It’s been a whole decade since the CW’s animated programming block Vortexx shut down and Funimation’s edited dub of Dragon Ball Kai was last seen in the US.
Kai premiered on Vortexx the day it launched on August 25th 2012 at 10:30am after a very successful run on the CW’s previous block Toonzai, as well as Nicktoons, but on the week of January 19th 2013 episodes began airing at the slightly earlier slot of 10am.
Kai then received new episodes from April 13th and a double bill followed starting May 18th until the week of August 10th, and then the week after for the remainder of the run it was a single timeslot at 10am each week.
Saban’s Kidsco Media Ventures LCC bought Toonzai and rebranded it after the splitting of 4Kids’ assets between themselves and Konami’s 4K Acquisition Corp.
The closure of Vortexx marked the first time in 50 years there were no Saturday morning cartoons on traditional TV in the US, following Fox’s decision to drop them in 2008, ABC signing over its block to Litton in 2011, and with Vortexx becoming the last remaining non-educational block without live action programming its demise marked the end an era.
The CW block was replaced by a new block titled One Magnificent Morning, which included half-hour programmes on healthy cooking, fashion and animal care.
At one point Vortexx aired a special, which featured Sonic summarizing the Saiyan arc, referring to Piccolo a Saiyan and their website at the time stated Kai took place “five years after the events of the original Dragon Ball Z series”, both of which were likely unintentional errors.
As Dragon Ball Community pointed out on Twitter while Toonzai marked the CW premier of the Saiyan and Freeza arcs, Vortexx was the first (and only time) the channel aired the Cell arc, and less episodes were aired over time on Vortexx because it was a Saturday morning block only. Nonetheless the channel aired a large number of episodes, so it was a massive success.
As Toonzai only had the first 52 episodes of Kai at the time of the sale, episodes 53-99 of Kai were likely purchased some time prior to the Vortexx block being launched, or during Dragon Ball Kai’s run on the channel. The Kanzenshuu staff at the time joked on episode 296 of their podcast about Saban not being able to count past 53, as this was the point the original US Dragon Ball Z dub left off when Saban’s association with Funimation (which was mostly syndicating the show and getting it timeslots) originally ended.
Dragon Ball Kai ran on Vortexx concurrently with the Nicktoons broadcast, which continued until April 2013, but when the show left the latter the CW’s block became the exclusive home of the 20th anniversary version of Dragon Ball Z on North American TV.
On the Toonzone forums a number of views were expressed over the fall of Vortexx with some regarding its end as the greatest mistake of the animation medium and others acknowledging that even without many other streaming services it was at a disadvantage in the TV landscape of its time.
The end of Vortexx marked a cultural shift of Dragon Ball on US TV, as only a few weeks after the block closed Dragon Ball Kai began airing on Adult Swim’s Toonami block, which was where Dragon Ball Kai: The Final Chapters and Dragon Ball Super premiered in the country.
To this day Dragon Ball has not returned to kids TV in the US, despite the monumental success it had 20-25 years ago on Toonami. It remains to be seen whether or not it will.
Nonetheless as we can see from this Kanzenshuu thread there are indeed fans who not only grew up watching Dragon Ball Kai on the CW but also have fond memories of it:
In any case whether or not Vortexx was in the wrong place at the wrong time we can be grateful that it introduced more kids to Dragon Ball, which is all we can ask for at the end of the day.