Herms watches the show (update: DB 29)

[omegalucas]

I kind of assumed FUNimation would have been supplied with some paper scripts for what was being said as well, but then again...that's a pretty big assumption on my part, and even then, there's no telling how good said scripts would have been coming from Toei and all.

I always assumed that they got that material for the dub itself and work from there.
That was kinda what the Portuguese team did for the subbed Kai for more or less the first half of the series (they used FUNi's american script as a basis for the subs more or less until the early Androids arc - and we got weird stuff like "Rei Kai" and "Tien") until a guy who used to sub the series in Portuguese for more... illegal releases (he was part of a team that subbed Kai when the episodes got out for downloading purposes) was hired and subbed the second half properly (which kinda got us some inconsistencies like having "Androids" one episode and "Cyborgs" the next). We could say he is kind of our Steve Simmons

[Puto]

Pretty sure Simmons mentioned he had to translate just by ear.

[Herms]

Episode 27
Goku--The Greatest Pinch

--This is the first time a fight has gone on longer than one episode. It’s actually kind of cute.

--Something about the sound effects for the custom tournament episode title card reminds me of 80s PBS. Not really surprising, considering this was made in the 80s, but still.

--The episode title is almost exactly the same as the title of chapter 50. The only actual difference in Japanese is a dot and two exclamation marks:

悟空最大のピンチ！！ (Gokuu saidai no pinchi!!)
Versus
悟空・最大のピンチ(Gokuu・saidai no pinchi)

OK, I said “dot”, but it’s actually an interpunct, functionally the same as a dash in this case. So the episode title comes out to “Goku—The Greatest Pinch”, while the chapter title is more like “Goku’s Greatest Pinch!!” (technically there’s still no possessive particular between “Goku” and “greatest pinch”, but whatever I say). Really, you could translate either title either way and nobody would care. But God would know.

--Meanwhile, the Funi episode title: “Number One Under the Moon?” It’s a play on the phrase “number one under the sun”, which gets tossed around a bit in the Funi dub of these episodes. I’m pretty sure it’s their way of translating the “tenkaichi” in “Tenkaichi Budoukai”. Their way of translating the entire name “Tenkaichi Budoukai” of course is “World Martial Arts Tournament”. This isn’t so bad. Budoukai=”martial arts tournament” straightforwardly enough. Tenka is literally “under the heavens/under the sky”; it’s a fancy way of referring to the entire world. Ichi is simply the number 1, so tenka-ichi means number one (ie the best) in the entire world. Hence “World Martial Arts Tournament”; the fact that it’s a “world tournament” implies that it’s for determining the best in the entire world. So it’s the same meaning as the Japanese name, in fewer words. But still, the tone is a bit different. “World Martial Arts Tournament” is a logical but generic name for…well, for a world martial arts tournament. In contrast, “Tenkaichi Budoukai” is a bit more distinctive; tenkaichi isn’t slang or anything, but it’s also not as generic as “World” is in English. So that’s where “number one under the sun” comes in. It has both the same meaning as tenkaichi, and is also closer in tone. It’s playful. It’s also really, really long, so I can understand them not wanting to say “Number-One-Under-the-Sun Tournament” every single time the tournament gets mentioned. So instead they stick with “World Martial Arts Tournament” and throw the phrase “number one under the sun” in whenever they can.

--After Bulma breaks Goku out of the Yoiko-MinMin-Ken’s spell, there’s a brief bit of filler where she hugs Oolong in happiness, and Oolong gets a little too excited. There’s also an audience member who looks suspiciously like Suppaman from Dr. Slump visible behind Bulma at certain points throughout the episode.

--On that note, we get two more technique names that the Funi subtitles don’t translate at all for whatever reason. First is Jackie’s hypnotic Yoiko-MinMin-Ken, or “Good Kid Sleep-Sleep Technique”, and next is his electrifying Bankoku-Bikkuri-Shou, or “International Surprise Palm”. The latter is probably a multilingual pun on the Bankoku Bikkuri Show, a Japanese variety show from the 60s and 70s.

--Speaking of the Bankoku-Bikkuri-Shou (catchy, isn’t it?), the anime adds a slightly more detailed description of this attack, via Yamcha. Seeing Jackie fire the attack, Yamcha declares that it “takes the entire body’s energy and converts it into several tens of thousands of volts of current”. Apparently Yamcha learned a lot about electricity out in the desert.

--But probably the most interesting detail about the Bankoku-Bikkuri-Shou (come on, say it three times fast) is that Jackie says the only other opponent to make him use this technique is Goku’s grandpa, Son Gohan. This bit is in the manga too, and the anime doesn’t expand on it at all, which is rather sad, since a flashback to this fight would have been great. Anyway, apparently Gohan and Jackie/Kame-sennin fought at least once in the past, though the circumstances aren’t very clear. Maybe it was part of Gohan’s training, or a tournament, since of course the two were never enemies…right? I’ve heard people say they fought in the Tenkaichi Budokai itself, though as far as I know this is never stated in the series or anything else official. It’s certainly possible, though if he and Gohan had previously fought in that very same ring, you’d think Jackie might mention that as well.

--When Goku becomes an Oozaru (named as such for the first time in this episode’s closing narration), we get the same shot of fleeing audience members that was first used for the rain scene back in episode 23. It includes the same incredibly bizarre-looking man who I previously called “indescribable” but will this time instead say looks like a potato crossed with a fish.

--Jackie’s super huge moon-busting Kamehameha here is called the “Kamehameha: Max Power”. In the manga, the “Max Power” bit is written with the kanji 最大出力, literally meaning “maximum output” and normally read as saidai shutsu-ryoku. But above those kanji it has the English words “Max Power” written in katakana furigana. In other words, it’s a Japanese phrase that’s meant to be read as its equivalent English phrase (looked at another way, Toriyama is using a fancy English phrase while still indicating what it means in Japanese). This is the same setup the manga uses for the “Super” in “Super Saiyan”. Anyway, in the anime Jackie instead says both versions out loud: “Kamehameha…saidai shutsu-ryoku…max power!”

--If you can stand one more translation note for this episode…as previously mentioned, the term “Oozaru” pops up for the first time here, as the narrator’s way of referring to the giant monkey that Goku transforms into. And lo and behold, Oozaru literally means “big monkey”. Or “great monkey”. Or “great ape”. “Great Ape” seems to be the standard English translation, possibly helped along by the fact that it’s a pre-existing term describing the family of animals that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and other people you may know. For some reason, I’ve never quite liked the translation “Great Ape”, even though it’s completely accurate. Well, technically apes are supposed to be tailless, but saru gets used to refer to both monkeys and apes in Japenese, and even in English few people give a monkey’s ass about such distinctions.

--So I usually leave it untranslated, but that has problems too. Oozaru isn’t actually a proper name for the transformation, at least not in the same way “Super Saiyan” or “Kaio-Ken” are. Like I said, this episode (and the equivalent manga chapter) are the first time it’s used. At this point it still gets called a few different things: monkey monster, big monkey monster, big monkey, etc. In other words, it doesn’t have a proper name and people refer to it however they see fit. “Big monkey” is just the variant that happened to stick: from here on out that’s what characters in the series call it most of the time (but not always), and so that’s what guidebooks, video games, and whatnot settled on. But it’s still just a generic term for “big monkey”, the same way the gigantic octopus Goku fights later on is dubbed Oodako/”big octopus”. I remember when I was first getting into the series, before I knew Japanese, I saw “Oozaru” and just assumed it was a made-up name, another bit of Saiyan terminology like “Bruits Wave” and “Zeno” and whatnot.

--I’m sure I had a point to all this, but I forget it now.

--One more tournament episode to go!

[kenisu3000]

--Something about the sound effects for the custom tournament episode title card reminds me of 80s PBS. Not really surprising, considering this was made in the 80s, but still.

Ha ha, I always wondered what that sound effect reminded me of! Boy, that takes me back!

[RandomGuy96]

The "Great Ape" thing was actually always a problem for me, even when I was a kid and thought that the form was always called "Great Ape". Apes don't have tails.

Yamcha knowing the power of the technique in volts raises so many questions. Does he have a math formula to convert Roshi's body energy to electricity? Does he just somehow sense the electric power itself? Or is he just making a really good estimate?

Yep, just one more episode until the 21st Budokai arc is over. After that, you only have several hundred more to go !

[Herms]

Episode 28
Clash!! Power vs Power

--I’ve sometimes seen it argued that it’s simply logical that DB features basically no female fighters who are significant in the long run. After all (they say), men and women have naturally different physical capabilities, so portraying women as physically equal to men would be totally unrealistic. Meanwhile, in today’s episode, an old guy blows up the moon with a death ray he fires out of his hands.

--So yeah, Jackie Chun blows up the moon. The first thing to get out of the way is that old chestnut, “how come the moon gets blown up twice?” Because in 133 episodes from now, history repeats itself when Piccolo blows up the moon to stop Oozaru Gohan. Unlike most of these common fan questions, this one has a totally straightforward explanation: 106 episodes from now, grown-up Goku explains that during his three years of training up at God’s temple, old green God removed Goku’s tail permanently so that he could safely restore the moon. OK, so it’s never explained how God restored the moon, but Goku says he did, and that’s why it’s back again in the Saiyan arc so that Piccolo can destroy it once more. I assume people get confused about this because a) it’s hard to forget big flashy scenes of guys blowing up moons, but easy to forget throwaway pieces of dialogue like Goku’s explanation, and b) most fans start with Z and only later go back and read/watch DB from the start, so they encounter both instances of moon destruction long before they get to the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai, assuming they ever even get there.

--Next thing to get out of the way: Jackie Chun/Kame-sennin is, as the kids say, a “moon buster”. This is arguably inconsistent with later developments, such as Kame-sennin himself describing the Kikoho as vastly superior to his Kamehameha, despite the fact that the Kikoho just makes a big hole in the ground. Piccolo blowing up cities is likewise treated as a huge deal, even though that’s peanuts compared to the moon (of course, Piccolo eventually blows up the moon too). We can just write this off as another case of Toriyama’s inconsistency, but more to the point, it’s probably a lingering influence from Dr. Slump, which is a lot more “anything goes” than DB. I mean, DB is pretty crazy, but Dr. Slump’s pure Loony Tunes. The Earth gets cracked in half on a regular basis, then just goes back to normal. Planets get knocked into each other like balls in a metronome. Mars gets casually destroyed. Come to think of it, at one point Arale breaks the moon to pieces by chucking a rock at it. And in the anime version, she cracks the sun. Because the sun, of course, is made out of a hard, rock-like substance. None of these things have any consequences, and the solar system always goes back to normal by the next chapter, because again it’s all operating on Loony Tune rules. Jackie Chun blowing up the moon here is in that vein. The big clue is that his destruction of the moon is not presented as some awe-inspiring display of power, like it would be for guys like Freeza or Broli later on, but rather as the punchline to a joke: “Goku becomes an uncontrollable monster when he sees the full moon?! Then I’ve got no choice! I must destroy…the moon!” At the same time, you can see that Toriyama’s already started moving towards the relatively more stable world of later DB. In Dr. Slump the moon would be back again later without any explanation (though maybe wearing a Band-Aid or two), but here it’s gone for good until a higher power goes out of the way to bring it back. We even get some discussion of what the consequences of a moonless world will be, though it mostly centers around werewolves rather than, say, the tides.

--But enough about the moon, let’s talk weird hats. This episode features audience members with hats that say “Time”, “Box”, and simply “Too”.

--After the whole Oozaru debacle wraps up, Goku wants to get right back into the match, despite now being totally nude. In the manga there’s some giggling sound effects from unseen audience members, and the announcer requests that Goku put some clothes on. In the anime we actually get to see the girls giggling at Goku, and one of them is a dead-ringer for the huge muscular girl Goku brought to Kame-sennin (the one whose appearance the narrator likens to “the death of Buddha”). She says that it’s “the first time I’ve ever seen one”. Goku’s response: “what, do you find winkies to be that uncommon?”

--The physics behind Jackie avoiding a ring out by sticking one foot in the side of the ring will forever remain mysterious to me. I’m no expert, but this may actually be less plausible than the moon thing.

--As the match winds up, Jackie Chun has a stirring inner monologue where he says that at its core, martial arts just boils down to two guys hitting each other, and eventually the stronger guy wins. Though he quickly adds that Goku’s sheer persistence is annoying, and his tiny body make him a pain in the ass to fight too. Then he has an epiphany: Goku’s small body is a weakness! In the manga, the two then run at each other and simultaneously kick each other in the face. Long story short, Jackie wins because his legs are longer, so his kick does more damage.

--But the anime inserts some extra fighting between Jackie’s little speech and the final double kick. Rather a lot of extra fighting, most of it to the tune of the fancy insert song, “Aim to be the Greatest on Earth”. In fact, after the mid-episode eye-catch, the announcer says that the match has gone on for four hours. Four hours! It’s not really clear where all this time is supposed to come from. The entire fight as animated is just three episodes, so basically an hour when you take out episode openings and endings, plus the scenes that take place immediately before and after the actual match. Are we supposed to assume Goku and Jackie fight for three hours off-screen during the commercial break? Anyway, after all the extra fighting it ends with the same double kick as the manga.

--This is the first use of an insert song in the series, right? Probably the sort of thing I should have been keeping track of more carefully. There’s going to be a couple more following along very, very soon.

--It’s a bit late to mention this, but as clearly seen in this episode, at this point the announcer is the one who does the 10 count whenever a contestant is knocked down. But if you go back to the start of the tournament, with Kuririn vs. Bacterian, one of the monks does the 10 count there. The announcer takes over this job midway through, essentially becoming the referee as well as the announcer. When Toriyama had this inconsistency pointed out to him in his Adventure Special Q&A, he meekly suggested that it may have been done to cut down on labor costs. So while this episode’s events are going on, somewhere out there is a poor, newly unemployed referee-monk.

--Speaking of the announcer and his dual role as referee, the anime adds in a brief bit where he consults with the dog monk (the one previously established as the head of the whole martial arts temple that runs the tournament) in order to clarify the rules for how to handle the double knock-out. This may be the last time we ever see him, unless the anime adds in more appearances. I’m pretty sure in the manga he just appears for that one gag where he opens the tournament with a “speech” that just consists of him barking.

--After winning, Jackie Chun thinks to himself that Goku is the first person to ever push him this far. This is interesting, though perhaps hard to reconcile with the whole Piccolo backstory (though of course Toriyama hadn’t really thought of that yet). Of course, Piccolo just one-sidedly beat the pants off young Kame-sennin in no time flat. So I suppose having a long, drawn-out fight against an evenly matched opponent would push Kame-sennin further than getting curb-stomped by Piccolo, in a way. Of course, Piccolo aside, the “nobody has pushed me further” line looks pretty weird when we get to the very next story arc and it turns out that there are assassins and mummies and whatnot walking around DB Earth who are way stronger than Goku is at this point. Kame-sennin must not get out that much.

--The anime adds in a little scene of Kame-sennin fantasizing about what he’ll spend his 500,000 zenny prize money on. It’s exactly what you’d expect.

--Cut to the joke where Goku almost single-handedly racks up a 470,000 zenny bill at the restaurant. Bulma thinks he ate enough food to feed 35 people, but Yamcha thinks it’s more like 50. If we take that at face value, it means a meal for a single (regular) person would run from about 10,000 to 15,000 zenny. This is roughly consistent with Toriyama’s idea that a zenny is more or less equal to a yen, though it’s a little on the high side if we’re being super-literal (obviously not a good idea). 10,000 yen is still over 90 US dollars at today’s exchange rate. That must be one fancy restaurant!

--This episode ends 9 pages into chapter 54, meaning that it stops right before Goku decides to head off in search of his grandpa’s memento, the 4-star ball. Instead, that scene starts the next episode. I understand that there were probably unavoidable logistical reasons for this, but I still think Goku setting off on a new adventure is much more effective as a way of closing out an episode than it is as a way of starting an episode. I admit, I might just be too used to the way it is in the manga, and this episode does end with everything nicely wrapped up…but it also ends with everything wrapped up. There’s no hook to draw you into the next storyline. The show just kind of assumes that at this point you’re invested enough in Goku to automatically tune in next week. Or, now that I think about it, they probably just assumed that everyone was following the manga anyway and so already knew what was coming up next. Either way, it’s a bit underwhelming.

--Well anyway, that’s the end of that storyline. You know, overall these first 28 episodes have been pretty good. Not too much filler, and what filler there is, is typically not bad. Quite often it even fleshes out the original story nicely. It’s a pretty decent adaptation of the manga. I hope they keep this up. I hope there’s not, like, five or so episodes of pure filler coming up. That would be stupid.

(Yes, I peaked ahead.)

[Kid Buu]

--This is the first use of an insert song in the series, right? Probably the sort of thing I should have been keeping track of more carefully. There’s going to be a couple more following along very, very soon.

The theme first appears in Episode 19, according to the main site.

(I was tempted to pull a "there's a site, too?!" joke, but I felt it was going to be in bad taste saying it to one of the staff members).

[Valerius Dover]

The instrumental piece in Episode 19 is kept in the dub, but the vocal version in Episode 28 is removed. There's no music at all in this scene in the dub. Just something I thought I'd note.

[Gaffer Tape]

--Speaking of the announcer and his dual role as referee, the anime adds in a brief bit where he consults with the dog monk (the one previously established as the head of the whole martial arts temple that runs the tournament) in order to clarify the rules for how to handle the double knock-out. This may be the last time we ever see him, unless the anime adds in more appearances. I’m pretty sure in the manga he just appears for that one gag where he opens the tournament with a “speech” that just consists of him barking.

Actually, he appears once more during the Giran fight to allow the use of Kinto'un.

[ABED]

--This episode ends 9 pages into chapter 54, meaning that it stops right before Goku decides to head off in search of his grandpa’s memento, the 4-star ball. Instead, that scene starts the next episode. I understand that there were probably unavoidable logistical reasons for this, but I still think Goku setting off on a new adventure is much more effective as a way of closing out an episode than it is as a way of starting an episode. I admit, I might just be too used to the way it is in the manga, and this episode does end with everything nicely wrapped up…but it also ends with everything wrapped up. There’s no hook to draw you into the next storyline. The show just kind of assumes that at this point you’re invested enough in Goku to automatically tune in next week. Or, now that I think about it, they probably just assumed that everyone was following the manga anyway and so already knew what was coming up next. Either way, it’s a bit underwhelming.

There's also the next episode preview to consider. I like that there's a nice demarcation with this arc and the next. Even though this story is wrapped up, it still doesn't feel like a series finale, so I don't think there's an issue with where they ended it.

[Puto]

Except any and all airings outside Japan had the preview gutted out (as Toei never provided them in the first place), so that only really applies to the original broadcast in Japan.

[Gyt Kaliba]

I’ve sometimes seen it argued that it’s simply logical that DB features basically no female fighters who are significant in the long run. After all (they say), men and women have naturally different physical capabilities, so portraying women as physically equal to men would be totally unrealistic. Meanwhile, in today’s episode, an old guy blows up the moon with a death ray he fires out of his hands.

Never before have I been so tempted to add a quote to my signature.

[RandomGuy96]

I’ve sometimes seen it argued that it’s simply logical that DB features basically no female fighters who are significant in the long run. After all (they say), men and women have naturally different physical capabilities, so portraying women as physically equal to men would be totally unrealistic. Meanwhile, in today’s episode, an old guy blows up the moon with a death ray he fires out of his hands.

I bring that up often, and agree with you. Even ignoring the whole idea of courage and an ideal state of mind letting you fly and shoot energy beams that blow up planets, there's the fact that the strongest fighters at the beginning of the series are a little kid and an old man, both of which are quite tiny and frail looking. And the difference in strength between the average male and average female is NOTHING compared to the difference between the average male and a seven foot tall strongman. But no one has a problem with the average sized Goku easily beating guys like Nappa.

Next thing to get out of the way: Jackie Chun/Kame-sennin is, as the kids say, a “moon buster”. This is arguably inconsistent with later developments, such as Kame-sennin himself describing the Kikoho as vastly superior to his Kamehameha, despite the fact that the Kikoho just makes a big hole in the ground. Piccolo blowing up cities is likewise treated as a huge deal, even though that’s peanuts compared to the moon (of course, Piccolo eventually blows up the moon too). We can just write this off as another case of Toriyama’s inconsistency, but more to the point, it’s probably a lingering influence from Dr. Slump, which is a lot more “anything goes” than DB. I mean, DB is pretty crazy, but Dr. Slump’s pure Loony Tunes. The Earth gets cracked in half on a regular basis, then just goes back to normal. Planets get knocked into each other like balls in a metronome. Mars gets casually destroyed. Come to think of it, at one point Arale breaks the moon to pieces by chucking a rock at it. And in the anime version, she cracks the sun. Because the sun, of course, is made out of a hard, rock-like substance. None of these things have any consequences, and the solar system always goes back to normal by the next chapter, because again it’s all operating on Loony Tune rules. Jackie Chun blowing up the moon here is in that vein. The big clue is that his destruction of the moon is not presented as some awe-inspiring display of power, like it would be for guys like Freeza or Broli later on, but rather as the punchline to a joke: “Goku becomes an uncontrollable monster when he sees the full moon?! Then I’ve got no choice! I must destroy…the moon!” At the same time, you can see that Toriyama’s already started moving towards the relatively more stable world of later DB. In Dr. Slump the moon would be back again later without any explanation (though maybe wearing a Band-Aid or two), but here it’s gone for good until a higher power goes out of the way to bring it back. We even get some discussion of what the consequences of a moonless world will be, though it mostly centers around werewolves rather than, say, the tides.

I do agree that it's probably best to just forget about the moon busting feat rather than try to find consistency and logic in it, especially since Roid Roshi never appears again after this, and Roshi later says there's nothing he can do against Daimao except use the Mafuba. Still, it's just really weird that Roid Roshi can do this when characters much stronger than regular Roshi at this time can still be injured by regular ol' grenades and rifles, and the most powerful being in the history of the planet (except Buu...) strains to blow up a city. That's just such a drastic difference in power. It takes like 30 trillion megatons of TNT equivalent to destroy the moon... and Daimao's blasts are way less than one megaton, which itself is about 67 Hiroshimas...

--As the match winds up, Jackie Chun has a stirring inner monologue where he says that at its core, martial arts just boils down to two guys hitting each other, and eventually the stronger guy wins. Though he quickly adds that Goku’s sheer persistence is annoying, and his tiny body make him a pain in the ass to fight too. Then he has an epiphany: Goku’s small body is a weakness! In the manga, the two then run at each other and simultaneously kick each other in the face. Long story short, Jackie wins because his legs are longer, so his kick does more damage.

I always go back to that quote when someone states that DBZ ruined the series because the fighters rely primarily on power, or that the pre-Raditz story relied less on pure power than the post-Raditz story.

Fun fact, though I presume you already know: the iconic kick scene is duplicated in a later filler battle. Of course, since one of the guys in that fight is eight feet tall while the other is average sized, it probably shouldn't have worked as well as it did...

--After winning, Jackie Chun thinks to himself that Goku is the first person to ever push him this far. This is interesting, though perhaps hard to reconcile with the whole Piccolo backstory (though of course Toriyama hadn’t really thought of that yet). Of course, Piccolo just one-sidedly beat the pants off young Kame-sennin in no time flat. So I suppose having a long, drawn-out fight against an evenly matched opponent would push Kame-sennin further than getting curb-stomped by Piccolo, in a way. Of course, Piccolo aside, the “nobody has pushed me further” line looks pretty weird when we get to the very next story arc and it turns out that there are assassins and mummies and whatnot walking around DB Earth who are way stronger than Goku is at this point. Kame-sennin must not get out that much.

He seems to know who those guys are, so maybe he fought and beat them in his youth.

[ABED]

Except any and all airings outside Japan had the preview gutted out (as Toei never provided them in the first place), so that only really applies to the original broadcast in Japan.

The US had its own version, and if it was the finale, they'd advertise it as such.

[Kid Buu]

Yeah, the lack of prominent female fighters bothers me too. Eighteen gets a few memorable battles, but she is one of my least favorite characters. Videl started off completely awesome, but seemed to have lost her personality when she cut her hair.

[Herms]

Episode 29
Another Adventure—The Roaming Lake

--Well, here we are. This is essentially why I started this thread. While it was fun to finally see the first 28 episodes in Japanese for the first time, except for a handful of exceptions it was all stuff I had seen before, even if it was roughly a decade ago. Now though, we’re starting on a long, long, long stretch of episodes which I have never seen before, in any form, ever. Of course, I’ve read the hell out of the manga version, so it’s not like I don’t know the story. In fact, reading Viz’s release of the Red Ribbon era volumes was how I got into the manga version in the first place, and was one of the major factors in making DB one of my favorite things, as opposed to just a show I thought was pretty cool.

--Yet overall the Red Ribbon story arc seems rather unpopular with fans, at least around these parts. And I’ve personally always blamed the anime version for that. While I’ve never seen it until now, I have known that it contains an awful lot of filler. It opens with 5 episodes of more or less pure filler, the first time we get anything like this in the anime. The first 28 episodes of the show cover 54 chapters, so almost two chapters an episode. In contrast, the next 40 episodes cover about 43 chapters…almost one chapter an episode. In other words, the pacing from now on is only half as fast as before! Or at least, that’s what the math seems to indicate. But maybe actually watching the episodes will give a different impression. I’m hoping.

--Enough of that though, let’s get to the actual episode. As noted last time, it opens with the scene where Goku parts company with his friends to go in search of his grandpa’s keepsake, the 4-star ball. The manga version of this scene happens at nighttime after the tournament wraps up and everyone’s had dinner. The gang’s all crowded into Yamcha’s van (Yamcha tells Kame-sennin that he’ll give him and Kuririn a lift back to the island), then they stop and get out to see Goku off since he insists on taking off on his own right away. After Goku leaves, there’s a single panel showing the others back in the van. Apparently Bulma lost her airplane capsule that they were going to use to fly the rest of the way back…and to make matters worse, they’re out of gas! End chapter. In contrast, the anime version has this scene during the day (so presumably the next day after the tournament), with the group standing around outside the entrance to South City.

--On that note...in the anime South City has a big, fancy gate in the same architectural style as the Tenkaichi Budokai temple, which leads right out into a big desert.

--When Kuririn says that he’ll stay with Kame-sennin at Kame House for the time being, Kame-sennin is annoyed because he thought he’d get to spend time with Lunch, just the two of them. The anime adds in a little fantasy scene of him and Lunch having a romantic (?) meal.

--After the title card, there’s a scene showing Yamcha and co. crossing the desert in a van, since Bulma lost her plane capsule (“even hot girls make mistakes!”). This is an adaptation of that last panel from the end of chapter 54, although in that version they’re driving through town rather than a desert.

--The rest of the episode is pure filler. So while we did get a little bit of manga material starting out, the actual main plot of the episode (such as it is) is an anime-original story, which is a first.

--Unlike the manga, Kame-sennin and Kuririn head back home on their own rather than stick with Bulma and co (a wise move, as it turns out). On the way back, Kame-sennin stops by a lingerie shop to spend the remains of his tournament winnings, under the excuse that he’s buying a souvenir for Lunch (and/or his “granddaughter”; his excuse is a little inconsistent). He selects some panties and asks to have the cashier try them on, since she’s 19, the same as his “granddaughter”. She slaps him hard, which he enjoys a little too much. I love how Kame-sennin apparently thinks that women who are the same age are also all automatically the same size.

--Meanwhile Namu has returned to his village. Though he didn’t win the tournament, he did bring back lots of water since water is plentiful and therefore free in that part of the world. He tosses the capsule Kame-sennin gave him, and out pop several huge, metallic tanks of water. Apparently huge, metallic tanks are also plentiful and therefore free. But the village elder tells him that the river has dried up for some strange reason, and if something’s not done about it they’ll just run out of water again before too long. He also mentions a magical “Roaming Lake” that sometimes appears out of nowhere, but ignore that for now.

--The village kid who asks Namu if he managed to win the tournament refers to him as niichan, “big brother”. This may be the same kid from the flashback in episode 22 who calls him “big brother”, though I think there he uses niisan instead (same basic meaning, but more formal). The Funi subtitles here use “mister” though, since in Japanese young men can get called “big brother” even by people not related to them (similar to how you might call an old guy “gramps” even if he’s not your actual grandfather). However, I’d think that the more informal niichan is more likely to be used by an actual brother. At any rate, the Funi subtitles for episode 22 went with “big brother”, so there seems to be a problem with consistency if nothing else (probably due to Steve Simmons handling DB episodes 14-28 with Clyde Mandelin doing the rest, as jpdbzrulz4sure noted). Anyway, while we may not know this kid’s actual relationship to Namu for sure, according to the Adventure Special and later guides, Namu does have two younger brothers, Ami and Dabu, who get their names from the later portion of the “Namu Amida Butsu” prayer.

--So Namu sets out to sort out the problem with the river. He’s immediately attacked by a giant Pteranodon and is about to be eaten, but fortunately Goku happens by and rescues him. This all seems like an excuse to reuse animation from episode 1, where Goku likewise saved Bulma from a Pteranodon. I hate to be picky, but shouldn’t Namu be able to handle himself in a situation like this? He put up a decent enough fight against Goku, who at this point is way stronger than he was back when he was swatting Pteranodons like flies in episode 1.

--Namu becomes the first male character other than Goku to successfully ride on Kinto-Un (remember, Kuririn had to hang on Goku’s back since he couldn’t ride the cloud itself). Even Goku notes this fact, after he “pat-pats” Namu.

--Namu refers to Goku here as “Son-kun”, same as Bulma. Are they such good friends now?

--This episode features the second insert song in as many episodes, and also the second in the series overall: “Mysterious Wonderland”. Sitting here writing this right now, I honestly can’t remember what it sounded like.

--It turns out, the river’s blocked up due to a dam created by Giran’s clan, who are literally called the “Giran Clan” (Giran Zoku). We know their name because they say “we of the Giran Clan really love clean water”, in that way which characters tend to talk when giving poorly written exposition.

--So yeah, it’s a whole tribe of monsters who look like Giran. I already knew they were going to turn up, just from seeing them in guidebooks and whatnot. They live in really weird, blobby houses. Their dam is made out of the same Guru-Guru Gum that Giran used against Goku, so I think the idea is that the houses are too. Giran is their leader, which I guess I also already knew, but seeing it in action it just feels wrong. Giran really doesn’t strike me as the leader type. The earlier filler where he goes around in a trench coat and gets in bar fights seemed more on the mark. Not that you can’t be a leader of a tribe and get into bar fights, but in this episode his whole personality seems different, more laid-back and good-natured.

--The people making this episode couldn’t have known this at the time, but later on when Giran briefly reappears in the Piccolo arc, he’s just hanging out in some ordinary-looking village where two of the local panda people know him as a roughneck and bully. It might not be an entire village of panda people, but it definitely doesn’t seem to be the Giran Clan village we see here. Did his clan kick him out or something? Maybe he wasn’t such a good leader after all; maybe they didn’t like the fact that he kept going off to enter tournaments and get in bar fights and whatnot. Also, the even later Adventure Special book lists Giran’s occupation as “bodyguard”, though that’s another thing the people making the episode couldn’t have known.

--Giran tells Goku “long time no see”. How long could it have possibly been since the tournament? They don’t say at the start of this episode, but it seems like just the next day afterwards.

--So with Giran’s permission, Goku uses a Kamehameha to blow up the dam, the river goes back to normal, and all seems well. While all this is going on, there’s a subplot with Bulma and co., who get stranded out in the middle of the desert when Yamcha’s van runs out of gas (“even hot guys make mistakes!”). This is likewise adapted from the line in the manga where they notice Yamcha’s van is out of gas, but there we don’t actually see the car stop or anything (it’s “out of gas” in the sense that it’s almost out of gas). And again, here they’re out in the middle of a big desert rather than town, so running out of gas is a much more serious problem.

--To help stave off the heat, they have Puer turn into a fan, and Oolong into a beach umbrella. Pretty soon though, Oolong has to change back since his transformations only last five minutes. Puer can just keep going and going though, since he properly graduated from the Shape-Shifting Kindergarten, unlike Oolong who got kicked out early for stealing the teacher’s panties. This idea that Puer’s transformations don’t have a time limit is later mentioned by Toriyama in his Adventure Special Q&A, so odds are he supplied this info to the anime staff and they incorporated it into this filler. Toriyama might have also had a hand with the rest of the filler in this episode, since we know he sometimes supplied them with ideas for filler, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

--Actually, Oolong’s time limit isn’t the main problem: a big sandstorm rips through the desert, so even Puer can’t tough it out. They all head back into the van for safety. At the end of the episode, it turns out that the storm has blown their van all the back to South City. That really must have been quite a storm.

--Backtracking a bit, the sandstorm also sadly buries the river in Namu’s village. It seems the villagers are doomed after all. But wait! The “Roaming Lake” the village elder mentioned before has appeared out of nowhere! I don’t know if this counts as a Chekhov’s Gun or a Deus ex Machine. It was mentioned right at the start of the story, but it’s also a literally magical solution from nowhere. The village elder even says that Namu’s desire to save the village must have gotten through to “the gods” (Kami; in this context it’s not really clear if the word should be plural or singular, but I guess if we want we can count this as a time when Mr. Green Head actually got off his ass and did something).

--I could try and dig deeper into this episode’s writing, about how Goku and Namu spend most of it solving a problem, only to have their efforts undone at the last minute by a disaster that comes from nowhere, which is then likewise undone by a miracle from nowhere. But I really just want to discuss geography. Because as the above indicates, Namu’s village and Bulma et al are affected by the same sandstorm, meaning Namu’s village is in that same desert they were driving through. And this desert is right by South City. This doesn’t fit the standard map of DB Earth that debuted in Daizenshuu 4, but I can’t be too hard on the episode for that since it came out years before that map did (and the D4 map is based exclusively on the manga anyway). But still, the idea that Namu’s village is relatively close to South City is somewhat problematic, since the whole point behind his backstory was that water was incredibly scarce in the region he came from, while in South City it’s so plentiful that it’s free. And crucially, Namu and everyone else in his village are so unfamiliar with South City that they don’t realize water can be had for free there. If the two places are on opposite sides of the world (as with the D4 map) this just about makes sense. But if they’re within relatively short driving distance, then this is pretty absurd. How stupid must these villagers be, if they’re dying of thirst while living right by a city with free water?

--Overall opinion: not actually that bad, but not that good either. An episode featuring an entire village of Giran monsters should be much cooler than this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--This is the first use of an insert song in the series, right? Probably the sort of thing I should have been keeping track of more carefully. There’s going to be a couple more following along very, very soon.

The theme first appears in Episode 19, according to the main site.

That's just the instrumental version, so I don't think that quite counts. At any rate, that's why it didn't spring to mind.

--Speaking of the announcer and his dual role as referee, the anime adds in a brief bit where he consults with the dog monk (the one previously established as the head of the whole martial arts temple that runs the tournament) in order to clarify the rules for how to handle the double knock-out. This may be the last time we ever see him, unless the anime adds in more appearances. I’m pretty sure in the manga he just appears for that one gag where he opens the tournament with a “speech” that just consists of him barking.

Actually, he appears once more during the Giran fight to allow the use of Kinto'un.

Ah, I totally forgot about that.

[Valerius Dover]

The song in Episode 29 was also removed in the dub.

[UltimateHammerBro]

I've just thought how weird it is that episode 28's title could have been used for around 100 more episodes in the whole series

[RandomGuy96]

--So Namu sets out to sort out the problem with the river. He’s immediately attacked by a giant Pteranodon and is about to be eaten, but fortunately Goku happens by and rescues him. This all seems like an excuse to reuse animation from episode 1, where Goku likewise saved Bulma from a Pteranodon. I hate to be picky, but shouldn’t Namu be able to handle himself in a situation like this? He put up a decent enough fight against Goku, who at this point is way stronger than he was back when he was swatting Pteranodons like flies in episode 1.

And now we begin with the weird anime power scaling. Obviously, the pteranodon has been training.

--It turns out, the river’s blocked up due to a dam created by Giran’s clan, who are literally called the “Giran Clan” (Giran Zoku). We know their name because they say “we of the Giran Clan really love clean water”, in that way which characters tend to talk when giving poorly written exposition.

So, is Giran his last name? Is he the emperor or patriarch of this group of monsters? Or is does he just go by his species name? I'm guessing the first option, since he appears to be the leader.

--So yeah, it’s a whole tribe of monsters who look like Giran. I already knew they were going to turn up, just from seeing them in guidebooks and whatnot. They live in really weird, blobby houses. Their dam is made out of the same Guru-Guru Gum that Giran used against Goku, so I think the idea is that the houses are too. Giran is their leader, which I guess I also already knew, but seeing it in action it just feels wrong. Giran really doesn’t strike me as the leader type. The earlier filler where he goes around in a trench coat and gets in bar fights seemed more on the mark. Not that you can’t be a leader of a tribe and get into bar fights, but in this episode his whole personality seems different, more laid-back and good-natured.

I'd argue that, to be a leader, you HAVE to go to bars and get in fights at those bars, preferably after drinking a considerable amount and making obscene gestures.

I wonder how many other characters just completely change personalities in filler? I know Giran is one. Vegeta in the Namek arc, too. Maybe Super Buu. Goku also seems pretty off the mark in many filler appearances. And Yamcha actually manages to win fights in filler, which couldn't be any more out of character! Maybe Giran just tries to keep up appearances for the crowd, like a pro wrestler.

Toriyama might have also had a hand with the rest of the filler in this episode, since we know he sometimes supplied them with ideas for filler, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

Mayor Giran makes me doubt that, somewhat. Though I guess there's nothing saying he can't be a local bully AND a mayor AND a top tier martial artist AND a bodyguard. Mayor Giran doesn't no need stinkin' bodyguard, he guards himself. Or maybe he really did just get kicked out.

[MCDaveG]

Some interesting points here and there.
I was mostly surprised by Mayor Giran. I didn't found it weird and enjoyed it every time and never thought about that.
Tough that really is off-character a lot considering the Budokai and Piccolo arcs.