Episode 26
The Final Round!! Kamehameha
--There’s an overhead shot of the tournament arena at the start of the episode, and the audience looks remarkably small. Maybe a lot of people lost interest and didn’t stick around for the finals.
--There’s another recap of all the previous fights in the tournament. While it does make sense to have this sort of thing before the final match, it’s also…what, the third time we’ve had this sort of thing?
--Before the match kicks off, there’s a bit of filler as Oolong gets back from an unsuccessful search for Kame-sennin. Then the tournament announcer decides to briefly interview the two finalists. Goku vows to fight to give the fight everything he’s got, while Jackie…has fallen asleep standing up. Then, as the two go into their fighting stances and prepare to square off, the anime adds in a fiery background behind them.
--It is of course impossible to see Goku flying back into the ring by spinning his tail like a helicopter blade without thinking of Tails, but this episode came out about six years before Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Oh, and in case you were wondering about the name of this technique, Daizenshuu 7 helpfully dubs it “Flying through the Air by Spinning Your Tail”. Yep.
--When Goku matter-of-factly says he could have also fired a Kamehameha to get back into the ring, Jackie is outraged that Goku would compare his newbie Kamehameha to Jackie’s own highly refined version. He brags that it took him decades to “invent” his Kamehameha, and in the manga this passes by without comment. In the anime though, Goku wonders what Jackie means, since Kame-sennin is the one who invented the Kamehameha. Jackie quickly covers by saying that while he didn’t invent the technique itself, he did add several improvements. These “improvements”, it turns out, are a bunch of stupid Ginyu Force-style poses he does before actually firing the blast. Nice save.
--While it’s funny, the above filler does kind of kill the momentum leading into Goku and Jackie’s Kamehameha clash, the very first “beam struggle” we get in the series. There’ll be several more of these down the road, and while they’re usually big dramatic moments, I think it’s probably video games that have really cemented the idea of beam struggles as a standard feature of DB fights. In DB video games they seem to pop up all the time. It’s a bit like how in most games you can rattle off several Genki-Damas or Father-Son Kamehamehas in the course of a single fight.
--After the beam struggle, Jackie thinks to himself that Goku is so darn good that not only will he have to fight all-out, but he’ll even need to come up with a strategy. The anime modifies this so that he says he’ll need to come up with a strategy “during the commercial”. Cue commercial break.
--When Goku nails Jackie with an especially hard hit to the head, Jackie complains about Goku hitting “his own teacher”. Goku gets all confused: “Kame-sennin’s my teacher!” Jackie desperately covers by saying he got mixed up, and in the manga things move on. In the anime though, Jackie explains his confusion by revealing that he and Kame-sennin are actually cousins (because God knows, when I get hit on the head, I think I’m my cousin). To illustrate this, he pulls out a family tree that he just so happened to have up his sleeve. This man has clearly thought ahead. Interestingly, this family tree shows the face of Kame-sennin’s father. Obviously there’s no reason to think
anything on that family tree is true, but still, if anyone needs to draw Kame-sennin’s dad for their fan fiction or something, I guess it can’t hurt to use that image as a guide.
--Following that nonsense, Jackie Chun busts out the legendary Sui-Ken or
“Drunken Fist” technique (Zui-Quan in Chinese).
Given his name, it was probably inevitable that Jackie would use that technique sooner or later. Toriyama says in DB Forever and other interviews that he’s watched Drunken Master dozens of times, and that his love for those sorts of kung-fu movies was a big inspiration to draw Dragon Ball in the first place.
--But people like me who first saw this episode on Toonami will think not of the Drunk Fist technique but of the “Crazy Cow” attack, which is one of those bits of censorship that’s so bizarre you just have to love it. Or at least I do. There’s nothing quite like the sight of Jackie lurching around going “I’m a crazy cow!” with images of milk bottles in the background.
--The episode wraps up with a rare example of a scene in the manga that’s simply
left out of the anime. Goku’s unable to mimic Jackie’s technique since he’s never been drunk (and definitely has never been a crazy cow). He runs to the corner of the ring with his back to Jackie, and begins trembling and making weird sounds, almost as if he were crying. In the manga, he suddenly turns around and reveals a face like a vicious, drooling dog. He charges Jackie on all fours, but while Jackie cringes in terror, he unexpectedly summersaults over him and kicks him from behind. Jackie: “What kind of attack was that?!” Goku: “Kyou-Ken!” The joke being that “Kyou-Ken” can mean both “Crazy Attack” and “mad dog”.
--Apparently though, the anime staff thought that joke relied too heavily on how things were written, and so wouldn’t work too well as spoken dialogue. So they cut the whole thing out: in the anime, Goku runs to the corner with his back towards Jackie, but rather than bust out the Kyou-Ken, he launches straight into the Saru-Ken/Monkey Attack from chapter 49. Perhaps because they had to cover for the missing Kyou-Ken segment, the Saru-Ken scene is really dragged out for all it’s worth.
--On that note, chapter 49 is the start of DB volume 5, and Viz’s translation of DB volume 5 was the first DB manga volume I ever read, as well as one of my first manga volumes all-around. It was definitely the first non-flipped manga I ever read, since despite reading the whole “this book reads right to left” explanation first, it still took me a little while to really get the hang of it. I read the first couple panels of the Saru-Ken sequence in the wrong order before putting 2 and 2 together.
Perhaps it would have made more sense if they'd made it Lunch's panties though? Now that I think about it, that's the most logical place for him to have gotten some, even in the manga.
