How Nicktoons Censored Dragon Ball Z Kai | Frieza Arc | 3/4

I thought a lot of this stuff was lost to time; thanks for preserving it and being so thorough! I felt this way back when they aired on Nick, but I'm super grateful the "edited version" of the lines weren't cringey; they still got the necessary story across and preserved all the important character development and personality.

Imagine the Nicktoons version being your first exposure to DBZ. My prayers go the victims

"Fighting?! In a show about people fighting?! I will have no such thing! Censor it!"

4Kids Goku when Krillin -dies- gets sent to another dimension: "This ruffles my jammies!"

Never understood why they treated blood as if kids are never meant to see it, kids scrape their legs and accidentally cut themselves all the time, they probably see more blood than an adult does lmao

2:06 I find it funny that even the common idiom "I'm dying to..." was altered to avoid even the metaphorical death reference.

"All of them vanquished" is a cold line imo

That line change in the Nicktoons version changes the context behind what Goku said to frieza pretty significantly from the Japanese version

Kai: "YOU RUTHLESS, HEARTLESS, BASTARD!" Nick: "🧸"

Got to say the Nicktoons line of King Kai saying "Piccolo draws breath no more" sounds darker than the Uncut's " Piccolo has been brought down".

Never realized how much freeza enjoy choking people with his tail

It's annoying how many people don't know that the Nicktoons version isn't the original DBZ Kai and treat Kai like the Nicktoons version

And meanwhile in the CW/4Kids version, Frieza sends Krillin to the Shadow Realm.

13:17 Aww yeah Spongebob up next after Dragon ball Z Kai!

I find it funny when goku says oh no! And doesn’t even try to dodge the trap 😂

It's honestly impressive how much of the story is kept intact in the Nicktoons version, sure it censors every mention of death but the use of words like "they're gone" and "what you did" make it pretty obvious that's what happened to various characters. They don't actually shy away from it, they just choose their words carefully and only cut out the brutal action scenes to get past censors. Props to the people who handled these edits, especially whoever trimmed the fight scenes because they pretty consistently picked the right beginning & ending frames to make the cuts seemless.

I like how they added a milisecond long flash during almost every hit scene to pretend Frieza did nothing to Goku, he just got dragged by the very strong wind :face-blue-smiling:

I can't wait to see how they censored Trunks turning Frieza into spaghetti.

Thanks for documenting all these changes! I grew up with the Nicktoons version as a kid and watched the uncut version a while later. I’m grateful how lax the Nicktoons version was with its edits, and some of its line reads and line changes I actually prefer over the uncut version. It’s also crazy how much of the uncut version got slipped into the Nicktoons version, especially instances like Android 18 swearing in the last episode. The Toonzai/4Kids version went WAY crazier with the edits, even more than the Ocean dub in Z. It’s also thanks to the Nicktoons version that it introduced a whole new generation of fans to the series, just like the Toonami version did (which was also censored in its own right.) Double thanks for using the Yamamoto music for this. He’s a horrible person for plagiarizing so much of his work, but a lot of his tracks for Kai really left an imprint on me for a lot of people. It’s hard to watch Kai with the Kikuchi score, mostly because they did such a bad job at rescoring it, with the same few tracks over and over when he made hundreds of them for Z. I didn’t start softening up to the original Japanese music until DBZ: Kakarot. This whole set of videos brings back a lot of memories watching through the series again. Keep it up!

Thats why it was so lit because as a kid they were airing the uncut version