This week, we're going back to the very beginning. The place where it all began (for American fans anyway) Dragon Ball Z: The Ocean Dub!

This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Dragon Ball Z Episodes 1 and 2 as they aired in the original 1996 Ocean/Saban dub: "The Arrival of Raditz" and "The World's Strongest Team."

Episode 1 opens five years after the end of Dragon Ball. There's a farmer with a shotgun, alas his lovely rural day is ruined when a space pod crashes and a long-haired alien steps out claiming to be Goku's brother. Even worse he’s angry that Goku has failed to wipe out all life on Earth.

When Raditz finds Goku, he turns Dragon Ball’s lore on its head, instantly drawing a hard line between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Episode 2 escalates immediately: the only way to beat Raditz is if Goku and Piccolo fight together, and that means the series' hero and its former final villain have to put their old rivalry aside and become brothers-in-arms.

Ian Corlett's Goku, Brian Drummond's Vegeta-era voice work, the Rock the Dragon theme, Shuki Levy's score, this is the version of DBZ that a lot of North American audiences met first, and there's something genuinely time-capsule-worthy about revisiting it from the start.

We get into how the Ocean Dub was made, how it holds up and makes these two episodes such an effective opening for a series that was about to completely redefine what Western audiences expected from anime, and what it meant to encounter DBZ for the first time on a Saturday morning in 1996.

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📌 Topics covered this episode:

– DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 1 "The Arrival of Raditz" recap & review

– DBZ Ocean Dub Episode 2 "The World's Strongest Team" recap & review

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Toonami Absolution is a weekly podcast where Alyx, Jon, and Sam revisit the Toonami and Adult Swim shows that made them, and you, you.

From the block's early days with shows like Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Transformers: Beast Wars to the imported anime that made Toonami and Adult Swim appointment television for a generation of kids, such as Cowboy Bebop, Sailor Moon, and Dragon Ball.

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