Post
by Cipher » Fri Jul 27, 2018 8:57 am
Mostly just want to say I'm super curious to hear/see Mike lay out a timeline of Japanese GT promotional material with all of the vintage magazines he's accumulating. Hoping it'll show up in the form of either an article or a future podcast!
Also, the lack of filter on oozaru Goku in these episodes is baffling, Oob is a murderer, Boo's farewell is touching, and while I find this whole string of episodes completely enjoyable and the Tsufuru planet makes a lovely backdrop for the climax (even sticking with the series' theme of setting the series on exotic worlds as it finishes its first arc), I otherwise don't have that much to say about them. Neither my favorite nor least favorite part of the show.
Okay, I guess I do have two more things to say, perhaps more in response to the show as a whole than this particular string of episodes:
Oob really does get done dirty by the series, between his milquetoast characterization and no effort ever being made past this point, really, to portray the fact that he's significantly stronger than anyone not named Goku. I say this not because I'm in a fuss about power-scaling, or because I'm some kind of jilted Oob fan (who could be? he's a complete blank slate), but because it feels like an artifact of wanting to keep focus on Goku, and to some extent his Saiyan family, rather than something sincere to the story. From here on out we'll see him only in passive group roles, at least when it comes to large battles, and it just doesn't feel quite right.
On a more positive note, one of the things I feel GT does particularly well, especially in this first arc, is maintaining an important quality from the manga: You'd have to be some sort of savant to predict what an arc's ending will look like based on how it starts. It was nice to hear everyone pick up on that this episode as events dodged Jeff's predictions—Goku, looking like that, fighting a giant, golden monkey on a planet full of evil versions of his friends, is a weird ending to an arc that starts with a casual group trip through space. Hell, it's a weird ending even based on where we were five or so episodes prior. When the group was asked what the most evidently "Toriyama" thing about this batch of episodes was, I think everyone was just a bit remiss to not have cited that. (The humor in comparison is ... okay. It's not as wonderfully dry as Toriyama, but it never lets its jokes become too overbearing either, give or take a few hungry Goku gags.)
Next time: Hot off the heels of Boo, the rarest thing in Dragon Ball: a permanent, non-villain character death.