How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

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How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by matt0044 » Sun Oct 14, 2018 4:55 pm

I mean, when you think about it, kids starting off there should've be pretty darn confused as to who Goku or Piccolo even was. To say nothing of the other Z-Fighters who's connections to Goku were never explored so they're just other super powerful guys that Goku knows. Hell, they just throw things like wish granting "Dragon Ball" at us and Goku's Saiyan heritage that'd be a lot more of an effective plot twist if we know of what came before. If I started with this, I'd be more confused that curious honestly.

Sorry if this sounds like I'm rambling but I'm genuinely curious as somebody who had started with Dragon Ball Volume 1.
Last edited by matt0044 on Sun Oct 14, 2018 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Polyphase Avatron » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:00 pm

It certainly led to a lot of confusion and unanswered questions, but the show was just so good that most of us didn't really find it such a problem. I remember reasoning that there must have been some unseen backstory back when I first saw DBZ on Toonami, and when they started showing commercials for the original Dragonball, I thought 'finally, now I can see how it all started!'.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by TheBigBoy » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:20 pm

I was confused, but I didn't mind. I was into it from the start. Killing off the main character a few episodes in was a hell of a hook.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by precita » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:30 pm

It was fine, just no backstory for Piccolo.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by MasenkoHA » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:31 pm

I didn't see the first episode of DBZ from the beginning so I don't know if that would have helped (I think the first episode I saw was Escape from Piccolo? I definitely remember the Gohan befriends some orphans plot from back when I was 6) so there was definitely a lot of confusion when I caught an episode on tv like "what's with this talking pig guy?" "what's this Piccolo guy's deal?" as a kid you don't care too much about plot and character depth and you're just kind of watching for the action and the familiar character archetypes. So eventually you're just like whatever this show is freakin cool with the action and the violence and you at least know the characters names even if you don't know what their deal is.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by MasenkoHA » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:36 pm

precita wrote:It was fine, just no backstory for Piccolo.
And you have no idea who the hell Tenshinhan and Chiaoutzu and Korin and Yajirobe are. Also Lunch's whole schtick has to be confusing as hell for anyone who never watched Dragon Ball (at least the original english broadcast omitted her entirely) and Bora and Upa get a cameo that make them seem like random Indian dudes if you didn't watch Dragon Ball first.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by ABED » Sun Oct 14, 2018 6:15 pm

Clearly good enough that it millions of people never went back to the very beginning, but objectively from a story standpoint, it's not a good one. So much is taken as a given.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Bebi Hatchiyack » Sun Oct 14, 2018 6:44 pm

Never experienced that, I started with the original Dragon Ball then Dragon Ball Z (Living in France) :wink:
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by KBABZ » Sun Oct 14, 2018 8:48 pm

It's fine as a "start here for an awesome showing of why it's so good", but it doesn't give the viewer any support on where the characters come from, their relation to each other, or what makes them tick. Not to mention later stories also assume the viewers have a familiarity with the Dragon World's take on Earth as well.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by WittyUsername » Sun Oct 14, 2018 8:53 pm

Not particularly good. There’s a reason that Kai added in an entire prologue that summarized the events of the first half of the series. With that being said, it clearly didn’t cause enough confusion to the point where it affected the popularity of the show. I suppose I’d compare it to if someone started watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Avengers. A number of things would be unexplained, but people will still get what they’re looking for.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Lord Beerus » Mon Oct 15, 2018 3:11 pm

Objectively speaking, it's terrible pace to jump into Dragon Ball. A lot of what makes the Saiyan arc such a compelling and dramatic story is having the knowledge of the Goku's and the sporting casts character development and personal struggles.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by zarmack » Mon Oct 15, 2018 6:45 pm

The fact in many countries the Saiyan arc was able to catch on with major success without prior knowledge of Early DB speaks for itself.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by MasenkoHA » Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:21 pm

zarmack wrote:The fact in many countries the Saiyan arc was able to catch on with major success without prior knowledge of Early DB speaks for itself.
It caught on because little kids liked seeing people kick and punch each other. Not because it’s a good starting point

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by TheBigBoy » Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:31 pm

MasenkoHA wrote:
zarmack wrote:The fact in many countries the Saiyan arc was able to catch on with major success without prior knowledge of Early DB speaks for itself.
It caught on because little kids liked seeing people kick and punch each other. Not because it’s a good starting point
Yeah, because at the time that was still sort of rare in cartoons. They tried to censor it as much as they could but Dragon Ball Z had tons of actual legit violence.

Speaking personally, I was into the serialized storytelling, which was also pretty rare in western cartoons at the time.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by JohnnyCashKami » Tue Oct 16, 2018 10:15 am

Didn't matter much because when we're kids we usually just want to enjoy what we're watching, playing or listening to. Then, when we grow older we start to notice flaws we didn't before, like, the story isn't concise, characters aren't as compelling, the script was entirely changed and/or the music was constantly playing without breath of air.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Kaiza_Toshiyuki » Tue Oct 16, 2018 11:15 am

Doesn't really apply to me because I watched dragon ball first, but it is a bad starting point. It ruins so many moments of revelation like that goku is an alien, that piccolo isn't a demon, and tons other.

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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by ABED » Tue Oct 16, 2018 11:36 am

Kaiza_Toshiyuki wrote:Doesn't really apply to me because I watched dragon ball first, but it is a bad starting point. It ruins so many moments of revelation like that goku is an alien, that piccolo isn't a demon, and tons other.
Just putting it out there, Piccolo is both an alien and a demon. Where is it written that demons can't be from another planet? Otherwise, I agree.
I was into the serialized storytelling, which was also pretty rare in western cartoons at the time.
It was rare on American TV period. There would be stories that carried over and of course there were multiparters, but nothing to that degree of serialization even for prime time TV. I don't think it was until 24 that we started getting such heavily serialized stories.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Tue Oct 16, 2018 12:53 pm

ABED wrote:
Kaiza_Toshiyuki wrote:Doesn't really apply to me because I watched dragon ball first, but it is a bad starting point. It ruins so many moments of revelation like that goku is an alien, that piccolo isn't a demon, and tons other.
Just putting it out there, Piccolo is both an alien and a demon. Where is it written that demons can't be from another planet? Otherwise, I agree.
For added context, various installments of the anime films had extraterrestrial demons fairly frequently. Garlic Jr.'s Makyo race were demons who were from another planet for instance. As was Bojack and his crew IIRC. Even the demons who served under Slug were also from another planet initially.

Regardless of all that though, the Piccolo we know from DBZ was spawned from a demon that was itself cast off from (and thus took on characteristics of) an alien from another planet: Piccolo Daimao is both a demon AND an alien (or rather, a demonic entity with characteristics of the alien he came from): Ma Junior lost much of the demonic aspects of Daimao when he was reincarnated, and is thus closer to being more of a pure Namekian (and certainly is one once he re-fuses with Kami).

Ironically enough, the Saiyan arc explains and spells out ALL of this background fairly in-depth: in the Japanese version. The dub made sure to leave all of this crucial detail 100% out of its scripts (at least for Z: IIRC the Kai dub retains more of this info to at least some degree), so unless you're rocking the subbed version you're liable to miss all of this anyway.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by ABED » Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:32 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote:
ABED wrote:
Kaiza_Toshiyuki wrote:Doesn't really apply to me because I watched dragon ball first, but it is a bad starting point. It ruins so many moments of revelation like that goku is an alien, that piccolo isn't a demon, and tons other.
Just putting it out there, Piccolo is both an alien and a demon. Where is it written that demons can't be from another planet? Otherwise, I agree.
For added context, various installments of the anime films had extraterrestrial demons fairly frequently. Garlic Jr.'s Makyo race were demons who were from another planet for instance. As was Bojack and his crew IIRC. Even the demons who served under Slug were also from another planet initially.

Regardless of all that though, the Piccolo we know from DBZ was spawned from a demon that was itself cast off from (and thus took on characteristics of) an alien from another planet: Piccolo Daimao is both a demon AND an alien (or rather, a demonic entity with characteristics of the alien he came from): Ma Junior lost much of the demonic aspects of Daimao when he was reincarnated, and is thus closer to being more of a pure Namekian (and certainly is one once he re-fuses with Kami).

Ironically enough, the Saiyan arc explains and spells out ALL of this background fairly in-depth: in the Japanese version. The dub made sure to leave all of this crucial detail 100% out of its scripts (at least for Z: IIRC the Kai dub retains more of this info to at least some degree), so unless you're rocking the subbed version you're liable to miss all of this anyway.
All true, but it also feels like some treat Piccolo's Namekian origins almost like a retcon. In DB, Toriyama said Daimao was a demon, but two arcs later decided he was an alien as an explanation for the DB's.

I know this is going off topic, but I do find it interesting that Toriyama planted the seeds for Piccolo/Kami being aliens at the 23rd TB with both speaking an unknown language. That was a surprising bit of planning for him. To bring it back to the topic at hand, this scene is referenced in DBZ by Bulma and left in the Ocean dub, but was not a scene we ever saw having not been shown DB before DBZ.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Tue Oct 16, 2018 2:08 pm

ABED wrote:All true, but it also feels like some treat Piccolo's Namekian origins almost like a retcon. In DB, Toriyama said Daimao was a demon, but two arcs later decided he was an alien as an explanation for the DB's.
The thing is... its not like it ever contradicts anything or renders anything we knew before to be NOT true or valid. It isn't a "retcon" in the same way a lot of the stuff in DB Minus is for example. When we first meet Daimao, we're told he's a demon king. Then later we meet Kami/God, and we're told their backstory about how they were originally one being that split into two: a good/divine half and an evil/demonic half.

Come the time of DBZ, we find out that the original being they split from was an alien from another planet. Thing is: that DOESN'T therefore mean that Kami is now no longer a god and Daimao was no longer a demon. ALL of that plotline still 100% stands. All this fills in is the origins of the original being that the two used to be, and thus explaining their physical appearance, some of their weird physical abilities (limb regeneration, egg reproduction and whatnot), and the language they used in the 23rd Budokai, etc.

In other words, its executed less like a retcon and more like a genuine plot development: nothing we knew before has been thrown away at all, we're just given further added context that further fleshes everything out. The story being told throughout the Saiya-jin and Freeza arcs (where Kami and Daimao's mystical natures are still heavily featured and acknowledged and used as a jumping off point and as context for the unfolding space opera storyline) never once contradicts or "undoes" anything from the Daimao and 23rd Budokai arcs, and if anything merely supplements them with more details, context, and background.

For this reason, and tons of others, the idea that Z "demystifies" much of what transpired in DB is something I've never really agreed with.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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