“The existence of multiple suspicious musical pieces which may infringe on the rights of third parties has been confirmed within the musical compositions recorded for “Dragon Ball Kai”, an animated television work produced by this firm. The relevant musical pieces are used as background music in “Dragon Ball Kai”, and measures are promptly being taken to replace the relevant musical pieces from the background music of “Dragon Ball Kai”.
Also, we are proceeding with a swift investigation of the facts, and discussion of countermeasures with concerned parties in the near future. -Toei Animation
Yamamoto was ultimately fired and all of the background music used from the very beginning of Dragon Ball Z Kai was replaced with the original musical score from the Dragon Ball Z TV series by Shunsuke Kikuchi, and they continued using the original musical score until the end of Dragon Ball Z Kai.
Yamamoto used many different artists to inspire his music some of which created score for huge blockbuster films or are wildly popular musicians. For example he used music from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Journey, James Horner, and Danny Elfman these are just a few artists that Yamamoto used as “inspiration” for his music there are also many others that were not mentioned. “Seriously though if you’re going to copy someone else’s music why in the world would you take it from such famous artists” (Joyce, 2014).
As a result of Yamamoto’s actions he is no longer associated with the Dragon Ball franchise. Also when Dragon Ball Kai was released on DVD the musical score was replaced with Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score. Yamamoto’s music was also removed from the Budokai video game series when they made a revamped HD version of Budokai 1 and Budokai 3 they added music from other video games.
Many fans reacted negatively to the removal of Yamamoto’s score especially when the music was replaced for the Budokai HD Collection, because many fans had grown accustom to his style of music and feel that their favorite DBZ content is lacking because the music isn’t how they remember it. It is unclear as to why Toei Animation made this announcement so late into the broadcasting of Dragon Ball Z Kai, but this was one of the biggest stories to ever arise from the franchise and has impacted it over the past few years. Since this scandal the franchise has hired Norihito Sumitomo to compose the musical score for recent Dragon Ball content such as the recent Dragon Ball Z Movie titled Battle of Gods. He has also taken over the musical production of Dragon Ball Kai since they started remaking the Buu saga. Hopefully Norihito Sumitomo will have more sense than Yamamoto by keeping all of his music original.