BY BRAYDON KEDDIE: On the fictional planet Namek, the brawny Dodoria is at the mercy of the ruthless Vegeta. Grabbing the pink alien by the arms, Vegeta readies to tear them off while his deep-voiced enemy groans in pain.
“Look at you, Dodoria,” Vegeta mocks. “Here you are, crying like a woman!”
“I am a woman!” Dodoria shouts.
“What?
“I said, I am a woman!”
“What?!”
For any confused readers who regularly watched the popular anime Dragonball Z, the preceding dialogue probably doesn’t align with what you remember. Actually, this is a scene description from the web series, Dragonball Z
Abridged.
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| Anthony Sardina, voice actor, poses with a picture of Dodoria, his role on Dragonball Z Abridged |
What started out as an online satire produced by fans of the original anime, Dragonball Z Abridged is one of many popular abridging series that’s received a fan base of its own for giving familiar animated characters new personalities. Taking footage of the original show, the group Team Four Star will then dub over the animation with their own recorded lines to turn the end product into a fan-based parody.
Anthony “Antfish” Sardinha, a voice actor for Dragonball Z Abridged, defines the idea of abridging as reducing an original series to the bare essentials and then making it a comedy.
“You just take (a series), shorten it, and make it
funny,” Sardinha explains. “It often pokes fun at itself or throws in a pop culture reference. You can just create something that was already there and make it huge.”
Dragonball Z Abridged was created by voice actors Scott “KaiserNeko” Frerichs, Curtis “Takahahta101” Arnott and Nick “Lanipator” Landis, who work under the group name of Team Four Star. The majority of online abridged series are based off popular anime shows, such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Hellsing and Naruto. But Frerichs says that doesn’t mean you have to know the official series in order to understand their abridged version.
“We’re always trying to give something for everyone,” Frerichs said. “We try and refrain from too many inside-jokes that only Dragonball fans will get, but on the other side of the coin we still make sure we make those jokes so anybody who’s a big fan will go, ‘I get that!’”
While TFS isn’t the first to spoof an original show, part of its success in popularity has been due to having a large assembly of artists who have worked on their own solo projects. According to Arnott, who regularly meets online with the other TFS members for writing sessions, they’re constantly discussing the structure of comedy to put in each episode.
“You’ve got to make people laugh every ten to fifteen seconds,” Arnott says. “Keeping people giggling is the most important thing. I remember how I would initially laugh at an idea during one of our chats, but once you go over that same joke twenty times, refine and proofread it, the joke isn’t funny anymore. I have to remember how I first laughed at the idea, because the viewer will laugh like that.”
Aside from their love for the work they pro bers is theirbelieves that unless abridgers are fans of the material they’re satirizing, it won’t get as much as much appreciation.
“If you just do it on a series that you’ve barely seen or you don’t have any jokes, then you’ve doomed yourself from the beginning,” Sadinha says. “To make it work, you have to be a fan of the show you’re doing. You always want to watch the episodes.”
One of the biggest challenges for online abridgers is the copyright infringement policy for video hosting websites. Some have had their accounts suspended by the websites and their content removed due to these restraints. But Frerichs, who is also a writer and editor for Dragonball Z Abridged, says one of the key reasons they remain online is that they aren’t earning revenue for their videos.
“We’re trying to celebrate the official series, have fun with it and also do something that means a lot to us,” Frerichs says. “We’re not trying to use this to make money or springboard our own popularity. However, whether or not it’s legal, that’s hard to say. We never want to come to that conclusion by one of the or springboard our own popularity. However, whether or not it’s legal, that’s hard to say. We never want to come to that conclusion by one of the companies taking us to court.”
Even with the possibility of having their content removed, Frerichs has partly kept some of their content online through the use of filing counter-claims to YouTube due to their work being filed under parodies. Arnott assures that there are plenty of abridging projects online, but a large audience just may not have discovered them yet.
“There are lots of guys out there,” Arnottsays. “Some people say, ‘Abridging is dead!’ It’s not, because there are a lot of people who are really talented at what they do. It’s just a matter of people going out there and finding them. Type an anime into YouTube and type in abridged, and you will probably find a version of it.”
For episodes of Dragonball Z Abridged, visit...
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