Before Adult Swim ever existed, Cartoon Network ran something called the "Toonami: Midnight Run" at midnight - which was an extra, hour-long block of Toonami anime shows, on top of the main Toonami anime block which usually began at 4 or 5 PM and always went until 7 PM. Sometimes the reruns shown were the same episodes that were airing earlier in the day in the main Toonami block, but sometimes they were different and occasionally even got to be less censored. More than anything though, the Midnight Run was a way for people to see even more episodes of Dragon Ball Z, as it was a phenomenon back then. For most of the Midnight Run's existence, one or both shows were DBZ reruns - as was the case with this recording that I made back in 2001. And to give an appreciation of it, I'm showing the first 2 minutes and 30 seconds of what it was like when the clock struck midnight and a Midnight Run rendition of DBZ began. So you get to see the Toonami: Midnight Run intro, the Toonami DBZ intro (with special Midnight Run title font), a recap from the original Funimation English dub of an episode (with the old announcer), the original Funimation DBZ episode title card, and then a few seconds of the actual episode. (I'd show more but, you know... YouTube.)
This video is a lossless conversion from a VHS tape and is at ~60fps, meaning it looks as faithful as possible to how it would look if you watched this on a TV that was de-interlacing a VHS tape. It's also been upscaled to 1440x960 in order to be viewable at ~60fps on YouTube.
Other Videos By Velodus
2024-03-09
The First 2:30 of a DBZ Episode as It Aired on Toonami: Midnight Run [from VHS, lossless]
At present, Velodus has 4,125 views spread across 1 video for Dragon Ball Z, with his channel publishing less than an hour of Dragon Ball Z content. This makes up less than 0.15% of the total overall content on Velodus's YouTube channel.
193