Dragon Ball Z Abridged
is an Abridged Series of Dragon Ball Z created by Team Four Star, which ran from 2008 to 2019. The series quickly set itself apart from others of its kind for featuring a Super Group of Abridged Series content creators and is far and away one of the most popular on the internet.
Compared to most of its counterparts, DBZA is notable for having very character-driven, Call-Back heavy humor, making a genuine effort at faithfully adapting Dragon Ball Z's plot, and containing almost no Fourth Wall breaking (well, after the first season, anyway). That said, it does still have plenty of Lampshade Hanging and in-jokes relating to the franchise as a whole, and some of the jokes in question are obscure enough that they would probably go over the heads of even the most die-hard Dragon Ball fans. Essentially, DragonBall Z Abridged is what would happen if you put Dragon Ball Z and Archer in a blender.
The series is also notable for its voice acting, which audiences compared favorably to the official dub. Notably, the late Chris Ayres praised LittleKuriboh's performance as Freeza, and several members of Team Four Star were hired to do voice work in the Dragon Ball Xenoverse series.
Although the episodes persist on YouTube, continued issues with Toei Animation claiming the content included has resulted in them uploading the series to Twitch. Since the Cell saga, episodes premiered on Twitch at Team Four Star's video game streaming channel.
The series lasted three seasons, each one covering the Saiyan Saga, the Namek/Freeza Saga, and the Android/Cell Saga, respectively, along with several specials, a majority of the movies, and a sub-series based around Dragon Ball Z Kai that served as a way of comically recapping each season. Initially, Team Four Star stated they intended to continue with a fourth season that would cover the Buu Saga (the final arc of Dragon Ball Z) and included a stinger promising such at the end of the third season's finale in 2018. However, on February 1, 2020, KaiserNeko announced that Episode 60 would indeed be the ending of DragonBall Z Abridged: the team decided it was no longer worth it to continue the abridged style (in part due to struggles with various copyright claims as well as with longstanding creative burnout that had hit a tipping point with the cancellation of the show's adaptation of Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound), and any future content would instead be purely original.note Thus, episode 3.5 of Dragon Ball Z KAI Abridged, released on Jul 24, 2019, ended up being the final piece of DBZA content to be officially released.
Afterwards, Team Four Star started producing an original animated series called Dragon ShortZ, which presents new stories set in the DBZA continuity, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Cell Saga. When the series began TFS planned to make season 4 of DBZA in that style, but the February 1 announcement walked that back, stating that such an effort would be untenable and take too much time to produce, confirming once again that the abridged series was indeed over.
Another original animated series, HFIL, was released in March 2021, focusing on Cell's time in the afterlife stuck in the titular HFIL alongside other various DBZA villains. The first episode can be seen here.
In 2023, as part of Totally Not Mark's review/retrospective series on Dragon Ball, TFS would collaborate with Mark on the video covering the Buu Saga, producing DBZA-style scenes which they called "Buu Bits" interspersed throughout the review. While not a full fourth season, Team Four Star announced that these "Buu Bits" are as close as they're ever going to get to doing one, eventually releasing a full compilation of them on their own channel.
Team Four Star also has a spinoff channel, where notably, commentaries for DBZ Abridged are located.
The series has a recap page. For a similar concept executed differently, see Alternate Reality DBZ.
For convenience's sake, this list includes tropes from videos of two Dragon Ball movies that predate the formation of Team Four Star but include much of their cast.
This work provides examples of:
[EXTERNAL SCREAMING]
