Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a hectic week on my end, as me and my housemates have been racing to find a new apartment that’s anywhere close to affordable (and also accommodating of our beloved Eevee). It’s been ten years since any of us checked the rental market, and it turns out the city has spent that time upping its rates to accommodate the average billionaire looking to spend some time off his moon-yacht, leaving scant affordable housing for the rest of us. Nonetheless, we’ve got at least a couple prospects lined up, and have spent the time in between apartment viewings consoling ourselves with the indomitable spirit of Goku and his companions. Yes, Dragon Ball Z Kai has indeed become a fixture of our viewing schedule, and has left me with a few thoughts regarding the father of modern shonen. Let’s get to it!
Dragon Ball Z was actually one of the first anime I ever watched back during middle and high school, when it would air on Cartoon Network’s weekday Toonami block after school. I watched it frequently but not religiously, meaning there were lots of gaps in my knowledge of the actual plot. Z trends towards maybe twenty percent setup and eighty percent fight scenes, so I’d generally drop into fights without full context, with some portion of the Z fighters watching in awe and terror as their remaining companions did battle with the villain. Rather than being confusing, this piecemeal schedule actually enhanced the story’s allure; I could imagine whole sagas of context for the seemingly iron bonds I was witnessing, giving the story a sense of mysterious richness that simply watching it straight through would never have afforded.
Since then, I’ve never really made an effort to return to Z, as its drama and action frankly seemed rudimentary compared to the shows it would inspire. Z lacks the tactical ingenuity and thematic depth of Hunter x Hunter, the raw imaginative breadth of One Piece, or the standout animator showcases of various other modern shonen. Additionally, it was also rendered basically unwatchable by its abominable pacing, meaning it would take a strong incentive to get me back to the OG – like, say, my housemate’s ongoing journey through Dragon Ball, which proved itself an altogether charming ride earlier this year.
Buoyed up by the encouragement of Dragon Ball, and with pacing tightened courtesy of the Kai remake, my house thus embarked on an ambitious journey through Goku and his friends’ Z-era adventures. And as it turns out, while Z can’t come close to the creativity and sense of freedom embodied by its predecessor, it’s still a pretty darn engaging watch.
Paring the show’s pacing down from the original’s interminable repetition to Kai’s relatively streamlined approach is truly a revelation. Not only does this simply make the show more propulsive and watchable in a general sense, it also provides a variety of essential secondary effects: amplifying the sense of genuine escalation across fights, tightening the relationship of action and response to make consequences seem relevant and coherent, and even making the characters seem more intelligent, as they’re now allowed to arrive at obvious deductions without first spending half an episode staring in blank confusion. The show could frankly still use some harsh edits, but Kai seems to be about as good as it gets without cutting into Toriyama’s own pacing decisions.
With Kai trimming so much of the fat, the original Saiyan arc proceeds with genuine momentum, doing its best to counteract the inherent conflict-scaling limitations of the Z platform. That’s not an easy feat – after all, the original Dragon Ball topped off with a villain who was threatening to kill everyone on earth, presumably because Toriyama wasn’t really expecting to return to the property. There’s not really anywhere to go from “I’m going to destroy the world,” and Z is never able to reconcile its need to consistently raise stakes with its lofty starting point (a lesson that future power scalers like Oda would clearly take to heart). All it can really do is offer propulsive moment-to-moment action that threatens individuals we’ve come to care about, and the Saiyan arc offers a fine demonstration of that strategy in action.
After spending all of Dragon Ball squaring off in fierce combat with friends like Tien and Yamcha, watching them get so casually dismantled by the Saiyan invaders is genuinely horrifying. One longtime companion after another is brutalized and cast aside, the casual disregard with which their enemies conduct this violence only heightening the sense of hopelessness. Toriyama would proceed to overuse this tonal contrast to the point of dramatic indifference across every following arc (as well as his strategy of having Goku arbitrarily waylaid in order to force his friends into action – a trick Oda would unfortunately adopt as well, prompting my general classification of the trick as “the hero gets swallowed by a snake”), but here in their first Z adventure, Vegeta’s indifference to his opponents’ efforts still feels menacing.
With Vegeta having been established as wildly superior to everyone except Goku (and even Goku winning more through circumstance than genuine martial superiority), the Namek arc opens with some of Z’s most engagingly plotted material. Gohan, Krillin, and Bulma set out on what they believe to be a pure Dragon Ball hunt, only to find both Vegeta and the abominable Frieza hunting the same prize. Since our heroes can’t possibly defeat their opponents in a straight fight, they are forced to play a cat and mouse positioning game, using their superior reconnaissance abilities to sneak around their unstoppable opponents. Vegeta’s uncertain loyalties further complicate this arrangement, prompting tense negotiations and alliances of convenience between hated foes, all of which further emphasizes the sheer desperation of this chase.
Unfortunately, things take a dramatic turn for the worse once Frieza himself starts to fight. Even at Kai’s improved pacing, the battle against Frieza is overlong and exhaustingly repetitive, as he makes the same speech about only using some arbitrary fraction of his power between each extended sparring match. This is the point where Toriyama’s starting-at-the-ceiling scaling of conflict really proves its dramatic deficiency: with nowhere to go from “I could destroy the planet any time if I wanted to,” Frieza can only demonstrate his threat by spouting off arbitrary numbers, combining power level readings, three different form changes, and persistent declarations that “this is only thirteen and three quarters percent of my true power.” It’s ungrounded, it’s tedious, and it makes every bout up until Goku’s arrival (first he has to fly through space, then he has to restore his body in a vat of healing juice – that’s right, he gets swallowed by a snake twice in this arc) feel arbitrary and superfluous. In spite of the battle against Frieza offering that first, iconic transformation into Super Saiyan, this arc’s last act embodies all of Z’s worst tendencies, and I was happy to see Namek behind us.
Things fortunately pick up again in the next arc, with Toriyama again constructing a satisfyingly circuitous setup for his android arc. We start off with the top notch beat of Vegeta getting swiftly domesticated by Bulma, a relationship that ensures the two of them remain among Dragon Ball’s most generally endearing characters (alongside Krillin, who rides through these vast escalations in scale with good humor and thoughtful strategic contributions). Then there’s a whole bunch of time travel fuckery introducing us to Vegeta’s teenage son Trunks, and a rambling escalation across several waves of nefarious androids.
As in Namek’s early material, it’s the diversity of motivation and coherent scale of threat that gives the android saga a sense of dramatic substance. Between the clearly divergent, potentially non-threatening motives of Trunks’ alleged murderbots and the mysterious emerging threat of Cell, there’s plenty to sink your teeth into beyond simply wondering if some guy is strong enough to beat some other guy. And Goku’s general absence is frankly to the show’s benefit; since the end of the original Dragon Ball, Goku has essentially transformed from a person into a plot device, making him far less emotionally compelling than Piccolo, Krillin, or even Vegeta.
The transition from general android drama into Cell-versus-the-world threatens the same sort of binary “they’ll fail until suddenly they don’t fail” power scaling as Frieza, but fortunately Toriyama has a few more tricks up his sleeve. First off, Cell’s personality is far more interesting than Frieza’s monotonous “I’m the strongest being in the universe” – Cell has curiosity, Saiyan pride, and even a sense of humor. Secondly, the return of the World Martial Arts Tournament as the venue for Cell’s final confrontation is a brilliant choice, with the introduction of Mr. Satan and his loyal camera crew reviving Dragon Ball’s long-dormant sense of fun.
Basically everything Goku does in this arc is either boring or infuriatingly stupid (I was ready to chuck something at the screen when Piccolo informed Goku that his son is not in fact a monomaniacal battle fanatic like he is, and thus his entire plan for victory was faulty, something Goku had apparently not previously considered), but the Cell Saga offers plenty else to enjoy, even if it drags in its final stages. Goku’s loss is everyone else’s gain; though he stands as an unfortunate void of characterization at the center, his companions ably rise to the challenge of providing the show’s human element. Bulma ragging on her deadbeat husband! Piccolo affirming his fatherly love for Gohan! Krillin getting razzed about crushing on an android! There’s lots of fun character-rich stuff here, and with Kai’s pacing, the balance of drama is not so slanted towards gaping at power-ups as to undercut it.
From the bombastic, world-threatening drama of Cell, Z then transitions to what has likely been my favorite part of the series so far: Gohan attending a regular-ass high school, while simultaneously traipsing about town as the superhero Great Saiyaman. It’s inventive, it’s irreverent, and it’s simply joyous in the manner of the original Dragon Ball’s greatest material. Every major arc of Z eventually trends towards some tedious, interminable fight scene, but the beginning of each arc demonstrates Toriyama’s enduring talent for playful action and comedy, his whimsical approach to worldbuilding, and his knack for understated character rapport. Z has become a global phenomenon via an appeal that escapes me entirely, but every part of this show that doesn’t involve grunting and blasting is perfectly delightful. I look forward to weathering Buu and continuing on to Super!