Hello, ladies, gentlemen, and everyone between and beyond, and welcome to week 100 (!!!) of the first Dragon Ball rewatch of the decade.
We're doing five episodes a week, and we'll be watching every single episode of Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT. All 508 episodes. Plus the TV specials and the movies.
I encourage you all to watch in Japanese with subtitles, especially if you have never done so before, but watch along in whichever way brings you the most joy.
If we had finished writing up this thread on time and posted it two and a half hours ago or more, we could have said that Z episode 285 aired exactly 26 years ago, in the 29th of November 1995.
Oh well. We're coming up on the end of Toriyama's Dragon Ball now.
Previous thread: Week 99 (DBZ 279-283)
Next thread: Week 101 (DBZ movie 13, episodes 289-291)
Anyway, without further ado...
Episode 437 - A Last Hope!! We’ll Make a Huge Genki-Dama (DBZ episode 284)
Dub title: Call to Action
Originally aired 22nd of November 1995
Written by: Atsushi Maekawa
Episode director: Kazuhito Kikuchi
Animation supervisor: Shingo Ishikawa
Lend me your power! With Kaiō’s help, Vegeta sends this message to Earth. Gohan, Kuririn, and the rest of the Z Warriors quickly send their genki to Goku. The Genki-Dama starts to assemble. However, its size is nowhere near that of the entire Earth’s genki… “There was some sort of weird voice” … “How creepy” … “Don’t be fooled” … “Anyway, it’s got nothing to do with us…” Suspicious voices reach the Kaiōshin Realm. The Earthlings don’t trust Vegeta’s disembodied voice.
Anime-only/filler content: Extra scenes of people being revived, the various gods remarking on how small the Genki Dama is, various characters watching the events from Hell.
Episode 438 - Ultra Impressive!! The Genki-Dama From Everyone is Finished (DBZ episode 285)
Dub title: People of Earth Unite
Originally aired 29th of November 1995
Written by: Atsushi Maekawa
Episode director: Yoshihiro Ueda
Animation supervisor: Tadayoshi Yamamuro
The Genki-Dama was supposed to be Earth’s last hope. But though Vegeta throws aside his pride to try and convince people, it proves ineffective, and Goku receives jeers and taunts rather than genki. Even Goku’s own voice only manages to gather genki from a few of his friends like Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, No. 17, and Lunch. Goku despairs. At that moment, Satan cries out to the people of Earth. Hearing the voice of their hero Mister Satan, this time they raise their hands to the sky… The Earth’s genki crosses through the universe and reaches Goku!!
Anime-only/filler content: Vegeta trying to convince the people of earth to help for a little longer before Goku tries, more characters donating energy (Karin, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Lunch, Android 8, Sno, and some others), some of the gang on earth trying to convince others to donate energy.
Episode 439 - Son Goku is the Strongest After All!! Majin Boo is Annihilated (DBZ episode 286)
Dub title: Spirit Bomb Triumphant
Originally aired 13th of December 1995
Written by: Atsushi Maekawa
Episode director: Takahiro Imamura
Animation supervisor: Yūji Hakamada
Thanks to the good Boo’s tactics, Satan carries Vegeta to safety. Goku fires the Genki-Dama. However, he’s out of stamina. Boo starts repelling the Genki-Dama!! At this point, Vegeta shouts the final wish to Shenlong. With his stamina restored to peak condition, Goku slams the Genki-Dama into Boo with all his might. “This time, be reborn as a good guy”, Goku tells Boo. “See you later.” Majin Boo is finally completely obliterated, right down to the last cell…
Anime-only/filler content: More scenes of people in hell watching the fight, Kid Boo trying to use Vegeta to stop Goku using the Genki Dama, Mr. Satan and Good Boo subverting this plan, some of the earth gang reuniting on the lookout, various reactions to the fight from earth, Vegeta suggesting Mr. Satan gets the humans to give up more energy, which he doesn't do.
Episode 440 - Peace Returns!! Majin Boo, the Champion of Justice?! (DBZ episode 287)
Dub title: Celebrations with Majin Buu
Originally aired 20th of December 1995
Written by: Atsushi Maekawa
Episode director: Mitsuo Hashimoto
Animation supervisor: Kazuya Hisada
Majin Boo is annihilated. Vegeta tries to kill the remaining good Boo, but Satan desperately protects him. Goku tells Vegeta to spare Boo. Half a year later, on Earth: through Shenlong’s power, the people’s memories of Boo are erased. Boo has various exploits, including taking care of a jewel robbery before Great Saiyaman No. 1 and No. 2 (Gohan and Videl) arrive on the scene. At Goku’s house, bright and happy voices can be heard all the time. With the battle over, the warriors have an easy life.
Anime-only/filler content: All the dialogue when Goku and Vegeta return home, all the scenes after the reunion on the lookout.
Episode 441 - You’re Late, Goku! Everyone Party!! (DBZ episode 288)
Dub title: He's Always Late
Originally aired 10th of January 1996
Written by: Atsushi Maekawa
Episode director: Osamu Kasai
Animation supervisor: Masayuki Uchiyama
A party is being held at Bulma’s house in the big city. However, Goku is concerned about a dinosaur egg, and Chi-Chi gets fed up and leaves him behind. While watching the egg, Goku remembers his gentle grandfather. Meanwhile at Bulma’s party, things just aren’t the same without Goku there. Right as the party’s almost over, Goku finally shows up. Goku’s happy that the egg hatched safely, and even Vegeta can’t help smiling.
Anime-only/filler content: All filler! For the very last time.
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Interesting trivia from the manga:
- Missed Trivia: The main filler content for Z episode 274 is Goku and Vegeta fighting phantom versions of Gohan, Piccolo and Gotenks. This is the same setup as the showcase fight in Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans three years earlier, only with friends rather than enemies.
- Missed Trivia: In the manga, Dende takes the puppy with him, while in the anime, Mr. Satan keeps him during the final battle.
- Missed Trivia: Interestingly, the people of Earth who are revived remember the circumstances of their death, but not of their time in Other World. This means that anyone at the World Tournament grounds would remember that they were killed by Vegeta.
- Notably, Vegeta suggests that Goku use the very move that led to his downfall when he first met him. Vegeta was dead when Goku used it the second time on Namek, meaning Vegeta thought of this based on the single time it was used against him.
- Kaio's exact location isn't elaborated on in the manga; he's standing near a tree with hills in the distance behind him, meaning it's clearly not his rebuilt planetoid. In the anime, there were numerous Filler scenes of him alongside Kuririn and Yamucha at the Grand Kaio's White House mansion.
- The last five episodes of the Boo Arc (not EoZ) were written by Atsushi Maekawa, who started with Episode 257 where Piccolo stalls Boo at the Lookout. He would go on to write 28 episodes of GT (almost half of them), but was especially common after the Baby Arc, possibly because it was after the release of the Goku Jr. Special, which he also wrote. On top of that, Maekawa also wrote 11 of GT's last 14 episodes, including the last five episodes. This means that Maekawa wrote the last five episodes of the Boo and Evil Dragon Arcs that ended their series, as well as writing all of the "End of GT" content set 100 years in the future with Goku Jr.
- Mr. Satan pulls a Yajirobe by accidentally alerting the Arc Villain, currently in a fight, that the Genki-Dama is about to be thrown by giving the thrower away.
- In the panel of Vegeta saying he'll distract Boo somehow, Mr. Satan's mostache isn't inked in.
- In the first panel of Bora, a woman is standing behind him with a boy almost identical to Upa when Goku first met him. This has caused many fans to theorize that the woman is Upa's wife and they've had a child. In any case, they are the first two Native Americans in Dragon Ball who aren't Bora and Upa.
- The panel of #17 is the first time he's been seen since he was absorbed by Cell, and confirms that Shen Long resurrected him at the end of the Cell Arc. It also highlights whether or not 16 was resurrected as well, considering he was killed by Cell too.
- Curiously, 17 says that he hasn't heard Goku's voice in a long time, when he never actually met him. This is because Toriyama had originally drawn this panel with Lunch instead. It's possible, albiet unconfirmed, that Toriyama swapped 17 in to show that he did survive the Cell Arc.
- Perhaps as a nod to the above, the anime version of this scene includes an extra few shots of Lunch, now a delivery driver, stopping her truck and getting out to donate to the Genki-Dama. Lunch had not been seen since Z episode 30, in the filler scene during Goku and Vegeta's fight in the Saiyan Arc where she was drunk at a bar over Tenshinhan's death.
- The name on Lunch's truck reads "Lunch Express", making it a pun (Lunch Truck), as well as implying that Lunch started her own delivery business since we last saw her.
- Coincidentally, the Ocean Group dub and Toonami airing of the Funimation dub omitted 17's scene, possibly because he points a rifle at two civilians, also with guns, so that they donate to the Genki-Dama. This means that the US airings featured Lunch instead of 17, exactly how Toriyama originally drafted the scene! The Ocean dub sadly misses this trick by omitting the Lunch scene as well.
- In addition, both edited dubs omitted all the scenes set in hell this week.
- Hatchan, Sno, her parents, and the village elder all hold the record for the absolute longest gap between manga appearances. They were last seen in Chapter 67, which was published 9 years and 24 days prior to Chapter 515, their next and final appearance. In the anime however, Sno's appearance in the capital during the Daimao Arc gives the record to a different character who was last seen a few episodes earlier...
- Poetically, the manga was up to Sno's part of the story in the Red Ribbon Arc when the anime first debuted.
- The image of Goku holding up the Genki-Dama with Mr. Satan supporting him was redrawn by Toriyama as an earthquake disaster rallying message after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Interestingly, the Genki-Dama is depicted in green. As well, Goku is sporting the go symbol on undamaged gi, when in the original story, Goku's pants are ripped, he tore his shirt off moments before, and he never wore a symbol of any sort by the Boo Arc.
- Goku's gathering of the Genki-Dama marks the first time Mr. Satan doesn't dismiss a ki technique as "light shows and magic tricks".
- Goku momentarily zips out of the way of Boo's ki attack, showing you can leave the Genki-Dama for an ever-so-brief moment without it dissipating or floating away. This was previously shown in the Freeza fight: Goku is beat up and knocked into the water without the Genki-Dama disappearing.
- Goku directly tells Boo that he's going to die, the first time Goku has wanted that to happen to an Arc Villain since Piccolo Daimao. Despite this, Goku still wishes to fight him again, same as Vegeta and Freeza.
- Dende clarifying if Porunga can restore Goku's ki isn't given a Namekian translation. This is in fact accurate: you only need to speak Namekian to Porunga for the actual wish request, as well as to summon him.
- The anime adds a shot of every major character of the arc shouting "DO IT!!" for when Goku is about to destroy Boo with the Genki-Dama. In the Final Chapters, this shot was completely reformatted so that all the characters are visible inside the 16:9 crop. In particular, each pane shows different amounts of each character (Gohan is more visible, Mr. Satan's pane is smaller, Vegeta's ear isn't as visible, etc).
- KBABZ feels that the thicker lines of the TFC version suggests the shot was digitally reconstructed from the original 1995 elements, which would be remarkable given how notorious they are for throwing out that sort of thing. However Robo suspects Toei simply broke up the panes in the original image, digitally added new art extensions where needed, cropped others down a bit, and put them all back together.
- Outside of the ending, the Kanzenban has one other set of notable changes in the form of two extra pages at the end of Chapter 516. Here's the breakdown of alterations and additions:
- Page 13 is now mostly taken up with a new, large close-up panel of Boo being hit by the Genki-dama, with the first panel of him being vaporized shifted from the top to the bottom.
- Page 14 has two new drawings of Boo getting vaporized before nothing is left (originally, it was four panels with smaller and smaller specks, followed by dust clouds). Following this is the wide shot of Goku floating above the chasm, then Goku dropping out of Super Saiyan (both of these are wider than the original publication), then Vegeta on the ground saying "Took you long enough".
- Page 15 has a large close-up of Goku giving the thumbs-up, then two new panels of Vegeta saying he can't stand Goku's goofy attitude, before smiling. The panel of Goku was moved from the end of the previous page, enlarged and made much, much wider than before to remove an awkward crop.
- These changes may have been done for formatting reasons: in the original version, the panel of Goku giving the thumbs up was extremely cramped and thin. In the Kanzenban version, it takes up half the page, and mirrors the earlier panel of Boo getting hit by the Genki Dama. Given that the three new panels of Boo and Vegeta look like 1995 Toriyama (as do the extensions on Page 14), it's possible that Toriyama intended for this to be the end of Chapter 516, but had to cut it short to fit the 14 page limit.
- This is the second time Dende has healed Vegeta. Unlike on Namek, he's more than happy to do so.
- Bulma of course would have been especially happy to see Vegeta return, since the last she knew Vegeta had sacrificed himself to try and kill Boo.
- The final three pages before End of Z contain 33 consecutive panels with no dialogue or narration, which is the only time the manga has ever done such a thing. Aside from Vegeta describing the fight against Boo as being for the fate of the universe (which was arguably the case with Cell and Freeza), it's the first time the manga foreshadows that it's about to come to an end.
- The wish to erase everyone's memories of Boo would later give birth to the Three-Star Evil Dragon in GT.
- In the filler at the end of Z episode 287, Boo defeats a street fighter with a single punch, exactly what Goku did when he first arrived in West City.
- As well, during the street fighter's bank robbery, Boo flicks the bullet back with the same force as the gun that fired it, exactly what Raditz did in the very first Dragon Ball Z episode.
- At the end of the episode, Goten and Trunks perform the first nude Fusion Dance, while Goku performs the one and only instance of a nude Super Saiyan transformation.
- Z episode 288, "You're Late, Goku! Everyone Party!!", is the final Dragon Ball episode with significant amounts of filler. It's the 46th episode of the Classic Era to be pure filler (not counting GT, of course).
- Several of the Gohan Training, Fake Namek and Cell Games Prelude episodes don't count as pure filler, since they're intercut with manga events like Goku in Other World, Vegeta getting healed up and Goku recruiting Dende. The Driving Episode also doesn't count since at the very end it adapts the final page of Chapter 336.
- Of these pure filler episodes, only one occurs in the middle of an ongoing sequence of manga events: Episode 102, where Vegeta declares himself the strongest in the universe and fights Gohan before leaving the Namek survivors (he returns in Episode 103 like nothing happened).
- The only other qualifier for the above is Episode 124, where Vegeta, Piccolo, Goku and Gohan begin training for the Androids, however this occurs just before the three year timeskip to when the Androids arrive, and thus isn't in the middle of an ongoing storyline.
- Z episode 288 is the first for which Ocean used video masters from AB Groupe, the same ones used in their French dub. Presumably Funimation couldn't get their masters to Ocean fast enough any more. Ocean's faster pace of dub production would lead to their GT dub being entirely unrelated to Funi's dub, as we'll cover in two weeks' time.
- Episode 288 revolves around a party with all the Dragon Ball Gang in the wake of the Boo Arc, on a property owned by one of the characters. This format would be used again for the Jump Special in 2008, and a third time for Battle of Gods in 2014.
- At the start of Z episode 288, Gohan once again complains about how he's dressed, similar to before taking off for Namek.
- Chichi has no idea what the word for mascara is, signaling that she's a country bum with upper class admirations.
- While fastening his bow, Goten is given a bespoke animated reflection in the mirror.
- Episode 288 has a great many visual references to the very first Dragon Ball episode, since it has monkeys, a saber-toothed cat cameo, the giant river fish, and Pterosaur troubles. As well, the egg is hanging precariously on a branch on the side of a cliff overlooking a river, which snaps. In the anime, Goku does exactly that!
- When Kuririn arrives at Capsule Corp. he notes how Trunks has gotten a little bigger. An ironic comment considering how Trunks appears in Dragon Ball Super, which takes place after this!
- The car Yamucha nearly crashes into Capsule Corp. is a modified Lamborghini Countach design with a Back to the Future-style hover conversion.
- The big party is held inside the Capsule Corp. atrium that, when Goku first visited, played host to a few dinosaurs.
- The party's catering includes a few shish kebab-like dishes. On a completely unrelated note, KBABZ finds this episode to be absolutely faultless.
- This episode is the first time Tenshinhan has been depicted with the rest of the Dragon Ball Gang since he departed them at the end of the Cell Arc.
- This episode is also only the third time God has been on Earth itself, after Goku freed him from the jar in the 23rd Tournament, and when Dende accompanied Goku and Mr. Satan.
- Since Goku is close to his home, this episode confirms that it's located not too far from Mount Paozu, at least in the anime.
- Goku's flashback is broadly similar to the end of the Bardock Special, albiet at sunset rather than in the afternoon. It also depicts Gohan giving him the Nyoi-bo, where Goku's belt is given a bow-tie style of knot.
- Curiously, this episode features a triceratops. The most common type of dinoaurs in Dragon Ball are T-Rex like theropods (there's also Pterosaurs, although they aren't strictly dinosaurs).
- Chichi accuses Bulma of having a thing for Goku, something Bulma actually did ponder in the Namek arc after Gohan and Kuririn told her that he was on his way there.
- Goku knocks down trees in this episode, just like in the first episode of Z.
- The giant river fish also appears in this episode one final time, this time managing to eat Goku. For the first time since we met it, it lives through its encounter with the Son family, assuming it was able to drag itself off the rocks Goku left it on.
- In the wide shot of the Pteranodon eggs about to hatch, the saber-toothed cat is visible behind Goku.
- The left and right baby pteranodons hatch entirely off-screen.
- The shot of Vegeta leaning next to the window is very similar to the end of the manga, where Vegeta is leaning on the doorway to the Tournament arena (famous for his parting words in the Kanzenban ending).
- In total, Dragon Ball Z had 98 episodes that Kanzenshuu felt was Partial, Half, Mostly or completely filler (which is as many episodes as Kai 1.0, a mostly filler-free version of Z's first five Arcs). In comparison, the original Dragon Ball anime had 43 episodes with noted filler out of 153 (28% of them).
- Combinining the two, the entire Dragon Ball + Z run had 141 episodes with noted filler out of 444 episodes, or 32% of episodes.