Dragon Ball Z/Episodes

Dragon Ball Z (commonly abbreviated as DBZ) is the long-running anime sequel to Dragon Ball, adapted from the final twenty-six volumes of the Dragon Ball manga written by Akira Toriyama. The series premiered in Japan on Fuji Television on April 26, 1989, taking over its predecessor's time slot, and ran until its end on January 31, 1996, lasting 291 episodes in Japan.

In 1995, Funimation Productions licensed Dragon Ball Z for an English-language release in North America. They contracted Saban Entertainment to help finance and distribute the series to television, and Pioneer Entertainment to handle home video distribution. Saban hired the Vancouver-based Ocean Studios to dub the anime, and Shuki Levy (Saban's in-house musician) to compose an American background score and theme song (also known as "Rock the Dragon!"). This dub of Dragon Ball Z had mandated cuts to content and length, which reduced the first 67 episodes to 53. The series premiered in the U.S. on September 13, 1996 in first-run syndication, but was cancelled after two seasons due to a lack of interest from syndication companies. Pioneer also ceased its home video release of the series at volume 17 (the end of this dub) and retained the rights to produce an uncut subtitled version, but did not do so. Instead, Pioneer produced a bilingual uncut home video release of the series' first three movies, also dubbed by Ocean Studios.

On August 31, 1998, re-runs of the cancelled dub began airing on Cartoon Network as part of the channel's weekday afternoon programming block Toonami. Due to the success of these re-runs on Toonami, Funimation resumed production on the series' English dub by themselves, but could no longer afford the services of Ocean Studios without Saban's financial assistance. This led to Funimation creating its own in-house voice cast at their Texas-based studio, as well as a new background score composed by Bruce Faulconer. This new dub featured less censorship (due to fewer restrictions on cable programming) and premiered on Cartoon Network's Toonami from September 13, 1999 to April 7, 2003, continuing in re-runs through 2008. Kids WB briefly ran Dragon Ball Z in 2001 on its short-lived Toonami block.

In 2004, Pioneer lost its distribution rights to the first 53/67 episodes of Dragon Ball Z (as well as the first three movies), allowing Funimation to re-dub them with their in-house voice cast and restore the removed content. This dub's background score was composed by Nathan Johnson. Funimation's new uncut dub of these episodes aired on Cartoon Network during the summer of 2005 (in late night, due to the unedited content). Funimation's later remastered DVDs of the series saw minor changes made to their in-house dub for quality and consistency, mostly after the episode 67 gap, and had the option to play the entire series' dub with both the American and Japanese background music.