Dragon Ball Z: Dragon Box VS. Funimation Single DVD (Episodes 172 and 173)

I chose to compare episode 172 with each other on these releases for one main reason: The Funimation single actually uses footage from the Dragon Box! (Kinda.)

The Dragon Ball Z Dragon Box came out in Japan in 2003, this single DVD was released in America in 2004, and the US Dragon Boxes were released from 2009 to 2011. You might think Funi received the Dragon Box masters around the time they came out, but that's actually not the case. If you look closely, you'll notice that the Funi single has scratches on the footage as well as the tape marks between frames at the top of the screen, while the Dragon Box does not. Toei restored the original footage and cleaned those up from the footage (mostly).

It seems that the Funi single uses the Dragon Box transfer before any sort of remastering was done, not the finished Dragon Box masters , since they likely didn't have those yet. That's pretty intresting, and I'm not sure why they didn't use this footage for the rest of the single DVD's they have yet to release. Episode 172 is the only episode of the single DVD's to have this oddity. I also compared episode 173 to show you the usual difference between these releases.

It's worth noting that the North American VHS as well as the Australian DVD counterpart of the single DVD both use the standard digibeta footage that the rest of the single DVD's used, as both of those were released in 2002, a year before the Dragon Boxes even released in Japan. The North American DVD came out in 2004.

Fun Fact: EVERY EPISODE OF GT ON THE SINGLE DVD'S IS LIKE THIS! They also use the Dragon Box transfers before Toei fixed up the footage, which makes them look really sharp, despite having a low bitrate. That's pretty cool if you ask me. The Green Bricks also use that footage as a base, but Funi blurred it making it look soft, and then added a sharpening filter over it, giving everything weird halos.

It's hard to tell in this video due to compression and YouTube, but the Funi single for episode 172 is actually more grainy, and seems to be slightly sharper in person compared to the Dragon Box. Truth be told, the saying that the Dragon Boxes have no DNR is a total lie; almost everything re-released that was on film as some degree of DNR applied, it's just the Dragon Boxes use it more rationally than say, the Orange Bricks. The Funi single lacks it for this episode because again, this was before the remastering process.

In both episodes, I used the audio from the single DVD's, since I imagine most people watching this are more familiar with the audio from the Dragon Boxes.