Dragon Ball Z

Dragon Ball Z has one of those dubs that's extremely popular despite it being such an affront to the original material. Why is that, I wonder? I'm guessing it's mostly nostalgia. The same people who rave about how you have to watch DBZ dubbed are the ones who rant when there's a slight translation difference in any other anime. Hypocrites, in other words. If a company did today to an anime what Funimation did to DBZ decades ago, there would be a huge controversy over it, and you know it.

This will probably be the last Dragon Ball Month. It's not like there's not more DB/Z to cover, but I feel like I don't need to dedicate an entire month to it anymore, I've made most of the points I wanted to make about the franchise. This is one of the reasons I chose Wrath of the Dragon to review last, because it was the last DBZ movie until 2013's Battle of Gods (or maybe you want to count 2008's Dragon Ball: Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!!, which we still don't have over here, with an English dub).

The wraparound material is just explaining or showing bits of the last Penguin Chronicles (one of my old strips) arc that I never finished in strip form. I have fun.

My Dailymotion page

The wraparound material this time covers some of the storyline I never completed in my Penguin Chronicles comic strip, involving Prince Cassus' previous airship, the Gaizu, among other things. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with completing it via these videos (as flashbacks), these are anime reviews, but I guess I just like toying around with the sprites and backgrounds. And the pre-opening credits bit is set to Shunsuke Kikuchi's "M742", or "The Suspensful Intermission".

DBZ Movie 9, Bojack Unbound, is probably my favorite of all the DBZ movies, or indeed DB movies overall. It's nothing deep or profound, but it features a lot of great elements, from its settings to the action to the music. It's not perfect, it's just my favorite.

This will probably be the last Dragon Ball Month. It's not like there's not more DB/Z to cover, but I feel like I don't need to dedicate an entire month to it anymore, I've made most of the points I wanted to make about the franchise. This is one of the reasons I chose Wrath of the Dragon to review last, because it was the last DBZ movie until 2013's Battle of Gods (or maybe you want to count 2008's Dragon Ball: Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!!, which we still don't have over here, with an English dub).

The wraparound material is just explaining or showing bits of the last Penguin Chronicles (one of my old strips) arc that I never finished in strip form. I have fun.

My Dailymotion page

The wraparound material this time covers some of the storyline I never completed in my Penguin Chronicles comic strip, involving Prince Cassus' previous airship, the Gaizu, among other things. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with completing it via these videos (as flashbacks), these are anime reviews, but I guess I just like toying around with the sprites and backgrounds. And the pre-opening credits bit is set to Shunsuke Kikuchi's "M742", or "The Suspensful Intermission".

DBZ Movie 9, Bojack Unbound, is probably my favorite of all the DBZ movies, or indeed DB movies overall. It's nothing deep or profound, but it features a lot of great elements, from its settings to the action to the music. It's not perfect, it's just my favorite.

First, a little tribute to Daron Nefcy's Star vs the Forces of Evil, a show I only got into this year but will miss forever, for some reason. A really fun cartoon that blossomed into a compelling one with continuing story arcs. It's been over a month since "Cleaved", the final episode, but I wanted to sneak something in. I ended up doing more than I thought because I was able to link it to Dragon Ball. Starco forever, but the best relationship was Eclipsa and Globgor.

If the opening bit seems familiar, the first part is from Episode 97, "Mid Year English Dub Review III", but I added a bit more of me fighting recolored Free---er, Golex. You wouldn't believe how difficult it was to customize those fighting poses with the skeleton armor. I need to work on the beam effects, though. I used Dragon Ball Z sound effects for it, as you probably can tell.

Anyway, it's time for me to rant about Dragon Ball Minus and the newest Broly movie. Yeah, I know I'm doing a review of Bardock: Father of Goku, but I spend most of the time griping about the lore mining in the DB franchise in general, and my complaints about Minus in particular. Can we please stop doing Bardock stories? It was enough a long time ago, the mystique is long gone.

My final entry in this year's Dragon Ball Month is the eighth Dragon Ball Z movie, that one with the mountain of muscles who dumb people seem to enjoy. Seriously, Broly is a complete waste, because he's not even really a character. He's such a two(at best)-dimensional villain, and yet they give him this back story to try to get us to sympathize, or at least understand. Sorry, but that only works for characters with personalities. With Broly, it's just a lot of wasted potential. Granted, at least they tried, but maybe they should have shifted that effort into giving him something that defines his role, aside from a lot of screaming, and cry-induced insanity. Sure, most DBZ movie villains are shallow, even in the better movies, but this is a case of aiming high and falling low.

I had to move this video to BitChute because Toei is run by assholes.

I really should cut down on these long pre-credit and post-credit sequences, and I'll probably do that soon, but for now, I spend days meticulously putting them together. It makes me appreciate animation more, because they're barely animated, just a step or two above a slide show. I don't know if I intended them to continue story ideas from my comic strips (which frankly, I can't see anybody getting unless they read them, which nobody did) or they're there to provide atmosphere/pad runtime. I both love and loathe making them. Perhaps I simply want to show off. But if I didn't, I wouldn't be making these videos at all.

Did all of those Freeza soldiers really fit into that one ship? I hope Goku and the gang have a good sense to KEEP the ship when they've defeated Freeza  this time. Trunks blew up the last one, and that was a free fucking spaceship they could have used!