Dragon Ball Z--Season Two DVD Set REVIEW

Program Rating: B+Disc Ratings:Video: A-Audio: - - *Extras: F+*Audio issues will be addressed in the body of the review.Ah, good old DBZ. After the awesome season one set, I was on the edge of my seat for the season two set. This is a pretty good season, though it suffers a bit from being mainly a pre-curser to the main event, which is, ironically, Season Three. Season Two picks up right where Season One left off. The action packed season premiere finds our heroes, Gohan, Kuririn, and Bulma held captive on an alien vessel on their way to Namek in order to find the Dragon Balls and wish their friends who died in the battle with the Saiyans on Earth back to life. Eventually, they find a way to negotiate with their captors, and are back on their way by Episode Two of the season. I must say, the Season Premiere does a fantastic job of setting up the events to come. We are introduced to the terror of villain Freeza, and the main villain of Season One, Vegeta, is re-introduced into the mix and it is revealed he's headed to Namek too. Basically, the premiere leaves you on the edge of your seat, setting up everything that is to come. After some really, really bad filler (extra episodes made to pad out the series) our heroes finally arrive on Namek, and the Season picks up here. A lot of story happens between here and the Season Finale, with the dragon balls switching hands in-numerable times. Sadly, the anime is a bit slow, as it pads out many events so that it can create more episodes. It isn't nearly as fast paced as the original manga, but it does the job. Some of my favorite DBZ moments are in this season, and the anime does a great job adapting them to the TV screen. The last 10 episodes simply rock, and contain tons of fast-paced action, all leading up to a season finale that has our main character, Goku, on the edge of death, being slowly healed in Freeza's space ship, the question of who's wish the dragon will grant up in the air, and Freeza approaching for a confrontation. On the whole, Season Two is not one of the best seasons. As I said, it's more a precursor to Season Three, in which the heroes finally fight Freeza, then its own standalone plot. But if you like DBZ even a little, it's worth the 30 bucks.Once again, the video has been cropped from 4x3 to 16x9, and once again, it looks breathtaking. The colors are vibrant, though contrast could be stand to be much darker, as some of the colors aren't as deep and rich as they should be. The first half of the season is also way too bright. You can adjust your TV to compensate, but it is rather annoying. You really have to experiment with it, but when you find the right brightness levels, you'll be very impressed by the image. I'd say it looks a tad better than Season One, with a noticeable amount of less grain, and the last half of the season looks simply stunning. Let's hope the brightness issues are fixed for Season Three, because if they are, this could be an A+ image, when the film's age is taken into account. The audio...well, it's a mixed bag. I gave it no rating, because the story of the audio is very, very complicated. See, the first 60 episodes of the show were completely re-dubbed by the English voice actors, with the original Japanese music behind it. Remember me saying I loved the dub in season one? It's the same quality in Season Two, for the first half (up until around episode 64). After episode 64, the show was only partially re-dubbed, and so it feels very, very, very uneven. Some of the voice acting is good, but some of it is cringe-worthy. I switched to the Japanese Audio Track, (which I've always preferred; I watched it in English mainly because my little brother sometimes has trouble with subtitles-vision problems) and what an improvement it is. The Japanese voices are a million times better, and although the Japanese track is in Mono, it holds its own against the 5.1 English Mix. Quite a hat trick indeed. I'd give the Mono Japanese Track a B+, because the voices and music rock, but it sounds noticeably aged. Still, the mono exhibits a great deal of all-inclusive sounds that manages to put you in the middle of the action. As Mono sounds go, it just doesn't get any better than this. The 5.1 English Mix gets a C+. The music is good, but sounds dated, and the English voices range from good to awful, and are totally unlistenable in the last batch of episodes. The dialogue is slightly louder than the music, and is a noticeable improvement on the mono in terms of how inclusive the sound is. The stereophonic surround sound goes around all speakers, and is very good. It'd be an A if the dialogue didn't suck. A 2.0 stereo track of the English is also included. The difference is, instead of the Japanese music, it is the synthesized English music. I only sampled this, because the English music is like nails on a chalkboard. Basically, the sound does have more resonance then the Surround track, and sounds newer and cleaner throughout. It gets a C+ too. In short, pick the original Japanese Mono with subtitles. It makes the show infinitely better, and the subtitles, as always from Funimation, are EXCELLENT. They're small, and don't abstract the action, but perfectly big enough to read. They are very well timed, and the translation is beyond good. The subtitles get an A+++++.The extras....are non-existent, except for textless versions of the theme songs, which are as standard on Anime DVD's as Menus, so they don't count as Extras. There is an awesome 24 page booklet, and while that was enough to merit a D rating last time around, the fact that it still is the only bonus is inexcusable. There are so many bonus features that could be here, and yet aren't. It's sad, but the episodes and the quality of the presentation more than make up for it. The remastering IS the bonus here. I'd like to also mention the packaging. It's the digi-pack fold out version, where one disc overlaps another disc. Awkward to hold, and hard to get the bottom disc out, this packaging is a nuisance. They really can't change it now, or else it would look very strange on the shelf, but I wish they'd thought ahead on this one.Case in short, if you bought Season One (and if you haven't, go do so right now) then Season Two is a must have. It gets you psyched for Season Three, expected in mid-September. As a die hard anime fan, and a die hard DBZ fan, these season sets are a god send. They're cheap, of great quality, and altogether rock. If you are even just a bit curious about DBZ, go buy them now.