Dragonaball Kai: Remastering the Entire Saga

Wash those images of the live-action movie from your eyes!

With any blockbuster movie, the inevitable animation tie-in sprouts up. But the Japanese know to leave a classic, basically, alone. Co-inciding with the release of the live-action American Dragonball Evolution movie, the original Dragonball Z TV series has been re-cut and re-mastered into the HD Dragonball Kai.

So either the economy has helped to stop the creation of another Dragonball travesty (GT anyone?) or the Japanese really do worship the House of Toriyama. Dragonball Kai basically remasters 100 of the original 261 episodes of Dragonball Z (no young Goku) and are airing now in Japan, but disregarding all the filler that deviated from the manga. Sound good? Nothing planned this weekend? Great, you can watch the first 3 episodes right here, and they are subtitled in English for you.

The series is being extensively “refreshed” for Japanese TV. It is not new animation, but simply a remastering of the original film. Part of this will be reformatting and extending the picture to 16:9 Widescreen (the Jump image says it will not be a cropping of the series, at least not completely). Through digital processing, the image will be made vibrant. All the grime, damage and noise remaining on the “Z” film will be removed, making the image much clearer in HD.

We’ll definitely be looking forward to a DVD relase of this for our own Dragonball collection.