Dragon Ball Z 280
World is fuck, so I’m gonna write about DBZ for a while until the Benadryl kicks in.
Last time, Goku fought Majin Buu, but he wasn’t doing so great, so he upped the ante by going Super Saiyan 3.
This is where I regret falling behind on the manga way back in the Red Ribbon Army Saga, because the Buu arc is where the anime and the manga really start to get off-track from each other. I mean, the same plot points are followed, but in the manga, Goku fights Buu as a Super Saiyan 3 the whole time, while in the anime, he starts at SSJ2 and ramps up to SSJ3... twice. So it’s kind of hard to match up exactly which parts of the anime version are direct adaptations of the manga. They’re probably all there, but I’d really need to do a side-by-side comparison. A project for another time.
This has gotta be one of the best damn episodes of the whole shebang. Goku and Kid Buu are just whalin’ on each other, and this isn’t even the climax of this arc.
Starting out, Goku deals some pretty heavy damage to Buu, and he has some difficulty reassembling himself. But that’s about all Goku ever does to the kid. I mean, if Perfect Cell took a hit like that, he’d just be dead, or so badly wounded that it would take barely any follow-through to finish the job. But with Majin Buu these kinds of enormous blasts are just chip damage at best.
Something else I want to do one of these days is go back and try to figure out when they screwed up Dende’s Buu-Saga character model. I think most of Dragon Ball Super depicts him as a child, as if he never aged after the Cell Games, but I think that only happened because they were screwing him up as far back as 1995.
Here’s the thing, though: Why was Dende so short in the Cell Games? He had aged four years from however old he was in the Namek Saga. Piccolo Junior was fully grown by age three. Maybe this is the Namekian life cycle. You grow into an adult when you’re three, then you turn into a kid again, then you grow into an adolescent about 11 years after that, and then you just sort of switch back and forth for a while. It’s a good thing Piccolo’s off-screen for most of his life.
Yamcha and Krillin are watching this from the Grand Kai Planet, courtesy of King Kai’s telepathic vision. Why isn’t anyone else grabbing a Kai by the back?
And they’re even screening this fight in Hell, which seems kind of strange to me. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, but we’ve got pay-per-view in the commons.
Hey look it’s Cell! And Dr. Gero. You think they talk much at all? Think about how much it must suck for them. Gero was maybe the only other person Cell ever respected, because he trusted Gero’s grand design for him as the perfect being. And Gero must have viewed Cell as his ultimate hope for avenging the Red Ribbon Army. And then they bump into each other in hell, which proves that they’re both failures. All Cell really accomplished was to kill Goku, and now he’s not even dead anymore. I have to figure Cell/Gero interactions in Hell are pretty uncomfortable. At the same time, who else are they going to hang out with?
Why are all these guys still in their bodies? Everything that happened to Vegeta in this arc implies that letting Vegeta have his body after death is a big deviation from the norm. Episode 195 introduced the idea of DBZ’s hell being like this big Arkham Asylum for all the bad guys. I guess technically all those episodes with the dead Ginyus in the Frieza Saga did the same thing, but you could argue that they hadn’t been dead long enough to lose their bodies. Here, now, we’re looking at characters that have been dead for over seven years. I think the premise in Resurrection F was that the damned get to keep their bodies while they suffer, until they finally learn to let go of their past lives and move on. And I can see why Frieza’s such a bitter fuck that he’d still be holding on for over a decade, but what’s Recoome holding out for? Just get reincarnated as a cockroach or something and get it over with.
Also, why is Gero a cyborg in this scene?
And why isn’t Frieza a cyborg? I mean, he wasn’t a cyborg in Episode 195 either, but that seemed to suggest Gero would be fully human in hell, and he isn’t. And if Gero does get to keep being a cyborg, then why couldn’t he keep his hat?
Anyway, Goz and Mez recognize Goku as the guy who messed with them way back in the Saiyans Saga. Hey, why aren’t Raditz and Nappa in this scene? I watched an AMV where they edited Bardock into this, which seems like a good idea. Did they just not go to hell? I find that a little hard to believe.
Anyway, all the bad guys are salty as fuck to see Goku alive and fighting, and Frieza’s actively rooting against him. He’s just jealous because Buu’s doing better against Goku that he ever could.
Meanwhile, over on the classy side of the villain crowd, Cell wonders who Goku’s opponent is, since he’s clearly impressed to see anyone give Goku a tougher battle than himself.
Then Babidi shows up and announces to everyone he used to be tight with Majin Buu. Actually, he claims Buu was his servant, and that he taught him how to fight, which... yeah. I guess he did help Buu practice punching people’s faces off.
This whole moment feels a bit contrived. Babidi’s been down here for a couple of days already. I don’t know how long they’ve been watching this fight. I would imagine the oni switched it on somewhere when Vegito was on deck, so it kind of feels like Babidi was sort of hiding around back, waiting for someone to ask about Buu, so he could jump out and go “Oh, funny you should ask about that! I was Majin Buu’s master for like six hours, nbd.” I almost wonder if he paid Cell five bucks just to set this up. Cell demanded payment in singles, because he wanted to spend it on the vending machine. He’s a sucker, though, because hell may have a big screen TV, but the bill changer on their vending machine hasn’t worked in 10 million years.
Anyway, everyone’s impressed, probably just because Babidi has the inside track on Buu more than anything. You gotta figure most of these guys have heard it all before, and at least Babidi has a newer story to tell. Everyone’s probably sick of hearing how Frieza ate that crab while he killed Vegeta.
But then Babidi wanders off, and in private he cusses out Buu for, you know, killing him, and he roots for Goku to win. Wait, is Bibidi in hell too? You’d think they could catch up on old times.
Meanwhile... well, this shot had pink and yellow energy trails moving across the planet, and it looks pretty cool, but this screenshot doesn’t quite do it justice.
Kibitoshin is worried about their planet, but the Elder Kai insists that it’ll take more than this to wreck it. I want a woman who believes in me the way the Elder Kai believes in the sturdiness of the Supreme Kai Planet. That sounds kind of masochistic when I put it that way. Moving on.
Writing about all those other villains, it starts to come into focus how little I have to say about Majin Buu. I dig the guy, though. Critics complain that he doesn’t have much on personality or motivation, and they’re not wrong, but I think that’s part of the point with him. Godzilla doesn’t give touching speeches in his movies, but he remains a popular character because of the sheer spectacle of him. He’s a force of nature, a symbol of immense power that the human characters can barely comprehend.
In Buu’s case, he’s just this stubborn, impossible obstacle to peace in the universe. So much has gone wrong, and we could wish it all back the way it was, if only someone could beat this pink little turd. He’s got some personality, but his main purpose in this story is to just be there for the other characters to interact as they deal with the problem.
For example, while all this action is going on, Mr. Satan is basically helpless, but he reassures Bee that he’ll protect him, even though Satan thinks this whole adventure is a dream. This says a lot about Mr. Satan. Yeah, Bee had a big part in reforming the Fat Majin Buu, but he means a lot to Mr. Satan as well. It’s easy to write off Satan as a coward and a fraud, but even when he’s retreating into denial, he still wants to be a hero, even when the rest of the world is dead, even when his only audience is a little puppy. And you could have a moment like this with Mr. Satan regardless of the villain, but I think it stands out better when the bad guy is Kid Buu, who doesn’t get in the way with any big speeches or characterization moments of his own.
Back to the fight, Buu gets the drop on Goku, so he decides that this is no time to hold back...
So he drops a Super Saiyan 3 Kamehameha on the little creep. Yeah!
It blows Buu to pieces, but then the pieces just turn into mini-Buus and they all shoot back.
Goku tries to power up for another round, but suddenly he runs out of gas and collapses.
So Vegeta rushes to his side and offers to switch in. Yeah, this whole part is filler. In the manga, Vegeta only gets one turn, and this ain’t it.
However, I think some of Vegeta’s lines during this scene are lifted from the part of the manga where he fights Kid Buu later. So it’s a little weird here. I’m curious how Dragon Ball Kai handled these episodes, because when they started that project it seemed like their goal was to edit out most of the filler from the original DBZ anime, but in some cases that just isn’t practical. Like Pizza and her entourage in the Cell Games. They weren’t in the manga, but they appear in almost every Mr. Satan scene that was in the manga, so Kai had to leave them in, because the alternative was to painstakingly edit them out of every shot. Here, you may not even have that option. You could edit Goku vs. Kid Buu down to just one uninterrupted string of action where he’s fighting at Super Saiyan 3. Cut out this intermission with Vegeta, cut out the opening bit where Goku fights at SSJ2, but I don’t know if the fight choreography would still make sense.
Everyone watching is horrified that Vegeta can’t even land a blow, and Buu starts openly mocking his lackluster performance. What I don’t understand is why Vegeta would even try to fight Majin Buu in his base form. I mean, the real reason is probably because this fight is filler, and Toei didn’t want it to detract from when he actually fights Buu in the next episode. But it makes Vegeta look kind of stupid. He knows better, and we know that he knows better.
So Buu quickly overwhelms him, and he’s all set to fire a ki blast to finish off. Why doesn’t Vegeta just transform to escape it?
But then Goku jumps in and ruins Buu’s shot. He’s still in base form too, but I sort of buy this, because he snuck up on Buu. Even so, this sort of fast-and-loose attitude with power levels is exactly the sort of nonsense Toei did all through Dragon Ball GT, and one of several reasons why GT sucks. It’s not as bad in filler scenes like this one, interspersed among stories based on the manga, but once there was no manga to work from, they just decided there were no rules, and Base Form Goku was almost interchangeable with Super Saiyan 4 Goku. They just used whichever character design they preferred that day.
Vegeta’s astonished, because he thought Goku was down for the count, but he’s already back up and demanding to tag back in.
But Goku ain’t done yet. This is probably the other reason Toei had Vegeta fight in base form here, so it would make it look cooler when Goku defiantly powers up to continue his effort. And yeah, it works. I really do love this scene, but it’s a pretty egregious example of filler scenes messing with the flow of the story.
Goku ramps up to Super Saiyan 2, then back to 3, and we pick up where we left off. And that’s awesome, but the main idea of this fight is that Goku’s having a hard time fighting at this level. To have him drop out of SSJ3 early, then immediately get back up and resume SSJ3 like it’s no big deal... well, that undermines that premise. I guess you can make an argument that it supports the premise, because having Goku power down twice in this fight only emphasizes how volatile SSJ3 really is, but... I dunno.
Anyway, Goku goes back to fighting Buu, and you know, that may be the real reason Toei did that whole bit with Vegeta tagging in. The alternative is to just have SSJ3 Goku fight Buu for two and a half episodes straight, and that would get dull, no matter how well they animated it. You can have spectators observe the battle, and that’s a great way to break up the action, but a moment where Goku rescues Vegeta adds some drama. The manga didn’t do this, but it didn’t need to, because this fight was much shorter in print.
I guess that’s the main defense of filler. Sometimes, it’s not about padding the anime, or working the studio’s ��agenda” into the story, or anything sinister like that. Sometimes it’s just a matter of pacing.
Anyway, in either version, Vegeta watches Goku fighting, and quickly recognizes that Goku is the only one who can fight Majin Buu now. At Vegeta’s level, he’d only get himself killed.
Then he has this whole flashback of his relationship with Goku up to this point, and unlike most flashbacks in this series, this one features all new art, which is pretty awesome. Honestly, they could have used old footage from the Saiyans Saga, but they had already done that recently during the Babidi Saga, so maybe Toei figured they couldn’t do that trick again so soon. Or maybe they knew DBZ wes winding down, so they wanted to do something special while they still could.
Not surprisingly, Vegeta’s main recollection of his first fight with Goku are the parts where Goku beat the shit out of him while using Kaio-ken times three. That fight had a lot more to it than that, and it’s easy to forget that Vegeta dominated most of the battle, mainly because Vegeta himself doesn’t see it that way.
Then we get this part where Vegeta has kittens over Goku beating Recoome, and he begins to suspect that Goku is the Legendary Super Saiyan. Would have been awesome to see another shot of Luffa the Golden Ape from episode 66, but I guess that wouldn’t make a ton of sense in this context, especially now that we know what Super Saiyans actually look like.
For instance...
Vegeta considers that Goku’s secret might be that he’s motivated by a need to protect his loved ones, but even if that’s true, Vegeta has his own loved ones now, so they’d be even if that were all it was. I love how surly he looks here. “Dammit, I can’t believe I care about these stupid people! Now I gotta blow myself up if things get out of hand.”
Also, Vegeta’s observation ties in well with that filler scene from a moment ago. Goku was exhausted, but as soon as he saw Vegeta in danger, he pulled himself together and found the strength to defend him. Goku cares as much about Vegeta as the others.
But the real difference, Vegeta observes, is that he always fought for the fun of it, and for the satisfaction of killing his enemies. Goku, on the other hand, fights primarily to improve himself. That’s why he keeps pushing himself harder, and why he keeps seeing results. It’s not about winning, it’s about not losing. This seems to be a trend with Goku, where he usually says things like “I won’t lose” or “I ain’t lost yet,” instead of “I’m going to win.” Vegeta’s classic mistake is to assume that he’s already going to win, and then he crumbles when things start to go wrong.
And critically, this is why Goku doesn’t kill people if he can avoid it. Well, he killed a lot of Red Ribbon guys, but most of them were cowards and no real match for him. King Piccolo pushed him too far. After that, Goku’s been pretty light on killing enemies, and that’s probably because he reached a point where he became so strong that it got harder to find worthy adversaries. Vegeta would kill his enemies just to watch them die, but in doing so, he denied himself the opportunity to face them in rematches. This was something I read in a Superman comic once, where Superman overpowers an evil-universe version of himself, and he makes the point that his doppleganger kills all his enemies, so he only ever has to fight them once, where Superman has to stay sharp, because he has to mess with those guys over and over again. Same deal.
And you’d think Goku might have killed Vegeta after he surpassed him, like when he became a Super Saiyan, or when Vegeta went Majin, and no one would have blamed him for putting the bastard down. But Goku never did. Not because Vegeta was no longer a threat, but because he knew Vegeta could still catch up to him some day and challenge him again. Goku believes in Vegeta, even when Vegeta doesn’t believe in himself.
It’s like Goku knew Vegeta woud start to turn into a good guy. See, this is where I take issue with criticism of the dub, way back in Episode 36, when Goku asked Krillin to spare Vegeta’s life. The subs focus on Goku’s desire to beat Vegeta on his own, while the dub spends more time on Goku’s hope that Vegeta might see the light if they show him a little mercy. And you can argue that the dub is cramming their own take into the script, except their take doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Funimation’s take in Episode 36 is Vegeta’s take in Episode 280. Call it foreshadowing, or call it putting the cart before the horse, but the line itself isn’t out of bounds, because Goku did hope that Vegeta would learn the value of mercy, and and Vegeta knows it.
Again, let me pause to note that this big epiphany by Vegeta is much more effective when the bad guy is as flat as Kid Buu. We’re not missing anything during this fight because they’ve just been hitting each other, and Buu bites Goku for like half a second while Vegeta reflects.
The main point of Vegeta’s monologue here is that he’s always struggled with the idea of Goku as the antithesis of what he thinks Saiyans ought to be. And yet nothing succeeds like success. Goku’s stronger right now than any Saiyan in the last thousand years. Hell, right now, Goku’s the only Saiyan alive. Vegeta’s dead, and so are all the others. If his kindness is such a noose around his neck, why is he still breathing? Why is he the only Saiyan who figured out how to turn Super Saiyan 3? Why is he the only one who could bite Majin Buu on the head and get away with it? Because Goku’s metal as fuck, that’s why. Because kindness isn’t a weakness at all. It never was. If anything, it’s the lack of kindness that got all the other Saiyans killed.
And maybe Vegeta has to think about that a while longer, but he knows this much, Goku’s better than he is. He’s the best.
But he’s still not beating Buu anytime soon.
There’s a cool spot here where Goku hits him and his upper body stretchs out from the impact, and he waves hello to Mr. Satan before snapping back.
And by “waving hello” , I mean “fires more of this pink crap out of his hands.”
And this right here is the last shot of Cell, I think? There’s some more Frieza coming up, but I’m not sure if we see all the villains again or not.
Babidi’s watching from way back there, because he’s shy. I think Cell would hang out with Babidi. He’s pretty sociable, right?
Anyway, this fight rules, not just because of all the great action and fluid animation, but because of all the cool stuff going on around it. Everyone’s learning an important lesson about friendship today, thanks to Goku punching the crap out of this pink thing. That... sounds vaguely dirty. Let’s move on.
Oh, well, the episode’s over. That’s kind of awkward. Uh. Goodbye!
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