Why do people take "5 minutes Namek explosion" so seriously?

[peterx]

Never understood the problem people have with this.. why is this so big of an issue in the DB community?
Freeza is not an omnipotent god who can perfectly predict what will happen in the future and when.. he could have easily made a bad prediction and thats all. Also the fights could have easily happened much faster than what was seen in the anime, anime "slowed it down for us" to see everything.

[VegettoEX]

In my experience, it's less that it's being taken "seriously" from an in-universe perspective, but rather than what the viewer sees on-screen is emblematic of and providing a funny scapegoat for the series' actual worst production timing: its closest manga-to-TV catch-up ever experienced.

Quoting an article from our delightful 30th anniversary fanzine:

In June 1991 the series finally hit its smallest chapter gap between the manga and anime with only 10 chapters of material remaining. This coincidentally occurred with the broadcast of Dragon Ball Z episode 97, the now infamous episode where Freeza fires a blast into Planet Namek and declares it will explode within five minutes. Anyone familiar with the series will often make some sort of casual joke about it being the longest five minutes in history and proceed to blame the anime for making it even worse by stretching it out so much. However, did the anime really stretch it out? Up until this point the series had been moving along rather consistently at an average rate of 1.3 chapters per episode, but following Freeza’s aforementioned statement, the point that the series hit its lowest chapter gap, everything slowed down a bit to an average rate of a single chapter per episode. So while it did take 10 episodes (DBZ 97-106) to cover this material, it also originally took 10 chapters (DB 319-328) in the manga. This change was no doubt done to ensure that the anime would not catch up with the manga any more than it already had. Immediately following the conclusion of the battle with Freeza, an anime-only arc featuring Garlic Jr. was created (bringing back the big bad from DBZ Movie 1), extending the gap back up to 22 chapters, the largest margin seen for the remainder of the series.

The series slows to an adaptive crawl and a character simultaneously provides what seems to be a hilariously-out-of-touch timeframe, allowing for a pretty perfect storm of casual criticism.

[peterx]

Woow, nice info, never heard about this. Thank You!

[Vegard Aune]

In my experience, it's less that it's being taken "seriously" from an in-universe perspective, but rather than what the viewer sees on-screen is emblematic of and providing a funny scapegoat for the series' actual worst production timing: its closest manga-to-TV catch-up ever experienced.

Quoting an article from our delightful 30th anniversary fanzine:

In June 1991 the series finally hit its smallest chapter gap between the manga and anime with only 10 chapters of material remaining. This coincidentally occurred with the broadcast of Dragon Ball Z episode 97, the now infamous episode where Freeza fires a blast into Planet Namek and declares it will explode within five minutes. Anyone familiar with the series will often make some sort of casual joke about it being the longest five minutes in history and proceed to blame the anime for making it even worse by stretching it out so much. However, did the anime really stretch it out? Up until this point the series had been moving along rather consistently at an average rate of 1.3 chapters per episode, but following Freeza’s aforementioned statement, the point that the series hit its lowest chapter gap, everything slowed down a bit to an average rate of a single chapter per episode. So while it did take 10 episodes (DBZ 97-106) to cover this material, it also originally took 10 chapters (DB 319-328) in the manga. This change was no doubt done to ensure that the anime would not catch up with the manga any more than it already had. Immediately following the conclusion of the battle with Freeza, an anime-only arc featuring Garlic Jr. was created (bringing back the big bad from DBZ Movie 1), extending the gap back up to 22 chapters, the largest margin seen for the remainder of the series.

The series slows to an adaptive crawl and a character simultaneously provides what seems to be a hilariously-out-of-touch timeframe, allowing for a pretty perfect storm of casual criticism.

I'm kind of amazed that 22 chapters was the longest gap the series would have for the rest of its run. That does explain why you have stuff like We Gotta Power only featuring footage based on the very, very start of the arc though, I guess... But given what I've been led to believe about anime production turnaround, that still feels... unreasonably short.

It might be extremely anecdotal seeing how my literal only frame of reference is One Piece, but it does seem to me like Toei these days is eager to avoid such a short gap, seeing how in One Piece we now have a gap of over a year. Which, granted, isn't without problems of its own considering how Oda will release a chapter two to three times a month on average, so the anime had to resort to episodes covering less than a full chapter to stay behind, and ironically OP recently had its own "Five minutes till we all die!" sequence that lasted for twenty-four episodes... (Same reason as Namek, though I will actually argue that in OP it was less annoying because those twenty-four episodes covered like fifteen separate fights so it's somewhat easier to accept as just "We're constantly rewinding the clock to show a bunch of things happening at the same time".)

Then again... Toei also kind of repeated this absurd timeframe problem in the Tournament of Power, where they didn't have a very slow-progressing manga to stay behind... It was less severe, admittedly, with 46 minutes stretched out to like 30 episodes, but still, the narrator constantly chiming in to be like "This much time remains in the Tournament of Power!" did kind of shine a massive spotlight on how the stated in-universe time doesn't even remotely match up to what we are seeing. What was the timeframe given at the end of 130? Half a minute?

[Vegetto95]

I'm kind of amazed that 22 chapters was the longest gap the series would have for the rest of its run. That does explain why you have stuff like We Gotta Power only featuring footage based on the very, very start of the arc though, I guess... But given what I've been led to believe about anime production turnaround, that still feels... unreasonably short.

It might be extremely anecdotal seeing how my literal only frame of reference is One Piece, but it does seem to me like Toei these days is eager to avoid such a short gap, seeing how in One Piece we now have a gap of over a year. Which, granted, isn't without problems of its own considering how Oda will release a chapter two to three times a month on average, so the anime had to resort to episodes covering less than a full chapter to stay behind, and ironically OP recently had its own "Five minutes till we all die!" sequence that lasted for twenty-four episodes... (Same reason as Namek, though I will actually argue that in OP it was less annoying because those twenty-four episodes covered like fifteen separate fights so it's somewhat easier to accept as just "We're constantly rewinding the clock to show a bunch of things happening at the same time".)

Then again... Toei also kind of repeated this absurd timeframe problem in the Tournament of Power, where they didn't have a very slow-progressing manga to stay behind... It was less severe, admittedly, with 46 minutes stretched out to like 30 episodes, but still, the narrator constantly chiming in to be like "This much time remains in the Tournament of Power!" did kind of shine a massive spotlight on how the stated in-universe time doesn't even remotely match up to what we are seeing. What was the timeframe given at the end of 130? Half a minute?

It definitely seems like anime adaptations of long-running popular shōnen manga in general started to have longer gaps between their respective starts as time went on. Compare series from the '80s like
-Dragon Ball, the manga of which began in December of 1984 and the anime barely a year later in February of 1986, or
- Fist of the North Star, manga September 1983 and anime October 1984,

to series from the '90s like
- InuYasha, manga November 1996, anime October 2000 (yes, InuYasha had a gap of almost FOUR YEARS between its manga and anime, and STILL had a bunch of filler, then got cancelled, and came back to finish its adaptation of the end of the manga off five and a half years later...),
- Yū Yū Hakusho, manga December 1990, anime October 1992,
- One Piece, manga July 1997, anime October 1999,
- Naruto, manga September 1999, anime October 2002 (again... three year gap and still an absolutely absurd amount of filler).

There are many more examples of that, but it's very clear that, in general, anime production companies tended to wait a little longer to adapt popular long-running manga in the '90s and 2000s than they did in the '80s and before, and even then that didn't always work out for the best, as evidenced with the absolutely awful pacing of InuYasha, Naruto, and One Piece, etc. In recent years, mostly since the early 2010s, they've found a decent middle ground with the seasonal format, where they can be more accurate to the manga without having to fall back on filler for padding, but in exchange there's a much longer wait between seasons as compared to before where series would generally just keep running a new episode every week indefinitely.

That seasonal approach has also done WONDERS for monthly manga, as evidenced with Attack on Titan for one example. See the initial 2000 Gonzo adaptation of Hellsing vs. the original manga or the 1998 Madhouse Trigun adaptation vs. the original manga for how screwed up things can get if a weekly anime adaptation completely outpaces the monthly manga. Don't get me wrong, they're both great anime, but the fact still remains that neither is anywhere near as good as their respective manga since both had to go and do their own completely different things that fell short of what their manga eventually did, especially in the case of Hellsing with its ancient Egyptian vampire main villain who wasn't in the manga whatsoever. Now, if only Trigun could get a full re-adaptation of its manga a la Hellsing Ultimate (which was AMAZING). I especially want that to happen after getting saddled with Trigun Stampede earlier this year, 'cuz Stampede... kiiiinda sucked.

And though the seasonal format can work wonders for monthly series, it can also do the opposite... where really, really good series like Drifters or Made in Abyss will end up having YEARS between seasons. Drifters' first season aired all the way back in 2016, and with the manga having been on hiatus for the last two or three years (I know Hirano's infamously pretty lazy, but c'mon.. he fucking finished Hellsing!), I have little hope for a conclusion to the manga at this point, let alone a second season of the anime. And while Made in Abyss' manga is still going, the second season that only ended this past February ended at a point that the manga that has only gone maybe five or six chapters past, which means there's probably going to be a similar wait time until the third season as the five year gap between the first and second...

HOWEVER, that being said... I would still rather wait a good, long while for a faithful adaptation than have one run of the anime that ends up being forced to make up the remainder of the story on its own, usually with a vastly inferior ending to whatever the manga ends up with years later.

It's funny you mention the Dragon Ball Super monthly manga vs. the weekly anime, because, as you alluded to, that was a very different case. The Super manga and anime started almost simultaneously (the manga only starting a few weeks before the anime in June 2015), and the anime was not a direct adaptation of the manga the way the Dragon Ball & Z anime were of Toriyama's original manga. Instead, Toriyama wrote rough story outlines that apparently were little more than a few bullet points written down on a napkin, and gave a copy each to Tōei Animation and Toyotarō, and told them "Now make a full story out of that!", hence why the major plot beats are the same between the manga and anime, but everything between them, a.k.a. the VAST majority of the actual story, is VASTLY different. Same bones, VERY different nervous system, muscles, and skin lol

And yeah, I TOTALLY agree about the ToP time limit bullshit. I got REAL sick of being told at the end of EVERY EPISODE of that disgustingly overlong arc that only one minute had passed over the course of the entire 20-minute episode. What makes matters worse is that the time limit was COMPLETELY pointless; if the Zeno-Ō's had set the rules to just be last-man-standing, literally nothing would have changed because that's what ended up clinching victory for U7 anyway. And it COMPLETELY destroyed any real feeling of stakes or tension, which is the ENTIRE GODDAMN POINT of a time limit, because while 1 minute to them was 20 minutes to us, half of each episode was still just the characters both in the ring and in the stands standing around talking (and I got SOOOO sick of everyone in the stands explaining every last little detail of things that were totally obvious just by watching... way to talk down to your audience, Tōei... ).

Like, why the fuck add a time limit to then just turn right around and instead make it seem like the characters have all the time in the goddamn world? Couple that with the whole promise of "focus on teamwork and strategy" we'd been repeatedly fed for the previous dozen or so recruitment episodes being IMMEDIATELY thrown out the window the second the tournament started in favor of mostly boring, repetitive one-on-one fights filled with nothing but blurry punch/kick flurries and beam struggles, a.k.a. standard, tired old Tōei Dragon Ball fights we've already seen a hundred times since the '80s, and you've got the only series that can stand up there on the same level of Naruto in terms of "Worst Writing and Pacing for a Final Arc in a Battle Shōnen Series" in history (yes, I worded that like an Academy Award for a reason lol)

[peterx]

And yeah, I TOTALLY agree about the ToP time limit bullshit. I got REAL sick of being told at the end of EVERY EPISODE of that disgustingly overlong arc that only one minute had passed over the course of the entire 20-minute episode.

My explanation for this is that all the different fights show in an episode (and overall in the ToP arc) happen simultaneously, and just as I said before the fights happen MUCH faster for us to be able to see in "real", so the anime slowed it down for us

[Koitsukai]

Probably because people don't take relativity into account. Or also because when you were 10 years old, watching/reading the arc, most likely you had no idea about time not being absolute, not knowing that 5 minutes for you(Gohan) could feel like 50 minutes for me (Freeza).

[Vegetto95]

And yeah, I TOTALLY agree about the ToP time limit bullshit. I got REAL sick of being told at the end of EVERY EPISODE of that disgustingly overlong arc that only one minute had passed over the course of the entire 20-minute episode.

My explanation for this is that all the different fights show in an episode (and overall in the ToP arc) happen simultaneously, and just as I said before the fights happen MUCH faster for us to be able to see in "real", so the anime slowed it down for us

Except that's clearly not what was shown. Each character participates in multiple consecutive fights, which could not have possibly all been simultaneous, and the narrative makes no attempt to imply to any degree whatsoever that the events that occur do so in any order other than chronologically as shown. I've seen mooore than enough visual media in my life to be able to recognize the things that indicate parallel events, and it's the job of the writers and editors to make those things clear. So if the intention somehow WAS inf fact for most of those fights to be taking place simultaneously, Toei's staff certainly did an absolutely awful job displaying that.

And while obviously the characters move way faster than is actually depicted on-screen (with Dyspo in particular flat-out said to be able to move faster than light), which is something I understood and accepted long, LOOOOONG before Super was ever even the faintest idea in Toriyama or Toei's heads... that doesn't explain the other thing I mentioned before, which is the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE amount of time spent by 1) the characters in the ring standing around and talking with each other, and 2) the characters in the stands sitting there endlessly expositing things that didn't need expositing whatsoever.

I'm preeeeetty sure those characters can't talk at the speed of light (especially considering that is legitimately impossible due to the EXTREME difference in the speed of sound vs. the speed of light lol), and let's not forget that Blooma, a regular human with zero Ki superpowers, was sitting right there with them and frequently joined in on the conversations. If the characters fighting really were moving that fast the whole time and the fights were taking place simultaneously, bare fucking minimum five or six fights would have been over in the time it took for Beers, Whis, Blooma, and whatever U7 fighters had been knocked out just to finish explaining the one single move Insert Character Here did that was already completely obvious just by watching the goddamn fight (something that happened probably hundred times over those few dozen episodes...).

I 100% goddamn guarantee you that WAAAAAAY more than 48 minutes is spent on characters sitting/standing around chatting, and while part of me is tempted to measure just how much talking is truly in the ToP... nothing on Kamisama's green Earth could get me to sit through those 30+ awful episodes again lol

Unfortunately, the only real rational explanation for all that is simply the same exact thing the rest of Super suffered from... really, really bad fucking writing lmao

[peterx]

Yeah bad bad writing is certainly a thing here too.. but I wouldn't take this so seriously haha this is still a shounen for young boys (and for us, old boys )

[GokuHater]

I don't think truthfully that the line only is the problem.
I feel most of this comes from the fact that the Frieza battle portion of the story in the original Z anime is so prolonged it sometimes becomes unearable to watch.

They nearly caught up with the manga by this point so they did what they could to make these episodes slow using eg. filler, slow mo, or even flashbacks of episodes that we just watched.

Having sit through this and then get the 5 minutes line, with then several episodes containing these so called "5 minutes" for many people shows the absurdity of the pacing.

Mind you, in the manga the story flows quite quickly and reading this section fast you can easily make it in 5 minutes.

[Vegetto95]

Yeah bad bad writing is certainly a thing here too.. but I wouldn't take this so seriously haha this is still a shounen for young boys (and for us, old boys )

Eh, I don't agree. I will never forgive bad writing just because something is "made for kids". I personally think that's a terrible excuse, and it honestly just seems downright insulting to kids. Sure, you could make the argument that younger kids might not notice glaring flaws or discrepancies in writing and just want to enjoy the flashing lights and pretty colors and bam! pow! action, and perhaps that's somewhat true to an extent (but certainly not to the degree that many think... kids absolutely are smarter than we tend to give them credit for), but I maintain that we should expect better from the media made for our children because we expect the best for our children. Because they're our goddamn children lol

Thing is, remember that while made FOR children, these things are still made BY grownass adults. There are sooo many amazing movies and shows out there made primarily for children that don't use their demographic as an excuse to dumb down the storytelling, and instead still seek to tell engaging stories with strong narrative cohesiveness. Things like The Iron Giant, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Gargoyles, The DCAU (Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Justice League, etc.), One Piece, the first few seasons of Digimon (in Japanese at least... the English dubs are about as insultingly dumbed down "for da widdul kiddies" as you can get due to Saban's horrible 4Kids-esque standards and practices...), etc., etc., etc. Compare the horrid, immature writing of Dragon Ball Super to any of those and it becomes quite clear just how much more care went into them that clearly wasn't present with DBS.

Now, obviously I'm not expecting The Lion King or Rugrats or The Powerpuff Girls to be on the level of The Sopranos or Apocalypse Now or No Country For Old Men... but I'm also not going to sit here and shrug my shoulders and go "Well, it's for kids durr hurr" when I see horrible, lazy writing that was done by people who clearly just didn't care because they didn't think kids need/want/deserve to be told stories that are crafted with care and respect. (Also, disclaimer... I am NOT saying that The Lion King, Rugrats, and The Powerpuff Girls have bad writing; quite the contrary, I think they're great kids' shows/movies, if perhaps a tad simplistic. I was merely using them as an example of the specific demographic I've been referring to, nothing more lol)

In short, allow me to use one of my favorite quotes of all time from the acclaimed C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, one of the most famous and beloved series of children's fantasy stories of all time...
"I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story."

Plus... I've seen tooooons of really bad writing in things meant for adults. Plenty of PG-13/R-rated movies, T/M rated games, TV-14/MA shows, seinen demographic manga/anime, etc. have shit writing, and obviously you can't fall back on the demographic excuse for those. So really, it's all a matter of consistency: I will 110% call out bad writing no matter what particular age group a piece of media was primarily targeted towards. It's only fair lol

[Vegard Aune]

and let's not forget that Blooma, a regular human with zero Ki superpowers, was sitting right there with them and frequently joined in on the conversations.

This is a bit of a nitpick that is entirely beside the overall point, but... Bulma did not come along to the Tournament of Power. She was on Earth the whole time.

[Vegetto95]

and let's not forget that Blooma, a regular human with zero Ki superpowers, was sitting right there with them and frequently joined in on the conversations.

This is a bit of a nitpick that is entirely beside the overall point, but... Bulma did not come along to the Tournament of Power. She was on Earth the whole time.

Oh... right... I guess I got that mixed up with the Universe 6 Tournament arc where her and most of the supporting cast came to watch XD (and now that I think about it, I forgot that Bra had just been born right before they left for the ToP and she needed to take care of her). In full honesty, outside of maybe a small handful of brief clips here and there, I haven't watched any of Super since it first finished airing in Japanese five and a half years ago (and have zero plans whatsoever to ever revisit it in any capacity larger than that; I really, REALLY did not enjoy it), so there are definitely a few little deets I forgot. My bad

But still, the fact remains that it's highly unlikely that Kuririn/Tenshinhan/Piccolo/everyone else who got knocked out during the course of the arc and participated in the endless peanut gallery expositing with Beers and Whis were talking at superspeed lol

[Hellspawn28]

5 minutes on Namek is longer than how it is on Earth. Planet's have different rotations. Freeza was right about it taking 5 minutes to blow up since he was basing it off the time on Namek.

[Vegetto95]

5 minutes on Namek is longer than how it is on Earth. Planet's have different rotations. Freeza was right about it taking 5 minutes to blow up since he was basing it off the time on Namek.

I meeeean... considering that how time is measured on Earth is HEAVILY (if not entirely) based on the movement of the Earth relative to its sun... Namek has THREE suns in its system. That's GOT to make a HUUUGE difference in time measurement lol

Now... is that something Toriyama himself took into account and meant to be the case when he wrote the manga? Knowing him... proooobably not lol. But at least it's an interesting way to look at it and possibly explain away the anime discrepancies

And hell, think about Planet Vegeta... a full moon is the sun reflecting off the entirety of one side of the moon's surface, and in the anime, Vegeta's moon was said to only get full once every EIGHT YEARS! I gotta wonder what wacky astronomical movements regarding the orbits and/or positions of Vegeta and its moon and sun would cause that to be the case, and if that's even meant to be eight Earth years in the first place (I would imagine so, considering it was Kaiō-sama who said as much, and every other time he mentioned timespans, it was always in Earth time). An astrophysicist would probably have an interesting day figuring that one out lol

[Cursed Lemon]

Shonen in general has always had a reputation for dragging things out with exposition and random nonsense, but that particular moment in DBZ is quite possibly the most egregious example in history.

[theherodjl]

5 minutes on Namek is longer than how it is on Earth. Planet's have different rotations. Freeza was right about it taking 5 minutes to blow up since he was basing it off the time on Namek.

I don't know about that, it seems that most races in DB share a common system of measurements, language, and even culture to an extent. It would be odd for Freeza to measure time in any other way that what he was familiar with, knowing that he absolutely is not the type of person to educate himself on how time works on a planet that he was intent on simply destroying.

[Zephyr]

Freeza is not an omnipotent god who can perfectly predict what will happen in the future and when.. he could have easily made a bad prediction and thats all.

Yeah, I don't really think this line is the big deal that many make it out to be (at least from an in-universe perspective). Freeza's more-or-less saying "this fight is now on a very short time limit". He's throwing out a guess; a pretty good guess, but a guess nonetheless. He makes guesses at multiple points in this phase of the fight, and he's not the only one. Before powering up to 100% he says "At full power I'll end this in a minute! No...make that 30 seconds!" After he powers up and they have their first little scrap, he says "This planet can't have more than two or three minutes left." When the Namekian Elder is restored to life and the dragon is out again, Freeza wonders if the sky being dark is "part of the chain reaction I've set off...?!" While talking with the Namekian Elder, Kaio says that "Namek will explode at any moment!"

It's doesn't seem clear that Freeza's done this sort of thing before, so it's not as if he should be taken to be some sort of expert on the process by which a core-less planet collapses and explodes, such that we should take his guess as a binding time window. And with the collapse of a core-less planet being a geological process, it would be kind of odd for it to be subject to that sort of precise guessing in the first place, given the innumerable unseen variables that would be at play. In this regard the situation is very different from the way we treat the Tournament of Power's 48 minutes as a binding time window: something that was decided on in advance, actively kept track of by a referee, and called precisely when the time was up.

Maybe it did take exactly 5 minutes somehow, and Freeza was at least in the ballpark of 5 minutes with his guess. But I don't think we really need to treat his initial statement as precise and accurate, and call it Bad Writing™ when it seems like it probably took a bit longer than 5 minutes. But we should definitely laugh at how ironic it is that this was when we got the smallest chapter gap between the manga and anime, resulting in one of the latter's most padded sections.

[peterx]

My thoughts exactly, Thanks!

[Vegetto95]

5 minutes on Namek is longer than how it is on Earth. Planet's have different rotations. Freeza was right about it taking 5 minutes to blow up since he was basing it off the time on Namek.

I don't know about that, it seems that most races in DB share a common system of measurements, language, and even culture to an extent. It would be odd for Freeza to measure time in any other way that what he was familiar with, knowing that he absolutely is not the type of person to educate himself on how time works on a planet that he was intent on simply destroying.

Well, there was that one anime-exclusive scene about midway through Z episode 64 where Freeza was standing in front of the big monitor screen in his ship as it was reading out a bunch of data on planet Namek, such as its civilization level, natural resources, climate, etc. I mean, yeah, it was made very clear that he was mainly/only really doing so to see if it was worth reselling as part of his trade ring (which he deemed it absolutely was not), but nonetheless it seemed to be a fairly detailed analysis of the planet and it's not unlikely that Freeza might have gained some general idea of how its solar movements affect its time measurements.

Buuut, even then, yeah... I still gotta agree with your point and say it's more likely it was 100% intended to be five Earth minutes. As you said, Dragon Ball has consistently portrayed alien cultures, even in the afterlife realms where you would think time wouldn't have any meaning, or at least have much less meaning, as having similar, if not the same, scales of time measurement as Earth, undoubtedly just so Toriyama/Tōei can keep it simple and not have to worry about complicated spacetime mechanics and just say cool things like "Namek has three suns and never suffers lack of daylight!" (which we all know was mainly an excuse for Toriyama to avoid inking, a la Super Saiyan Gokū's hair or Gokū's Kame dōgi, as well as saving himself the trouble of keeping track of the specific passages of time whilst multiple groups of major characters were staying on Namek for weeks on end), or "Planet Vegeta only has a full moon once every eight years!", regardless of the sacrifice in realism that that creates.