(It’s been a while, but I’m planning to restart regular writing for this blog. This piece happened to fall timely enough to motivate me to finish now, and a wider announcement is forthcoming).
The upcoming Dragon Ball Super: Beerus is probably not intended for people like me, a marginal Dragon Ball fan at best, but its announcement seems puzzling regardless. “A TV recut of a TV retelling of a movie” is an idea whose redundancy is glaring from the pitch alone, not to mention doing that twice over since it will cover the story arcs for both Battle of Gods (which also has a Director’s Cut) and Resurrection F. I still don’t plan to watch it, but its existence is remarkable both for the show’s conceit and its surprising place in the larger anime landscape.
It’s not really a TV show, and that’s why it’s interesting.
Dragon Ball aside, anime is no stranger to recutting the same material across different formats. Compilation movies of TV shows with added retakes and scenes have existed in tandem with TV anime well through the 70s onwards, turbocharged by the success of the Mobile Suit Gundam trilogy and other theatrical recap and finale movies of the early 80s. Shows getting recut into compilation movies and new movies getting recut into TV airings is so common but also unremarkable that most of them are trivia footnotes rather than distinct impressions separate from their source.
Some occasionally gain more notoriety if the changes are drastic enough or if the recutting gets comical. Sunrise are some of the more notorious compilation merchants, perhaps reaching their apex (or nadir) with their recent recutting the in-game cutscenes of a shuttered Gundam mobile game into a movie released theatrically. Madoka Magica’s decision to broadcast a TV recut of two compilation movies of the original TV show (which had already received extensive post-air home release changes) also stands as one of the more egregious examples, though it was done to promote a long-delayed sequel movie.
Despite that precedent, the announcement of Beerus is odd considering what its content entails. For these early parts of Super, this is up to cut #4 of the same material, #5 if including the retellings from the tie-in Super manga that’s the basis for the eventual Galactic Patrol anime. Even though it will reach the anime-specific Universe 6 tournament, most of Beerus is retreading existing retreads from source material that is barely over a decade old, and most of it already from two widely popular movies. There was even confusion amidst show’s initial reveal over whether it would retell only the Battle of Gods movie or more of the Super anime, which is not the type of question a show’s announcement should prompt if it has a clear, tangible vision.
The subsequent staff announcement only furthered this sense of aimlessness. “Matsuto Seya”, credited for “Composition and Direction Arrangement,” is a name with no prior use or citing before this and appears to be a pen name, which is the exact arrangement DB Kai had with its “Yasuhiro Nowatari” and “Togo Shoji.” The chief designer and animation director is again Tadayoshi Yamamuro. Regardless of personal fan preference, his artistic style was the predominant one of Dragon Ball’s anime for nearly everything since the 90s through to the mid-2010s. The anime and larger franchise finally started dabbling in different designers and approaches after such a long stretch, but this returns it right back as if the intervening ten years never happened. Aside from a new editor and photography director, nothing else was announced about the core animation team.
Belaboring the repetition of the covered material and staff is perhaps uncharitable given the context of Super’s initial release. The production exhaustion of Toei’s TV anime output during the mid-2010s is well-trodden ground by now; Precure and One Piece had some of their more notorious art pitfalls, Sailor Moon Crystal’s jank initiated one of the earliest “remake vs original” animation comparison flare-ups, and the sheer number of new things they were making stretched so much of their workforce thin across the board.
In that sense, Super’s rushed preproduction came at the worst possible time, and the resulting floundering animation quality through so many of the show’s episodes, especially the movie retellings early on, is almost as central to its legacy as Jiren or Ultra Instinct. The fact that Super cycled through five series directors in less than two years, ran without a series composer (head writer) credited for the majority of its run, and pulled in as many of Toei’s directors and animators from across their pipelines as it could, all speaks to the immense lack of preparation that cast a shadow over its entire run, despite the highs it occasionally reached. The impulse to try another crack at parts of the show is almost understandable.
However, that makes the decision to start with content already told through both the movies and Super, rather than the Super’s original stories thereafter, even more needless. Anime remakes of previously adapted manga/novels are a separate field with similar repetition issues, but there’s enough nominal validity in wanting to improve a work’s first anime adaptation if it was beset with messy anime-only plots, radical changes, story truncations and cutoffs, or outright production woes.
Comparatively, animation issues aside, Super’s retellings expanded the stories of two full, feature-length movies, both of which had standard enough development timelines and enough input from Toriyama, so it is hard to claim there was much of a compromised initial vision for these stories, regardless of what the show did later. Beerus may end up making larger story edits, but the fact that the show is tethered to material already retold this much is limiting, save for potential post-hoc changes to align with what came later. Dragon Ball’s narratives are infamously loose and on-the-fly, but that spontaneity itself is an enduring part of its appeal, and that’s gone when the core of this show is a mere tinkering around the edges of events already covered well before.
That feeling of tinkering carries over to the visuals and presentation shown thus far. Returning to a character design and stylistic philosophy the franchise was stuck with for decades and only recently started to move away from means there is little new artistic vision aside from picking out corrections. While the retakes of some of the show’s sloppier fights are its most touted changes, many of the shots have only marginal fixes or are the same but with new compositing. Doing a remaster/recut of material already this covered has the unavoidable effect of inviting endless frame-by-frame and shot-by-shot comparisons. Because of how repeated the narrative beats are, there is little else to do but to scrutinize every drawing, compositing change, timing adjustment, or minutiae regardless of its relative importance in the episode.
The vastness of DB’s fans also means there’s little consensus this can really achieve when there are three to four versions of every scene and shot to compare with many permutations. Maybe someone prefers this animator’s pose in this moment but hates the erasure of others in the same scene. Maybe the compositing on this one beam was improved but then this other filter on the next shot ruins it. Maybe the framing of this standoff was better than the show, but is it better than the movie? There’s almost no end to what can and will get picked apart. Preference, nostalgia, fickleness, or plain contrarianism makes it hard to see how much this can fully satisfy that many people aside from the most casual.
Some of this is perhaps overthinking things; Beerus will probably do well enough by virtue of being an airing Dragon Ball anime, but any larger creative goal with this seems almost unwinnable. If this aiming to supplant everything before, movies and Super, then this type of intense nitpicking is unavoidable, where it’s hard to say how many even can view this as a show by itself. If the intentions are more benign as a mere reattempt for Super’s specific failings, then it’s still hard to get excited for what amounts to the anime equivalent of a make up exam.
Given this lack of direction, why is Beerus interesting to devote any discussion to, let alone this much?
The answer comes down to a diminished but still important facet of some anime that’s rarely acknowledged by international fandoms: TV Timeslots. One of the announcements for Beerus stated that its broadcast would start on October 11, at 11:15 PM Sunday. While that seems like a random time to air, it’s actually the current dedicated slot for One Piece on Fuji TV, which finished its recent airing under its seasonal model two weeks prior.
Fuji TV is inseparable from Dragon Ball’s history as an anime. Starting from Doctor Slump and into Dragon Ball’s debut, every major DB anime has had Fuji TV involved as producers, show or movie. Additionally, Toei Animation has a longstanding production relationship with Fuji TV for some of its most popular shows. One Piece has aired on it since its inception and remained one of the highest rated airing anime for decades, often in a 9:30 AM Sunday slot. The preceding 9 AM Sunday block has also hosted decades of Toei shows including Digimon, Kitaro, and Dragon Ball Super.
After decades of airing nonstop, One Piece announced in October 2025 that it was shifting to a seasonal model of only 26 episodes a year, making it one of the last major longrunning anime to shift out of that release schedule. However, even before this official switch, the show had already taken a six month long break from October 2024 to April 2025 to “recharge” before its switch to a new 11:15 PM Sunday slot, and it aired a “remastered” version of its Fishman Island arc for 21 episodes with new story editing, compositing, redraws, and occasional new cuts. After the first official seasonal break began in December 2025, Fuji TV aired other assorted programming between then and April, but there wasn’t a dedicated Toei program during that slot. With Beerus, now there is.
This seasonal-plus-stopgap approach was also incorporated into Fuji TV’s other anime block. After years of back-to-back shows, up until the exhausted run of Tosouchu The Great Mission, the 9 AM Sunday slot finally started breaking up the shows more seasonally. Two cours of Kitaro “best of” reruns aired before the start of the next show in Digimon Beatbreak, which then ran for a full year. That slot is now airing Digimon “best of” reruns until whenever they announce the next show.
This shift is also emblematic of the changing anime production and TV landscape towards smaller seasonal chunks of episodes. For a variety of reasons relating to production volume, staffing capacity, studios booking projects years in advance, declining broadcast TV viewership writ large, wanting adaptations of completed manga instead of simultaneous ones, almost no anime is produced in a long runner format anymore aside from those targeted at younger kids. Even unbroken four cour or two cour runs are rare, with most anime either doing one a time or splitting two cours with a season in between. This also includes the change that many shows now air only in late night or midnight-predawn TV slots, regardless of whether they are aimed at adults or teens.
Toei was one of the last studios still making multiple nonstop long-running shows for prime network broadcast slots. With One Piece now shifting to two cour seasons and Digimon having airing gaps, their biggest holdout remains TV Asahi’s “Nichiasa” 8:30 AM Sunday block, whose same animation production line has continued from the 80s through to now from various one offs, Doremi, and eventually Precure. Despite declining nationwide TV viewing habits, broadcasters still play a prominent role in anime production, especially so for Toei where their biggest properties aim for broad kid audiences and mostly air in non late-night slots.
This, more than any quibbles about creative or artistic vision, is the clearest reason for Beerus to exist. Toei still wants to use this timeslot, and they need something for the network to show and attract ratings if they aren’t making their anime on a nonstop airing schedule anymore. The new One Piece late slot still consistently placed in Japan’s TV ratings top 10s despite its shift to 11:15 PM from 9:30 AM (which then started hosting Demon Slayer reruns, which also placed), so why not use it to promote Dragon Ball in the interim?
That these prime slots can host recaps and recuts for months perhaps speaks to the slightly diminished necessity for TV airing, but maintaining them is still important enough for Toei and Fuji TV’s partnership. The marketing announcements have tried to make Beerus seem as fresh and big as possible, but it has the same function as the One Piece Fishman Island remaster or the Kitaro and Digimon reruns. It may have slightly more put into it than most recaps and recuts, but the core of it is still the same filling of time and retaining an audience until an actual show is ready to return.
Where and when the eventual Galactic Patrol anime will air is an open question; it could be the 9 AM Sunday slot, the One Piece 11:15 PM Sunday slot when it is on another break, Daima’s one-off 11:40 PM Friday night slot, or something else. But in the interim, Beerus makes perfect sense as a stopgap to tide people over until then and get use out of an already successful and new Toei anime time slot.
Even more than Dragon Ball Kai, or any other Dragon Ball anime, Beerus is a show where the artistic vision is far behind the commercial and promotional aims of the parties involved. It typifies the challenges of two legacy companies adapting to the changes of TV broadcasting and anime production, and that alone makes it interesting in the broader landscape and history of TV anime. Beerus may still entertain on its own merits; Dragon Ball has remained a juggernaut through decades with and without new anime, and the stories it’s retreading remain popular, but these intersecting industry trends give more context to its purpose than any claims to representing a new or refined creative intent.
It’s hard to call Beerus a real show, but it was never meant as one in the first place.
