On Sunday, FUNimation’s dub of Dragonball Z will turn 10 years old. It will be 10 years ago on September 13th, 1999 when Toonami aired (then on a Friday) a full day of Dragonball Z, aka Z-Day: 4 reruns of the Ocean Group dubs in the Namek arc leading up to the 2 “world premiere” FUNi dub episodes: “Ginyu Assault” and “Incredible Force!”.

Promo of Season Premiere CM (via YouTube)

- Promo #1

- Promo #2

It has been an honor growing up watching one of the best, if not greatest dubs in the country (in before anti-dub fans). I don’t think I would be a DBZ fan today if it weren’t for FUNimation. Chris Sabat has done an outstanding job of portraying Vegeta. Brian Drummond did an alright job of Vegeta, but it didn’t quite fit the way he turned out to be later in the series.

It took some getting used to hearing Vegeta and the other characters, but as the series progressed, FUNimation turned it into the best Anime series I’ve ever watched. For the record: Ocean Group still dubbed Dragonball Z all the way to the end of the series for fans in other countries (i.e.: Canada and UK).

This event is a little special for myself as well. It will have been 10 years since getting exposed to Anime as a whole, thanks to Pokemon. A few months after settling on the aforementioned series, I decided to check out Dragonball Z to see what the hype was about (after a suggestion from an old friend). It was in the “middle” of the series, but not the first episode, of the Saiyan Vegeta arc. It was the one of the episodes of the Ocean dub where Gohan utters the (in)famous lines: “You smell like toenails!!”…

It’s such a coincidence that 2009 (and in late 2008) has been a good year for the Dragonball franchise as a whole: “Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return! special, the return of Dragonball Z in Japan as Dragonball Kai, and the release of Dragonball Evolution.

FUNimation is also doing something special for DBZ fans: they are releasing (finally!) the Dragon Box DVD Boxset, which is similar to the set released in Japan a few years ago.

Dragon Box Trailer