voice of Yajirobe in Kai, was married to the character's second Latin American Spanish voice Luis Daniel Ramírez.^note Who was already the character's second voice actor in DBZ after its first actor Araceli de León's death. They have since divorced.
  • Cynthia Eslava Sarli, the translator for the Latin American Spanish dub, is the wife of Armando Coria, Dodoria's Latin American Spanish voice actor.
• Directed by Cast Member:
  • As with most of DBZ, the original Dragon Ball, and the movies, Christopher Sabat returned to direct the English dub.
  • The Latin American Spanish dub of the first 98 episodes were directed from episodes 1 to 54 by Irwin Daayán, Dende's voice actor, and from episodes 55 to 98 by Patricia Acevedo, who played Chi-Chi (Milk in the Spanish dub) and Chaotzu (Chaoz in the dub). For The Final Chapters, Gohan's voice actor Luis Alfonso Mendoza directed the dub.
• Executive Meddling: In The Final Chapters, Toei Animation forced Funimation to replace the audio of Cell Games Reenactment that featured Team Four Star's voices with the audio from the original dub.^note The team "reprising" their roles from Dragon Ball Z Abridged, with the exception of Curtis Arnott, who played Fake!Mr. Satan, with plenty of in-jokes to the Dragon Ball Z dub.
• Fan Edit: The author of Dragon Ball Recut, a much-revered reduced-filler edit of the first Dragon Ball anime, is working on an edit of Kai that'll try to remove the pieces of filler that Kai still retained; the author's noted that some scenes, such as those involving Gregory, are too ingrained with the main story to remove, while many others, like the infamous Ginyu/Bulma body switch episode, were quite expendable.
• Fandom Nod:
  • The series included a little Shout-Out to Dragon Ball Z Abridged by having Nappa note that he hates the media.
  • The entire Cell Games Re-enactment originally using Team Four Star as the voices of the actors for their characters was this incarnate.
  • In the edited TV version of the English dub, there are some alternate voice lines done for this reason. The biggest one probably being Vegeta shouting, "IT'S OVER 9000!!!!" in the scene where Goku shows him and Nappa how strong his power level is, as it had become a huge meme since the Ocean cast dub had Brian Drummond yell it as Vegeta in the same scene.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • 95 episodes of Dragon Ball Kai with the Kenji Yamamoto score aired from April 5, 2009 to March 6, 2011, before he was fired by Toei for plagiarism, mainly of the scores for Avatar and Terminator: Salvation. Reruns of these particular episodes have since replaced it with cues from the Shunsuke Kikuchi score from DBZ. On the respective Japanese Blu-ray, Japanese DVD, American television airings, and American DVD/Blu-rays,^note Parts 1-4, not the "season" sets. the Yamamoto score was intact on episodes #001-#076, #001-#072, #001-#063, and #001-#052. So your best bet to getting all 95 Kai episodes with the Yamamoto score would be to trade with someone who recorded the show off of Fuji Television during the aforementioned period in the run. Episodes #096-#098 were never released with the Yamamoto score, so you would be completely out of luck finding those with the music intact.
  • The Cell Games Reenactment with Team Four Star's dialogue isn't featured on the home releases, but is floating around on the internet after a fan saw that their audio was still in a streamed version and quickly recorded it after seeing it, then put it online for all to see.
• The Original Darrin:
  • Japanese version:
    • Masaharu Satou was the original voice actor for Master Roshi following Kohei Miyauchi's death, but was replaced shortly afterward by Hiroshi Masuoka. Satou returned as Roshi for Kai and has continued to provide his voice since.
  • English version:
    • Chris Cason was the original voice of Mr. Popo for Funimation's in-house dub, but left after the Frieza Saga was over, and Christopher Sabat took over when the Android Saga began. Cason resumed his role as Mr. Popo when Kai was dubbed, 11 years later.
    • When the English dub of Kai was originally recorded, Brad Jackson had temporarily left Funimation during the time period, so Bryan Massey voiced Oolong for its original run as well as the dub of the first film, Curse of the Blood Rubies. By the time, The Final Chapters was dubbed, Jackson had returned and resumed his role as Oolong, also playing him in the English dubs of both Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Super.
    • Burter is voiced by Vic Mignogna, who had earlier voiced the role in the uncut redub for the first 67 episodes for DBZ. However, he himself was redubbed by Chris Sabat for consistency for the uncut box sets, because he was unavailable to redub Mark Britten's lines for his other appearances. Sabat had previously voiced the role in some video games, and has since returned to the role again in recent games.
  • Latin American Spanish version:
    • Rocío Garcel and Eduardo Garza, the original and second voice actors for Bulma and Krillin, respectively,^note Garza having taken over Rossy Aguirre, who voiced Krillin as a kid and young adult from his first appereance until episode 60 of DBZ resumed their roles here after being replaced by Mónica Manjarrez and Luis Daniel Ramírez during the Buu Saga. Likewise, José Lavat returned as the narrator of the series after being also replaced by Joaquín Martal in Dragon Ball GT.
  • The French dub had most of the original team from Dragon Ball Z reunited, after all but two of the voice actors were replaced in Dragon Ball GT. Since then, they have stayed on board for all subsequent entries.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Japanese version:
    • Invoked midway due to the suicide of Daisuke Gōri; his roles have been filled by Ryuzaburo Ohtomo. Mr. Satan was replaced with Unshō Ishizuka when he appeared. Likewise, Ohtomo took over for Shenlong due to Kenji Utsumi dying in between the three-year-gap that took place between the Cell and Buu sagas airing.
    • Bin Shimada later replaced Takeshi Aono as Kami-sama during his last appearances in the Android Saga following Aono's hospitalization for a stroke. Aono subsequently died from complications caused by it in 2012. He would also replace Joji Yanami as Babidi for the Buu Saga, though Yanami continued to voice the Narrator and King Kai.
    • Yuko Minaguchi was replaced by Shino Kakinuma as Videl, due to Minaguchi studying abroad at the time.
    • The entire Ginyu Force was also replaced, along with Zarbon and Dodoria.
  • English version:
    • Most notable is Frieza's English voice. In the original Ocean dub and the early Funimation dubs, female voice actress provided his voice.^note Pauline Newstone and Linda Young, respectively. This, along with Frieza's character design and effeminate personality, led to Viewer Gender Confusion among Western viewers. In Kai, a male voice actor, Chris Ayres, was selected to voice Frieza.^note Young would provide Frieza's laugh at the beginning of the first episode, though that was probably an oversight. The reason for this being that they apparently had Young start to record the series as Frieza, but when they realized she wouldn't most likely be able to talk as fast as the animation and scripts needed, the role was recasted.
    • Stephanie Nadolny and Meredith McCoy's respective roles of young Gohan and Android 18 were taken over by Colleen Clinkenbeard. Although McCoy was supposedly contacted to reprise her role, Clinkenbeard was brought in anyway as a last minute substitute.^note Since she had filled in for a video game before, and was voicing Gohan anyway. Even when McCoy started voicing 18 again in the later films, Super, and video games, unlike Brad Jackson, they had Clinkenbeard voice her in The Final Chapters to maintain consistency. It's not 100% clear why Nadolny was replaced, as she claims she was interested in reprising the role.
    • Monica Rial replaced Tiffany Vollmer as the voice of Bulma. Vollmer says she had retired from voice acting, and later moved to New Orleans to pursue a career as a makeup artist.
    • Todd Haberkorn, the voice of Allen Walker in D.Gray-Man, took over duties as Android 19, sounding even more robotic than the original dub voice.
    • Doc Morgan replaced Kyle Hebert as the voice of the narrator. Hebert would still voice Ox King and reprise his role as teen and adult Gohan in The Final Chapters, however.
    • Brina Palencia replaced Monika Antonelli as Puar and Chiaotzu, as she had already done so in then-recent video games. Antonelli had moved away to Minnesota.
    • The Ginyu Force was completely replaced, except for Sabat as Recoome. R. Bruce Elliott replaced the retired Brice Armstrong as Ginyu,^note who himself had replaced Dale D. Kelly Vic Mignogna replaced Sabat as Burter while Jason Liebrecht replaced Sabat as Jeice,^note Sabat has since returned to the two roles in video games and Greg Ayres replaced Bill Townsley as Guldo.^note Townsley still returned to voice Cui.
    • Alexis Tipton, who started voicing Trunks in Super, is his character's half of Gotenks' voice for some reason. Additionally, Tipton also took over the role of Erasa, a classmate of Gohan and Videl's, from Laura Bailey.
    • The broadcast dub uses Vic Mignogna as the singer for the shortened opening, while the Part DVD and Blu-ray sets switched the singers for the first six between Sean Schemmel, Justin Cook, Vic Mignogna, Greg Ayres, Sonny Strait, and Brina Palencia, while the last two feature a few different mixes of the voices switching off lines.
    • While Dameon Clarke, Cell's original English voice actor, would reprise his role as The Original Darrin, for Cell's lines in one of the Hell scenes in The Final Chapters, as seen here, he's voiced by Jim Foronda instead, who doesn't even remotely sound anything like him.^note This is weird for several reasons; first is the fact that Clarke voiced Cell in the character's earlier appearances in the series, so it breaks a bit of vocal consistency with the character, they most likely could've gotten Travis Willingham to sub in, since he was also dubbing Ace's scenes in the One Piece dub while they were recording the dub of The Final Chapters, or they could've simply reused his line from DBZ, as seen here, and since they reused the DBZ lines for the Cell Games Reenactment to replace Team Four Star's, this wouldn't be that jarring.
    • For the first 98 episodes, Oolong was voiced by Bryan Massey. In The Final Chapters, Brad Jackson was finally brought back to reprise his role.
    • In an odd case, that's more of The Other Marty, it was shown in a preview that several members of Team Four Star recorded the voice parts of the actors in the "reenactment" scene of the fight with Cell that were dressed as the characters they play in Dragon Ball Z Abridged with their abridged voices. However, once the episode with the scene aired, their dialogue was replaced with a mix of the original DBZ dub's dialogue from the same scene. This was apparently demanded by Toei.
  • Latin American Spanish version:
    • For the first 98 episodes, aside from Eduardo Garza and Rocío Garcel reprising their roles as The Original Darrins for Krillin and Bulma, most of the main characters were recast for financial reasons. It was also recorded at Candiani Dubbing Studios, as the original studio Intertrack was shut down. Makes sense with Yajirobe, whose original voice actor Araceli de León died of a heart attack in 1999;^note And here is voiced back by Luis Daniel Ramírez, who had replaced de León back in DBZ, before Ramírez in turn was replaced by José Arenas during the Buu Saga as well as Master Roshi, whose voice actor Jesús Colín retired from acting in 2005 and moved to Acapulco, and subsequently died in 2011 of natural causes. The fiasco surrounding the financial issues caused Toei to re-organize its Latin American division.
    • By the time The Final Chapters premiered in Latin America, most of the original Latin American Spanish cast, including Mario Castañeda, René García, and Gerardo Reyero, returned to reprise their roles that were previously re-cast. Majin Boo and Ox-King, however, were, respectively, re-cast with Marcos Patiño and Enrique Cervantes,^note As by then Majin Boo and Ox-King's voice actor Mario Sauret had retired from voice acting in 2013 and was living in Querétaro due to labor issues. and Mr. Satan, Cell, and the Budokai announcer retain their voices from the previous dub of Kai. As a bonus, Garza, Garcel and the actors voicing secondary characters who had reprised their roles stayed with the cast for the series.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • A rumor apparently going around on some forums indicates that Christopher Sabat wanted Scott McNeil, Piccolo's Ocean voice actor, to take over for the official Funimation dub actor for him. This has never been confirmed by Sabat himself, and doesn't really make much sense, since he's been his official American English actor since 1999. This most likely stems from him giving up a lot of his secondary and tertiary roles in this series from DBZ to other actors to lighten his work load, but still keeping the important ones; Vegeta, Piccolo, Yamcha, Kami, Shenron, Porunga, and a few others. It might also come from the fact that McNeil voiced Shiki in the dub of One Piece: Strong World, and the episodes of the show that he appeared in, in 2012, two years after the Kai dub started production.
  • Among the fiasco of the Latin American Spanish dub, there was a rumor that the reason Irwin Daayán, Dende's voice actor and director of the first 54 episodes of Kai in that dub, quit directing Kai after episode 54 and subsequently didn't reprise his role as Dende in Battle of Gods and Super was because of the backlash Kai received in the region. While the circumstances behind him not reprising his role in Battle of Gods and Super are unknown and may have to do with the backlash, he has gone on record as saying that he actually quit directing due to financial reasons.
• Posthumous Credit: Despite dying of a heart attack months before the Buu Saga episodes even started airing, Ichirō Nagai recorded all of his lines several months in advance and was given a credit as Karin.
• Promoted Fanboy: Thanks to this promo, it's clear that Fake Goku and Fake Vegeta were voiced by Lawrence Simpson (MasakoX) and Nick Landis (Lanipator) of Dragon Ball Z Abridged. Though this was left out of the broadcast version, the lines were still recorded and released online.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Cynthia Eslava Sarli, the translator of the Latin American Spanish dub, is the older sister of Irwin Daayán, Dende's Latin American Spanish voice actor.
  • Nayeli Mendoza Adame, Bee's Latin American Spanish voice actress, is the daughter of Luis Alfonso Mendoza, Gohan's Latin American Spanish voice actor and the dubbing director for The Final Chapters, and the niece of Ricardo Mendoza, the Latin American Spanish voice actor for Yamcha and Guldo.
  • Guillermo and Armando Coria, the Latin American Spanish voice actors for Dr. Gero and Dodoria, respectively, are uncle and nephew in real life.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • Kenji Yamamoto was the first composer for Kai. However, Yamamoto was fired by Toei in 2011 after it was revealed he'd been plagiarizing tracks going as far back as 1991. This resulted in Yamamoto's score for Kai being replaced by the original Shunsuke Kikuchi score from DBZ, both in later episodes and in DVD releases. Eventually, Norihito Sumitomo composed the music for The Final Chapters, cementing him as the de facto composer for the Dragon Ball series.
  • Team Four Star, specifically Scott Frerichs, Nick Landis, Curtis Arnott, and maybe Lawrence Simpson, who lives in his home country of the UK, got "greylisted" from working at Funimation for a while as a result of Toei finding out that Christopher Sabat tried to sneak them into the dub of The Final Chapters.
• Role Reprise: Quite a few. For some, DBZ was their first voice acting role before becoming major players in the industry.
• Schedule Slip: For the Buu Saga English dub. Back in 2012, Mayumi Tanaka, Krillin's Japanese voice actress, announced that the rest of the series was being put together specifically for overseas broadcasts. However, it wasn't until December 7, 2016 when it was finally announced that the Buu Saga would be airing in January 2017 back to back with Super, under its overseas title, The Final Chapters. It was during this time that Funimation released new DBZ Blu-rays, dubbed Battle of Gods and Resurrection 'F', the latter in less time than they did the former, and announced that they were going to dub Super.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: In 2014, it was reported that Funimation hadn't recorded the dub for The Final Chapters. Furthermore, it didn't broadcast in the West until 2017.
• Stunt Casting:
  • Aya Hirano as Dende. His recast English voice actress Maxey Whitehead could count given her breakout role of Alphonse Elric, but she'd already developed a niche for voicing young boys by then.
  • Team Four Star's casting for the Cell Games Reenactment was pretty brilliant on Christopher Sabat's part, since they'd become the most well-known abridging group on the internet to both Dragon Ball fans and non-fans alike, and had been voice actors at Funimation for several years by then, doing tertiary and secondary voices in several of their properties.
• Throw It In!: One can tell from this clip that all of the lines in the Cell Games Reenactment were entirely made up. Given that this was Team Four Star's doing, it's par for the course with their comedy and writing.
• Un-Canceled: The series was cancelled in Japan after the end of the Cell Saga. Due to its overseas popularity, more episodes were produced for the international market. However, despite initial word being that it was specifically for the international market, Kai actually returned to Japanese TV on April 6, 2014 following the cancellation of Toriko.
• Unfinished Dub: The Arabic dub of Dragon Ball Z Kai only covered the first 54 episodes.
• What Could Have Been:
  • At one point, Sean Schemmel briefly discussed the show getting an alternate English dub like most every other show in the franchise through the Ocean cast and studios. Kirby Morrow, Goku's third Ocean dub voice, then discussed the dub sometime later and said that casting was underway and that he sounded "too cool" to reprise the role. Many other Canadian voice actors, some that were a part of the Ocean DBZ dub, have also mentioned being a part of it. Then, in Geekdom101's video interview with Brian Drummond, Drummond mentioned that he had recorded all of his lines as Vegeta for the dub some time ago. Then Kix, a UK kid's network, started airing their own edit of the Funimation dub instead of the Ocean dub, leading many confused and speculating over the reasons, with the leading theory being that a lack of interest from Canadian broadcasters is the reason why the dub hasn't surfaced in Canada at least. So, the recordings are most likely sitting on a hard drive somewhere in Canada going to waste.
  • Linda Young was originally announced as reprising her role as Frieza, and her laugh is heard in the first episode. She also recorded a few more later episodes before Sabat decided to recast the role with a male voice in the role. However, Young continued voicing other characters such as Baba and Piza.
  • Meredith McCoy was asked to reprise her role as Android 18, but declined, since she was living in Israel at the time. Colleen Clinkenbeard was brought in to replace her at the last minute, as she had already filled in for the Shin Budokai video game in 2006. McCoy later returned to the role beginning in 2014 after returning to the U.S.
  • Dameon Clarke was living in Los Angeles at the time recording took place, so his return as Cell was up in the air for a while. Travis Willingham, who had earlier filled in for several video games, was tapped as his replacement if he couldn't work it out.

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