YMMV / Dragon Ball Z Kai

• Americans Hate Tingle: This series is disliked in Latin America, to the point that fans reportedly boycotted it. The reasons? The massive censorship that the series had,^note Toei Animation decided to use the censored version commissioned for Nicktoons, instead of the Japanese version, as it had been the case for the original version of the series, to sell the anime to TV networks that are against violence in TV shows, such as Televisa, TV Azteca and so on. but especially Toei Animation's changing most of the original cast of the dub.^note The big thing that brings down criticism is that the replacements' performances are based on the English dub rather than Japanese or the ones established here. For example, Edson Matus based his Goku on Sean Schemmel instead of Mario Castañeda. The fallout from this also caused Toei to restructure their Latin American division, and they would eventually bring back most of the original cast for The Final Chapters to the fans' rejoice, though by this point the series was irreparably tainted by the backlash; not helped by the original cast never going back to redub the original 98 episodes of Kai.
• Arc Fatigue: Even in Kai's heavily edited form, the Namek Saga still drags on quite a bit. It’s actually significantly shorter than both the Android and Majin Buu Sagas, but it’s much less varied, making it feel monotonous as a result. It doesn’t help that it has one of the few filler plots that's retained.^note Namely, the subplot where Ginyu swaps bodies with Bulma. It’s still much, much better than what it was like in the original, unedited version of the series.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Dragon Soul" and "Sanjou!! Ginyu Tokusentai!!" for the first half. For the second, there's the Engrish "Fight it Out" and the Japanese theme, "Kuu Zen Zetsu Go." Which one's better usually depends on personal preference.
  • "Only a Chilling Elegy", Frieza's Leitmotif. Ominous Latin Chanting mixed with Metal. Fits him to a T.
• Broken Base:
  • Some hardcore Dragon Ball Z fans have denounced Kai as dishonoring the original series by censoring scenes, having scenes badly redrawn, and removing much of the character inherent in the extended stories, while others enjoy the much faster-paced plot, due to most of the filler padding out fights and other scenes to a near crawl, as well as not seeing the Digital Destruction as that big of a deal.
  • The casting changes for some of the characters in the English dub. Some fans like it because they feel that the new voice actors did a very good job and that their voices suit the characters better. Others hate the changes because they prefer the original voice actors, as they grew up listening to them when DBZ was on the air. And then there's a third group who compare the voices, with not a lot of attachment to either actor and say which ones they thought were better.
  • Kenji Yamamoto's score split the fandom between those who thought it helped give Dragon Ball a fresh look for a newer generation and those who preferred Shunsuke Kikuchi's score for one of a variety of reasons.^note Often Nostalgia Filter and/or simply personal preference. When Yamamoto was revealed to have plagiarized most of his songs from Western artists and his score was subsequently replaced with Kikuchi's, the fandom was broken up again as to whether Yamamoto's actions were plagiarism that deserved to be punished or were inspirations/homages that fall under fair use.^note Which doesn't exist in Japan's legal code. Yamamoto's soundtrack was replaced with the original Japanese DBZ soundtrack. The English dub followed suit starting with episode 64 and all reruns of episodes previous to this. The DVD releases were also affected beginning with the fifth DVD set.
  • Aya Hirano as Dende. Some are fine with it, but others feel like her voice didn't fit the character. Some also feel that she was only cast simply because she was a big name at the time.
  • The use of Team Four Star for the Cell Games Reenactment. Some fans are sad/mad that their audio was cut before the episode aired, thinking that their performances should have been left intact, since it's their usual shtick of making fun of the series, and they enjoy the self-parody the dub team tried to sneak in. Others are glad, however, because they are tired of the references of them and Dragon Ball Z Abridged, or just don't like their shtick.
• Common Knowledge: Kai is sometimes thought to be heavily censored. However, this isn't the case. While the original version does have some censorship, it's largely negligible (largely amounting to the holes in Raditz & Goku's chests being filled in, middle fingers being censored, less blood, Gohan's nudity being altered, and other little things like that). This assumption can be largely attributed to the original broadcasts on Nicktoons and especially on The CW, which were heavily censored. The home releases have the series as it was originally seen in Japan. Although, the one bit of censorship that was unnecessary was the cutting of the entrance of the guy who shoots Bee and his partner, as that was manga material and leaves his entrance in Kai as being a bit contrived.
• Fan Nickname: For the two parts of the series itself. After The Final Chapters came out, there have been several names fans have given both it and the first 98 episodes to distinguish both from each other. For the first 98 episodes, fans either refer to it as Kai, or "Kai 1.0", while The Final Chapters gets either the abbreviated "TFC", "Kai TFC", "Kai 2.0", "Buu Kai", &/or "Boo Kai".
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series was much more successful overseas than it was in Japan, where it was seen as a pointless edited re-release of the far more beloved DBZ. It was only because of its success in the West that The Final Chapters was made. This likely has to do with the West's lower tolerance for Padding compared to Japan, making Kai a much more appealing proposition. In the U.S., the English dub also helped in this regard in terms of the acclaim it received: the scripts used were far more accurate than the original dub, and many characters were recasted to the fandom's approval (particularly Freeza). In comparison, the Japanese version was seen as a step down due to how much the voice cast had aged.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The stunt Christopher Sabat tried to pull by having Team Four Star dub over the Cell Games Reenactment was found out by Toei before the episode aired. As a result, this caused the four members of the team in the dub; Scott Frerichs, Nick Landis, Curtis Arnott, and Lawrence Simpson, to be "greylisted" from working at Funimation for a while, as Landis revealed in a live stream.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: See here.
• Improved by the Re-Cut: It was released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of DBZ, and was explicitly meant to be a more faithful adaptation of the manga. Among other things, many of the talk breaks and filler/padding sections and episodes were removed, leaving Kai with 167 episodes to the original DBZ's 291. As a result, Kai is a much tighter, more action-packed viewing experience compared to the original DBZ and considered, to some, the far superior product.^note Part of the reason the original DBZ had so much filler and padding was that it was being produced while the manga was still ongoing, resulting in the anime crew being forced to try to pad the anime so Akira Toriyama could move the story along in the manga. Even though The Final Chapters didn't remove as much filler as it should've, it's still a faster watch than DBZ's version of the arc pacing-wise, as it removes a lot of the worst filler that genuinely padded the runtime and wasn't necessary to the story overall. It says something when the editors seamlessly edited out the filler of Vegeta and Goku exploring Buu's body to line up more closely with the manga where they were in Buu's head from the start rather than his stomach, as was the case in DBZ.
• Narm: Sure, Gohan's screams are properly full of emotion. However, some of them carry on so long that it loses the intended effect.
• Narm Charm: The Ginyu Force's entrance. No matter what language it's in, the poses and song that accompanies them are so cheesy that it can't help but be entertaining.
• Older Than They Think: The first official attempt to cut down the filler in DBZ was the 1996-1998 Saban English dub of the Saiyan and early Namek Sagas done in collaboration with Funimation and The Ocean Group. It reduced 67 episodes to 53, and despite being censored, is the preferred cut of those episodes among many fans, to the point where Funimation reissued this version in a limited edition box set in 2013. One compliment of this cut is that it removed the worst and most excessive filler, but still left in the more entertaining filler episodes, and enough to allow for good character development.
• Presumed Flop: When people hear that "The Final Chapters" was made for international audiences, they assume the show did not performed well in Japan. However, the series itself did pretty well on TV in its home country, with an average rating of 9.4%. It was the merchandise that failed to make the expected profits, this combined with the high productions costs (all the remastering of the video was outsourced to a company called Q-TEC, which wasn't cheap), the Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011 which forced episode 98 to be home video exclusive due to its original airing being pre-empted by news covering the event, the infamous Kenji Yamamoto plagiarism scandal that forced to stop all home video releases and halt all international broadcast to replace the soundtrack, and Toriko already being schedule to replace Kai in it's timeslot were the reasons why the Buu saga wasn't produced until years later.
• Screwed by the Network: The Final Chapters was practically dumped by [adult swim], premiering at the same time as the English dub of Super, and at a later time slot with far less promotion.
• Seasonal Rot: The Final Chapters is considered this, due to the forced 16:9 cropping, the degraded picture quality (notably its green tint), and less of the filler getting cut out. Even the English dub seemed a bit more phoned-in compared to the original 98 Kai episodes.
• Superlative Dubbing:
  • The English dub is close to flawless since most of the voice actors have been voicing these characters for over a decade, on top of the scripting and translating being more accurate. The uncensored version, in particular, served as a template for subsequent dubs in the franchise.
  • The French dub team acknowledged that the dub of DBZ was a mistake and delivered a dub very close to the original. This also applies for whatever languages that had a DBZ dub based on the French one, such as Catalan.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: This ended up being so widespread in composer Kenji Yamamoto's work that Toei actually kicked him off the show towards the end of its initial run, and the music for the series, except for the eyecatch and opening/closing themes. The most blatant example: the track "The Ebb and the Flow" is a very blatant ripoff of "War" from the Avatar soundtrack. It is an almost note for note copy.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many fans who grew up watching Funimation's original DBZ dub decry Kai's change of dialogue,^note Even though Kai's dubbed English scripts are far more accurate. the changes in voices,^note Even though Kai benefited from Christopher Sabat, Sean Schemmel, and others gaining a decade of voice acting experience since the original dub, and the loss of Bruce Faulconer's music.^note Which was disliked by fans of the original Japanese version of DBZ back in the day. For most fans, part of the hostility comes from the loss of some of the voice actors that were a part of the DBZ dub, such as young Gohan, Bulma, Frieza, and Android 18.^note This is most notable concerning Gohan's voice actress, Colleen Clinkenbeard since he now sounds younger. This rubbed some fans the wrong way as they are more used to his gruff voice provided by Stephanie Nadolny.
  • In Latin America, the fans' dislike for the replacement of most of the original cast and dub style during Kai's original 98-episode run became infamous.
• Tough Act to Follow: A specific example with the English dub of the opening, "Dragon Soul". It is generally considered an excellent and catchy localized Anime Theme Song to the point of Superlative Dubbing for some people, and subsequent English dubbed Dragon Ball opening and ending songs haven't been able to live up to it for many fans, either due to awkward translation and lyrics (if dubbed by American artists) or for awkward, narmful Engrish (if dubbed by the original Japanese singers).
• Vindicated by History: Due to the Vocal Evolution of the English cast, as well as the later dubs of Battle of Gods, Resurrection 'F', and Super, this series helped some fans who disliked the DBZ dub to look at them in a more positive light.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • For Funimation, a point of contention for many fans is that the English dub of DBZ is very polarizing. This series gave the company another crack at it and it shows.
  • As noted elsewhere, the French dub is more faithful, as the dubbing team acknowledged that the dub of DBZ was a mistake.^note It was the basis of the infamous "Big Green" English dub and some other foreign dubs that are generally disliked.
  • The Latin American Spanish dub of the first 98 episodes had a very negative reception due to the censorship and, most importantly, the fact that none of the voice actors who dubbed the main characters was in the dub. In The Final Chapters, where possible, all characters are dubbed by their original voice actors, and those that didn't (either by retirement or death) get the voice actors that reprise them in Super. The negative reception somewhat mellowed out after this, but the damage had already been done to many.
  • The series, in general, helps with much of the Archive Panic that ensues for latecomers who attempt to watch the original DBZ, due to the latter's length and large amounts of filler.
  • The Final Chapters is one, as some people were wondering why Toei didn't have the Buu Saga cut down too. Unfortunately, while it's perfectly watchable, it has aspects that make it feel half-hearted on Toei's part.
• Woolseyism:
  • Team Four Star's dub of the Cell Games Reenactment lampshades this in spades and lovingly pokes fun at them to HFIL and back, with many references to the past dubs of Dragon Ball, both shows and games, in their two minutes of screentime.
  • The already kickass "Dragon Soul" was dubbed in English by various members of the voice cast. The first version of the song was sung by Sean Schemmel, which makes it come across as an Image Song for Goku.
  • The first half of the first 98 episodes' English dub scripts were adapted faithfully yet cleverly by J. Michael Tatum, and it's almost always mentioned as a plus when discussing the dub. The second half lacked his involvement and it shows.
  • The announcement, in 2024, that there would finally be an European Spanish dub of Kai, has sparked high hopes in Spain as, after the very good dubbing Super got, they can finally put behind the terrible, French-based dub from the nineties.

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