During the Navarre Corporation Conference call on Tuesday morning, Navarre CEO Cary Deacon revealed that Navarre's subsidiary Funimation has acquired the rights to Dragon Ball Z Kai and would begin releasing the series on DVD in latter part of the current fiscal year.  Dragon Ball Z Kai is basically a hi-def, streamlined version of the Dragon Ball Z anime series, the most popular of all various Dragon Ball iterations.  Produced by Toei, the animation powerhouse responsible for all the Dragon Ball series, the DBZ Kai anime began airing in Japan last April. 

Toei remastered the original DBZ footage in high definition, updated the opening and ending sequences, and re-recorded the vocal tracks using the original cast members.  The footage was re-edited to conform more closely with the narrative flow of the DBZ manga.  Entire story arcs were eliminated and the 291 episodes of DBZ will be reduced to around 100 episodes of Dragon Ball Z Kai.  The opening and closing sequences are all new, but the main narrative is all taken from the pre-existing DBZ material.  Since the original DBZ animation cels had been discarded after the last episode was produced in 1996, fixing damaged frames required considerable ingenuity.

The opening theme for DBZ Kai is “Dragon Soul,” while the new closing number is “Yeah! Break! Care! Break!.”  Both songs are performed by Takayoshi Tanimoto.