Dragon Ball GT, Episode 1: A Devastating Wish!
Oh yes, this is happening.
So, this month... is where I'll start watching Dragon Ball GT. And I'm going to do episodic reviews the way I do my superhero cartoon episodic reviews, because all of this is new to me. The reason why I didn't do episodic reviews for Super back in 2017 was because I was in a mad rush to just catch up with all the new stories and the weekly anime format, whereas as far as GT is concerned, there are only some 60+ episodes and they aren't going anywhere.
A bit of a disclaimer: I have not seen Dragon Ball GT, and what little I know about it I know only from playing Xenoverse 2. I know some of the characters, some of the upcoming transformations, and I think most of the big-name villains and some plot threads. It's a little more than I knew before starting Super, but I knew a lot of details before reading through Dragon Ball Z and I relatively enjoyed myself through that.
And a bit of a mission statement here for those that is less up-to-date about the intricacies of the multiple Dragon Ball series out there... basically, in the 80's, mangaka Akira Toriyama wrote Dragon Ball and its immediate sequel-slash-rebrand Dragon Ball Z, which has since became the quintessential manga/anime series to make its mark not just on the Eastern market, but internationally. Those were all adapted from the works of a single author, and while there are some filler episodes and non-serial movies, they were more or less following the vision of a single author. Then Dragon Ball Z ended. In the 1996, with the blessing and initial character and concept drafts from Toriyama, Toei made Dragon Ball GT, a sequel set after Dragon Ball Z and starring certain... questionable changes to this beloved fictional world.
Now here's where it gets interesting. While Dragon Ball Z has been received with generally favourable praises from fandoms both east and west, GT... wasn't. In fact, thanks to a particularly atrocious dub, Dragon Ball GT had the stigma of being the black sheep of the Dragon Ball world, the sort of "how not to make an anime-only sequel" and apparently watching GT is more painful than having your balls smashed with a hammer, if some of the more vocal fans in the internet are to be believed. Well, I've recently been gifted the GT DVD box-sets... and I guess I'll find out.
A bit of a mission statement: I don't sit anywhere on the GT-is-good-or-bad fence, since, y'know, I haven't actually watched the series at all. I am, however, told by quite literally everyone to watch the series in its original Japanese audio, which the DVD box-sets thankfully have, so there you go. That's what I'll be working with. Also since this is he first episode, it's slightly longer than what the next couple of episode reviews will be. Depending on how this goes, I'll probably combine some episodes together. We'll see.
Anyway...
We start off five years after Z, or thereabouts, with Goku actually training with Uub (or Oob depending on your preferred localized version of that name) in Kami's Dende's Lookout. It's the final hanging plot thread from the ending of Dragon Ball Z, and I'm not sure about how it's handled here. I personally never gave two shits about Uub -- he's a nice little footnote to the whole Kid Buu saga, and a neat way to wrap that particular arc up. Anyway. Goku and Uub have a bit of a sparring match, nearly blow up poor Dende's house, and then Uub buggers off. Okay? The fight isn't anything particularly special.
We then jump straight into the premise, which is the fact that a very, very old and crotchety Pilaf gang has climbed up the lookout in search for dragon balls. Not the Dragon Balls we all know and love, mind you -- the Black-Starred Dragon Balls, never mentioned before in the series, but apparently created by the Nameless Namekian before he split into Kami and Piccolo. Which... which I guess we'll go with. I mean, it's no less ridiculous than many of the swerving plot twists that the entire franchise as a whole likes to do. What's perhaps more ridiculous is the Black-Star Dragon Balls turning Goku into a kid due to Pilaf using a wrong turn of phrase, and, oh, to inject some additional tension apparently the earth will blow up in a year if they're not gathered back together... and they're spread across all four galaxies after a wish has been made. These pieces of information are just machine-gunned at us without much time to process (from Pilaf in the middle of the episode, and then Kaio/King Kai at the end), and I really wish they had been a bit better with the info-dump. It's not the existence of the Black Star Dragon Balls that's wrong, it's the execution.
Anyway, Goku gets turned into a kid, which... which is the reason why some people hate GT in the first place, and while I won't damn the series because of just this one creative choice, it is a ridiculously strange one that doesn't seem to add much other than to milk that original-Dragon-Ball nostalgia buttons while still riding on the coattails of Z. It's really weird, without accomplishing much in terms of narrative or aesthetics, really.
The vast majority of the first episode is honestly just devoted to the introduction of our main heroine -- Pan, daughter of Gohan and Videl, who the audience would last saw as an adorable pre-teen at the end of Dragon Ball Z. Now she's all grown up into a tomboy that shows off her midriff, trying to go on dates with douchey-looking older boys and accidentally scaring them off when she shows off her utter badassery in single-handedly beating up a small army of bank robbers. Oh, outdated gender values dissonance. Anyway, Pan is... Pan is honestly just generic. It's just the first episode and she could go either way, but at least with her original Japanese audio she just seems like a generic Shonen manga protagonist. Well-meaning but brash. She and Kid Goku spend a bit too much just mucking around and talking to each other before they realize that they're related.
Roshi also shows up groping women, and his entire purpose in this episode seems to just to be a figure that Pan trusts to identify Goku. It's a bit weird, and I really wished they would've allowed Goku and Pan to come to the conclusion themselves. Not only would it feel more organic and build chemistry between the two characters, it would be more hilarious beyond what we got -- "wait, what? This kid is my grandpa?" before immediately cutting straight into a crying Chichi.
As a pilot episode... it's honestly not one that starts off strong at all. Part of it is because of the rather poorly-handled introdumps, as well as the poorly-handled character introductions. I wished the show had committed in one way or the other, and not end up with this weird mess where I don't feel satisfied in either learning about the newcomer Pan, or in learning the new lore that GT presents to me. Oh well. Can't say I'm impressed, but it's honestly not bad bad. It's just tepid. We'll see how I feel as we go on.
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