next began), and their accompanying slate number as listed in the CD booklet. I also made up my own names for the cues, as the only real names available applied to the suites as a collective instead of the individual recordings.
When I finally bought a DVD player in 2002, one of my first DVDs was the first DBZ movie, which gave me more to chew on. Now I had discovered that a large handful of the more iconic music pieces from the TV series had actually originated from this film. What was more, I noticed that all of the Dead Zone cues that happened to be on my beloved CD set were indicated in the liner notes with slate numbers marked “M8--.” There was a pattern! Immediately my OCD took hold and I charted it all out to find that the numbers corresponded with the order in which each cue “appeared” in the movie.
A few months later I left home to serve a religious mission. Mormon missionaries are expected to refrain from seeking “worldly” entertainment—to stay away from television, video games, lively music and the like, except in special circumstances—so my Dragon Ball merchandise had to stay behind. I quickly found, however, that the music I had grown so fond of over the past year had stuck with me, in my head, and continued to haunt my gray matter until I thought I would go mad for want of a “hit”: I was officially a Kikuchi junkie, and my drug felt as distant as the moon. Six months later, the first thing I did after visiting with my family was run to my CD player, pop in Daizenshuu Disc 5 and listen to M1002: the “shocking horror” piece that announced the appearance of Shenlong in DBZ Movie 3, and one of my most frequent disembodied earworms while out in the mission field. Nothing was sweeter to my ears after hearing this cue only in my head for six months.
I went on to buy all the DBZ DVDs I could, as well as the other few BGM CDs Columbia had produced (finding to my delight that one of them—Ongakushu volume 1—included the heroic theme I so adored and sorely missed from the 5-CD set), and after a while I became thoroughly fed up with how much music it turned out had never been released on CD. By late 2005, I was taking names, so to speak; I was charting out all of the music I could identify, starting with that fateful episode bearing Cell’s first on-screen appearance, and making note of where on the CDs to find the released material, and how much was unreleased.
I kept my newfound hobby to myself until Columbia announced that they would be coming out with a new CD set after all these years. The online store listings cruelly referred to this upcoming release as the “Dragon Ball Z Complete BGM Collection,” but I knew something was amiss when I saw in the product details that it would be merely a three-disc set. I didn’t yet know just how many discs it would require for a complete DBZ music collection, but three was definitely too low a number. I posted what I had finished of my BGM episode documentation on the Daizenshuu EX forums so that others could get a larger scope of how much unreleased material we were looking at, and eagerly awaited February 2006, when this new set would hit and I’d finally know the truth about its contents. Sure enough, the word “complete” in its title turned out to be some kind of fluke in the marketing, because nowhere on the packaging did it claim to be all-inclusive, and for good reason. Not only was more than half the set a rehash of Discs 4 and 5 of the Daizenshuu collection (most of the tracks being the exact same suites), but Columbia had also bogged down disc space with movie-size versions of each film’s end credits song.
Of course, if we’re being honest, the Daizenshuu set had a misleading title as well; even though I’ve seen daizenshuu translated as “anthology” (a legitimate way of putting it in English), the literal meaning is “big complete collection.” While it is true that the 5-disc set came out before the series was even finished being produced, it still could have included so much more pre-1994 material.
All in all, the BGM Collection wound up containing 198 cues in total, only 64 of which (less than a third) had never been released before. Had they placed a specific focus on unreleased DBZ cues, it could have included well over 150 and still had room left over for iconic repeats from previous albums, or maybe even some unreleased stuff from the original Dragon Ball as bonus tracks.
The history of Dragon Ball BGM releases is confusing and woeful. The CDs that focus on one movie (Ongakushu vol. 2, as well as the movies 10 and 11 soundtracks) are great, and there’s very little to complain about those...but each new release that’s structured in the “every track is a suite of cues” format is bogged down with problems. Even the very first release, the Dragon Ball Ongakushu vinyl, had a problem of its own which would thankfully never be repeated outside of its 12 recycled tracks on the 5-disc set: the aforementioned crossfading together of the cues, a practice I simply could never get behind, as it renders it impossible to cleanly separate them. There are even worse issues to explore, however, such as the fact that on the CDs, each title card fanfare, and the Next Episode Preview theme that uses “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA,” are all fabrications (presumably, the masters for the true recordings are lost somewhere, but the recent surfacing of the preview theme in the Ping Pong anime for a parody suggests otherwise).
Or how about what’s arguably the worst problem: Columbia’s tendency to treat each new suite-structured release as if no CDs existed prior, instead of placing proper emphasis on previously unreleased music? We do NOT need M817 on three completely different collections, not while there’s rarer material begging for disc space. If it’s a matter of reviving material from out-of-print CDs, why must each release be so far apart from one another as to merit this practice to begin with?
The vocal songs are generally unnecessary as well; there’s plenty of room for those on the deluge of albums that come out each year. In 1998 Sailor Moon received a complete release of BGM in a colossal 10-disc collection (the “Memorial Music Box”). This from the same company and music label that owns Dragon Ball, so why couldn’t we have been graced with the same miracle for our own favorite series? Did the Sailor Moon set sell poorly, making Columbia wary of large BGM compilations? (Proving the sad case that Sailor Moon fans get everything Dragon Ball fans want.)
To make matters even more depressing, our chances of getting more releases of Kikuchi’s scores for Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z have worsened over the years: the BGM Collection is still the latest Kikuchi release for the Dragon Ball series, and as of this writing, that was nearly nine years ago. Dragon Ball GT wasn’t even scored by Kikuchi; the reins for that project went to Akihito Tokunaga. Ever since Dragon Ball Kai first started airing in 2009 with a completely new and more modern-sounding score by Kenji Yamamoto, I’ve had the uneasy impression Toei’s been slowly phasing Kikuchi out of the picture entirely due to his “dated” sound. Even the incident where the scandal over the melodies Yamamoto stole gave rise to a return of the classic Kikuchi recordings was merely out of a last-minute necessity...and it proved to be a disaster, as the person in charge of music placement, possibly due to the pressures of short notice, made abysmally poor judgment calls as to which cue would fit each scene. Add to that the fact that placement was limited to cues on the BGM Collection (because those were the ones most recently remastered and therefore offered the best sound quality), and even then, apparently only the selections they had full rights to, causing massive repetition in the use of certain cues, and it’s no wonder this whole change went over with fans like a lead balloon. I shudder whenever it hits me that this was probably most of the more casual American fans’ introduction to Kikuchi.
Consider Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans, Episode of Bardock, Battle of Gods and the return of Dragon Ball Kai for the Majin Buu arc, all productions from recent years, none of which Kikuchi had anything to do with. It seems that Shunsuke Kikuchi has passed the baton on to composers less daring to be unique or to indulge in strong melodies, favoring instead shapeless atmosphere and superficial attempts to be “epic,” which in the end prove largely forgettable. I recognize that, at the age of 83, Kikuchi is no spring chicken, and that’s a laughable understatement. I can’t deny being sorely disappointed, though, when the composer for Battle of Gods was announced and i
t was someone else. In any case, new composers would be inevitable anyway, but I would have at least preferred one with a much more classic sound. Is that really so much to ask?
Sometimes, all these frustrations pile up and I just feel like throwing my hands up in the air in defeat. In the end, it all comes down to how much I wish the general public placed much more value on film and TV scores. If they did, there wouldn’t be any of this nonsense where amazing music sits rotting away in a vault instead of being commercially released, so that those of us who appreciate this powerful art form could have our Holy Grail. Of course, I was spoiled in my early youth by some truly phenomenal TV music, so perhaps that experience gave me a certain privilege everyone ought to have. I was barely five when Disney’s DuckTales premiered, with its gorgeous collection of leitmotifs and bombastic statements in brass by Ron Jones (yet another unreleased and criminally under-appreciated score), so I guess it’s no wonder it didn’t take much for Kikuchi’s equally bombastic musical voice to work its magic on me. I think it’s an