Bleach Kai and Dragonball Kai Recut:

For the sake of eliminating filler, some nice fellows over at nyaa.si have produced cut to manga versions of Bleach and Dragonball Kai.  I thought Dragonball Kai was already cut to the manga, but apparently not, as this version impressively boasts a 34 episode (in terms of 24 minutes per episode standard) reduction in length.  That's a large amount of people's lives no longer wasted by filler, on a series that was already supposed to fix the filler in Dragonball Z.  I hate to think how awful watching Z would be.

Dragonball Kai Recut also restores the original 4:3 aspect ratio, which is kind of necessary because you would lose the top and bottom art of every frame otherwise.  The top and bottom of pictures are also important, they were drawn for a reason.  Widescreen isn't worth artistic fidelity.

Last time I rewatched Dragon Ball I was unimpressed and demoted it about 10 slots, but maybe that was because I wasn't watching Kai Recut.  Maybe if I watched this version, the actual faithful version to the manga, I would be excited again.  After all, I'd gotten pretty sick of Naruto until its cut to manga version came out.

Bleach Kai cuts 48 episodes worth of filler, or about 1/4 of the Bleach that aired before the Thousand Year Blood War.  Yep, 1/4 of the series was still filler, even when you don't watch any of the filler eps.  It was that bad.  Before I would just manually skip past filler sequences, but this file saves me the bother, while also catching filler perhaps I wasn't aware of.  This new version of Bleach also makes me want to rewatch Bleach and see how good it's gotten as a result.

If only One Pace would finish their job, all the big shonen jump series could be properly condensed to their manga sources.  Naruto, Dragon Ball and Bleach are all covered now, the One Pace editors are the last ones out.  One Piece is admittedly a bigger task than the others, especially because new episodes are still being released, but they've had decades to work on this task so that still isn't really an excuse.  How can they still be stuck midway through Arabasta at this late date?  That stuff came out decades ago.  Does it really take decades to edit an episode?

Humorously, this dips my total great anime episode count back down to 9,996, 4 episodes beneath the landmark 10,000.  But it will be back to 10,000 by the end of the week, so it's a very fleeting negative feat.  I swear my great anime count will never go below 10,000 again!  There aren't any more series with filler that needs to be cut, it's smooth sailing from here on.