Herms watches the show (update: DB 29)

[Gyt Kaliba]

This episode’s Requisite Big Guy Voiced by Daisuke Gori (RBGVBDG):

Oh there's going to be a LOT of RBGVBDG moments. You could probably do a counter for this and have it break the triple digits before you even get to Z.

[RandomGuy96]

Wow, you're just churning these out now, aren't you?

--When “Bad” Lunch chases Kuririn around, the anime adds in the detail that she throws her kitchen knife within inches of his crotch. Also, Kame-sennin measures Kuririn as running the 100 meters in just 8.8 seconds during the chase (and Lunch was right behind him…more fun for strength debates).

That would mean Lunch > Usain Bolt in terms of speed. Damn, we've all been underestimating her.

--Despite having earlier been afraid to take on two armed policemen, Kuririn takes out a sabertooth tiger in one blow when push comes to shove. I’ve always interpreted this as Kuririn not knowing his own strength and lacking confidence, but thinking about it I guess taking out a tiger doesn’t necessarily mean you’d do well against two armed men. Either way, right after that Kuririn hides in fear from a triceratops, so clearly triceratops > Kuririn > sabertooth tiger. Of course, he also runs from Lunch rather than knocking her out, despite her presumably not being as dangerous as a sabertooth tiger. OK…maybe Bad Lunch is worse than a sabertooth tiger. She certainly seemed to be more than a match for those two policemen…

I'm pretty sure men with guns > tigers. As you noted, being strong enough to easily beat a tiger wouldn't make you a match for men with guns. Heck, Goku could one-shot a bear in the last arc, and I doubt he'd do well against a couple of armed men (especially if they had rifles) considering how much a single pistol bullet seemed to bother him.

I also notice that this period is one of the few times DB fighters are directly compared against real life weapons. Krillin < two armed policemen, Goku > pistol bullet (but not by much), Goku > axe. Most such comparisons come from guidebooks rather than the show or manga, though, like when it was noted that Oozaru Goku's battle power of 100 gave him destructive power on par with a battleship's main gun, or when Daizenshuu... 7, I think, compared the power of King Piccolo's (BP: 260) blast to that of a small nuclear bomb.

--Unlike the manga, in the anime Kuririn actually brags about beating that tiger in one blow before throwing down with Goku.

I bet he'd feel pretty silly about making that boast if he later figured out that Goku had one-shotted a bear that was 8 feet tall 10 feet tall 30 feet tall 40 feet tall really big.

Nobody gives him too much trouble, though he does use the Roga-FuFu-Ken to take down the requisite Big Guy Voiced by Daisuke Gori. Meanwhile, Bulma watches from outside and practically drools.

But HOW big!? How bulky, how tall? At what point does Yamcha's head come up to...? His shoulder, his nose, his eyes? I must know, this is extremely important.

--Even Goku seems genuinely scared of the T-Rex that chases them while they deliver milk. Kame-sennin warns them that they have to run at full speed or else they’ll be devoured. Can T-Rexs run as fast as Olympic sprinters?

This kinda seems like a gag scene to me, since he had no problem with that bear, and T-Rexs don't seem particularly dangerous considering their body shape. What's it gonna do, step on him? Lean over and bite him? I doubt Goku's not fast enough that he can't just jump on it's face and punch it. Though I guess it's possible that the bear wasn't actually supposed to be twice the T-Rexs size...

--Part of Kame-sennin’s morning training regime involves having Goku and Kuririn plow a huge section of field bare-handed. He tells them that tomorrow they’ll have to plow an even bigger area. The two are supposed to keep this up for eight months, so that means they’ll plow a total area over 240 times what we see them do this episode. I feel like they should definitely run out of ground to plow long before then, but I guess we don’t really know how big that island is. Or would they have to re-plow the same area multiple times over the course of eight months? I also wonder if anybody would plausibly need that much ground plowed.

It's possible that's not an actual standardized part of the training, just something he's going to make them do for a few days. I imagine that he's making a decent amount of money off of it.

--During the construction work scene, in the anime Kuririn has a flashback to his seniors at Oorin Temple bullying him. The memory causes him to swing his plow so hard it breaks. It helps build those seniors up a bit more so that it’s more satisfying when Kuririn gets his revenge, since in the manga we don’t see or hear about them at all until the tournament preliminaries.

That's the case with more than a few characters. The anime can make them seem much more major than they actually are in the manga, where they just come and go and it feels like they were barely there. Pilaf might qualify as an example of this. Usually, I qualify this as a good thing.

--In the same scene, when the (inexplicably freshwater) shark first turns up the soundtrack features a clear parody of the Jaws theme.
--Still in the shark scene, the anime adds in a bit where Goku amd Kuririn escape to dry land, only to be chased back into the lake by the same T-Rex from last episode. So, despite being pretty fearless around tigers, giant sword-wielding bears, armed men and whatnot, Goku at this point is still afraid of sharks and T-Rexes. Oh, and I’m calling this thing a “T-Rex” despite it having a big horn.

Gag logic at work, no doubt.

[Kid Buu]

But HOW big!? How bulky, how tall? At what point does Yamcha's head come up to...? His shoulder, his nose, his eyes? I must know, this is extremely important.

And so beings the birth of "filler" Yamcha legacy.

[dbgtFO]

But HOW big!? How bulky, how tall? At what point does Yamcha's head come up to...? His shoulder, his nose, his eyes? I must know, this is extremely important.

And so beings the birth of "filler" Yamcha legacy.

When that big guy started talking, he immediately reminded me of LittleKuriboh's Tristan voice from Yugioh Abridged.

[Herms]

It's been a bit of a gap again, but I'm going to see if I can stick to a daily schedule from here on out.

Episode 19
The Tenkaichi Budokai Begins

--Still no last episode recap, but instead this episode starts with a lovely scene of the mountaintop monk ringing his temple’s bell in the misty early morning. Definitely the best start to an episode so far.

--Another filler scene revolving around Kame-sennin’s pervy antics: during dinner, he drops a meatball (?) under the table and goes down to get it, at which point he decides to use his chopsticks to get a peak under Lunch’s skirt. But the dinner table is stacked with too much food, and it collapses on him before he makes any progress. The real focal point of the scene for me though is Lunch’s amazement at Goku and Kuririn’s bottomless appetite. She looks almost terrified.

--To illustrate the passing of the seasons, this episode shows a farmer harvesting crops. At this point it’s a month until the tournament, so technically it should be April…according to the official timeline codified about ten years after this episode aired which nobody actually working on the episode could have possibly known about. I thought April would be too early for harvest season, but of course it all depends on what the climate is like on that island, which we really have no way of knowing. In fact, it seems that April~May is crop-harvesting time in the Punjab region, so there’s a fact you can take with you I guess.

--There’s a fairly lengthy filler sequence where we check in with Yamcha, who it turns out has spent the last month training out in the forest somewhere, growing quite a bit of facial hair in the process. After smashing a big hole in a big rock, he decides to call it quits and head back to civilization. He arrives back in West City just in time to save Bulma from getting hit by a truck, though she doesn't recognize him. Instead, her immediate reaction upon seeing a man with facial hair is to assume he’s a sexual predator.

--This marks the second time we’ve seen West City in the anime, ages before the point in the story where it appears in the manga.

--On that note, with their training all done Goku and co. depart for South City (or “Metro South” as the Funi subtitles have it). The implication is that South City is where the tournament is going to be held, though I guess they never flat-out say this. It’s not until the next Tenkaichi Budokai rolls around that the tournament is said to be held on Papaya Island. In fact, at that point Papaya Island is described as the “site of this year’s Tenkaichi Budokai”, implying that it’s held at other locations during other years…even though the tournament grounds always seem like the same location from tournament to tournament, apart from the big remodeling they get for the Boo arc. Anyway, the guidebook solution to all this is that the TB is always held at a martial arts temple in South City, the capital of Papaya Island.

--The anime specifies that the nice suits Goku and Kuririn wear to the tournament were made by Lunch. It’s a nice detail, although the extent to which Lunch is now basically acting as their mom is a bit weird.

--A man on the plane to South City is reading a newspaper titled “USR News”. What’s that supposed to be? The official newspaper of US Robotics?

--The fly superhero Buzz-Buzz Man from Dr. Slump is visible on a billboard in South City.

--In the manga, the tournaments are all pretty much just one day affairs. Goku and co. show up in the morning, register, go straight to the preliminaries, fight the main matches right up to the finals, then head home once it’s all over. The anime though tends to stretch them out over a number of days, one of the relatively few instances of them flat-out changing the way things happen in the manga, as opposed to just adding in extra filler scenes. So in this episode, rather than registering the morning of the tournament and going right to the preliminaries, Goku and co. show up the night before the tournament, register, then head to a hotel to spend the night.

--OK, I guess that’s not too different from just adding in filler scenes. It really just means an extra scene of the gang sleeping in a hotel, and the sky being dark for the registration scene before that.

--This next bit involves a bit more rearranging though: in the manga, Goku doesn’t meet up with Yamcha until nearly the end of the preliminaries, and it’s only after he, Kuririn, and Yamcha have all qualified that he goes outside to reunite with Bulma/Puer/Oolong. In the anime though, he reunites with Bulma, Yamcha, and co. right after registering, and Yamcha hangs out with him throughout the entire preliminaries. I’m not entirely sure why they bothered making such a change. It’s not really better or worse, just…different.

--If you look for him, you can see Toriyama’s Balinese tour guide Wayan Budhiyasa on the lefthand side as the gang arrives to sign up for the tournament, just like in the manga. This was a cameo Toriyama threw into the manga to honor the friend he made during his trip to Bali (in fact, Bali’s scenery provided most of the inspiration for the Tenkaichi Budokai’s scenery). Still, Budhiyasa doesn’t stand out quite as much as he does in the manga, and he doesn’t have his name written on his sleeve, so he’s much easier to overlook. In the manga he stands out so much that for years before the full story of this cameo was uncovered, people were always asking about who the heck that guy in chapter 32 was supposed to be. And by “always” I mean “at least twice”.

[TheDevilsCorpse]

Anyway, the guidebook solution to all this is that the TB is always held at a martial arts temple in South City, the capital of Papaya Island.

They really combine the two like that? In which guides? South City isn't located on Papaya Island on the Daizenshu 4 map, They capital and the tournament grounds are on two different islands...

[Herms]

Anyway, the guidebook solution to all this is that the TB is always held at a martial arts temple in South City, the capital of Papaya Island.

They really combine the two like that? In which guides? South City isn't located on Papaya Island on the Daizenshu 4 map, They capital and the tournament grounds are on two different islands...

Daizenshuu 7's geographic dictionary (and Chouzenshuu 4's the same way), the entry for South City describes it as the capital of Papaya Island and site of the TB. Interesting that there's a guide to guide contradiction there; this is even more complicated than I thought. And apparently Daizenshuu 4 describes South City as "only mentioned in a line of dialogue" (I don't have the book itself handy, but I do have Word files with the translations I did way back when). If I had to guess, I'd assume when they were making Daizenshuu 4 the staff mistakenly thought South City was only mentioned by Trunks when describing the island where the androids appear, with no connection to the tournament. Then sometime between then and when they were making Daizenshuu 7, somebody must have spotted the original reference to South City, where Kame-sennin and co. head there for the tournament, so they changed the original setup around a bit to come up with the "South City=Papaya Island=site of the tournament" idea.

[RandomGuy96]

--Another filler scene revolving around Kame-sennin’s pervy antics: during dinner, he drops a meatball (?) under the table and goes down to get it, at which point he decides to use his chopsticks to get a peak under Lunch’s skirt. But the dinner table is stacked with too much food, and it collapses on him before he makes any progress. The real focal point of the scene for me though is Lunch’s amazement at Goku and Kuririn’s bottomless appetite. She looks almost terrified.

Speaking of the guidebooks, didn't one state that Saiyans have no favorites or least favorites when it comes to eating? It's kind of a waste, then, that they keep feeding Goku actual prepared and likely expensive (in the quantities he consumes it) food, when they could probably feed him anything.

--The anime specifies that the nice suits Goku and Kuririn wear to the tournament were made by Lunch. It’s a nice detail, although the extent to which Lunch is now basically acting as their mom is a bit weird.

Lunch = STILL a better parent than Goku. Actually, this made me think: does Krillin ever even mention his parents?

--A man on the plane to South City is reading a newspaper titled “USR News”. What’s that supposed to be? The official newspaper of US Robotics?

A non-socialist USSR?

--In the manga, the tournaments are all pretty much just one day affairs. Goku and co. show up in the morning, register, go straight to the preliminaries, fight the main matches right up to the finals, then head home once it’s all over. The anime though tends to stretch them out over a number of days, one of the relatively few instances of them flat-out changing the way things happen in the manga, as opposed to just adding in extra filler scenes. So in this episode, rather than registering the morning of the tournament and going right to the preliminaries, Goku and co. show up the night before the tournament, register, then head to a hotel to spend the night.

I was under the impression that them flat-out changing events was pretty common, even if just in the minor details. Though they do just add a lot of scenes/show off-screen stuff too.

[TheDevilsCorpse]

Daizenshuu 7's geographic dictionary (and Chouzenshuu 4's the same way), the entry for South City describes it as the capital of Papaya Island and site of the TB. Interesting that there's a guide to guide contradiction there; this is even more complicated than I thought. And apparently Daizenshuu 4 describes South City as "only mentioned in a line of dialogue" (I don't have the book itself handy, but I do have Word files with the translations I did way back when). If I had to guess, I'd assume when they were making Daizenshuu 4 the staff mistakenly thought South City was only mentioned by Trunks when describing the island where the androids appear, with no connection to the tournament. Then sometime between then and when they were making Daizenshuu 7, somebody must have spotted the original reference to South City, where Kame-sennin and co. head there for the tournament, so they changed the original setup around a bit to come up with the "South City=Papaya Island=site of the tournament" idea.

Well, that's annoying. I guess DBO complicates this a bit more too, as they follow the Daizenshu 4 map and have Papaya Island be he home of the Tenkaichi Budokai grounds, but with South City nowhere in sight (presumably stuck on the island to the left, like on the Daizenshu map).

Interestingly though, and adding a bit more confusion to the mix, it seems Papaya island is also where Roshi brought the boys to train for the 21st tournament. As the left side of the island is the temple, but the right portion of the island has the spiral mountain where Goku and Kuririn had to deliver milk.

[Herms]

And, for what it's worth, it looks like the full color comics Q&A (the non-Toriyama part) also describes South City and Papaya Island as separate places:

Q5: What sort of place is South City, which was attacked by the Artificial Humans?
The Tournament Arena for the Tenka’ichi Budōkai is nearby!
A metropolis on a large island floating in the southern sea. Papaya Island, which is where the Tenka’ichi Budōkai is held, is nearby.

(Of course, they make the mistake of treating South City as the place the androids attack, instead of an island nearby)

This is all starting to make me a bit dizzy. Maybe it's time for some sort of comprehensive Kanzenshuu geography guide.

[UltimateHammerBro]

Speaking of the guidebooks, didn't one state that Saiyans have no favorites or least favorites when it comes to eating? It's kind of a waste, then, that they keep feeding Goku actual prepared and likely expensive (in the quantities he consumes it) food, when they could probably feed him anything.

Maybe that's why Goku sometimes says things like "it wasn't really good, but at least I'm full".

A non-socialist USSR?

Or a non-soviet one. Pick your favourite.

[ABED]

--In the manga, the tournaments are all pretty much just one day affairs. Goku and co. show up in the morning, register, go straight to the preliminaries, fight the main matches right up to the finals, then head home once it’s all over. The anime though tends to stretch them out over a number of days, one of the relatively few instances of them flat-out changing the way things happen in the manga, as opposed to just adding in extra filler scenes. So in this episode, rather than registering the morning of the tournament and going right to the preliminaries, Goku and co. show up the night before the tournament, register, then head to a hotel to spend the night.

For both the 21st and 23rd Budokai, the tournament is the day after sign up. The 22nd takes place over several days, with the finals having it's own day.

[Herms]

Episode 20
Will It Appear?! The Power of Training

--There are 137 participants in the Tenkaichi Budokai preliminaries. That’s a surprisingly low number, considering this is supposed to be a world championship, and there appears to be absolutely no prior screening process. As we saw last episode, people just walk up off the streets and sign up. There must be an awful lot of self-selection, with only people who know they’re damn good bothering to make the trip over to South City. Of course, even the audience isn’t that big, especially compared to what we see with the revamped tournament in the Boo arc, and it doesn’t seem like it’s being televised or anything. I have the sneaking suspicion that, despite the fancy title, the Tenkaichi Budokai is pretty much just a small podunk martial arts tournament at this point.

--The big bit of filler for this episode is an ongoing subplot of Bulma trying to watch the preliminaries, which are held indoors with no audience members allowed in. So she stands on Oolong’s shoulders and peaks in a window. Meanwhile, Oolong keeps trying to peak up her skirt. Just when I’m thinking “why doesn’t she have Oolong turn himself into a ladder?”, she has Oolong turn himself into a ladder. Sadly, before Bulma can give Oolong her panties in gratitude, Kuririn knocks his old Oorin Temple chum straight through the wall, creating a convenient ground-level hole to look through and making Oolong’s services unnecessary. The “Oorin Temple guy knocked through wall” bit happens in the manga too, but they integrate it into the filler nicely.

--It’s a mystery to me why the audience has even bothered to show up at this point, since they can’t watch the preliminaries. I guess people want to get there early and try and get a good seat or something. Not that there are seats, actually: the audience all have to stand up throughout the entire tournament. The more I think about it, the more the TB seems like a bit of a crock.

--This episode’s Requisite Big Guy Voiced by Daisuke Gori (RBGVbDG): the huge wrestler who Goku fights for his first match in the preliminaries.

--There are a lot of cameos and Easter eggs in the tournament crowd scenes, both with the preliminaries participants and the audience outside. Besides the Staypuft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, there’s also Batman, and a guy who’s basically the face of Suppaman from Dr. Slump stuck on a wrestler’s body. Maybe I should start taking pictures or something…

--As mentioned last time, the anime changes things up so that instead of Yamcha only meeting up with Goku towards the end of the preliminaries, he meets up with him at the tournament registration and so hangs out with him and Kuririn throughout the whole preliminaries.

--Besides the extra bit of screen time Yamcha gets hanging out with Goku, the anime does him a real big favor by giving him a cool climatic preliminaries fight against a wolf guy. This wolf guy mocks Yamcha’s wolf-theme, saying he’ll show him the power of a real wolf. The fight ends with that standard anime thing where the two opponents rush at each other and attack, then end up standing with their backs too each other. This is quickly followed by that other standard anime thing where one guy wobbles a bit or something and everyone thinks he’s lost, but then the other guy totally falls over or dies or explodes or whatever. Surprisingly, in this case the not-falling over/dying/exploding guy is Yamcha, and the totally falling over/dying/exploding guy is the wolf. Who, if I remember right, was voiced by Daisuke Gori, though he was not a Requisite Big Guy.

--Last pit of nit-pickery for now: 137 participants means that there should be 7-8 rounds to the preliminaries total; presumably 7 with some people getting seeded or whatnot. The time limit for each preliminary round is 1 minute (!), so assuming they hold each match of a given round simultaneously, this thing should really fly by. Even factoring in the time it takes to draw lots and get people to where they need to be and whatnot, it probably wouldn’t last much longer than this episode itself.

[medama_oyaji]

I always got the impression that the Tenkaichi Budoukai was relatively secret, or at least "elite" in the way that only the biggest martial artist enthusiasts knew about it. And then by the Buu arc, thanks to Mr. Satan's HYPE powers, it had "sold out" to some extent, cameras and whatnot.

[Gyt Kaliba]

...I never noticed before that the audience members all had to stand up. Is that something that only happens in the anime, or is it like that in the manga too? And do they seem to get seats in later tournaments?

Then again, this IS the only tournament where it's implied that this one dog monk guy is more in charge of running the show then the tournament announcer guy is. Maybe he sucks at his job and that's why we never see him again?

[ABED]

I always got the impression that the Tenkaichi Budoukai was relatively secret, or at least "elite" in the way that only the biggest martial artist enthusiasts knew about it. And then by the Buu arc, thanks to Mr. Satan's HYPE powers, it had "sold out" to some extent, cameras and whatnot.

That's not the impression I got. I think it's just a matter of popularity. It became more popular as people heard about the matches. It went from every 5 years to every 3 years because of the matches our heroes put on. It's probably like UFC when that first got started. It wasn't as big as it became, but people knew about it.

[JulieYBM]

Gouri Daisuke voiced both the big guy, the thin Orinji monk, and the wolf in this episode. His next role, that I know of, is in Episode #23 walla.

[thomas1up]

...I never noticed before that the audience members all had to stand up. Is that something that only happens in the anime, or is it like that in the manga too? And do they seem to get seats in later tournaments?

Then again, this IS the only tournament where it's implied that this one dog monk guy is more in charge of running the show then the tournament announcer guy is. Maybe he sucks at his job and that's why we never see him again?

Yeah in the Boo saga they get seats, they don't seem like really good seats though, just concrete or something.

What I wonder is how Mr. Satan managed to be World Champion for as long as he did, because in Dragon Ball we see contestants that could easily 1 shot Mr. Satan (Namu, Giran, King Chappa) Did they just give up or was it because that the Tenkaichi Budokai had merely become a popularity contest at that point?

[Kamiccolo9]

...I never noticed before that the audience members all had to stand up. Is that something that only happens in the anime, or is it like that in the manga too? And do they seem to get seats in later tournaments?

Then again, this IS the only tournament where it's implied that this one dog monk guy is more in charge of running the show then the tournament announcer guy is. Maybe he sucks at his job and that's why we never see him again?

Yeah in the Boo saga they get seats, they don't seem like really good seats though, just concrete or something.

What I wonder is how Mr. Satan managed to be World Champion for as long as he did, because in Dragon Ball we see contestants that could easily 1 shot Mr. Satan (Namu, Giran, King Chappa) Did they just give up or was it because that the Tenkaichi Budokai had merely become a popularity contest at that point?

Well, the last one we saw with superhumans ended up with Piccolo murdering most of them. I imagine that they figured that discretion was the greater part of valor, and just stayed away.

[Kid Buu]

What is with Yamcha defeating all these anime-original characters voiced by Daisuke Gori?