GT treating the Z movies as having happened

[MasenkoHA]

It's funny because Toei chose to keep their Precious (Broly) out of the equation in GT, probably to save face, since he was coming back only to get oneshot back to hell.

That said, they could’ve simply made him more than just fodder like the rest. Or maybe, since the Z movies contradict not only the main series but even each other, Broly exists in a different timeline altogether, but I doubt they put that much thought into such a minute matter. More likely, Broly was missing simply so he wouldn’t be disserviced.

Janemba does not exist anymore and Hirudegan... probably too distracting visually to be part of the arc, IDK.

I still don't know why Baby didn't come back.

Koyama Takao didn't work on Dragon Ball GT, which is probably why Broly did not appear. Koyama is the reason why Broly has three movies: he couldn't think of other characters to serve as antagonists.

Didn’t Koyama write all the Z movies? Broli was just his precious baby boy

[JulieYBM]

It's funny because Toei chose to keep their Precious (Broly) out of the equation in GT, probably to save face, since he was coming back only to get oneshot back to hell.

That said, they could’ve simply made him more than just fodder like the rest. Or maybe, since the Z movies contradict not only the main series but even each other, Broly exists in a different timeline altogether, but I doubt they put that much thought into such a minute matter. More likely, Broly was missing simply so he wouldn’t be disserviced.

Janemba does not exist anymore and Hirudegan... probably too distracting visually to be part of the arc, IDK.

I still don't know why Baby didn't come back.

Koyama Takao didn't work on Dragon Ball GT, which is probably why Broly did not appear. Koyama is the reason why Broly has three movies: he couldn't think of other characters to serve as antagonists.

Didn’t Koyama write all the Z movies? Broli was just his precious baby boy

He wrote those first thirteen Dragon Ball Z movies, yeah. He couldn't come up with other antagonists on such short notice, so he kept bringing Broly back.

[WittyUsername]

I never thought there was some deep reason why Broly didn’t appear in GT anymore than why Cooler wasn’t in Movie 12. The animators simply didn’t include him. It’s not like Cooler has any relevance in the Super 17 story. He’s a non-speaking cameo. That’s it. General Blue and Officer Black have a more significant presence there.

[Scsigs]

OK, let me put it through another angle:
Do you personally believe the modern Z Movies (BoG/RoF), Daima and Super take place in the same universe/continuity?
Furthermore, do you believe they take place in the same universe/continuity as the manga?

Battle of Gods & Res F, you can just watch in between the episodes they slot in between in Super & you don't get a lot of continuity problems since the arcs in Super were adaptations of the movies (outside of parts of the first episode where Beerus is randomly awake & on another planet) & nothing in them's contradicted in later stuff in Super from what I can figure, which I have to figure was done on purpose by the Toei staff.
Daima, no. The existence of Super Saiyan 4, Vegeta going SS3, & Shin & Kibito being defused earlier than they should automatically makes Daima incompatible with Super. This was never my argument, though.

Both have contradictions with the manga as well. The timeskip between Buu's defeat & the last chapter of the manga was meant to not have much going on in that timeframe. I still like both because they have a lot of good things like most of the original movies have good things in them. Don't get me wrong, I think it'd be better if Super took place after the end of Z so there's no continuity problems, but it is what it is & Toriyama didn't think so. They're their own timelines & that's ok.

[Hellspawn28]

Vegeta knowing the fusion does not mean Fusion Reborn is canon to GT. In the Buu saga, Vegeta knows about fusion as Goku ask to do it with him inside Buu, and he refused. He saw what was going on Earth when he died.

[WittyUsername]

Vegeta knowing the fusion does not mean Fusion Reborn is canon to GT. In the Buu saga, Vegeta knows about fusion as Goku ask to do it with him inside Buu, and he refused. He saw what was going on Earth when he died.

Him knowing about fusion isn’t the problem. The problem is him knowing how to perform the dance.

[JulieYBM]

"Kids probably saw the movie!" Or "It’s been fifteen years, he probably learned it at some point!" Are the logic that the production staff were most likely working under.

[Scsigs]

"Kids probably saw the movie!" Or "It’s been fifteen years, he probably learned it at some point!" Are the logic that the production staff were most likely working under.

This is literally what I think they were running on because there are other things that they did in GT that you're supposed to connect the dots on that I see other people legit get confused on, but I figured them out a while ago.
1. Goku being a kid again limits his powers. How much? Well, he can't go SS3 for long because Gotenks couldn't sustain the form too long (even though the original logic is that SS3 burns through energy quickly, which is why it can't be sustained for long) & he can't teleport for some reason, but he's otherwise very strong still.
2. Gogeta's fusion only lasts for like 10-15 minutes. Why? Well, SS4 burns through energy quickly & somehow Fusion is linked to energy now instead of the actual time limit (which would also later be part of the dumbass retcon in Super of how potara fusion works to make sure Vegetto's fusion ran out too quickly, just replace SS4 with Blue). This is, seemingly, brought on the fact that, seemingly, Gotenks' fusion ran up quickly because SS3 used up a lot of energy when the time passage in the Buu arc was really weird when it came to that part of the story & the logic around Gotenks & SS3 was screwy like a lot of other things in that arc, so it doesn't track properly for some people.
And then there's the Super 17 arc which throws all logic out the window entirely to tell a stupid story that makes no sense all to set up the next arc.

The problem with a lot of the ways the writers thought about the logic of the stuff they put in the show that tried to play off stuff from Z & the manga is easy to see why they did them the ways they did, but they don't make a ton of sense, or are inconsistent as a result.

[ABED]

I'm surprised that there has been not only several pages in this thread but the length of some of them also amazes me. I mean this in a good way. The only thing I have to say on the subject thus far is that I've watched the Dragon Ball shows a bunch of different ways. At first I watched the shows then the movies at the end, as in DB, DB Movies, DBZ, DBZ movies, GT. Then I started watching the movies along side the show at approximately the place in the timeline they would ostensibly take place during. I'll do that as long as I watch the shows. It works really well.

[Kid Buu]

I mean, Vegeta is a lot more advanced than Goten and Kid Trunks. It is possible that just watching them doing it from the afterlife, he picked up on how to do the dance.

[MasenkoHA]

Pretty sure Vegeta’s refusal to do the fusion dance was because he thought it was stupid not because he didn’t know how. Him knowing it in GT doesn’t contradict anything that happened in the manga or Z tv series.

[Grimlock]

One that pops to mind is that Bulma looks clearly aged in EoZ, which shouldn't be the case if she bought those de-aging bugs on the Demon Realm.

I guess there's that, but isn't that just a "recurring joke", as in, Daima's version of "Bulma is using the Dragon Balls"? All this Bulma and her de-aging thing doesn't seem that is meant to be taken seriously, or at least, I hope it is not. Maybe she got that, but lost them at some point, and then she aged naturally, I don't know. I tend to ignore this, but I guess there's just no way around it.

I mean, Vegeta is a lot more advanced than Goten and Kid Trunks. It is possible that just watching them doing it from the afterlife, he picked up on how to do the dance.

Why in Dragon Ball Super Broly he needed Goku and Piccolo to teach him, then?

[Hellspawn28]

I think people take fan serivce or small nods way too seriously. Trunks only uses his sword in the opening and not in the actual anime. The animators are like "Hey wouldn't that be cool", but fans will be like "This movie happen because of this one thing!".

[Kid Buu]

I mean, Vegeta is a lot more advanced than Goten and Kid Trunks. It is possible that just watching them doing it from the afterlife, he picked up on how to do the dance.

Why in Dragon Ball Super Broly he needed Goku and Piccolo to teach him, then?

Oh I haven't seen Super.

[BernardoCairo]

Alternate stories to what? Almost all the Z movies refer back the main storyline. This isn’t like the og Dragon Ball trilogy which actually is an alternate universe divorced from the main series where the movies are connected to one another. Pretty much all the Z movies assume your familiarity with the tv series and reference events going on at the time.

Well, first of all (and most obviously), they could never have happened in Dragon Ball Z. In fact, it's almost as if the production team deliberately chose for them to happen at the worst possible moments in the story. Secondly, most of them are retellings of old arcs from the main story (which makes sense, since they didn't have much time available, having to make two movies a year at some point). I'm not saying, for example, that Piccolo Daimaoh didn't happen in the movie universe because we had Slug instead. Of course that doesn't make sense. I'm just saying that, purposefully, most of these stories are almost direct retellings or are heavily inspired by the original series.
The guys at Toei were professional screenwriters. They knew the stories didn't mesh at all. I suspect they wanted the freedom to do whatever they wanted and didn't care much about it. And yes, the production was insane and some of these elements were eventually brought back in the anime. But to me it's quite clear that the stories are fundamentally different for me to simply ignore this. These are levels of incompatibility that are almost ridiculous.

[WittyUsername]

At the very least, GT doesn’t seem to treat it as if it’s the first time Vegeta’s ever performed the fusion dance. It seemed to me like the writers at Toei were operating under the idea that Goku and Vegeta had done the fusion dance before and Movie 12 was the only instance of them having done so in any form of media at the time. I mean, unless we assume that they decided to fuse for fun offscreen at some point.

Then again, Gogeta in GT acted a lot more like Vegetto than his Movie 12 self, so I don’t know.

[JulieYBM]

Maekawa Atsushi wrote the last five episodes of Dragon Ball GT, Episodes #60-64. Maekawa wrote Dragon Ball Z Episodes #257-258 and #264-265, among other episodes. Those episodes involved Gotenks, meaning that Maekawa was familiar with the concept of Fusion and it's possible he simply suggested it as a plot beat for the battle with Super Yi Xing Long. I don't think it needs to be more complicated than that. The audience at home would already know what Fusion was from Dragon Ball Z, the movies and the comic and games. He or Series Director Kasai Osamu probably just didn't see a reason to depict Vegeta struggling with learning the dance.

[90sDBZ]

I also think the movies disregarding the main continuity worked to their benefit. They let us see a bunch of cool stuff that the main story rarely, if ever, got around to;

-The Spirit Bomb/Fusion/SS3 actually succeeding at defeating villains

-The entire Z gang fighting alongside Goku in Tree of Might. From watching Z's openings you'd think these teamups would be more common, but no.

-The first ever real Goku/Vegeta team up in Return of Cooler (in the anime it only happens in Buu arc filler, while in the manga the closest they get is taking turns vs Kid Buu)

-An all out battle between the Z Fighters and a group of Androids, with all 3 Super Saiyans present. It's basically what the Android arc was building up to before changing course with Cell. We never saw Goku fight 16, 17, and 18 in Z, but Movie 7 is the next best thing.

-Broly being an evil Super Saiyan who actually lives up to the original legend of being a bloodthirsty monster

-Gohan getting some more focus in multiple movies

-Gogeta

[MasenkoHA]

At the very least, GT doesn’t seem to treat it as if it’s the first time Vegeta’s ever performed the fusion dance. It seemed to me like the writers at Toei were operating under the idea that Goku and Vegeta had done the fusion dance before and Movie 12 was the only instance of them having done so in any form of media at the time. I mean, unless we assume that they decided to fuse for fun offscreen at some point.

Then again, Gogeta in GT acted a lot more like Vegetto than his Movie 12 self, so I don’t know.

Even so GT insinuating that Fusion Reborn and Cooler’s Revenge and Return somehow happened despite the logistics nightmare of trying to figure out when and how isn’t any different than the Garlic Jr saga of Dragon Ball Z saying Dead Zone and Tree of Might somehow happened. We can’t even claim “oh the Garlic Jr saga ALSO occurs in the mystical movieverse that exist in a totally separate timeline from the tv series” because Maron gets a cameo during the Android saga and Hire Dragon appears in the driving episode and gets referred to by Goten later on.

[WittyUsername]

I also think the movies disregarding the main continuity worked to their benefit. They let us see a bunch of cool stuff that the main story rarely, if ever, got around to;

-The Spirit Bomb/Fusion/SS3 actually succeeding at defeating villains

-The entire Z gang fighting alongside Goku in Tree of Might. From watching Z's openings you'd think these teamups would be more common, but no.

-The first ever real Goku/Vegeta team up in Return of Cooler (in the anime it only happens in Buu arc filler, while in the manga the closest they get is taking turns vs Kid Buu)

-An all out battle between the Z Fighters and a group of Androids, with all 3 Super Saiyans present. It's basically what the Android arc was building up to before changing course with Cell. We never saw Goku fight 16, 17, and 18 in Z, but Movie 7 is the next best thing.

-Broly being an evil Super Saiyan who actually lives up to the original legend of being a bloodthirsty monster

-Gohan getting some more focus in multiple movies

-Gogeta

In the case of Gogeta, didn’t Toriyama confirm that he did in fact intend for Goku and Vegeta to do the fusion dance, but because of Movie 12’s development, he came up with the Potara and Vegetto instead?

While we’re on the subject of the movies though, it’s weird that out of the 13 DBZ movies of the original run, the only ones that bothered to include Yamcha, Tenshinhan and Chaotzu were movies 3 and 9. Meanwhile, Oolong was constantly getting shoved into those movies, despite being little more than a background character in the manga at that point.