Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies

Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies, (ドラゴンボール 神龍の伝説, Doragon Bōru: Shenron no Densetsu) originally known as Dragon Ball: The Legend of Shenron, is the first movie in the Dragon Ball franchise, first premiering on 20 December 1986 in Japan. The movie is an alternate retelling of the events of the Emperor Pilaf saga from the original Dragon Ball series, retelling the meeting of Goku and Bulma and their encounters with Oolong, Yamcha and Master Roshi. Emperor Pilaf and his gang, however, are replaced with the evil King Gurumes and his subordinates Bongo and Pasta.

Dubbing History
Curse of the Blood Rubies was first dubbed by Intersound, Inc. for Harmony Gold alongside the first five episodes of the series. It was edited together with the third film, Mystical Adventure, with dialogue rewritten to closer link the two films. The Harmony Gold-dubbed double feature was aired on various TV channels in the United States in a limited run in late 1989.

The movie was then dubbed in 1994-1995 by BLT Productions in association with FUNimation. The movie was dubbed first as a test to serve as a pilot for the series for TV stations. Much like the TV series, the movie was censored for content (scenes such as Roshi requesting to see Bulma's breasts in exchange for the Dragon Ball, and Oolong transforming into Bulma and showing him them). Two versions of this dub were made of the film, one using Harmony Gold's names, and the other using the names closer to the Japanese version eventually used by FUNimation. The version with Harmony Gold's names appears to have been a test and was never publicly released, but it was eventually found by the Twitter user Tanooki Joe in 2019. When later aired, in order to pad out the running time and the gaps left by the cuts, scenes from BLT's dub of Episode 2 of Goku and Bulma getting to know each other were spliced into the film. As with the BLT-dubbed TV Series, the movie featured a new score composed by Peter Berring.

In Europe, the film was presumably dubbed by Chinkel Post-Production for AB Groupe (now known as Mediawan Thematics), using their limited France-based voice cast of five voice actors. (It is to be assumed Doug Rand was not cast in this film, nor the other two films, as his voice is not heard anywhere in the dub; he did provide voices for the later Dragon Ball Z films.) This dub aired on Toonami in the United Kingdom, under the original title The Legend of Shenron, though was never given a home video release like many of their dubs for the Dragon Ball Z movies.

For many years, the film was the only one left undubbed by FUNimation's in-house studio. This is mainly due to the licensing of the BLT dub of episodes 1-13 and the film by Trimark Pictures. This licensing agreement would end up being extended with the acquisition of Trimark by Lionsgate in 2001. The license finally expired in 2009, allowing FUNimation to finally release the film with their own dub.

Unfortunately many years had passed since the dubbing of the original Dragon Ball series, and many voice actors, such as Stephanie Nadolny (Goku) and Tiffany Vollmer (Bulma), had since left FUNimation. Thus characters were recast with the dub cast utilized for Dragon Ball Z Kai, which was currently being dubbed. The script was mostly recycled from the 1995 script, which itself was based on the 1989 script, only reverting the characters' changed names back to their originals. The censorship of the Harmony Gold and BLT dubs were not retained, and thus contains the inappropriate moments and profanity of the Japanese version.