Anime OVA Review: Dragon Ball - Episode of Bardock

Dragon Ball: Episode of Bardock [2011]

Oh god, this. Episode of Bardock is actually released very recently, to tie in with one of the many Dragon Ball Z video games. It's thankfully since been apparently confirmed to be a 'what-if' scenario, and in my own personal headspace more than anything else, this is going to be shelved in the 'non-canon' section. It's just so bizarre and makes my head hurt so much.

Because, you see, "Bardock: Father of Goku", released all the way back in 1990, is an actually great story about Bardock's ultimately futile attempt to defy Emperor Freeza and save his people from annihilation, while at the same time finding solace in the fact that he's seeing strange flashes into the future. 

But somehow, in this OVA, Bardock finds himself inexplicably transported into the past by Freeza's Death Ball. Which has never been shown to be able to transport people into the past. And only Bardock -- not the many Freeza soldiers, not the planet, not the Saiyans, and no other victims of the Death Ball. It's so absolutely stupid that the game Xenoverse 2 actually had to retcon in a "oooh a time-space opened due to the actions of the time-travelling villains!" cutscene to try and even make sense of the sheer stupidity of the premise.

Somehow, Bardock immediately realizes that he's in the past within two or three lines, even though the people talking to him are these weird eyestalked, purple-skinned blob people that claim that the planet is "Planet Plant". Bardock ends up befriending the alien kid in the most dry and perfunctory protagonist-befriends-random-villager scene that honestly has no chemistry at all behind it, and really makes relatively little sense considering that we last saw Bardock as... still an ass, just an ass fighting for his people. I do promote character development, but Bardock's huge 180 feels unearned and completely out of nowhere. 

He fights a bunch of aliens with laser guns terrorizing the Plant-ians, who have some sort of goop that the Freeza Force would later use in their healing chamber. And then the boss of these aliens, a space pirate called "Chilled", apparently an ancestor of Freeza, shows up. It would be easier to take Chilled seriously if he wasn't wearing that shitty-looking weird orange leotard with a neckline as low as Chilled's crotch. God, what a stupid design. Oh, and of course he's just a more banal ripoff of Freeza than Cooler.

Chilled fails to kill anyone, despite the Plant-ians being actually disposable, but just whacking one away causes Bardock to get so angry that he becomes the almighty Super Saiyan, which... is really weird, honestly. I'm not completely opposed against it, but it is so unnecessary to the story, comes out of nowhere, and feels unearned. Bardock beats Chilled, apparently inspires the myth of the Legendary Super Saiyan, and then walks off into the sunset, all victorious...

Honestly, I don't mind it if the OVA actually makes Bardock's character transformation from a rough-and-tough space-pirate-turned-freedom-fighter far more organic, but here he's in flat out designated-hero mode, and not having the benefit of having literal decades between watching Father of Goku and Episode of Bardock, the character disconnect and the lack of development between one to the other really took me out of it, leaving me slogging through the generic plotline of the movie (which had time travel thrown in JUST BECAUSE) feeling more confused than pumped.

And I'm just genuinely baffled that this script is something that they actually put into production and not just fanwank. Because by god, it really feels like fanwank. The premise is dumb, Bardock's character is inconsistent, Chilled is a flat villain in addition to looking stupid, and the whole time-travel and Planet Plant thing honestly just feels jumbled. Not to mention that the Plant people are so damn flat and boring that I was actually hoping that they die. I am not opposed to another Bardock story, because "Father of Goku" made him so cool, but really? Is this the best that they could do? The animation's somewhat pretty, but it's such a piss-poor mix of ideas that don't mesh or work well together, and that makes it just worse than all the other bad movies, whose crime is merely being boring, or merely being bad. "Episode of Bardock" manages to be bad and boring at the same time.