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

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

Post by ABED » Sun Oct 21, 2018 12:47 pm

From perspective of TOEI it's not exactly a prequel, but from point of a viewer that first sees DBZ and only thereafter DB it comes down to the same thing, it has a prequel-effect.
As someone who falls into that camp, it isn't the case at all. It never had that effect.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by MasenkoHA » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:05 pm

Toonami certainly treated it as a prequel (they’re so cute at that age!) the American DBZ Faulconer or die fandom almost entirely disregards it as a superfluous prequel but it definitely is not. To treat it as a prequel like Young Hercules or Young Sheldon or Smallville is disingenuous

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

Post by Hellspawn28 » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:38 pm

I find it rather confusing as a kid. I think most people who watch DBZ on Toonami back in 1998 probably didn't care since they only watch the show for the action and not the plot.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Mister_Popo » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:58 pm

MasenkoHA wrote:Toonami certainly treated it as a prequel (they’re so cute at that age!) the American DBZ Faulconer or die fandom almost entirely disregards it as a superfluous prequel but it definitely is not. To treat it as a prequel like Young Hercules or Young Sheldon or Smallville is disingenuous

It's a great story, i am glad i've seen it first.
People who haven't seen the series at all, i always recommend to watch DB before DBZ.

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

Post by Kinokima » Sun Oct 21, 2018 3:22 pm

I was going to say it worked for me and I wasn’t confused but I guess this is technically false. I remember I really loved Gohan in the Saiyan arc but it wasn’t enough for me to keep watching the show. I might not have continued watching more but my friend & her sister who introduced me to the show then told me about Future Trunks and how he was Vegeta’s son. I was intrigued that a cartoon villain had a child and so I watched Trunks episodes and became a fan. I then went back and watched the Freeza arc & read some of the Dragon Ball manga. So yeah I watched it the entirely wrong way at first.

Mind you this was about 20 years ago. So while I don’t think I was confused by the Saiyan arc it didn’t hook me and maybe it would have if I had known the characters more from Dragon Ball. Now I really love & appreciate the Saiyan arc.

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

Post by The Time Traveller » Sun Oct 21, 2018 3:45 pm

MasenkoHA wrote:Toonami certainly treated it as a prequel (they’re so cute at that age!) the American DBZ Faulconer or die fandom almost entirely disregards it as a superfluous prequel but it definitely is not. To treat it as a prequel like Young Hercules or Young Sheldon or Smallville is disingenuous
Unfortunately even in Japan now DB comes second when it comes to releases. Z movies before DB, Z series before DB, Kai started with the Saiyan arc, the full color release started with the Saiyan arc.

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

Post by Vijay » Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:40 am

Mind blown! Dats how good it was...

No one cares abt Goku or Piccolo's pastor their origin as whatever happening at present is simply outstanding in terms of writing, development, actions & the tonal consistency

At least for me

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

Post by ABED » Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:37 am

Vijay wrote:Mind blown! Dats how good it was...

No one cares abt Goku or Piccolo's pastor their origin as whatever happening at present is simply outstanding in terms of writing, development, actions & the tonal consistency

At least for me
Plenty of people cared about their past and a big part of what makes it outstanding writing and development is because of previous stories lending much needed context.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by DragonBallFoodie » Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:31 am

Speaking for myself, the Saiyan Saga suited me fine as a jumping on point.

It got me into DBZ, and more or less enabled me to go back and look at DB.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:11 am

Vijay wrote:No one cares abt Goku or Piccolo's pastor their origin as whatever happening at present is simply outstanding in terms of writing, development, actions & the tonal consistency
But at the time Dragon Ball was the "present". And going by that logic, you shouldn't have been interested in Z either because when FUNi dubbed Z, GT was the latest thing made.

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

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:13 am

Kunzait_83 wrote:Its the scene where Kami and Mr. Popo are discussing the changes that Piccolo has gone through since his Ma Junior reincarnation: that he's no longer technically a demon anymore because the souls of those he kills are sent to the afterlife and are no longer left trapped in limbo like before. In Kai it should be circa episode 5 or so.
Hey Kunzait, just letting you know I made a transcript of the scene in question. I don't think you saw it? viewtopic.php?f=7&t=42903&start=20#p1548041

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

Post by Kunzait_83 » Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:37 am

KBABZ wrote:But at the time Dragon Ball was the "present". And going by that logic, you shouldn't have been interested in Z either because when FUNi dubbed Z, GT was the latest thing made.
Bingo.

Lets just put this to bed: these discussions are never actually about "what is objectively the best place to start from a storytelling standpoint". These discussions, like so many others, basically boil down for a lot of people to "This is all about what I was introduced to as a kid and what I'm most nostalgically used to". People don't cite the Saiya-jin arc as the best place to begin the series because it makes the most logical narrative sense: they cite it because it was what first got them pumped for Dragon Ball/Z as kids. All fine and dandy by itself, but that's just NOT a particularly compelling or valid argument regarding what makes the most storytelling sense here.

One of the big arguments I've always heard people make for starting with DBZ over DB is that Z was "newer, fresher, and more modern". When the fact is, FUNimation brought Dragon Ball Z to America well AFTER it had ended. The Saiya-jin arc was nearly a DECADE old by the time it had first aired on U.S. TVs. GT was still ongoing when DBZ first aired in syndication, and GT was over with entirely when it made its Toonami debut on Cartoon Network: by which point the Saiya-jin saga was OVER a decade old.

Dragon Ball Z was NEVER "the new hotness" at ANY point when it was being dubbed by FUNimation. Not EVER. The mainstream U.S. audience for DBZ was ALWAYS very much "behind the curve" of much of the rest of the planet when it comes to this series, and the same masses of kids that are supposedly allergic to anything over five minutes old were getting hyped as all hell for what was actually a VERY old show, particularly the Saiya-jin arc episodes, even back in the late 90s.

DBZ was never a "late 90s/early 2000s" anime like its so often (even subconsciously) treated as by many fans here (due to "That's when I got into it!" and "Its what I know from when I was a kid!" syndrome): its a late 80s/early 90s anime. Period. 90% of the people posting here had never heard of DBZ or had gotten into it until it was ALREADY long over with and old news throughout the rest of the world.

The idea that "Dragon Ball Z was more modern and so it had more natural appeal because original DB was so old and 80s" and similar arguments that have been put forth by dub fans and the like has ALWAYS been garbage, because there wasn't anything about DBZ that was "modern" or "current" even at the time when it was first being brought to the U.S.

One of my favorite bits of stupid FUNimation/Cartoon Network-isms is when the Boo saga dub was first being aired on CN in the early 2000s; Cartoon Network was hyping it up as "The World Premiere!" of these particular episodes. Not the U.S. premiere mind you: the WORLD premiere. For episodes that had aired and had been seen by many (including myself) since roughly TEN YEARS prior to their Cartoon Network debut.

And the Saiya-jin saga ITSELF is... from the 1980s. Following IMMEDIATELY after original DB had ended. And THAT'S the arc that first hooked most U.S. kids (and is the subject of this very thread).

Lets say FUNimation didn't skip to the Saiya-jin arc: lets say they had skipped to the 23rd Budokai. Or the Daimao arc. Or hell, even the 22nd Budokai. For whatever reason, hypothetically. Does anyone think that there's ANYTHING inherent about those episodes of those arcs that is SO fundamentally different from the Raditz episodes that they would immediately turn off the same kids that got into the Saiya-jin arc material at the tail-end of the 90s? You have the SAME cast of characters engaged in much the SAME kinds of conflicts and the SAME kinds of high flying, mach speed, Ki explosive martial arts battles, all rendered in very much the SAME animation/art style.

Hell, I'll even throw the dub fans a bone and say that in this hypothetical alternate reality, FUNimation had even went to the trouble of replacing Kikuchi even for those earlier original DB arcs with something more Faulconer-esque. Come on, be honest folks: if your first exposure to Dragon Ball was a hypothetical late 90s FUNimation dub of Goku having THAT insane-ass fight with Piccolo at the 23rd Budokai, with full on FUNimation Saturday morning cartoon schlock synth "rock": you're telling me that THAT would somehow be a gigantic turn off... but somehow, magically, the stuff with Raditz had the special magic touch that was needed to hook you? Seriously?

Image
Old and boring

VS

Image
Fresh and cutting edge!

This whole conversation (like so many others with regards to FUNimation's treatment of the series) has ALWAYS been complete bullshit. Dragon Ball would've caught on no matter WHAT was done to it or WHERE in the story it started from: its visuals alone are simply too dynamic and too distinctive for it NOT to instantly grab masses of eyeballs. All it ever needed was a big enough audience to actually see it. People only defend FUNimation's decisions due to familiarity, NOT because they made ANY kind of logical sense WHATSOEVER. They didn't back then, and they never have.
KBABZ wrote:Hey Kunzait, just letting you know I made a transcript of the scene in question. I don't think you saw it? viewtopic.php?f=7&t=42903&start=20#p1548041
I did see it, and if you go back and look, I edited my previous post to that to thank you for it. :thumbup:
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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.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 22, 2018 11:16 am

Kunzait_83 wrote:
KBABZ wrote:Hey Kunzait, just letting you know I made a transcript of the scene in question. I don't think you saw it? viewtopic.php?f=7&t=42903&start=20#p1548041
I did see it, and if you go back and look, I edited my previous post to that to thank you for it. :thumbup:
Oops, haha! Thanks!

I think in regards to the core Dragon Ball story and works of the manga and anime, they're both very late 80s/early 90s. But I would argue that for the FUNi dub specifically it's an odd mix of that plus he late 90s/early 2000s, due to the rewritten dialogue, the new intros for Z and GT, and of course the score replacement. It's a whack hybrid of the two where the visuals are of the original time but all the audio is from a decade later (working on Dragon Ball edits, it can be plainly obvious that the music is 30 years old and the audio 20 years). It's much like how Kai is a mix of the original time period, but the intros and Yamamoto score make it distinctly 2009 as well (which was one of my problems, it didn't feel aged like the footage they were using).

I also think there's at least half the tiniest grain of merit to starting with Raditz: it begins with the introduction of Goku, Gohan and Chi-Chi in a manner deliberately evoking the first DB episode, the first few episodes establish out of the gate what kind of abilities Goku and Piccolo have, and the more important character relationships are brought up, like Master Roshi and Bulma.

HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is that all of those work more through coincidence. You have no real appreciation that Tien and Goku used to be rivals, that Piccolo is the son/reincarnation of Earth's greatest mass-murderer on a course for redemption with solid history regarding Goku, Roshi and Krillin, how utterly INSANE it is that Goku managed to make a kid, or just how long-standing Goku's relationships with Roshi, Krillin, Bulma and Yamcha are. You get a sort of thin face-value knowledge of things when, for example, Bulma briefly reminisces about their earlier adventures, but it's nothing compared to the pure nostalgic feeling when you know exactly what she's alluding to. And of course that arc was never DESIGNED as a jumping-on point to begin with. It doesn't exactly go out of its way to re-introduce everything for newer viewers like a lot of comic books do to attract new audiences. And the unfortunate side-effect is that by having so little appreciation for everything, there's this mis-conception that the story ultimately doesn't matter at all and is just an excuse for epic energy fights (because that's how it came off to new viewers at the time because they were watching for mountains being blown up and people getting bloodied holes shot through them).

And that's pretty ironic considering that it's arguably because of the great storytelling that Raditz, or any other start of an arc, work as well as they do to introduce new audiences to begin with. If you start with Trunks, for example, you get the focus of Goku as the main character, that he has a gentle but up-and-coming son, that Vegeta's an asshole who hates him, and that Bulma is the fish out of water normal who finds all this crazy. The same applies if you start with the Roshi training: Goku's a naive but gifted boy, he just came off a previous awesome adventure and has met Roshi before, and when he reunites with Bulma and co. it's immediately obvious that he already knows them.

I've always held the opinion that the mark of great storytelling is that you can jump in at pretty much any point in time in any language and still get at least a basic appreciation for what's going on, what's at stake, and what the character relationships are. And to go back for irony, you could argue that those exposed to Dragon Ball via pirated VHS tapes got this much worse: they were exposed to the story in a completely different language and culture to theirs and had to view the story at the whims of what was available in the store, and yet the story was still great and memorable and compelling.
Kunzait_83 wrote:Image
Fresh and cutting edge!
Or even:

Image
Old and boring, apparently!

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

Post by ABED » Mon Oct 22, 2018 11:21 am

Far too many people cite the original DB's failure to catch on twice as evidence of its lack of appeal. We've been over the reasons why it's BS, so that's not my point. DBZ first aired pre-streaming. DVR's were just beginning to to catch on. Point being, the chances of watching DB from the beginning were slim. DB would've gained its audience over time regardless, DB just needed a timeslot and a channel that its target audience watched.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Mon Oct 22, 2018 11:37 am

KBABZ wrote:I also think there's at least half the tiniest grain of merit to starting with Raditz: it begins with the introduction of Goku, Gohan and Chi-Chi in a manner deliberately evoking the first DB episode, the first few episodes establish out of the gate what kind of abilities Goku and Piccolo have, and the more important character relationships are brought up, like Master Roshi and Bulma.

HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is that all of those work more through coincidence. You have no real appreciation that Tien and Goku used to be rivals, that Piccolo is the son/reincarnation of Earth's greatest mass-murderer on a course for redemption with solid history regarding Goku, Roshi and Krillin, how utterly INSANE it is that Goku managed to make a kid, or just how long-standing Goku's relationships with Roshi, Krillin, Bulma and Yamcha are. You get a sort of thin face-value knowledge of things when, for example, Bulma briefly reminisces about their earlier adventures, but it's nothing compared to the pure nostalgic feeling when you know exactly what she's alluding to. And of course that arc was never DESIGNED as a jumping-on point to begin with. It doesn't exactly go out of its way to re-introduce everything for newer viewers like a lot of comic books do to attract new audiences. And the unfortunate side-effect is that by having so little appreciation for everything, there's this mis-conception that the story ultimately doesn't matter at all and is just an excuse for epic energy fights (because that's how it came off to new viewers at the time because they were watching for mountains being blown up and people getting bloodied holes shot through them).
The thing I was trying to get at is, most of the same kinds of fans who'll defend starting the series at Raditz are usually also the same kinds of fans who'll claim "story didn't matter to me as a kid, I just loved the cool fighting!" When the reality is, had FUNimation started BEFORE Raditz... they'd still get the very same exact type of cool fighting that hooked them either way ANYWAYS. So the whole damn argument is rendered totally moot and completely falls apart by their own logic.
KBABZ wrote:(because that's how it came off to new viewers at the time because they were watching for mountains being blown up and people getting bloodied holes shot through them).
They didn't even get that last part though due to censorship. Its always struck me as particularly funny how DBZ got this reputation via the dub as such a "hardcore badass" show when the version most widely seen initially was the wussified one where most of the "hardcore" content was totally stripped out. :lol: :lol:
KBABZ wrote:And that's pretty ironic considering that it's arguably because of the great storytelling that Raditz, or any other start of an arc, work as well as they do to introduce new audiences to begin with. If you start with Trunks, for example, you get the focus of Goku as the main character, that he has a gentle but up-and-coming son, that Vegeta's an asshole who hates him, and that Bulma is the fish out of water normal who finds all this crazy. The same applies if you start with the Roshi training: Goku's a naive but gifted boy, he just came off a previous awesome adventure and has met Roshi before, and when he reunites with Bulma and co. it's immediately obvious that he already knows them.

I've always held the opinion that the mark of great storytelling is that you can jump in at pretty much any point in time in any language and still get at least a basic appreciation for what's going on, what's at stake, and what the character relationships are.
Excellent points all around, and very much agreed on that last sentiment especially. Though an exception is probably the Freeza arc, which is a very particularly awkward place to begin at by almost any standard, since it picks up and continues on so closely and directly on the heels of the aftermath of the Saiya-jin arc. But for MOST of the other arcs, this general sentiment definitely holds true. A lot of Toonami-era fans (and funny enough, a lot of early 90s fansub VHS-era fans like myself) started with the Cell arc.
KBABZ wrote:And to go back for irony, you could argue that those exposed to Dragon Ball via pirated VHS tapes got this much worse: they were exposed to the story in a completely different language and culture to theirs and had to view the story at the whims of what was available in the store, and yet the story was still great and memorable and compelling.
As someone of the pirated VHS generation and who started DBZ flush in the middle of the Cell arc (with Piccolo fighting first form Cell), I can 100% attest to this. The particular episode that really hooked and sold me on the series was the one with Kuririn fighting Cell at the airport: doesn't get anymore of an arbitrarily random jumping on point than that.
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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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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:28 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote:
KBABZ wrote:And that's pretty ironic considering that it's arguably because of the great storytelling that Raditz, or any other start of an arc, work as well as they do to introduce new audiences to begin with. If you start with Trunks, for example, you get the focus of Goku as the main character, that he has a gentle but up-and-coming son, that Vegeta's an asshole who hates him, and that Bulma is the fish out of water normal who finds all this crazy. The same applies if you start with the Roshi training: Goku's a naive but gifted boy, he just came off a previous awesome adventure and has met Roshi before, and when he reunites with Bulma and co. it's immediately obvious that he already knows them.

I've always held the opinion that the mark of great storytelling is that you can jump in at pretty much any point in time in any language and still get at least a basic appreciation for what's going on, what's at stake, and what the character relationships are.
Excellent points all around, and very much agreed on that last sentiment especially. Though an exception is probably the Freeza arc, which is a very particularly awkward place to begin at by almost any standard, since it picks up and continues on so closely and directly on the heels of the aftermath of the Saiya-jin arc. But for MOST of the other arcs, this general sentiment definitely holds true. A lot of Toonami-era fans (and funny enough, a lot of early 90s fansub VHS-era fans like myself) started with the Cell arc.
Yeah. You can also make the case for that concerning the Baba arc too, since it's the continuation of the Red Ribbon Arc (to the point where there are some days I'm confused it's even considered separate to begin with considering the quest isn't even over).
ABED wrote:Far too many people cite the original DB's failure to catch on twice as evidence of its lack of appeal. We've been over the reasons why it's BS, so that's not my point. DBZ first aired pre-streaming. DVR's were just beginning to to catch on. Point being, the chances of watching DB from the beginning were slim. DB would've gained its audience over time regardless, DB just needed a timeslot and a channel that its target audience watched.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what I did when I was a kid: me and my sis watched from the second episode of Dragon Ball every Saturday evening with pizza all the way up until the conclusion of the 22nd TB (whereupon it was reset to episode 1 for some insane reason).

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

Post by ABED » Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:06 pm

Yeah. You can also make the case for that concerning the Baba arc too, since it's the continuation of the Red Ribbon Arc (to the point where there are some days I'm confused it's even considered separate to begin with considering the quest isn't even over).
I consider it an arc within an arc.
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:14 pm

KBABZ wrote:Yeah. You can also make the case for that concerning the Baba arc too, since it's the continuation of the Red Ribbon Arc (to the point where there are some days I'm confused it's even considered separate to begin with considering the quest isn't even over).
From my recollections, the overwhelming majority of DB fandom in the old-old days typically didn't usually considered the Baba material to be a separate story arc from the rest of the Red Ribbon stuff. There were certainly SOME that did here and there (Curtis Hoffman MIGHT have been a notable figure at the time who did, but I can't remember for sure), but that was definitely more outside the norm way back when: overall it used to be the much more overwhelming convention among most fans in general that the fight against Baba's ghost warriors was still part of the broader, overall Red Ribbon arc (as almost an extended coda of sorts), with that storyline proper not ending until Goku wishes back Bora and regains Si Xing Qiu/Shushinchuu.

I'm not sure how much of it was due to FUNimation's arc breakdowns or some other factors, but the idea of considering the Baba stuff to be its own separate arc seemed to become more common and widespread (even among more Japanese version-centric corners of fandom) much more so in later years than it used to be in the earlier, pre-dub years.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
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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KBABZ
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Re: How good was the Saiyan Saga as a jumping on point?

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:19 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote:
KBABZ wrote:Yeah. You can also make the case for that concerning the Baba arc too, since it's the continuation of the Red Ribbon Arc (to the point where there are some days I'm confused it's even considered separate to begin with considering the quest isn't even over).
From my recollections, the overwhelming majority of DB fandom in the old-old days typically didn't usually considered the Baba material to be a separate story arc from the rest of the Red Ribbon stuff. There were certainly SOME that did here and there, but that was more outside the norm way back when: overall it used to be the much more overwhelming convention among most fans that the fight against Baba's ghost warriors was still part of the broader, overall Red Ribbon arc (as almost an extended coda of sorts), with that storyline proper not ending until Goku wishes back Bora and regains Si Xing Qiu/Shushinchuu.

I'm not sure how much of it was due to FUNimation's arc breakdowns or some other factors, but the idea of considering the Baba stuff to be its own separate arc seemed to become more common and widespread (even among more Japanese version-centric corners of fandom) much more so in later years than it used to be in the earlier, pre-dub years.
Considering the main Kanzenshuu site also acknowledges this break, it would not surprise me if one of the Daizenshuu or Chozenshuu had it as well. Personally I've always felt that the idea of having a mini-Tournament just to find out where the last Ball is came off as rather filler-like and a bit of a whiplash considering it's rather different compared to what Goku had to do to get each of the previous Balls, but the reunion with Grandpa Gohan makes it worth it in the end.

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

Post by ABED » Mon Oct 22, 2018 6:44 pm

I consider it a related arc within a larger arc. Even though most name the arcs after the antagonists, I would consider the end of the arc the destruction of the RRA.
Personally I've always felt that the idea of having a mini-Tournament just to find out where the last Ball is came off as rather filler-like and a bit of a whiplash considering it's rather different compared to what Goku had to do to get each of the previous Balls, but the reunion with Grandpa Gohan makes it worth it in the end.
Filler isn't limited to non-canon moments. If this is filler, it's damn entertaining filler.

Out of any of the points to jump into DB that aren't the beginning, the Saiyan arc is about as natural a start as any since every story thread to that point had been wrapped up.
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