Post
by Super Ghost Kamikaze » Thu May 14, 2009 10:18 am
So, the music in this episode was an epic clusterfuck.
On one hand, the second half of the episode had some nice music on Kaio's planet, and the second "humans training" scene had a great piece. I especially like how the Kaio's planet music was light and silly, a perfect fit for the scenes in question. There was also an excellent piece when Gohan was playing around and getting food at the start of the episode, it just fit really nicely and made the scene a ton of fun to watch.
The problem with the good music, though, is that it came with some extremely disappointing, overall just plain terrible pieces. The rock guitar riff for one of the Gohan sparring scenes was the worst offender, making me think that this is what the inverse of the Japanese music with English voices offered on the orange brick sets would be like. It was literally ear-splittingly horrible for me, like someone had intentionally tried to make something fit within the annoyance spectrum between obnoxious radio DJs and the "mosquito tone".
There were a bunch of pieces that were either annoying, or not bad pieces in and of themselves but just jarringly unfitting for the scene playing along with them. Gohan being chased by a dinosaur was pretty bad, for example. It started off fairly well when the dinosaur shows up, but then it devolves into this really annoying piece by the time the chase actually starts.
The "Dokkan Dokkan" instrumental doesn't seem to fit half the scenes it's put to. When Goku reaches Kaio-sama's place, playing that as a huge "victory tune" just doesn't feel right. And the first piece of music we hear on Kaio-sama's planet wasn't any good either. The music picks up when Bubbles shows up, though, and the rest of the music in scenes on that planet are just fine.
Watching this episode, I sometimes wished that the whole soundtrack would go back to just "meh", so I wouldn't have to sit through tripe that made me go "Get the fuck out of my Dragon Ball, you wretched piece of shit" for some of these tunes. At least it's getting noticeable though, which is a start?