#Goku “The Legendary Super Saiyan” Child Saiyan DBGT!

[juridical-angel-blog]

Special Picture Goku Child Saiyan DBGT!

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball GT Retrospective (7/7)

[Note: I wrote this on January 16, 2013.  Originally, I had embedded a video of Goku Junior slapping his bare ass for like ten hours, but it’s down now :(   Such is life.)

Well, I know I said I finished watching Dragon Ball GT, but there's one last thing in the box set: Dragon Ball GT: The Movie

This actually isn't what it sounds like.  I'm pretty sure the "movie" was actually a TV special, and it didn't really have much at all to do with the characters or plotlines of GT.   Really, it's more of an epilogue tale of the future, set one hundred years after the events in Dragon Ball GT.   Of course, GT was set some forty years after the beginning of the first Dragon Ball storyline, so it seems like a jump too far.   From what I understand, the original plan was to wrap up the GT series with the end of the Baby Saga, but something happened and they ended up making another twenty-odd episodes.  In between all that, they had this GT special set up, probably as a final sendoff to all things Dragon Ball.   This was somewhat undermined by flashing a hundred years back for Super 17 and Shadow Dragon Sagas, but in the final episode of GT, they flashed forward yet again to tie the series finale with the special.   So, the premise of the special is pretty straightforward.  One hundred years after Baby's defeat, Goku and everyone else from Dragon Ball is dead.  The only one left is Pan, who's looking pretty spry for a a centenarian.  Actually, I'm not sure 100 years was the best time frame to use.   Goku's master, Master Roshi, was already three hundred years old when Dragon Ball started, and he survived all the way to the end of GT, never really aging much.  The implication was that his lifetime of martial arts training somehow allowed him to unnaturally extend his lifespan, but it was never actually explained.   Further, we never really found out what the lifespan of a Saiyan is.  Goku and Vegeta aged very little across the timeline of DBZ/DBGT, and Vegeta explained that Saiyans have a much longer physical prime than humans do.   Humans like.... Master Roshi?   I don't think anyone really put a lot of thought into this, probably because no one ever seriously planned to cover the world of DragonBall that far into the future.   Even if we knew how long Saiyans and humans can normally live in that universe, the Saiyan-human hybrid characters would still be an x-factor.   I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we really can't tell what keeps Granma Pan so fit.  Is it because she's one-quarter Saiyan?  Is it because of advances in that Earth's medical technology?  Is it because any human in that world could live past 100 with proper diet and exercise?   Or is she tapping into the same ki techniques that preserved Master Roshi for so long?   What I kind of dig about the special is that no one really knows, and we may never know.  The world of Goku and his friends is gone, lost forever like a forgotten dream.  Pan seems to be a minor celebrity in her own right, but it's because she's Pan, not so much because she was related to the mysterious Son Goku, daughter of the brilliant scientist Son Gohan, or the heir of the legendary world champion Mister Satan.  If she married, her husband is never seen or mentioned.   We have no idea if she had brothers or sisters.   She must have had at least one son or daughter, but the only reason we know this is because of her grandson, Goku Jr.  There's a melancholy to that.  Maybe some of these missing figures are still alive, but they're clearly not part of Pan's life anymore.   It's just her and her grandson living in Satan City.   Goku Jr. probaly knows the city was named to honor his ancestor's heroism at the Cell Games, but the information is meaningless to him.   It's ancient history, especially to a small boy.  Goku Jr. is the spitting image of his namesake, but this doesn't mean that much to him either.   He knows Goku was a great warrior, someone whom Pan respects tremendously, but he might as well be Abraham Lincoln.  He looks in the mirror and sees himself, not a cartoon character who could blow up entire planets with his fingers.   Pan tries to train Goku Jr, but he's kind of a klutz.  More to the point, he's timid and doesn't want to fight.   A bully named Puck takes a cool-looking novelty pen from him, and he just lets him keep it.   Pan gives him shit for not standing up for himself, but he doesn't see the big deal.   During this conversation she has a heart attack or something like that, and we cut to the hospital, where Pan is apparently in bad shape.  Goku desperately promises to train harder and fight anyone he has to if it means she'll pull through.   This is where Pan realizes she's been too hard on the boy.   I like this scene because it would have been too easy to forget that Pan was kind of a pushy jerk when she was a kid.   The adult Pan is still demanding and refuses to take crap from anyone, but she's been wanting Goku Jr. to be like her grandfather, and he has been all along. Son Goku wouldn't start a fight over a pen, no matter how many cool floaty things are inside it.  But he would go through anything to save Pan, and that's what Goku Jr. is determined to do, too.   When Pan takes a turn for the worse, Junior heads home, and notices a photo of Pan as a child, holding a Dragon Ball.  He flashes back to a time when Pan tried to tell him the story of the photo, but he was too preoccupied playing video games.   PAN: Hey, check this out.  It's a picture of me and my robot friend Giru.   And I had a dopey orange bandana, and I whined all the time, and Vegeta never got to do anything cool, and-- GOKU JR.: That sounds really boring, granma.  I'm gonna play more Super Mario World.   It's hard not to like Goku, Jr., is what I'm trying to say.   Anyway, Goku Jr. doesn't know the whole mythology of the Dragon Balls, but he does vaguely understand that they grant wishes, and the four-star ball was sort of a family heirloom, so he devises an ill-conceived plan to travel to Mount Paozu and search his ancestor's home for it.  A truck driver offers him a lift, but this is just a trick to get all the stuff in his giant backpack.   Evil Truck Driver is perhaps my new favorite GT character. GOKU JR.: So what's in this truck?   ETD: It's full of hamburgers, kid.  It's pretty awesome.   GOKU, JR.: Wow, you sure have a lot of food in the cab.   ETD: Yep.   I've got even more food in this bag here, too.   You want some?   GOKU JR.: Nah, I've got my own food in my backpack.   ETD: ... Really?    Uh... say, you want to hop out and take a whiz?   It's a long way to go.   GOKU JR.: Yeah, I guess I'd better.   I'll just leave my backpack stuffed with food in your truck filled with even more food.     ETD: Delicious.  Uh... I mean, scrumptious!  I mean!  I'm driving away and taking your food with me!  Ha ha ha! I feel really bad for whoever's expecting those hamburgers to arrive.   Actually, maybe he's not even a real truck driver.  He just stole the truck one day and he's been living off its cargo ever since.   Ironically, this turns into a lucky break for Goku, because he meets Puck while he walks to Mt.  Paozu on foot.  Puck had heard about Goku's plans before he left, and he was so impressed with his daring that he wants to tag along and watch when Goku is eaten by wild animals or bandits.  The thing is, Puck's a pretty fair outdoorsman, so as they get closer to their destination he's able to help Goku live off the land.  Along the way, Puck begins to bond with Goku Jr., and they have a few minor adventures.   Wolves attack them, but they're rescued by a woman with a shotgun who takes them to her home for the night.   Unfortunately, she turns out to be a witch or a demon or something.   Whatever she is, she eats people.  Goku Jr. is suspicious from the start (due to his past experience with Evil Truck Driver), so he and Puck manage to escape.   Their partnership comes to an end on a rickety bridge.   Goku Jr is afraid to cross until Puck proves it's sturdy enough.   Even so, the bridge nearly collapses, and Puck falls off in a failed attempt to rescue Goku.  Goku manages to climb back up on his own, and then he rescues a bearcub from one of the same demon bandits he escaped earlier.  In gratitude, the bear’s mother escorts Goku to his ancestor's home, but they're once again attacked by the bandits.   This time, they're joined by Lord Yao, their leader.   The mommy bear tries to fight him off so Goku can take her cub to safety, but she's hopelessly outmatched.   Worse, the baby bear slips away and tries to help, so Goku can't even save him.  Frustrated with his powerlessness, Goku Jr finally loses his shit and transforms into a Super Saiyan.  He clobbers Lord Yao and frightens his henchmen away.  When he reverts to normal, he has no memory of the battle, and believes the bears did all the work.   With all that out of the way, Goku Jr. locates the Four-Star Dragon Ball in the ruins of what was once his ancestor's childhood home.   This is really a melancholy scene.  The house belonged to Son Gohan, the kindly old man who adopted the elder Goku when his spaceship crashed on Earth.  When Dragon Ball begins, Goku leaves that home to begin his adventures, and aside from a couple of trips to pick up his things, he never really returns.   Now, some 140 years later, it's still standing, but derelict.  No one remembers the kindly old man who lived there, or how his compassion changed the universe for the better.  Someone must have left the four-star Dragon Ball there to honor his memory, but even the significance of that gesture is lost in the sands of time.   Goku Jr. doesn't understand how the Dragon Balls work, so he starts praying to the four-star ball, asking the Dragon to restore his grandmother's health and bring Puck back to life if at all possible.  When he gets no answer, he becomes upset, and then he notices the original Goku standing beside him.   He introduces himself as Goku Jr.'s great-great-grandfather, and explains that the Dragon Balls only work when you have all seven of them.   Nevertheless, he congratulates his descendant for his courage and strength, and then Pan and Puck arrive on the scene in an aircraft.   Apparently they didn't die after all.   The elder Goku disappears without a trace, and Goku Jr. is left with the lesson that his inner strength was what saved the day.     I'm not crazy about the ending of the story, since it's never explained how Puck survived his fall.   Pan's recovery is no big deal.   No one knew for sure whether she would live or die, so it's entirely plausible that she got better, went home, and realized where Goku Jr. must have gone.   But Puck fell off a bridge into a deep canyon.  Unless Pan swooped in and saved him in the nick of time, I don't see how else he would have survived.   Of course, some other superhuman resident of Mount Paozu might have stepped in, but the special seems to be built on the idea that the superheroics of old are no more.   Of course, based on the finale of Dragon Ball GT we might infer that Goku Jr.'s wish really was granted after all.   In the final episode of the series, Goku merges with the Dragon Balls as Shenron exiles himself from the earth.   So if the Four-Star Ball was sitting in his old house, it must have been Goku himself who put it there, because no one else would have had it.  And it's reasonable to assume he had the other six with him, so when Goku Jr. made his wish, he really did get it to work after all.   The implication is that Goku is the Dragon, and he's not too picky about the rules.  I think this is what Toei was going for, but they wanted to keep it ambiguous.  Maybe Goku did come back from death to grant his descendant's wish, or maybe Goku Jr. imagined the encounter, and Puck and Pan's survival was just a fortunate coincidence.   The next time we see these characters is in Episode 64 of the regular GT television series.  Goku Jr. has learned to harness and control his powers to become a talented martial artist.  He enters the World Tournament and faces one of Vegeta's descendants in the final round of the Junior Devision.  Pan is still in good health, and she meets Vegeta Jr.'s mother, indicating a friendly, if not close, relationship still exists between the two families.  The elder Goku reappears once again to watch the tournament finals, but Pan only glimpses him for a moment before he vanishes again. There's a bittersweetness to the special that really makes it worthwhile.   Beyond that, it's actually kind of boilerplate.  It reminds me a lot of the "Episode of Bardock" special that was recently produced.   In that, Goku's biological father Bardock miraculously survives the destruction of his home planet by getting thrown back in time, where he becomes the hero of the pre-Saiyan Planet Plant and turns Super Saiyan at the climactic moment.  It's not a bad story, it just doesn't have a whole lot else going for it other than being a callback/tribute to the main Dragon Ball storyline.   A lot of fun was had with these future scenarios, depicting heroes who would carry on after Goku: Future Trunks in his alternate timeline, Uub at the end of DBZ, Pan as the heir apparent in GT, and Goku Jr. in this special.  But none of these characters ever really goes anywhere new.  At best, they follow a path similar to the one charted by Goku and his contemporaries.  The moral is that the story is the same no matter who the main character is.  Goku Jr. barely knows the legend of his famous ancestor, but he carries on the tradition nevertheless.   That's the "hero's legacy".  Goku might be forgotten after a few generations, but the things he stood for, the causes he fought for, the example he set, those things are timeless.   And that brings us full circle, because I think the chief mistake of Dragon Ball GT was in trying to de-age Goku to artificially loop his character arc.   Toei wanted to make Goku his own successor, when they probably would have been better off making Pan the main character, having her own goofy adventures with Goku and Vegeta chilling out in the superhero retirement home.  Or they could have skipped ahead and made the series about this Goku Jr. kid, since he has the look they wanted without all the baggage.  GT ended with a ham-fisted morality play about how the Dragon Balls had been overused, which is humorous coming from a studio that couldn't let the Dragon Ball franchise end with dignity.  With the special, they kind of got it right, but only for a moment.

[theantisocialcritic]

Archive Project - August 5, 2014 - DBZ Battle of Gods Review

DragonBall Z: Battle of Gods, 2014. Akira Toriyama 85 Minutes Watch the Teaser Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUJHZekAz3Q&list=FLTPp050rjx1yapFW2pko3pQ&index=27 Tonight marks the opening of the limited one week run of long awaited return of DragonBall Z in it's first major motion picture for nearly twenty years! I'm going to review the movie but first I need to do something of a short retrospective on the series as a whole for either of my readers that hasn't seen nor heard of DragonBall before. Beginning life in the 1980s as a Japanese Comic book, DragonBall was born into the world into that moment when Martial Arts was the coolest thing ever. The story centers around a strange young boy named Goku, a naive little boy that lives in the woods who strangely enough has a monkey tale. After being discovered by Bulma, a budding young scientist who is on a quest for a series of magical artifacts known as the Dragon Balls, Goku begins a journey around the world to become a martial arts master. On his journey he meets many friends such as a desert bandit named Yamcha, a monk named Krillin and a rival martial artist named Tien. He also faces many enemies who seek the same artifacts sought by Bulma such as the idiotic Emperor Pelof and the Demon King Piccolo. After the series concluded a sequel series titled DragonBall Z was created to continue the series after Goku has grown up into an adult, gotten married and raised a young child named Gohan. DragonBall Z is by far the more fondly remembered of the three series (a subsequent third series called DragonBall GT was created but isn't commonly well thought of). DBZ was brought to the West as part of Cartoon Network's famed Toonami programming block in the late 90s/early 2000s. Its reputation skyrocketed amongst young people as part of the first wave of mainstream western anime fandom. DragonBall unfortunately never quite got the coverage as DBZ. In many aspects however the original DB had advantages over the subsequent series. Not to degrade how good DBZ is but DB had significantly better writing cops on hand. DBZ took a greater focus on action, with simplified storytelling and character motivations. It also dropped a lot of the more childish absurdist-fantasy elements of the original series in favor of a more focused cast of characters. Thats not a complaint really, it does work to make a compelling story, but on an intellectual level DBZ isn't as fascinating. It is however ridiculously awesome and fun to watch. DragonBall Z remains to this day a stable of the genre that most fans have a special place in their hearts for. Heck as i'm writing this now i've got my Season 2 Blu-ray playing on my Playstation right now! As most ultra-successful animes do, DBZ inspired a number of feature films promote the show. I've yet to see all of them, but in my personal opinion the best of them work at their best when they are doing world building and/or present genuinely compelling drama. Fusion Reborn, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan and the first Cooler movie are among my favorites while Tree of Might and Lord Slug don't do much for me… With that out of the way, DragonBall Z: Battle of Gods holds significance as the first movie conceived by the show's creator Akira Toriayama since he left after the compilation of DBZ, just before DBGT. There have been some works in the DragonBall universe to come out in the last several years such as DragonBall Z Kai, a full series reedit that cuts out all of the annoying filler that fanboys love for some reason, as well as a couple decent specials. BoG however is a return to form of the series. A deliberate homage to the original series with nods to the best of DB and DBZ from the mind of it's original creator. As a movie, its pretty dang good! One part light hearted comedy, one part doomsday scenario, all anime! Taking place in the immediate aftermath of the events of the series finale story-arc, a powerful Deity known as the God of Destruction or Beerus has sought out Goku believing his power to be that equaling a fellow Deity's. When it turns out he is not, Beerus travels to Earth to find Goku's allies in an attempt to find the one with Godlike power. On a pure comedic and action-packed level, the movie works really well! Its not quite Oscar material but its directly paying homage to itself in a really entertaining way. If anything, BoG has some of the best writing chops that the series has brought to the table since the end of DragonBall. I was actually pretty surprised by how the movie chose to play out it's story arc with the villain. Its was fascinating and caught me off guard. The action of course.. well its a DBZ movie! Its exciting, colorful, ridiculous and fun to watch! Everything I wanted from it! The only major flaw I found was that of a tonal issue around the middle of the movie. The first half is a lot of comedy and character interaction but when the movie switches from party at Bulma's to Doomsday Martial arts fight, it does so rather swiftly and in a way that detracts from the tension of the fight. Granted within ten minutes you won't care because the fight does pick up. It just bothered me that for the first few minutes of the doomsday brawl I wasn't all that invested. Overall though if you like me are a longtime fan of the DragonBall franchise you will love the heck out of Battle of Gods! Definitely set aside time this week and check it out before it leaves theaters! If you've never checked out the series before i'd definitely recommend you to it! There are plenty of free anime sights across the Web like AnimeFreak or dbz.tv where you can watch it for free but if you wanna see it on the big screen you can buy the first season of DragonBall Z on DVD/Bluray at Best Buy for about $20.00. Definitely check it out! Its a whole lot of ridiculous, absurd fun! Thank you for reading! Live long and prosper!

[juridical-angel-blog]

Special Imagine Dragon Ball GT ''The Legendary Super Saiyan Goku & Super Namekian Junior''!

[juridical-angel-blog]

Special Picture ''Goku Child Super Saiyan 2 DBGT''!

[juridical-angel-blog]

Special Poster Dragon Ball GT ''Space Team''!

[juridical-angel-blog]

Special Wallpaper Dragon Ball GT!