There is a particular sort of cat that sleeps for decades, wakes in a filthy temper and considers the destruction of an entire planet a proportionate response to being disturbed. Most of us have shared a house with one. Toei Animation has built half a franchise around him, and on Sunday night the God of Destruction stretched, yawned and padded back onto Japanese television in Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, a redrawn, re-edited and thoroughly scrubbed-up remake of the 2015 series’ opening arcs.
It went out at 11.15pm Japan time on 11 October on Fuji TV, slipping neatly into the slot vacated by One Piece, which has wandered off on one of its periodic sabbaticals and isn’t due back until 2027. Crunchyroll simulcast it the same day across North America, Europe and a good chunk of the rest of the planet, Hulu has it in the States, and Netflix picks up weekly episodes from 17 October, a polite six days behind. The streaming rights have, in other words, been carved up three ways like the estate of a minor deity. American fans got an early peek, too: episode one had its world premiere at New York Comic Con on 8 October, with Jason Douglas and Ian Sinclair, the English voices of Beerus and his unflappable angelic valet Whis, on the panel and Monica Rial, Bulma herself, hosting.
Why do it at all? Anyone who watched Super on its first outing will remember the answer. The original was made on a schedule so punishing that faces in the early episodes drifted off-model like waxworks left too close to a radiator, and the internet, which never forgets, screengrabbed every one of them. Toei’s remedy is what it insists on calling an “enhanced edition”: a heap of newly drawn and redrawn cuts, fully re-rendered footage, fresh voice recordings, new music and sound effects, and a reconstructed narrative that the studio says sits closer to Akira Toriyama’s manga. Executive producer Akio Iyoku has been careful to describe it as enhanced rather than built from scratch, a distinction that will matter enormously to precisely nobody outside Toei’s marketing department. Nobody, mercifully, has reported Frieza shooting first.
Video not playing? Watch the Dragon Ball Super: Beerus Super Surge trailer on YouTube.
The story itself is now on its fourth telling. Beerus first turned up in 2013’s Battle of Gods, the first Dragon Ball cinema outing in eighteen years, before being retold in the 2015 anime and again in Toyotarou’s manga. The set-up remains one of the more endearing routes to a cosmic apocalypse. The purple god wakes, hears gossip about a Saiyan who beat Frieza, and comes looking for Goku; if nobody on Earth proves sufficiently entertaining, Earth is cancelled. Think Bagpuss, if Bagpuss could delete solar systems and had very firm views about who gets the last pudding.
The more radical surgery is to the pacing. Toei hasn’t confirmed an episode count, but reports point to roughly twenty episodes covering the Beerus saga, Frieza’s gilded comeback in Resurrection ‘F’ and the Universe 6 tournament against Beerus’s brother Champa, material that originally sprawled across the best part of fifty. For a franchise that once took ten episodes to destroy a planet with five minutes left to live, that is practically a jump cut. Early word from the New York screening suggests the first episode has already shed much of the original’s dawdling, which is exactly where the scissors needed to go.
The team behind it is reassuringly seasoned. Matsuto Seya handles series composition and direction, long-serving Dragon Ball hand Tadayoshi Yamamuro is character designer and chief animation director, and Norihito Sumitomo provides the music. Masako Nozawa is still Goku, as she has been since 1986, and turns ninety this month, which makes her the most indestructible thing in a show full of men who survive exploding planets. Koichi Yamadera returns as Beerus, MEGATERA ZERO supplies the opening theme, “ONOGAMI”, and Vickeblanka the closer, “Kan Peki no Peki”. Toriyama, who died in 2024, is credited for the original work, story and character designs.
Here at SFcrowsnest we are normally the first to groan when a studio announces it is remaking something that already exists, but this one has a better excuse than most. Hollywood tends to remake things because it has run out of ideas; Toei is remaking this because it ran out of time the first go round. It is also a runway for Dragon Ball Super: The Galactic Patrol, the new series adapting the manga’s Moro arc, which will finally push the anime past the Tournament of Power where it stalled in 2018. Beerus, at least, should approve of the arrangement. He has never once objected to other people doing all the hard work while he has a nap.
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