I was musing with a good friend about Dragon Ball the other day, which turned into obsessive and very animated musings over wings and nachos with my lovely wife. As an extremely white Canadian male my introduction into anime was very... stunted. YTV introduced me to the Samurai Pizza Cats, a show that legend would have it arrived from japan without translations or transcripts, hence why it was actually pretty funny. The story goes on to say they just aired the episodes in any order and scratched together dialogue that made sense to them... not sure how accurate that is but again... it's pretty damn funny. A few years later a little show called Dragon Ball aired on the same channel, the jokes were watered down, the nudity was covered up and the voices were dubbed, but by god it was anime.
We got one season of the original Dragon Ball series out of YTV then it kind of faded into darkness. It was interesting to us youngins, but somehow didn't satisfy the audience in a way that cartoons punching each other in the face quite could... Queue Dragon Ball Z. Much like it's predecessor this aired as a watered down version of the original but it had a hard rock theme song... so who's to complain? The Dragon Ball Z ran a season... then ran it again... and again... and again... for someone looking to learn more about these characters this was frustrating... we didn't have a lot of internets... and what we had was mostly words. I found out what I was missing with later seasons and got hungry for them. Though not nearly hungry enough to do anything about it... but low and behold someone listened and we got us the next chapter in the story, the Freeza Saga. To understand the frustration in watching this show... imagine someone gives you a brand new puppy, you love this puppy and want to spend all of your time with said brand new friend, however you only get 30 mins with it a week, and a good 15 of those mins the damn thing is asleep. The show was made in Japan with a lot of love, but the kind of love that requires you to meet weekly deadlines... so there's a lot of filler. People yell for excessive amounts of time, people tell back stories, and sometimes people just chase a monkey around a tiny planet for weeks on end. But we put up with it, cause it's all we had. They aired the Freeza Saga over the course of about 3 years, which is equivalent to about 350,000 years to a young person, then it just played over and over and over again... thanks to the internet I again knew what I was missing... what was just beyond the credits and over the exploding hill. I'd have collected all 7 Dragon Balls just to see what happened next. Thanks to the internet I knew it all, but had experienced none of it. I didn't go back for a long while... until... my wife and I never really stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons and we became aware of something called Dragon Ball Z Kai. I of course wrote it off as either a reboot or a reairing of the original show. Oh how I was wrong.
All killer no filler doesn't even do this program justice. This is how the show should have been from day one. They took out all the stuff that was confusing and unnecessary and went back to moving the plot forward at a regular clip. I watched it with my wife and was shocked at how quickly it moved along but didn't miss anything important (any fun stuff I'd fill her in on) but all in all this is a good time. Like picking back up a childhood book and finding a 20$ you stashed in there for safe keeping. It just keeps on giving. They cleaned up some of the artwork and added back in all the glorious brutality that kept this one in high demand to the Japanese market all those years ago. Production of new contents seems to have stopped for a while or at least slowed down, which is a shame. I'd like to see the series as a whole done like this. It's just wonderful.
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