Furthermore, the North American broadcast famously merged episodes. For example, the three-part climactic battle where Goku transforms into a Super Saiyan for the first time (original episodes 94-96) was often presented as a single, elongated episode. When the series later aired in unedited form on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block, FUNimation began re-dubbing from episode 68 onward, but the numbering system had already been cemented. Consequently, the English-language broadcast version—the one millions of 1990s and 2000s kids grew up with—totaled . This number remains ingrained in North American pop culture, even though it omits 15 episodes present in the original Japanese run.
However, for a generation of Western fans, the episode count is complicated by the production history of the English dub. When Saban Entertainment and Funimation initially brought the series to the United States, the episodes were heavily edited for content and cobbled together to form syndicated packages. In this original English broadcast run, the count was technically higher——due to the editing process, where scenes were cut, and episodes were occasionally spliced together or renamed to fit syndication standards. Later, when Funimation released the "Uncut" and "Remastered" versions on DVD and streaming services, they aligned the count back to the original Japanese numbering, settling the Western tally at 291 as well. dbz how many episodes
