Dragon Ball & Dragon Ball Z (found original broadcast audio of anime series; 1986-1996)

Status: Partially Lost

Dragon Ball (ドラゴンボール, "Doragon Boru") is a Japanese manga that ran from 1984 to 1995. Composed of 519 chapters in 41 volumes, the manga chronicled the adventures of the monkey-tailed boy Son Goku as he searched the world for seven mystical objects known as "Dragon Balls", which would summon a dragon when brought together to grant a single wish. The manga's popularity helped codify many tropes of the newly-emerged fighting genre, and would quickly gain two anime adaptations by Toei Animation: Dragon Ball (which covered the first 194 chapters of the manga and ran from 1986 to 1989) and Dragon Ball Z (which covered the remaining 325 chapters and ran from 1989 to 1996). While the animes proved to be immensely popular with audiences, Toei ran into considerable difficulties when it came to releasing them on home video: they had already junked the audio master tapes for the entire series.

After the initial broadcast of each episode, Toei would destroy its audio master for unknown reasons. Given the low budget of anime at the time, it's likely that this was done to conserve their budget, not willing to spend money on more magnetic audiotape or increased archive space (similarly to the motives for the junking of 147 episodes of Doctor Who from 1963 to 1974); one can assume that each master tape was either recorded over with new audio or destroyed entirely. Because Toei no longer possessed the audio they needed, all home media releases featuring the shows' Japanese audio utilized the optical audio taken from their 16 millimeter film reels; this audio is significantly lower-quality compared to the master tapes, featuring higher amounts of white noise and tin.

Because anime studios usually didn't provide distribution copies of their audio masters for foreign regions at the time (as dubbing was the most popular choice back then), Toei has never made any efforts to recover the lost audiotapes. However, numerous individuals from the Kanto region were able to record each episode of Dragon Ball and Dragonball Z on their VCRs and upload the audio of each recording online decades later. Because television broadcasts in the Kanto region were received directly from Tokyo Tower rather than NTT (which cut out high tones to block white noise), their audio was virtually untouched from the original masters, making significantly clearer than the audio used for all other broadcasts & releases. Since this audio was taken directly from the original broadcast of the anime, it has appropriately been dubbed the "original broadcast audio." It is not known how much of the master audio has survived from this method, as all available recordings of it only utilize segments of each episode.