Dragon Ball: Sub or Dub?

Most sub-or-dub arguments are about acting. This one is mostly about music, which makes Dragon Ball the odd case in this catalogue: the English Dragon Ball Z is not a different performance of the same show, it is the same show scored by different composers.

The short answer

Watch the sub if you want the version Toei made. Watch the dub if you grew up on Toonami and the guitars are half of what you are coming back for. Both of those are honest answers, which is not a thing this site says often, and the reason is that the two tracks diverge further here than anywhere else we cover.

The dub replaced the score, not just the voices

Shunsuke Kikuchi wrote the original Japanese music: brass, strings, and an adventure-serial register inherited from the seventies television Dragon Ball descends from. Almost none of it reached American sets. The early Saban-backed run swapped it for a synth score by Shuki Levy and Ron Wasserman, and once that partnership ended Funimation moved production in-house in Texas and hired Bruce Faulconer, whose music carries the show from the Ginyu Force through the Buu arc: electric guitar, synth pads, and a willingness to hold one ominous chord under a four-minute stare.

Whether that is vandalism or an improvement is the real argument, and both sides are describing something true. Faulconer's score tells you a fight is a catastrophe. Kikuchi's tells you a fight is an adventure serial with a cliffhanger at the end. The same footage reads differently.

What the sub has that no dub can copy

Masako Nozawa has voiced Goku since 1986, and she also voices Gohan, Goten and Bardock. One actress plays four generations of one bloodline, so when Goku meets his father in a flashback or spars with his son, the family resemblance is not an idea the script asserts, it is a sound you hear. Every English version splits those parts between separate actors, because casting one adult woman as a grandfather, a father and two boys is not a decision a Western studio arrives at unprompted.

That is not decoration. A running joke of the franchise is that Saiyans come out of the box looking identical across generations, and the Japanese track runs the joke through the casting sheet.

The complication on the Japanese side

The original track has its own mess. Dragon Ball Z Kai, the recut, was scored by Kenji Yamamoto until March 2011, when Toei acknowledged that his work had likely infringed third-party copyrights, removed him, and dropped Kikuchi's original Z music back in. Which score you hear on Kai therefore depends on when your copy was mastered, so "the original music" is a slightly harder thing to ask for than it sounds.

Which to pick

If you are watching Dragon Ball for the first time, the sub, and specifically Kai for the Z material, since it cuts the padding the broadcast schedule forced on the original. If you are rewatching something you saw at eleven years old, take the dub without apology; the Faulconer cues are load-bearing for that memory and no argument about fidelity is going to compete with them.

One thing the dub is responsible for is worth its own page: Vegeta's scouter line is "over eight thousand" in Japanese, and we go through how it became nine thousand separately. For where the films and arcs sit, see the watch order, and the lines themselves are on our Dragon Ball Z pages.