Yeah, I know, in Japan the Dragon Ball Z manga isn't a separate thing from the Dragon Ball manga, but it is in the collected volumes they released here in the States. Besides, like hell I was going to pass up an opportunity to post a picture of Vegeta getting punched in his stupid face.
Toriyama does the old Five Years Later maneuver between Goku beating Piccolo and marrying Chi-Chi and the start of this. At which point he reveals that Goku's not just a weird kid who had a monkey tail, he's a weird alien kid who had a monkey tail. Oh, and he was sent here as a baby to subjugate this world so it could be sold to someone else, killing all the present inhabitants if necessary.
The story still has a lot of Goku going to some new place to fight new people and learn new tricks, but the periodic tournaments are largely abandoned. So are a lot of the comedy elements, especially during the Androids and Cell Sagas. There are brief bouts of it here and there, though. The brief stretch on Namek with the Ginyu Force, basically a bad guy version of Power Rangers, complete with choreographed poses and what not. Captain Ginyu asking Frieza if he should perform the Dance of Joy (although that was probably anime filler).
Then the Buu Saga brings some of the humor back. First with Gohan trying to fit in at a regular school, then his trying to be a masked superhero, complete with his own ridiculous poses. After that, there's the brief stretch where Goten and Trunks are the ones on the front lines, and since they're little kids, they come up with stupid attacks. Poor Piccolo gets reduced to playing the straight man for them. Even Buu himself, in his initial form alternates between terrifying and silly. The way he sort of dances around or puffs pink steam out of his skull when he gets annoyed, but then he turns people into cookies and eats them. Yikes.
But most of the series is still fighting, people getting punched in the face or shot with energy blasts. The antagonists are stronger, but at the end of the day I'm not sure that changes much really. Is there a functional difference between Vegeta coming to Earth and being able to destroy and entire planet, and Frieza or Cell showing up and being able to do the same, but even more easily? Motivations, I guess. Vegeta trying to find a way to reach the top of the heap, Frieza for revenge, Cell because he's been designed to be perfect, and he wants to know that he is. And the best way is to beat everyone else.
I admittedly prefer the earlier arcs, the Saiyan and Frieza Sagas. I read a post recently that said Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z could be divided into two halves, at the point where Vegeta first mentions the Legendary Super Saiyan. Before that, the series is all about Dragon Balls. After that, it's all about Super Saiyans, and I think that was part of my issue. Anyone that wasn't at least part Saiyan got sidelined more and more. Maybe if the character that benefited the most in terms of focus wasn't friggin' Vegeta I wouldn't have minded so much, but it was, so I did. Vegeta is the equivalent of the dumbshit police chief in Die Hard, always there to be wrong or make things worse.
Like a lot of people I got into Dragon Ball Z through the anime first, on Cartoon Network late in my high school years. I think a friend of mine mentioned it to me first, and Cartoon Network had finally been added to my family's basic cable package, so I watched it when I could after school. I don't think it was the first anime I'd seen - I know I watched Voltron as a kid, and I remember Sailor Moon being on another network before it was on Toonami, even if it wasn't really my jam - but it was the first one where I understood this was from a different country, and where the series really interested me and made me want to watch more. Granted, that's been more branching into other styles of anime and manga; none of the shonen series that owe something to DBZ have ever come close to interesting me as much as it does (One Piece comes closest, but I feel like that's still more in concept, or maybe the fictional setting in general, than the actual story Oda is telling.)
2 comments:
Oh gosh, DBZ. I wasn't familiar with the anime -- I'm not sure we got it over here -- but I started reading the manga when Viz started putting out the collections in 2002ish. They were cheap and easy to read, and I got quite into it. I stopped when I had about 12 volumes and it was clear there would be a lot more than that in the future, and that it would never really change. It would always be a cycle of fighting-losing-getting stronger-fighting-again-winning-someone-new-turns-up-GOTO-10.
That's a pretty accurate summary. It helps a little when Toriyama varies the tone, lets things get silly again sometimes, but it does boil down to that same cycle.
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