BONUS: Media Club Plus watches Dragon Ball - Part 1 - Episodes 83-85, 93+94

Hey everyone, there are some small technical issues with the most recent Hunter Hunter episode.

Everything's fine, but we only recorded it over this last weekend, and I didn't get a chance to work on it for as long as I would like to in order to make it sounding good.

So instead of releasing that, I'm releasing this, the first Media Club Plus bonus episode where we covered Dragon Ball, the original Dragon Ball.

We're going to be talking about episodes 83, 84, 85, 93, and 94

from the Tian Shinhan arc.

Actually, that first episode is sometimes split into the end of the previous arc.

Again, that's 83, 84, 85, 93, and 94 of the original Dragon Ball.

And the 28th episode of the normal Hunter-Hunter programming will be out next week.

Not two weeks from now.

It'll be out next week.

So we're just shifting one week down.

I just need a couple extra days to finish it.

I should also say that if you're on the Patreon at at friendsofthetable.cash, the next bonus episode,

bonus episode 6, which is Dragon Ball Z part 2, will be out on the 15th of October.

So the week following the next Hunter Hunter episode.

Okay, bye.

I am also, I have extrapolated what I think Dragon Ball is about from

absolutely getting to what is Dragon Ball about because there's about 110

episodes that happened before this.

This is a terrible, this is not terrible, this is a weird way to introduce you to Dragon Ball, but it's the best way to talk about Dragon Ball

in how it relates to Hunter Hunter.

I think.

Like, if you're going to drop someone into a season, I think this is a great slice, especially with what we've been talking about.

I will say all that again in one minute.

You know, one to five minutes.

Okay, there we go.

Welcome to Media Club Plus Bonus, a bonus podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us.

As always, we're brought to you by Friends of the Table.

This bonus, we're watching in 1986's Dragon Ball based on the manga by Akira Toriyama.

My name name is Keith Carberry.

If you're listening to this, you've probably been listening to the main feed of Media Club Plus where we're talking about Hunter Hunter.

This is going to be

heavily involving that discussion.

So if you want to, if you haven't, if you're just finding this in your Friends of the Table feed on friendsofetable.cash, maybe check out that podcast and watch some Hunter Hunter and then come back to this afterwards.

With me.

Oh, Sylvie?

Well, I can ask this.

If you want to, I can ask this later.

I just have a question about

when this is coming out in relation to

Hunter Hunter.

How careful should we be?

We should not restrict what we talk about.

Okay.

We should talk about it as if the people watching have seen

all of Heaven's Arena arc.

Okay.

And I'll say that this might come out a little sooner than that.

And I haven't decided.

And I just think that's not that big of a deal.

And if people want to watch ahead five episodes, then they should do that.

Especially if you were some of the people who have watched ahead the entire series already.

Right, which seems to be most people who are watching first time are having a hard time keeping pace, which I think is great.

I think it proves that

this is a good idea of a show to cover.

I also, before we get any further, I want to say that if you are listening to this, thank you for supporting us.

Yeah, that's awesome.

On friendsatthetable.cash.

I'm saying that not to further funnel you towards something that you already support us with, but to acknowledge that you have chosen to spend your money and time with us, and we're very grateful for that.

And Jack, do you want to finish introducing yourself there?

And I'm Jack.

You can find me on co-host at JDQ, and you can follow me.

No, what?

What's happening?

You can can get any of the music uh featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com I turned around in my head the idea that the bonus episode would have special custom music but we are so busy right now as an outfit

that that I am already ping-ponging between so many different states maybe in future it'll have its own music the episode that aired this week featured me not having written the Hunter Hunter thief yet talking about

episode to be released before we started releasing episodes.

And I listened to it and I fell into the trap that I always fall into, which is I heard myself say that and I thought, but you did it.

What were you complaining about?

But there's always more music to write.

And that's what the complaining is for.

Yeah.

Hey, look, that boulder's going to get back up that hill.

Doesn't matter how many times it falls.

Yeah, exactly.

That's how it goes.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at SwanDerry3000.

You could check out our merch shop at friends at the table.shop.

Hell yeah.

It's so exciting.

A lot of stuff up there.

If you've checked that out recently, depends how recently.

Maybe there's a bunch of new stuff up there that you haven't heard about.

You know, as of like late November.

And

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere, Sylvie Bullet.

Check out the TikTok.

TikTok,

whatever the app is, friends underscore table.

I always always got to say a URL and I don't think it really translates well to that.

No, right.

TikTok.com/slash at friends underscore table.

If you're

weird and you're going to browser TikTok,

if you want to browser TikTok.

I have absolutely posted things from browser TikTok to the show account, okay?

It's it, that's different because it's like a link is different.

But if you're, if you're saying like, you should go to tick tock.com and

follow me on tick tock.com.

It's just so not a website.

You're right.

You're right.

It's not a website.

It's an app.

Anyway, I don't think I said, you can find me on Twitter at Keith J.

Carberry, also co-host.

And you can find the lots of plays that I do at youtube.com slash run button.

We're talking about Dragon Ball today.

And

Jack, I know that you don't know anything about Dragon Ball.

Nothing at all.

Sylvie, I know that you do know about Dragon Ball.

Yeah.

Drake less than you.

Yeah.

How Dragon Ball are you?

I have watched every episode of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super in all of the movies associated with those.

I have never watched Dragon Ball.

Wow.

GT for that matter.

Sure.

But that's the one to miss.

Oh, are we able to bring up GT?

Because I love GT.

Fuck yeah, we are.

No, GT is fun as hell.

Yeah,

baby's a cool villain.

I think it's great that they make Goku a child again.

They're gonna do that again.

They're doing it again.

Yeah, because GT was good and they're righting the wrong of making it non-canon.

I believe that GT was good.

I'd believe it.

To get, I've also seen like some Dragon Ball, but it was like when I was a child, a literal child.

It's mostly Dragon Ball Z and like the video games.

Super never really grabbed me.

I think I might be the lukewarmest on Dragon Ball Z, like as a thing, of the people who've seen it.

But I do like it.

Yeah.

Dragon Ball, I grew up.

I was a huge Dragon Ball, a Dragon Ball Z fan growing up.

And

watched them together, really, because they aired back-to-back on Toonami.

So the first time I was watching Dragon Ball, I was also watching Dragon Ball Z, which is kind of a weird way to

watch.

That's really weird.

That's really weird.

Because it was the early 2000s.

There was no other way to consume it, really.

So I just watched Goku as a kid and then also watched, like, what's the same guy up to in 20 years?

And I always loved both, but it wasn't until I re-watched Dragon Ball for the first time and Dragon Ball Z

like three or four years ago that I realized, oh my god, Dragon Ball's amazing.

I love Dragon Ball.

Yeah.

I love a bunch of stuff that it's doing.

And

it

like struck me how

dissimilar it is, despite being the thing that leads into Dragon Ball Z, how dissimilar it is from the sort of the shonen

like

Hydra that extends out of the body of Dragon Ball Z.

Yeah.

Because it really is an adventure show in a way that

is, I think,

if not like rare, it's definitely less common and like not the lineage that you would expect.

First impressions, maybe, of these episodes.

So, I should say for the people, no, we're going to do first impressions in two steps.

The first step is, I'm going to tell the people who listened what we watched, just in case you have been following along.

We watched season seven of Dragon Ball, the Tian Shenhan

World Martial Arts Tournament arc, episodes 1, 2, and 3, so everyone getting to the tournament.

And then we watched episodes 11 and 12, which is Jackie Chun's fight against Tian Shenhan, the sort of main antagonist of the season.

And I want to start by just saying a little bit of what Dragon Ball is about.

And I want to get

first impressions from Jack also.

Yes, I want to know what Jack thinks Dragon Ball is about before you give any sort of summary.

Yes.

Totally.

Dragon Ball

is the story of

the strongest child in the world.

A 10-year-old boy with a monkey's tail named Goku.

Goku, presumably because people have figured out that

unchecked and untrained, he could wreak disastrous worldwide havoc, is being trained by an extremely horny old man called Master Roshi, who maybe turns into a turtle or has something to do with a turtle.

He definitely has an extremely sort of like dopey turtle following him around at all times.

But I've also seen images of Master Roshi with a turtle shell on his back.

Goku

travels around the world finding himself in shows of strength and fighting villains who either seek to beat the strongest boy in the world or don't know he's the strongest boy in the world and perform some sort of injustice that he has to get involved with.

What is it?

Dragon Ball?

Oh, that's not important.

True.

It's not.

Don't fucking matter.

I don't know.

They didn't come up at all.

I have to imagine that he has to get them all.

I don't know how he can get stronger.

But apparently,

maybe if he gets the Dragon Balls, he will be stronger.

You can see them in the title cards.

They're like these sort of.

They look like an orange crossed with a bowling ball.

His friends are a

kind-hearted muscle himbo called Yamcha and a

Mafioso baby.

Yeah, Krillin is a monk.

Krillin's a monk.

Was a monk.

He got bullied out of the monastery and chose to become a

chose to become a martial artist.

He's not a baby?

He is the same age as Goku.

He might even be singing.

He is Goku's Kilowa.

If you want to put it that way.

Sure.

Well.

No, he's not like relationship-wise, but he's like the best friend to the protagonist.

Yes.

And he's Goku's best friend.

The same age best friend.

You could make the argument that actually Bulma is Goku's Kilua.

That's a good point.

That is a good point.

Which is also my favorite.

So it is worth saying that.

And Krillin is Leorio.

Sorry, Krillin.

All of these characters.

Because we know Krillin canonically gets to have sex at some point.

That is true.

That is canon.

Yeah.

All of these characters show up in their first appearance in these chunks, dressed up nicely to go on a plane ride.

But the vibe is so mafioso that I genuinely thought they were mafiosos who had arrived to threaten Master Roshi.

Yeah, they're really just for no reason just in their Sunday best

in a way that is odd.

Because this is sort of like

this is your introduction, but it really is like the gangs getting back together, is like the thing.

They haven't seen their friend appreciate this for a while.

Yeah, there's also a pig who wears suspenders.

Yep, Oolong.

Uh, uh-huh.

Okay, not named in

these episodes.

So, throughout my notes, he's just the pig.

There's

a fair descriptor.

These people talk.

The Doby Turtle talks.

His name is Turtle.

The pig talks.

His name's Oolong.

There is a floating

cat that can possibly shapeshift.

This is Yamcha's best friend/slash husband named Puar.

The pig can also shapeshift.

They never bring this up.

Oh, interesting.

There is Bulma, who is a blue-haired

lady in a yellow jacket.

She seems fairly normal.

She's the richest woman in the world.

She's also like the smartest woman in the world, too.

She's the richest and smartest woman in the world.

Yeah.

And then there is a woman.

Oh my god, my wife.

Huh?

A woman.

Well, there is a woman who, and this is genuine, this was genuinely baffling to me

with no context.

I have a pretty high,

as you will have heard from previous Hunter Hunter episodes, I have a pretty high tolerance for encountering odd things and just sort of going like, well, guess that's the way it is.

This genuinely confused me.

There is a blue-haired woman who, I think, when she sneezes,

what's her temperament like?

She's lovely.

She's so nice, and she has like

a metered, careful, pleasant voice.

And she doesn't want to kill.

And then when she sneezes,

she turns into a blonde-haired woman with a bow in her hair who regularly produces like high-caliber weapons and shoots people with them and she hates everybody except Goku so when she's in nice lady mode she's like yay go Goku and then when she's in evil lady mode she's still like yay go Goku but she's like I will smash in anybody's faces who threatens Goku this woman is was named several times but I didn't have subtitles and the English actors kind of swallowed their lines with the result being that I got through five five of these episodes with this nightmare lady, only knowing her as the woman who occasionally changes her name.

She has two names depending on

what you're watching and if it's in English or Japanese or the manga.

Her name is Lunch.

No, you're kidding me.

No, her name is Lunch.

L-U-N-L.

It's localized as Launch.

Yes, but it's Lunch.

Yeah, her name literally is Lunch.

Yeah.

But it is commonly, they say Launch a lot in the English dubs.

And we won't get into this in these episodes, so I don't feel like it's jumping ahead.

No.

What's her deal?

So I can explain.

I can explain first.

Yeah, let's explain lunch first.

Here's the explanation for lunch.

It's the second time.

They never explain it.

Oh, really?

Yes,

it just is a thing that happens.

It's always a problem.

It's basically a joke on Master Roshi's like trying to

be the

nice one's

super old and appropriate lecherous boyfriend and she sneezes and attacks him and brutally hurts him instead and that's the only that is the only thing that she does but they kind of lose track of that as the impetus for the character and instead she's just there

in scenes to uh but she doesn't really cause problems at least in the stuff we saw she just sort of it's like the weather changing sometimes

she tried to kill a few people it's just that they blocked the bullets they can't die.

Nobody can die in this story unless it is meted.

Unless it is prophesized.

That's what the impression I get.

But yes.

Okay.

Where do we want to start properly?

Because I think that that is mostly it.

I think that's basically what happens in Dragon Ball.

This crew goes rolling around.

I'm a little confused about

where the aliens get a

okay.

So weirdly, it's right after what we're gonna watch.

You're kidding me, really?

Yeah, well, okay, so let's start.

Let's start super high-level.

Like, we're just gonna tell you stuff about Dragon Ball just so that you have kind of a common understanding of this world.

Uh, so that we're not always just throwing stuff like a shapeshifting cat who never actually shapeshifts, and also the pig friend who they don't even mention shapeshift but totally can.

Um,

uh, Dragon Ball is the story of Goku.

Goku is an alien.

He crash lands on Earth and is found by his grandfather, Grandpa Gohan.

His tail causes him to turn into a giant and sort of unstoppable, unthinking ape monster.

Which did not appear at any point in these episodes.

Well, it happens during the full moon.

He's a werewolf?

He's a were

ape.

Yeah.

Oh.

So they regularly pull out his tail so that this doesn't happen.

But he did.

This is subtext, basically.

He did crush and kill his grandfather by mistake

to death.

And

so yes, he does eventually become a student of Master Roshi because his grandfather was also a great martial artist and sort of grew up together with Roshi.

And the dragon balls are magical balls that when you get them all together,

a giant, you know, 500-foot dragon appears and grants you one wish.

Does he want his granddad to come back?

No, that never comes up.

Yeah.

They bring a lot of people back to life with those balls.

Yeah.

Never his grandpa,

but part of it is like he joins Bulma, who's looking for them, I believe, in Dragon Ball.

Yeah, Bulma wants to wish herself the perfect boyfriend.

Yeah.

She's very Kathy ack

in Dragon Ball sometimes, but that's fine.

The newspaper comic strip, Kathy.

Yes.

Just to be clear to people.

I also want to point out, I'm pretty sure the alien stuff, like Goku coming from space, is like, isn't that

Z where that gets added, right?

I don't think it's

added per se, but I think it is explained and fleshed out.

It's deeply explained, and it sort of becomes all about that.

But he is, I believe, in Dragon Ball, he is found like in a spaceship.

Hi, everyone.

This is wrong.

I looked it up just to double check.

And no, Goku was not planned to be an alien from the start.

And they didn't reveal it in Dragon Ball.

They revealed it at the very beginning of Dragon Ball Z.

It's made even more confusing because people in Dragon Ball are constantly referencing Goku as he must be an alien or

you know stuff like that he gets scanned by a robot and the robot is like alien so i guess i just always had it in my head that he was sort of an alien the whole time but no it was not an alien the whole time okay bye

Okay, okay.

I just wanted to check on that because, like, like I said, I don't have as much experience with Dragon Ball other than bits and pieces here and there.

Yeah.

So

maybe we want to save this for later discussions, but Keith, since you brought up the moon and Goku turning into a big ape, did anybody happen to notice a reference about the moon that was dropped in one of these?

Yes, I have the quote written down.

Yeah, this baffled me.

I didn't know how literally to take it.

So, in the

sorry, Dre, you can tell the story.

Well, no, Jack, what was baffling to you?

I believe that.

So, this is a tournament arc, and we will.

It is no accident that we've chosen a tournament arc after finishing Heaven's Arena.

Midway through one of the fights,

someone says that Jackie Chun destroyed the moon.

Sure, yeah, he did.

He did.

Jackie Chan is a martial artist who is a unique character.

He is definitely not someone in disguise, and we definitely won't get into that.

Yes.

Yes, Jackie Chun destroyed the moon?

Yes, because at the 21st world martial arts tournament,

Season Chun came out, and Goku saw it and turned into a great ape while he was fighting Jackie Chun.

And so Jackie Chun blew up the moon with a

Kamehameha or a Kamehameha.

Okay, that's interesting.

If you're a Fortnite kid.

Oh, yeah.

And the moon is gone now?

Just gone?

Yeah, until they wish it back at some point.

Yeah.

Okay, so one wish per person or one wish per

dragon balls.

So when you collect all the dragon balls, you get one wish per time that you collected them and then what happens is that they are scattered to the four winds and for one year they are indistinguishable from normal stones and then after a year they turn back into dragon balls and you can collect them again.

Is there some sort of device that helps them find dragon balls?

There sure is Bulma invented a dragon ball radar.

I don't know how Bulma learned about the dragon balls but this is the Goku just runs into her and she's like I'm collecting dragon balls and explains all of this to him in like literally the first episode.

Do the dragon balls regularly sort of get like snatched up by villains and then they have to go to the villain's lair or do they tend to stumble upon the dragon balls sort of in situ in a creekbed or something?

Almost every time that they get the dragon balls, it's because they're trying to stop a bad guy from trying to get them first.

For the most part, or usually it's into

like, I don't know, I want ice cream.

Let's go find the dragon balls.

And then we just jump into jets super quick.

But yeah,

during Z and Dragon Ball, it's yes, it is.

The dragon balls are way more important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

How many are there?

Seven.

That doesn't sound like a lot.

No, but they are scattered before anywhere.

Yeah.

Across the whole world.

And they're the size of your fist.

They're pretty small.

Okay.

And usually a bad guy has some of them.

Is there like a can they tell how many have been found at any given moment?

They've got them in their possession, I think.

There's no like counter in the top right corner of the Dragon Ball.

There's no like Michael Howards.

Yeah.

There's no scoreboard.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

But the Dragon Ball.

Also, I feel like worth mentioning because I know there is someone screaming at their

podcast player that we haven't mentioned it yet.

This is also like, I believe, a loose adaptation of the classic story Journey to the West.

A lot of the characters are based on that.

Getting that out of the way before

time passes to mention it.

I'm not familiar with Dragon Ball, but I am familiar with Journey to the West.

And I was in a call yesterday with Keith and Austin.

And Keith and Austin were talking about how it's Journey to the West.

And it was like a picture just snapped into focus for me.

I was like, oh, shit, he's got the staff.

Yeah.

He's got the

cloud.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's the hopping vampire.

Oh, is that?

Chao Tzu is based off of that little vampire dead guy.

I don't know who

is the

one who says the slur at Krillin.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

The little guy.

Oh, you watched the dub, too.

Should we say that?

Wait, say again?

That we watched the dub so people know that.

Oh, yes.

We watched the dude.

I recommended for people who weren't sure to watch the dub because I think that there's

just a lot in it that I like.

There's a lot of performances that I think are really fun.

There's like they do a good job of like localizing a lot of stuff.

And

there's

like

there's nothing that you, I think, lose from watching the sub, but I just think there's a lot of fun stuff in the dub that you would miss.

Yeah.

So,

but yeah, the jung-shi is

Chu-Tzu.

Shall we start at the beginning?

I believe that's a good idea.

Because the episodes open with an absolutely banger narrator.

If Hunter Hunter's narrator is an omniscient,

faintly menacing

guide.

to the viewer and Goan.

You know, this person is saying, the Hunter-Hunter narrator comes in and says, Goan has just had his first fight with Hisuka, but he has not yet realized the full extent of his power.

What will Goan do when Hisuka's power is revealed?

And you're like, shit, what will he do?

This narrator arrives and he says, the greatest of all teachers is life.

This guy has the affect and tone of a 80s, 70s, and 80s educational film.

And in fact, he plays into it further later in the episode where he says, face front, students today's life lesson things aren't always what they seem at the beginning of episode two

he gives a brief pitch for the ocean as a concept

It's all real big, you know, like

you know the mighty Amazon River stretches from as the as you hear the projector clicking This guy's fantastic.

Yeah, I love the narrator.

Yeah, he also unlike the hunter-hunter narrator this narrator wants to promote the show

Like he ends each episode by being like join us next time on the exciting next episode of dragon ball yeah whereas the hunter hunter guy is sort of just like we'll go and die let's find out

don't watch this no

um and we begin with a classic just a classic image in fiction animals driving little cars yeah god it's so good it's so good so this is a filler episode um this is not in the manga.

Konkichi, who we're going to meet in a minute, is not

invented for the anime.

But I just thought that this episode gives like a really good peek into

some of the actual in the anime canonical

sort of adventure kind of vibe and Goku kind of just like walking around, meeting people, doing stuff, helping people out

that the tournament arc is kind of missing

a lot of.

But sorry, go ahead.

We're tiny,

big animals driving tiny little cars.

Yeah, we have a bear.

We have, I think, a hippopotamus or something, a rhino,

and a tiger or something.

Yeah.

Definitely a tiger.

Definitely a tiger.

And there's an ape, I think.

It's a tiger, an ape, and a boar.

A boar.

They are driving a little car and they're chasing a

like a.

Is the one I'm looking for, Kitsune?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Little fox guy.

Yeah.

A little fox guy in another little car.

And there's a little chase.

They catch him and they start beating him up.

They say, beat.

They say beatings for breakfast.

And then as they're beating him up for breakfast.

Oh my God.

The background dialogue.

There's some just really good background dialogue in it.

The background dialogue, one of them says, beatings to breakfast of champions.

It's so good.

It's so good and it's like

it's just like i i mean

this guy plays 9 000 background characters in dragon ball like it's just like oh it's the guy that plays the big guy yeah

and these lines a lot of the background lines seem to be ad-libbed um

or at least that's the impression that i get that you know the the vocal director said all right we just need five lines from you beating a guy up and they're like yeah beatings to breakfast of champions um there's like lots of background dialogue of like later they're in an airport, and someone's like, The hotel breakfast this morning was amazing.

It's it's very pleasant.

Uh, Goku arrives, and presumably, is this fair to say about Goku?

He cannot stand to see injustice.

Um,

or does he just like kicking the shit out of people on season opportunities?

I'm gonna say that it's a little bit less of A and a little bit more of B than you would think, yeah, but it's definitely still A there, though.

Yeah, like Goku is someone who is

like

super curious about the world

and

wants to know what's going on and doesn't really understand everything that he's he lives his entire life as a human on earth and never really gets used to it

and

and it and it just he just like if someone's getting beat up he would be like why are you doing this if he can

you know what I mean but he would just stop though he's like hey everybody chill out let's see what's what's going on here

that's not what happens here he kind of just escapes with Konkichi but

yeah Goku is like kind of a weird character in that he's not super consistently a justice seeker what is interesting is that

And we're gonna, we should get right to Goku and Gon

as

similar protagonist characters.

I think Goan is an extremely consistent character, at least in terms of what we have seen.

Goan is like a

perfect straight line of intent.

Whether or not that intent is necessarily always wise,

I don't ever really feel like I am

adrift in Goan's characterization.

And this might just be that I've spent more time with Goan than I had with Goku, but I think consistency and specifically sort of consistency in his actions is something that I really associate with Goan.

He knows what he wants to do.

He points himself in that direction.

He hits it with his head as hard as he can.

Yeah, and

I think that that's also true with Goku.

I think that the difference between them is more the situations that they're put in and less a major difference in their character,

like in their reliability as characters.

I don't know.

Does that sound fair?

Does that make sense?

I think so.

Do you think that that's about right, Sylvie and Tre?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, sure.

I'm so curious about...

We might get into this one day.

Dragon Ball Z, Goku is older, right?

Yeah,

Google is an adult.

He's got kids.

And I doubt that we're going to see Goan as an adult.

But I am very curious about what a Goan-like character as an adult would look like.

There is a horrible answer that I can already feel bubbling in my soul, which is that an adult who is like Goan looks like Jean.

Yeah, I was going to say, like.

But I don't want that to be true, you know?

You mean literally look?

You mean is like?

No, I mean is like

personality.

Yeah.

Is someone who is just like, you know, I'm living the world at 110%

and I am existing in it, but that comes at the exclusion of my relationships with others.

I could argue Goku is like this.

Yes, Goku is very very much like this.

Yeah.

Do people like Goku out in the world?

I mean, other than being like a protagonist, he is a very liked, well-liked protagonist.

Yeah, people love him.

Yeah.

Yeah, Goku's great.

It's sort of like,

it's hard to even talk about how closely aligned

I think Goan is written as a Goku-like.

Oh, yeah.

And I think it's it's it's not just deliberate,

but it's like

it's like purposeful.

Like it's like

I think that I think that over the course of Hunter Hunter, we'll see

Tagashi

doing things with what his idea of a Goku character

would do

and be like.

Goku does not know that he can't run to an island.

No.

And I think that this Goan would know that fully.

I think that Goan would be like.

I think it back.

He can run to an island.

That's the.

Yeah.

He can.

He's confused that he's being told that he can't do this because he can.

And I didn't know that

at that point.

So my read in that moment was,

this kid is so weird.

This kid's understanding of the world is so weird that he doesn't understand that you can't run to an island.

Boy, did I have egg on my face in a later episode.

But

also, I knew we were going to a tournament arc, but I didn't know why.

And because there is one.

Konkichi's accent, which we're going to talk about in a second because it's amazing,

confused me a little.

So I wrote down, did he say the world's large lunch tournament?

He did not say that.

And it was only later that I was like, oh, it's the world martial arts tournament?

uh, and that cleared that up for me.

Uh, but Konkichi is like, All right,

we need to get you some plane tickets to get to Papaya Island where the world martial arts tournament is taking place, and uh, it's gonna cost a lot of money, but you helped me out of a bind, uh, so I'm gonna make sure that I get you there.

Yeah, yeah,

and okay, we got to do the accent, we gotta talk about the accent.

We do

He talks like

a heavy New York Oliver Twist.

For some reason.

You know,

I don't know why he does this.

No, there's no reason why he should sound like a tiny little New York Oliver Twist.

But he does.

The Brooklyn Artful Dodger.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it makes sense.

Hey there, brother.

Well, that was cool.

You saved me.

You're my brother.

This fucker talks like Hulk Hogan.

He sure does.

And he does it.

And he talks a lot in this episode.

This is my first encounter with Dragon Ball, and it's this fox from Brooklyn.

Yeah, who can't shut up?

Who can't shut up.

And rapidly reveals himself to be a criminal, but one of the good kinds of criminals as opposed to the bad criminals.

He just does things like robbing rather than beating people up,

as far as we can tell.

I don't know if it's true.

And And he really robs.

I think he just steals.

Pickpocket.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's pickpocket.

It seems like

he got in bad with these big, bigger, tougher animals, and they put him up to crimes because he's not.

Yeah, he's a non-violent offender.

Though, when he pickpockets the guy in the airport, it does look like he's punching him square in the dick.

I mean, that's a pretty good way to distract someone so you can pickpocket them.

So enough.

So if you get the crime dragon balls and you get all eight of them, you can punch someone squarely in the dick with no repercussions.

Sure.

I saved them all up.

I wish.

So Kokiji takes Goku to the airport to be like, the only way to get to an island is to fly.

Goku could have been at the island way sooner if he just didn't.

He just didn't have.

It's not that he didn't have the confidence to tell Kokiji, like, no, I can get to the island.

He just is like kind of a go-along to get along guy.

He's excited to go on a plane too.

He wants to go on the train

plane.

Yeah.

Oh, I got to go on a plane.

Like, we find out later that he's already got the flying Nimbus.

Right.

When he eventually gets there and talks to Master Russia.

The training is not the exciting bit for him.

It's the plane.

He's being in a plane.

Yeah.

And I would, I get it too because it's an Akira, it's like an Akira Toriyama plane and he just draws the greatest vehicles of all time.

Yeah, untouchable.

Absolutely untouchable in terms of vehicle design.

It is like deeply 90.

What if the compact cars of the 90s were squished down into these little things?

But then also he's doing the same thing with fighter jets and helicopters and tanks.

They're just like

everything's compact and tiny and squished, but also futuristic, but also 90s.

I think like every capsule corp design

in the show, like the technology that they have is just like fantastic, like you're saying.

Like they do all these really wonderful, rounded, um, like sides to everything.

I'm thinking specifically of, like, a motorcycle that Bulma has in the uh manga that I read.

Um, it reminds me a lot.

Oh, go ahead, Sylvie.

No, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, like, the design sensibilities are very much like what you said of the cars of the time, but like compacted to

in the same way.

It's like if a like a

boardwalk impressionist was doing a portrait of them.

Um, oh, yeah, uh, Keith has linked it in the chat, the bike that I had in mind.

God, look at this.

They're so good.

The things it reminds me of, I mean, obviously, it reminds me of the way that Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli draws vehicles.

Miyazaki is another absolute king of vehicle design, especially military vehicles.

All of the Ghibli planes and tanks and armored trains and things are just so cool looking.

The other thing is that it reminds me a lot of

the Belgian Lean Clare style of illustration that you see in like Tintin comics.

There's something very

50s

Europe about the way a lot of these vehicles are designed.

I'm blinking some of the art.

Oh, sure.

This is a piece of art by Yves Chalande from the book Le Jeune Albert.

I don't know

how this work was in conversation with the manga artists of that time, but they would have been, you know, presumably coming up in the world, sort of the world of illustration at around the same time.

And I wonder if there was some overlap there.

Real quick.

They're contemporaries, right?

Like, oh, sorry, go ahead, Keith.

Oh, just to get this out of the way, Sylvie mentioned Capsule Corp.

Bulma's family owns, invented, and owns the company/slash technology.

Capsule Corp puts

anything you could think of into these tiny little capsules, like poke balls, but they're like shaped like sort of like a big aspirin and you click a button on the top and throw it and it just like poofs into a car or an apartment or a picnic or it's very jetsonsy it's very jetsonsy yes and also there's dinosaurs

yeah there's all sorts of um

interesting creatures in this uh world and that is consistent with hunter hunter too you know this vibe of like

uh well well, at first I thought it was just people and animals, but then as it went on, it was like, there are dragons in the background, there are dinosaurs, there are sort of demons,

there are like weird inky black masses with two sort of eyes on stalks popping out of the top of their head.

There is something that looks like Green Green Jellybean Man's tough older brother

at some point.

It is very much that same vibe.

And there's email.

And there's email.

Is there email

in Hunter-Hunter?

Oh, no.

I mean, there is email in Dragon Ball once they invent email in Dragon during Dragon Ball Z.

Yes.

Is this a

thing that is consistent with Shounen anime generally?

This sort of like breadth of character designs beyond the human?

Or is this really a Dragon Ball thing that

Tagashi is picking up on when he makes these incredible Hunter Hunter background characters.

I think something that it kind of comes back to is how we talk about that Dragon Ball is way more of an adventure series than a like battle series

in terms of like other shounen stuff.

Hunter Hunter, the same way, it's more about the adventure tone, while like

at a certain point, the genre shifts way more to like

the I mean Dragon Ball Z is a perfect sign of this.

The genre shifts to just fights between two characters who is the strongest.

Yeah, because so much less about like weird guys yeah there's less exploration and like part of that like there's some of that i'm not gonna say that's completely gone in dragon ball z i just think that it's like um the beginning of that trend in the sort of like um industry i guess uh i might be talking out of my ass here but at least that's how it looks to me no i basically agree i think that it is like

much less of a shonen thing and much more of an adventure show thing that like dragon ball highlights really well because of like the just the stuff that akiratoriam has seemed interested in drawing in in the 80s yeah uh that then kind of fades as

like

in the 90s the the uh the

the genre sort of constricts to be very Dragon Ball Z like

before I think we're probably in a widening phase now of the genre.

Yeah.

I wonder if we're going to ever talk.

Like, I'm sure we will at some point talk about more modern shounen, but it's in a really interesting place right now, I think.

Yeah.

Where a lot of stuff is sort of recurring from earlier

trends.

Which may have a lot to do with the massive popularity of the 2011 Hunter Hunter series.

Yeah.

Could be.

I think that it's all part of it.

I think the

resurgence of Hunter Hunter is a thing.

I think that Dragon Ball Super coming back and driving people back to look at older Dragon Ball is part of it.

I think it's just no one wants that comparison thrown in their face.

Fair.

Dragon Ball Super.

I forgot what I was saying.

Sorry.

No, you're all good.

You're all good.

I was pretty much just repeating what I said earlier, where it's like,

I think this was a more common thing,

like prior to the heyday of things like

I don't know I feel like kind of like hacky for keep using Naruto as a like measuring stick but I think it like is very much a

it's such an important delineation

like it was a hugely pop like the number one most popular one um in a while I think One Piece is probably the most similar to this vibe, and even that sort of ends up becoming more of a battle anime later on.

Though

I fell off one piece like halfway through, which is to say 600 chapters in.

So I don't know if I'm wrong about that.

I think that like...

Yeah.

I don't know if I would call it the most common thing in Shounen anymore, though, to have this sort of like

world building that doesn't really necessarily...

Or like character designs in the world that gesture at world building, but aren't really ever expanded upon.

It's just, yeah, of course there's tiger people here.

What do you, what do you,

there have always been tiger people.

It's part of the tapestry of the world.

And it's not a plot point.

It's just like it is the composition of the place.

And it's very consistent that they show it to you, but it's not

like...

It's always, it's just like part of the vibe of it.

And I think, I think a good way to answer this question really briefly is like, if you watched a bunch of

of the anime and the genre of the last 20 years and then you went to go watch Dragon Ball, you'd be like, wow, this feels way different.

It feels different.

It looks different.

The things they're interested in are different.

The pacing is different.

Everything is different.

It's super different.

They do a little crime at or rather Konkichi does a little crime

at the airport.

It falls apart in just like a sort of classic fast way.

He manages to steal some tickets and then

drops them in the shock of being discovered.

But the people who discover them think that he has found them instead of stolen them.

And it seems like they're prepared to, you know, give him a reward or something.

But he is already scarped.

He's run off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To me, it seemed like he was like trying to help Goku by committing a crime and then sort of decided that he didn't want to.

Or maybe it's that he got cold feet because he ran into the security guard.

Yeah, I think so is the latter.

It's a little bit unclear.

Well, they have the he has the monologue later on

about because he hands the stuff over so quickly.

It's like, so somebody dropped this.

And then later on, he does have the monologue about like, when I met you and you let me call you brother,

you know, it changed me.

I, you know, I thought I could be a good person for the first time.

Like, this is him turning away.

This is his first sort of refusal of crime.

Yeah, possibly.

Yeah.

But, well,

only one thing for it.

Gotta go to the elephant parade.

Gotta go to the circus parade.

To scam scammers.

Beautiful elephant parade.

And now we move into much like animals driving cars, another classic, classic piece of fiction in the world.

Scamming the man with the hit the thing with the hammer to make the bell ring.

Scamming scammer.

And you're stronger than he thinks you are and you hit it and it breaks the machine yeah i just love how goku just being like totally led by the hand from place to place by konkichi he's just like

okay you gotta hit this thing with the hammer and he's like okay

so it's kind of been go's thing right yeah like og dragon ball that he's just like i'll tag along i like hanging out with you yeah

Sure, whatever.

I'm trying to get to the island.

Konkichi seems to be helping with that.

Let's go.

Let's do it.

I like to be the circus.

I love Goku sort of starting to awkwardly call him brother back.

Like, it just doesn't sound natural coming out of his

cute performance.

Very, very funny.

I love, love Goku in Dragon Ball.

The English VO from the Funimation dub is so good.

But it's like, okay, brother.

Yeah.

This guy, you know, I'm very easygoing.

I'm just going to go along with this guy.

They

win some money from this game and are about to leave when like a Cadillac pulls up, uh, and inside this Cadillac is a witch.

Okay, an actual

Konkiji says, Brother, who is this woman?

And I wrote down, hmm, it's important to have an audience insert character because he said exactly what I was just thinking in that moment.

Uh, this witch is she's wearing pink, she's wearing a black witch's kind of cape, she has pink hair, she is floating on a crystal ball.

Or everything below her torso is a crystal ball.

Can't tell.

Potato, potato.

Potato, potato.

I think I wrote down her name.

Her name is Barba.

Yeah.

She is a witch.

And she sort of looks Konkichi dead in the eye and is like, I know.

I know your deal.

Goku, in this sort of very gone-like, placid, naive

approach, is just sort of like, yeah, well, he's helping me.

He's my brother.

We call each other brother.

And Baba is like,

I know who you are.

And it causes Konkiji to have a really good,

very,

I'll finish my sentence and then I'll talk about that.

It causes Konkiji to have a big meltdown

where he sort of goes off and starts coming apart at the seams.

This doesn't happen too much in these episodes.

I'm comparing it directly to the move that Tagashi does all the time where he just positions the camera behind somebody else or other.

They become our point of view character for often an extended period of time.

And we don't really get that here in these episodes.

Instead, what we get is it will zoom into someone's face and we will hear the thought that they are thinking, very much like a sort of thought bubble with some reverb applied to it.

So we know that they are not sort of speaking it out loud.

The other Dragon Ball move is just like having characters say things out loud.

Oh, just being like, Yeah, they'll just be like, I don't trust you since you did the whatever.

Yeah, or, you know, there's the part he runs, uh, he runs around the corner with his little drink.

Uh, and like, basically, instead of, I think they do, but it's something they would do if he didn't do this literally.

Instead of thinking into his head like he did when Babu was there, he just starts saying all that stuff out loud.

Like,

I can't believe she didn't know, you know, she knew who I was.

How is it gonna blah blah or whatever?

And I think that in this scene, we do get a little bit more of the sort of more

involved Tagashi approach, where the camera follows Konkichi down into this little alley, and we get a full scene of him being like, all right, she's seen through me.

Here's how this affects me.

Here's how this might affect my relationship with Goku, etc., rather than what we get in later episodes, which really is just the thought bubble coming out of someone's head and them saying, you can't beat me.

I'm too strong.

Or whatever.

We do have a lot of TN thought bubbles.

Tien and Roshi's fight, we get a lot of like thinking back and forth to each other.

Yeah.

Like Tien will think, I can't believe this old man has got my number.

And then Roshi will be like, or I mean, no, sorry.

I mean, Jackie Chun.

They say it straight up.

Like, he says it to the guy while signing up.

Yeah, I was so fun.

I remember it being way more of a like thing, but I guess that was the first time around.

No, that's the only person that he reveals it to is just because he only has five minutes to sign up where he's disqualified.

So he's like, it's me, you know, don't tell that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Go hole.

Are you saying you just get scary voices?

I just went, oh, because your voice was so good.

Yeah.

Yes.

It does speak to the

kind of clarity and ease with which Togashi and the anime adapters are able to do these like really extended extended sequences of drifting perspective in the show, you know, where it will become Tonpa's episode

for a while.

Or it will become.

I think a good example of this is in the fight with

Hisuka and Castro.

Although our protagonist's characters are watching that fight and we get some of their reactions,

the perspective really is embedded so firmly in that match.

You know, we are not really watching this through Gun or Killua or Wings eyes.

You know, we are there with Hiseker or with Castro, depending on who is kind of playing the move at that time.

Whereas in the later fights in these episodes, it is very much like our point of view character is what's the baby called?

Krillin?

Krillin.

Yeah, Krillin is Mafia baby.

And the boss baby.

Yeah.

Yes.

Standing on the sidelines.

Yeah, just sort of like vaguely kind of embedded in the audience, sometimes with Balma, sometimes with Goku and Krillin.

Yeah, it is like it becomes apparent.

It's like it is just just like a, as far as how the show is presenting the frame,

much less sophisticated.

Yes.

And

I think I want to talk about that a bit later in terms of, you know, sort of how the genre has

changed or developed between the late 80s and 2011.

But I think the place to do that is probably

once we've gotten a little further into the tournament.

Sure.

Then we cut to the Kame House, a house on an island.

It's the only thing on the island.

This is literally the turtle house.

Oh, Kame means turtle?

Yeah.

And it has

a god?

Am I

with an I.

Oh, but they use Kame K-A-M-E

to

describe something else, too.

Maybe I'm not.

Maybe I'm mistaken.

Anyway, go ahead.

And this is when the Mafia shows up to wait for Master Roshi.

Master Roshi is a kind of Netaro.

Or

swap it.

Yeah, let's talk about this.

Because we get introduced to kind of the crew, the Himbo, Bulma, the girl who's two girls, the pig, the turtle, the flying cat who's Yamsha's husband.

Every squad got the girl who's two girls, the pig, the turtle.

Hey, if your squad doesn't have the girl that's two girls, then you're the girl that's two girls.

Is it when she sneezes, or is sneezing like

one?

Okay.

That's very funny.

Do they, there are bits where they try and make her sneeze, etc.

Almost definitely.

Yeah, I could just sort of write out one of those episodes very quickly.

I think it's very good, but you know.

I still have

my mistake here from a second ago.

One of Master Roshi, who is also known as the Turtle hermit,

is also known as the god of martial arts.

And then there's the two, there's the Kame and Kami in those two nicknames, and I just swapped them.

You can't be calling yourself a god and a turtle.

That's confusing.

I disagree.

Roshi is a lecherous old man

who lives on an island and is an exceptionally skilled

martial arts and I have to imagine sort of like the broader spiritual aspect of martial arts, tutor.

He's a bit like the impression I get is if

Natero had, instead of saying, I'm going to build a death game, said, What if I actually mentor these people individually?

Slash, sexually harass them.

Slash, sexually harass them.

Yes.

That seems to be the impression I get.

Although the

similarities between these two characters are so overwhelming that I am so curious about whether Netaro is specifically a play on Master Roshi or whether this Roshi character is a Shonen stock character or whether it's some combination of those.

It's both.

This is definitely a stock character.

The Roshi, the

lecherous like hermit, the lecherous martial arts master guy.

the

like, this is uh

this shows up in a lot of stuff.

This kind of thing of like the

the

uh

the extremely competent, unserious,

mysterious, powerful guy that you underestimate.

Yeah, I don't know if it's like a one-to-one, but you could always kind of compare it to like the drunken master archetype in like martial arts movies and stuff.

Right.

Um,

in your experience, is Roshi the kind of defining version of this character for most people, or would you say that there is a more Roshi generation at the very least?

Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, for three generations,

yeah.

I mean, like, how I can kind of just like start naming off like the Roshi rip-offs, or not rip-offs, but like

that are doing this exact

stock character, like you said.

Like, there's Jiraiah Naruto, we've got got Netaro.

Oh, fuck.

I really thought I had more.

There are more.

Hold on.

I'm going to find more.

It is interesting then that Tagashi has taken this character archetype and kind of pushed him further up the chain of command, as it were.

Instead of...

There is something to be said for the fact that Netaro is at the helm of a

game of hundreds of people.

Yeah.

Rather than just being like five unfortunate, brilliant students.

So this is something that this is going to come up.

The Roshi, Netaro, the differences between them, I think become increasingly important as Hunter Hunter develops.

So I don't want to get too deep into it.

But I think that like

one thing that we can say now

And it's sort of the thing that I've been pitching about what's interesting about Hunter Hunter from the beginning, and just like to friends when I talk to my friends about Hunter Hunter, is

that Master Roshi is genuinely the strongest guy on the earth,

as far as season seven of Dragon Ball is concerned.

And

you know, there's only

like two

other people in that conversation right now, and it's Goku and Tien.

And

something that Hunter Hunter says is like,

what happens when you take Roshi off of the island that he lives on?

He's like, little one, he's not a hermit.

You know, like, put him in the real world.

Like, what really is the world's reaction to someone who can blow up the moon?

Yes.

And,

you know, Hunter Hunter is like, well, there'd obviously be like a society of them and they would,

you know, have this bizarre outsized influence on public policy.

Yeah.

They would they would run the infrastructure.

Yeah.

If if if um

There's more than one way to rule the world.

Like, Cell from Dragon Ball Z

wants to, you know, defeat the strongest people on the planet Earth and then blow it up.

Some people just want to be the president.

And in the case of Netaro, he wants to be the president of a death game/slash secret society that is about as unsecret as it can be.

It is very funny watching the

fight with Hisuka and

Yamcha.

Fake Yamcha.

That guy is called.

I said his name earlier.

You did.

He's still called Carlos.

What's his name?

It's Carlos, yeah.

And being like, the people in the audience can't see the Nen.

What are they even watching?

What are they?

Do they even see the second guy?

Like, what is going on?

You know,

you know,

kilos in the audience, like yelling stuff out, like talking about Nen, like, use your Gyo.

Like, everyone's just like, okay, yeah, this is, it's really like the one, it's a, it is the biggest sort of suspender disbelief thing in Hunter Hunter is just like,

how is Nen's secret?

How are Hunter's secret?

They just are.

Trust us.

It's fine.

Um,

events transpire where Konkichi's loyalty to Goku is tested and the criminal gang sort of press gangs him into committing a bank robbery, but Goan thwarts it and Konkichi tearfully says that he is going to sort of

did I say Goan?

Yeah

Goku Goku thwarts it and Konkichi tearfully says that he's going to become a teacher.

Because there's the little boy from the circus that he gave a lollipop to and consoled him when his when his uh balloon popped.

Sure, that's his stepson now.

That's his stepson now, yeah, he got married to the mom.

Oh, right, off-screen, okay.

Or maybe this is in episodes that I haven't seen, or we flashback and learn about

the first episode of Dragon Ball Super is actually uh Konkichi's wedding.

Yeah, they saw they finally Dragon Ball Super finally tackles the Konkichi plot hole.

So there's Dragon Ball Goku baby, Dragon Ball Z Goku adult.

This is where

Vegeta is.

Yes,

Vegeta is Dragon Ball Z.

And then there's Dragon Ball Super?

Yeah.

Yes.

Which is after Z?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

Is Roshi in Z?

Yeah, Roshi's in both.

Yeah.

Oh, huh.

Because he can't die or something.

And it doesn't matter if he dies because they just get the Dragon Ball Z.

He's drinking from the Fountain of Youth.

Okay, sure.

Yeah.

Did he drink from the Fountain of Youth kind of late, and that's why he's an old man?

No, I just think he's really old.

He's just thousands of years old or whatever.

I think that he's like approaching 100.

Sure.

Okay.

Rip Bozo Henry Kissinger, who approached 100 and then died.

And then died.

You would not last at the number one under heaven martial arts tournament.

Masteroshi is around 300 years old in Dragon Ball.

Wow.

I mean, that's got to be like the tortoise thing, right?

Like, tortoises live to be

super gold.

There's got to be that type of riff.

He claims to be immortal by eating the paradise herb, which is the found of useful thing that I was talking about.

Oh, we smoke in paradise herb.

Paradise herb with Master Roshi.

Terrible.

Nightmare blunt rotation.

Me, Master Roshi, the pig.

It depends who else is there.

It could be a nightmare or a dream.

The first dispensary I ever went to had a lovingly done painting of Master Roshi smoking a bong on the wall.

Hell yeah, it did.

It was like a slightly black market weed dispensary.

Like it was like, it's not legalized yet, but we shouldn't also have this place open.

Also, here's our Master Roshi art.

I guess I'm going to start noticing Master Roshi out in the world now.

Oh, yes, you will.

You will also start noticing Goku more.

Though I'm sure you already knew Goku.

I know who Goku is.

I know who Goku is.

You know when he looks like he's an adult?

I do.

In fact, the adult version of Goku is the one that I think of when I think of Goku, to the point where I actually have to check, is this the same guy?

Right.

Answer, yes.

But he's missed his plane.

Goku has missed his plane.

I wrote down

because they're standing on a dock side, and they explained that Papaya Island is on the other side of the world.

And you need to, a boat would take forever to get there.

You need to, you know, get a plane.

And I wrote down, is Goku really about to swim around the world?

And then he jumps in and starts swimming, and I wrote, yes, he is.

Because that's what he does.

He just swims off and the narrator comes back in to say, like, will he make it to the martial arts tournament on time?

And we can see the question he does.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He beat up those tigers.

He skinned them and started wearing them as a as a as new clothes.

And he still made it on time.

Yes, he meets some tigers.

He arrives on an island and is menaced by some tigers.

And his reaction to the tigers.

Yeah, he tried to give them papayas.

And they said, no.

He says, oh, look at the tigers.

Which is a great line.

When you see the tigers, and yes, when he shows up later, he is wearing tiger skin.

Are you hungry, Kenny?

He has obliterated the tigers.

Meanwhile, the Mafia crew is on the plane to the tournament.

I don't really know why they're going separately from Goku.

I imagine Goku was doing his own thing prior to this point.

Goku was given the task by Master Oshi.

Instead of continuing direct training alongside

Yamcha and Krillin, he should go and train on his own in the wilderness for three years.

Who was the character that you described in an earlier Hunter-Hunter episode as like his dad or something just put him on a rock surrounded by dinosaurs?

Oh, that character

hasn't been born yet.

And it's

Goku's son.

Or Goku's son.

Goku.

Goku's son, Gohan.

Goku is the guy who puts him on the rock and says good luck, but

no.

No, he leaves him with the guy who does.

Yes, okay, no, no, no, no.

Goku dies.

Goku dies.

And then definitely Pevo's like that torn up about it, though.

Well, yeah, and then Piccolo's like, well, your son is super strong, so I'm going to go train him.

And so Piccolo leaves him alone on a rock.

The guy who looks like a Fiddle D elfman.

The green man?

No, he's a big, green, tough guy.

Yeah, he's not a Fiddle D

Piccolo DBZ.

I'm looking him up.

If you call Piccolo...

I'm so...

He doesn't have Fiddle D D vibes.

Yeah, he's...

Yeah, like, when you said elf, I thought, like, oh, yeah, like, he's because he's got big, green ears, like, Lord of the Rings elf.

I guess it's partially because Toriyama did the art for both, like...

Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger to me, but like, he...

Piccolo always reminded me of, I think his name's Magus from Chrono Trigger.

Sure, yeah.

yeah.

Who's the like evil elf man?

I mean, he's kind of more Vegeta-y than Piccolo-y, but I see it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

I don't.

I.

Maybe it's because I've never seen

move or talk.

Fair enough.

He's griffins.

Yeah, he just growls.

Yeah, and he kind of becomes Goku.

He kind of takes over as Goku's son's dad.

We should watch some Dragon Ball Z.

I really like her.

He takes over as Gohan's daughter's dad, too, in Super.

Yeah.

Do we like him, Piccolo?

Oh, yeah, we love Piccolo.

We adore Piccolo.

He's got his heart in the right place.

Not only does he have his heart in his right place, he has all of his very strong muscles in the right place.

And he uses them for good.

He uses them for good.

He was Vegeta before Vegeta likes a hunter around.

Yeah.

I don't know who Vegeta is either.

But in any case,

this is all in the distant future.

Not even born yet.

Maybe born on an alien planet.

Actually,

we're about to meet his dad.

What?

What?

I've met his dad?

No.

No.

Oh, oh, oh, I see.

We'll meet Piccolo's dad, though.

God, this is the inverse of the Hunter-Hunter game where you're not worried about spoiling things for me, so I'm just seeing the story just like snatching into place.

I didn't have to tell you shit.

Hey, do you want to know how many forms of Goku there are?

Yeah,

yes, of what's going on.

Do you want to guess how many Goku forms there?

So here's my guess.

Up through Super, Sylvie?

Is that what you're...

Through Super, yeah.

the when I looked this up, that's the answer I got.

And it might even be out of date now.

So Goku turns into an ape when the moon is full,

but I have to imagine that also through smart training,

he can go Goku mode.

He can.

It's so funny because I'm going to just tell you this now.

Sylvie may not have even been counting the ape.

I'm,

you know what?

I don't know if it is.

No, it's not.

Okay.

Okay, wait.

I'm adding, I'm I'm adding the ape one.

And I'm adding.

There's another one that they missed.

But we are talking about it's ape mode, but then it's also like when he goes Goku mode and his hair catches fire or something.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you know what that's called?

No.

Oh, yes.

That's called going Super Saiyan, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you also undershot it.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so there are 21, according to IMDB, there are 21 canon Super Saiyan transformations.

Wow.

It's from a screen rant article, apparently.

I could not.

Okay, I'm looking at an IMDb list.

So obviously you've got

to guarantee they at least left one out.

They also didn't add on the Uzaru, which is the giant ape.

They don't have Kaioken, which I would count.

Kaioken

chronically underappreciated.

Then they probably will have Super Saiyan Blue Kaoken.

I don't know how they do have Super Saiyan Blue Kaoken.

But no Kaoken original.

And also, if we're counting Goku variants, I would also add Child Goku from Dragon Ball GT.

But again, scrubbed from Canon by the cowards.

But that was also.

Sylvie, this list is all Super Saiyan Transformations, not just Goku.

Oh, god damn it.

Really?

Yeah.

But

even this supposedly

exhaustive list leaves out the false Super Saiyan

from...

God, what fucking movie was it?

Was it Garlic's Revenge?

I believe so, yeah.

Which Super Saiyan?

Uh, False Super Saiyan.

It's when it's the Garlic Jr.

movie where basically it which takes place before the Frieza arc.

Uh, Goku almost goes Super Saiyan.

I'm looking at a list that is 20 and it is just

Goku.

Unless we're not counting fusions.

Are we not counting fusions?

Oh, we can count fusions.

Because I was going to say Gogeta and Vegeta fit in there, and I'm just saying these to have these words bounce off Jack's brain.

Okay, this this list is older.

Oh, no, it's not older.

This one has 13.

It's got Uzaru, KO Ken, Super Saiyan, Super Saiyan 2, Super Saiyan 3, Super Saiyan 4, does include Super Saiyan 4, Super Saiyan God, Super Saiyan Blue, which comes after God, Jack.

Super Saiyan Blue, KO Ken, Ultra Instinct Sign.

This is where they lose me.

Perfected Ultra Instinct.

Divine Key Giant Battle Avatar.

That can't be real.

I don't know.

No,

I think that's from the Super Manga.

I like Super Saiyan 4 a lot when they get weird.

They're furries.

Yeah, it's good.

We should probably just talk about regular Dragon Ball.

I did just want to bring that up because I think that the...

There's a running joke in, I think also in the Dragon Ball Fighter Z community about how many different Gokus are in that game.

Sure.

And it's just sort of funny to talk about as this part of the staying power of the character is just how many different Goku colorways there are.

Yeah, sure.

Great point.

You started talking about Gohan Blanco.

Wow.

This is probably the experience that I'm probably having right now is what the world feels like to dogs.

Yeah?

Yeah, that's true.

I feel like, yeah, we all just went into a fugue state saying words that don't make any sense

outside

Garlic Jr.

All right, let's see.

The Mafiosas arrive.

I thought that

I went through a real roller coaster.

I thought that Master Roshi was really horny on the plane because he was in proximity to flight attendants.

Then I thought it turned out that he was very scared of flying on the plane.

This is not the case, right?

Sylvie, neither of these are true.

I think, so it is so before Sylvie reveals what this is, I want to say it is so hard to understand

what is going on just from the dub.

It's very confusing.

I think that, Jack, you're right.

That the only thing that you can assume really is that he's scared to be on the plane and everyone is embarrassed that he's making a scene.

But that's not it.

Would you like me to explain multiple things that have changed and specifically changed in the Funimation dub of this?

Yes.

Okay.

First of all,

there's a part where

they're talking about Jackie Chun and Lunch starts getting really mad about it.

Sorry, lunch.

I always called her Lunch because that's how people call her because they think it makes it less more cool.

But no, lunch is a better name.

It makes it more cool for her to be called Lunch.

Yeah.

Dragon Ball is known for its food-based names.

Almost everyone's name is food based in some way or another

um

she in the original japanese dub uh and the manga is talking about wanting to hijack the plane but after 9-11 they had to change that so that's why she just gets angry when jackie chun is mentioned um which is why

like

um

Like they the the way that though I wanted to look this over on the wiki be to make sure about everything And they describe it as Roshi talking to the stewardess in the dub because he's afraid of lunch finding out about him being Jackie Chun.

But in the original dub,

or the original Japanese dub, and on my subtitles that I had going, Master Roshi really needs to take a dump.

And the stewardess is like, we're almost there.

Can you just hold it?

And he's like, no.

And he's like, no.

And then later on when they land, he comes back and says, Sorry about that.

I really had to go when he comes back from them waiting around for him.

That's why they're all like, Where is he?

He's taking so long.

Yeah, okay.

It makes the episode a little more confusing because of all the weird changes there.

I don't know why they couldn't have kept him talking about his guts while also changing the lunch thing.

There's a lot of censorship in this era of anime.

Oh, yeah.

There's like, here's, I mean, I have like a totally

like

non-expert theory, which is just that there's a lot of anime that is like showing girls in a bathtub and like only barely censoring the toplessness or characters who take their pants off.

There's actually a lot of that that gets left in at the beginning of the

of the Dragon Ball anime.

And I think that they're, so they're just like super keyed up to get ready to censor anime.

And so, because they have to bring censors in for anime, they're just like, oh, take the gross poop stuff out.

Like, because that is the sort of thing that gets censored all the time.

And it's like, you can't talk about poop on the like, what?

Or later on, another one is like Master Oshi being an extremely horny Grosso, like walking down like a shop street.

And the camera is showing him being a gross, horny old man, but they've cut out all of the

dialogue of him noticing girls wearing t-shirts.

So he'll just be like oogling a girl, obviously, and then being like, nice shoes.

It's really weird.

I mean, it speaks to like one, just like different like

standards for what constitutes children's television, I guess,

in like different countries, but also like

very much the idea that

at this time that anime, and I sound like such a fucking nerd when I say this, but like, anime had to just be for kids.

And I'm not saying that as a like, take my, take away cartoon seriously type thing, but they didn't really recognize the broader audience for the comedy that Toriyama was like going for with the series.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, it is very funny to like leave in all the oogling, but take out him calling the girls cute.

Yeah.

Like, it's so technical.

It just makes the show feel more lecherous than him.

Like, it's really weird.

Right.

Yeah, it's very weird.

Yeah.

Master Roshi is like gross.

He's so

disgusting, man.

So much worse.

He's a pretty nasty man.

Than anything that ever happens in.

Like, this makes Leorio, Leorio's worst moment.

Like, Master Oshi is pulling that three, four times every day.

Yeah.

He's also, although he also

such a heightened stock character that it almost comes across as pantomime.

It's like Pepe Le Pieu.

Yes,

exactly.

A character so

utterly powered by the bleak engine of his own lasciviousness.

Right.

It just drives him from scene to scene.

Right.

And it's, and, and, and, and, like, the

like

he's

it's it is supposed to be, I think, inherently funny.

The contradiction between the discipline that it takes to become a sort of a hermetic martial artist of his caliber with the complete lack of discipline that he has around

women.

That is like

and that is supposed to never stop being funny

somehow.

When they land, they're all very excited to eat.

I get the impression that, like, you said that food was very important to the show's kind of naming conventions.

Food seems to be very important to Goku as well, right?

Like, a running gag in this character is that he is very hungry and he likes to eat food.

Oh, God.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Barely begun to scratch the surface here.

Yeah, barely scratches.

Yes, it is like, you know, he, you know, in Dragon Ball Z, he's eating like

he's eating restaurants out of house and home.

Yeah.

Okay, sure.

And Goan doesn't really have a trait like this, right?

I don't think that Goan is

quite so much of a stock character that he's like, and he's the guy who is always super up for food or whatever.

Yeah,

I think that there's like this

like Goku is so powerful that he just like needs a lot of fuel all the time.

Yeah.

But

it comes across as more magical in

like less mechanical in Hunter Hunter, which is funny because actually the way that all the powers work is so much more mechanical.

Yes, it really is.

And we'll get into Nan later as the fighting starts.

I wrote down the old man is cruel to the turtle.

Is this something that happens consistently?

Yeah, they're sort of husbands in a sort of Rodney Dangerfield way, I find.

Much of that name I'm getting.

Husband to the flying cats.

Yeah, a little bit the the turtle is constantly not picking up on subtle uh cues that and roshi is berating him for it right yes yeah

okay

that's that's fair enough

they all get into matching pajamas it's very cute um

there is a kind of like um

almost like uh children's story companionship to this dorm room full of nine beds.

I just went over to the Discord and saw make sure of Grumpy Piccolo with his arms crossed and underneath his fiddle Diddle.

I have to look up Piccolo's voice.

I have to, I'm going to search Piccolo Soundboard Dragon Ball.

Okay, here we go.

Let's see what we got here.

Piccolo Soundboard Dragon Ball.

one,

Dragon Ball Z soundboard, Piccolo.

Okay,

there are some lines here.

Agreed,

check me out.

Do me a favor.

Don't get carried away.

I can play these so that we get.

Just tell me which one you're going to play, and I'll hit it on my end too.

It'll get brought into there, it'll record it, so it'll be in the episode.

Okay, nice.

Cool.

Will we be able to hear it?

No.

I could

have that happen if we wanted for a second.

No, no, no.

I'm going to make him say

you again.

Okay.

Ah.

You again.

Now he's going to say.

Okay, he said, you'll never succeed.

You're too weak.

Oh, is that near the bottom?

You'll never succeed, you're too weak.

It's sort of in alphabetical order.

Yeah, and now finally he's gonna say Goku.

Goku.

Goku.

Okay.

Yeah, he's so grumbly and like a baritone.

Fiddle D.

Now hold on, there is an eye.

There is a version of Ticcolo that is fiddle dee D.

There's a version, yes.

Oh, you mean big green?

No, I mean postboy.

Post boy?

Oh,

yeah.

Should we show?

Okay, yeah.

There's Postboy.

Oh, God.

Drip the fuck out.

I love Postboy.

Post Boy.

Whoa.

This is a good one.

We should watch that filler episode sometime.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is a remember the show.

We should just watch it.

Okay.

So, Dre has shared a still from Dragon Ball Z.

It shows Piccolo, who is a huge green elf

wearing a baseball cap backwards and a huge yellow shirt that says post boy on it in purple and then there's a red-haired lady in a shirt and tie looking happy in the background

is Piccolo an elf

he's a Namekian okay fine

oh that lady works for capsule corp she's got the little logo on her chest

sorry did we say what this episode was about no uh do we want do we want to I mean it's not who cares, I think, right?

Oh, the filler episode?

Yeah,

what do you think they're doing, Jack?

Why do you think Piccolo would dress like this?

You got anything?

He's trying to look cool.

He's trying to look like a.

Okay.

So he's like on a date.

I wouldn't have said he's on a date.

I don't know.

No, he's learning how to drive.

So he's trying to look normal.

Yeah.

That's a driving instructor.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, he and Goku have to learn how to to drive.

Oh, my God.

His horrible wife is making him learn how to drive, and so he and Piccolo learn how to drive.

He has a horrible wife.

Goku has a horrible wife.

Yeah.

Goku has a wonderful life and wife and does not realize what he has at home.

This is not, this is,

I will defend this to the death.

This is not a judgment on anyone other than Akira Toriyama's inability to write a woman character.

Fair.

Okay, fair.

He does Chi Chi a massive disservice,

but

his hands write the words, and they are bad words.

She is terrible.

That's fair.

Yeah, Toriyama's got Toriyama never quite figured out the woman thing for extended periods of time.

He gets it sometimes,

like all my love in the world for Boma, but also,

I love Boma.

Yeah.

Boma's the closest to being the best, and

she is able to maintain that for a pretty long time.

Yeah.

Are we going to meet Apicolo in Hunter Hunter?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Exciting.

That's fun.

I do have to occasionally remind myself that I have not yet met even half of Hunter Hunter's characters.

There are.

And the Phantom Troop don't count because there's fucking tons of them.

Even setting them aside.

But even then,

I was re-watching.

I was getting my girlfriend caught up with where we're at.

And

like half the characters in the current credits theme you haven't met yet.

And not just including the Phantom True.

Yeah.

Because there's tons of them.

If you were to evenly divide out,

let's just pretend,

let's just say that we're

a fifth of the way through the show, which is about right.

We have not met a fifth of the characters.

characters.

Yeah.

Okay, let's see.

Oh, yes, I was saying that there is something kind of like children's story,

there is a children's story sort of companionship in the matching pajamas and the nine-bedroom dorm

that all the boys go to bed in.

It's tempered slightly by Master Roshi doing exactly what you think he does, sneaking into the girl's dorm and like getting kicked out or whatever.

But there's this like really nice, there's this nice shot of everybody putting on matching blue pinstripe pajamas, and then the camera, you know, panning down this dorm where it's like the

hotel room with twin beds, except it's got like tons of beds in it, all in a row.

And it reminds me a little bit of the way that Tagashi

really takes time to

show Goan and Kilua as friends who are also like 12-year-olds, you know, like whether they're playing together or whether they are fighting each other in a pillow fight or whether they are playing with toys or whatever.

I always think the moments in Hunter Hunter where they just dial into like, these are friends hanging out,

is really sweet and carries forward that same sort of companionship that we see here in this moment.

The next morning, it's time to register.

Goku has still not showed up.

Master Roshi, however, goes up to the

registration desk and, becoming his alter ego, Jackie Chun,

by slightly removing his glasses, registers.

What makes this Jackie Chun joke work

is that shortly after this, Master Roshi, quote unquote, leaves and Jackie Chun quote-unquote arrives.

And all of our main characters are like, oh shit, Jackie Chun's here.

I love that guy.

Let's hang out with him.

Gene Parmesan.

It is.

It's Gene Parmesan.

Yeah.

They drop some clues about this at various points, but just to get it out there, we'll talk more about this later, I think.

But Jackie Chun wins the last time this tournament is a full season of this show, which is in season two.

His aim, and Jack, I don't know if you watched the video that I put in the chat for...

for us to watch, which was like him explaining to one of the other contestants back in season two why he's being Jackie Chun, which is basically like, Look, Goku is nine years old.

He is the he's in the top five strongest people on the planet right now.

Uh, you know, maybe back then it was more like top 15.

He can't win the world's martial arts tournament.

I have to stop him from thinking that he is hit his pinnacle.

He needs

more obstacles.

However, without me, the strongest and most lecherous man in the world, he kind of wouldn't have obstacles.

Right, yeah.

And, you know, this is like

the long view on this is that this sort of

shenanigan pulled by Master Oshi here kind of allows Goku to save the world a bunch of times in Dragon Ball Z.

But I don't know if it's I don't know if it's on the

barring that, I'm like, should we be beating up kids so that they don't get too big of an ego?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Hey, it works here.

It works in Hunter-Hunter.

You know.

Yeah, it is a very, it is like,

it is the narrowest thing that he could have done.

Yes, there is something going on here about the way that

Dragon Ball and Hunter Hunter are interested in talking about

the kind of

ways in which someone can be a teacher and the ways that they believe teaching works.

I wrote some notes about this.

Yes, between Master Wing,

who is this like

sort of slapdash,

purportedly kind-hearted teacher who at the same time is very interested in sort of instrumentalizing these children, and then

Master Roshi, who takes on the form of Jackie Chun and beats up his own students.

And then Natero, the god-king of a death game.

And then even the way that Hisuka sort of views cultivating

Goan.

There's something totally legitimate to include Hisuka, which is a condemnation of Netero.

Hisuka.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

Like

that Hisuka belongs in the conversation of teachers, I think, is like

a really disgusting but accurate look at what

netero is doing

yes the the the way that

these shows talk about teachers as interested in cultivating power and having uh very particular sort of ideologies about how that power can or should be best cultivated um

whether that is uh wing's sort of um

Wing is sort of more insidious about it than, for example,

Roshi or Hisuka.

And Hisaka is also pretty insidious about it, which is saying something.

Let me see.

Oh, yes.

Jackie Chun

registers,

and then they briefly pitch that the cat husband will turn into Goku and register as him, which is

a great plan.

Flawless.

Doesn't matter.

They're not checking IDs or anything.

No.

Then Goku shows up and they're all like, yay, Goku, you did it.

Realistically, they could have had just Yamja go over there and say, I'm Goku.

I'm Goku.

Well, really, it turns out all you needed was

just Roshi to walk over there and be like, oh, hey, Goku's here.

Sign him up.

Yeah, he registers him automatically at that point, really.

It's very odd.

We maybe are underselling that Goku's kind of famous for being the nine-year-old who came in second place in last tournament.

In much the same way that Goan and Kilua and to a slightly lesser extent, Zushi are hailed as like the children who made it to Floor 200 or whatever.

Yeah.

I did love that everybody is standing around during this talking about how Goku, it's not like Goku to be late when in like Dragon Ball Z, half of the arcs are around people just waiting for Goku to finally show up.

Yeah, we mentioned this actually in an episode

of the podcast where Goku is so powerful that one of the main ways the show works is that you have to come up with some reason that Goku can't fight the villain, or it would be over too soon.

So you've got to artificially keep him away from the fight for 10, 15, 20 episodes.

Depending on if you're watching Kai or Original.

Yeah, yeah.

These stakes did nothing for me.

At no point, really.

And this could be because I was watching these episodes out of context.

It didn't really have any connection to these characters.

The stake of him not showing up.

Barely any of the stakes in these episodes.

I felt like we were walking towards a series of foregone conclusions almost every time, and it made it difficult for me to buy in sort of emotionally to what was happening.

As opposed to what has been proven time and time again in Hunter Hunter, where I make a prediction that I think is accurate, and then the show swerves from it at the last possible moment into like a stranger thing.

But for example,

Goku arriving here, I was like, oh, he's going to arrive 10 seconds before registration closes, and everyone's going to be like, okay, good.

Yeah.

And that's exactly what happened.

Yeah.

We did miss.

We missed one thing, which is the introduction of the antagonists.

Oh,

yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Master Shen, Chao Tzu, and Tian show up while they're waiting for Goku.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So here's my fun name that I didn't quite hear right the entire time because they call him like just the crane master for for a bit yeah um and then at a certain point they start calling him hermit crane but i heard it as herman crane um sure famous politician

so i was just like did the dub really name this guy herman crane um no that that was something i genuinely had to check while we were recording um

I like that a lot.

These are our villains.

We have a sort of Master Roshi analog, Herman Crane.

Hermit Crane or Master Shin.

This is Roshi's rival.

He's got a hat that is a bird.

It looks pretty sick.

He gets pretty ruthlessly mocked for this hat later.

But I don't like this guy very much, but I do like his hat.

I think he looks great.

He's stupid.

It's a dumb hat.

It's a very dumb hat.

He is joined by a small dull boy

called Chatsu.

Chatsu, yeah.

Who doesn't really do much.

He calls Krillin a slur at one point, and he counts on his fingers and gets berated for it.

He's just odd-looking.

This is in the Tagashi school of character design, of like just throw a real weird-looking character in.

This is the character that's based on the Jung Shi, the jumping vampire from Journey to the West.

Oh, yeah.

And then

there is

who hangs around with a three-eyed god named Shen?

The muscle of this crew is a man named Tian Shen.

He has three eyes and they are where you would put three eyes

if you had to in a row?

No,

his third eye is where the third eye is on your head and these I don't know I have to imagine that this guy's

a famous Dragon Ball character, but I'm describing him as though I've seen him for the first time because I had.

I really love the way his eyes are animated.

All three eyes are kind of like looking in different, not always looking in different directions, but rather than sort of sitting solidly in the middle of his forehead, his third eye is always looking around.

It is an active eye.

Later on, one of the characters says about him, is he human?

Because his power is so strong.

The man has three eyes.

I'm...

Is he an alien?

Is he a monster?

I don't know.

So there is an answer to this question, but it's kind of boring and it's not in the show.

It's just in like a lore book.

Was he blessed?

Is it like a blessing type thing?

He's from a race of people called the Triclopses that came to Earth centuries ago that had super

strength and interesting powers.

Okay, and Tien is the last of them.

He is a Triclops-human hybrid.

Okay.

So someone calls him Triclops during the heroes.

Yes.

And it's literally.

Okay, sure.

Although,

to be fair,

I believe that that is maybe a joke that then gets retconned in a lore book into being real.

Okay.

That would make sense to me because

in Dragon Ball Z, Tian kind of becomes more of a comedy character.

Tian is the.

Again, this is Dragon Ball's fault.

The same way that

Chi Chi is a horrible racist, or not racist, sexist caricature,

but that doesn't make her not a bad wife.

Tien is

just one of many interesting characters that gets like totally left in the dust by

Akira Toriyama's insatiable desire to draw newer and powerful Gokus.

True.

Now, he does sacrifice his life trying to buy time for people to get strong enough to kill Cell.

It's one of the best scenes of the whole Dragon Ball Z.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and then he's the statler to the Yamchez Waldorf for most of the series after that.

Yes, well, yeah, it's true.

Tian Shin is the

sort of the Goku of

the Crane Man, Hermit Crane.

Yeah, yeah, he is like.

The thing we've papered over a little bit is that

the Crane Master,

Master Shen,

is Master Roshi's longtime rival.

And he's like the evil Master Roshi.

He's just as lecherous, but much less likable.

He also wears sunglasses.

He also wears sunglasses.

And

his crop of students are like,

you know,

they're sort of mirror, evil mirror images of Roshi's students.

You've got

the

kind of obnoxious little one, and you've got the really, really, really strong one, but this one's mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tian sort of fills the role of both Yamcha and Goku

because he does like

this in the, I mean, yeah, but in the later episodes, like we see that in the aftermath of his fight with Yamcha.

Yeah.

And like he and Yamcha snipe at each other a lot during the episodes we watched.

And there's like

there's such a sadness to Dragon Ball Z, like especially early on, you just have this this horrible

section of that show where every character realizes that they aren't strong enough to continue being relevant.

And they have this weird phase where they're being phased out as people who get screen time.

And the characters feel like they recognize this.

It's bizarre.

Everybody in this crane crew does seem to be a little afraid of Tian Shin.

And we see this kind of further on,

his anger or his frustration

sort of causes both Chat Tzu and the Hermit Crane to sort of flinch a little.

Although, as the episodes wear on, it becomes clear that

there is a very direct manipulation happening between the Hermit Crane and Tian Shin, who is kind of fashioning him as

his protégé

for his own sort of evil ideology um

but yeah they they arrive they they sort of we we get some nice trash talk um and then the tournament begins the tournament is taking place in a

hmm it's hard to say it seems to be a temple built on or around another ruined temple we have this sort of big tournament building it's nowhere near as big as heaven's arena um it's like a low building that has several rings in and there's hundreds of competitors or everybody uh, sort of clamoring around.

And then outside, you can see these carved walls that are sort of semi-ruined, sort of have fallen apart.

Um,

I'm trying to sort of extrapolate what the world is like from these little tiny glimpses that I get of it, of this tournament venue that is at once complete and also seems to be built in a ruined temple.

It's pretty cool.

Um, I like that a lot.

Although, compared to the

first impression that I got was that this feels like the church hall equivalent of Heaven's Arena.

You know, if Heaven's Arena is like the full-scale

height of tournament battling, this is like they got a referee called Jim

around.

He's being paid a small salary.

This is Endermural.

Exactly.

And 180 bruisers have arrived to, you know, wallop each other.

This, I think, is because Heaven's Arena is so outlandishly

just turned to the extreme that even the world martial arts tournament in Dragon Ball feels kind of small.

It's like 250 floors.

Is this something that Tagashi does a lot?

Just turns the dial until it breaks and then plays off what happens when we have spun this out to its most outlandish

conclusion.

I think that's totally true.

I think, like,

have you played Forza Horizon?

Yes.

So, you know how there's just like this bizarre vibe of like

everything in this entire world revolves around

psychotic race games.

Yes,

that really is what it feels like.

And in order,

so that is Dragon Ball.

And then to me, Hunter-Hunter is like all constantly like,

what would the world be like if that were true?

Like, what would happen if people took fighting as seriously?

They would build a giant monument to it that would have non-stop fighting every day instead of once every five years.

Byzantine rules or whatever.

Yes.

Yes.

If Dragon Ball is Forza Horizon, Hunter Hunter is what happens if you zoom the camera out and go to

a normal open world game in that world.

I would really play a Forza Horizon Discolysium, though.

I don't know what that would be, but that's what I'm thinking.

And that's what I'm thinking.

That would also be.

You'd have to get David Cronenberg's crash in there as well.

Oh my god.

Because there would be car fetishism immediately, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

A literal eroticism of car vehicles.

Clown car fucker.

Yeah, yeah.

Or the twisted metal.

That is twisted metal.

That is twisted twisted.

That's twisted metal.

That's sweet tooth.

But again,

that is even less interested in the reality of the world than Forza Horizon is.

I mean, yeah, that's...

Though, connected to Dragon Ball, they are all trying to get one wish from

sort of

otherworldly entity.

It begins, and the narrator says, you know, 180 fighters are here,

each possessing a unique fighting style.

And that is the...

That is,

you know, that's the game of tournament arcs, right?

I mean,

maybe that's not right.

The impression that I get is that the fun of a tournament arc is, here come all the weirdos.

Each weirdo possesses a unique fighting style.

Let's smash them into each other.

Do you think you could even go further and say, like, that's just like the fun of

shonen anime for a lot of people?

And like, to me too, as an extent, is like different...

How do different abilities match up?

How does like, how will our protagonist react to this character's new outlandish style?

It's a big thing in like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, for example, which I think is something that I'm probably going to bring up as a touchstone for Hunter Hunter.

I would love to see

that at some point.

I'm going to just say it now.

We're going to talk about JoJo on the bonus episodes.

I'm going to make this happen.

Before we get so deep into Nem,

I would like to

watch something that teaches me what a stand is.

Yeah.

You mean we're not deep into Nen?

No.

Close.

No.

We have dipped our toes into Nen only.

Real quick, I want to add to what Sylvie just said and say that I think the other thing, like the thing that

Dragon Ball and Shonen does as

part of its form

with

tournament arcs and the sort of tournament arc likes that a lot of shows have, especially in the last 15 years, that are like not doing what Dragon Ball does, which is like, let's just spend 20 straight episodes doing a tournament

or a Yu Yuhaka show.

Let's just spend 45 straight episodes doing a tournament.

All these characters also have like conflicting

worldviews and ideologies

that are sort of

by the show's logic, inherently tied to their fighting and their fighting styles.

And they matter in direct proportion to how much of the characters matter to the show.

And a lot of what we get out of

a lot of the reason why you have a tournament

is

to

watch characters

fighting

as a direct analog and metaphor for

like

testing, you know, personal ideologies against each other.

We see that with the, we're going to get to the Roshi fight.

Like, that's, that is not just what's happening in that fight.

That is like what, to me, a tournament is about in a shon.

It is like, like, we're fighting and talking.

We're having our own ideas.

We're punching each other.

And those punches are changing our ideas about the world.

Well, here's the it, it's what makes a good, I'm gonna like kind of this feels like a non-sequitur, but trust me, it's what makes a good like action movie is when you can tell something about the way a character is through their fighting.

I think that's like a big thing in like uh like Wu Shaw films and stuff.

And I think that's something that also comes into shounen is when it's done well, you should be able to get some sort of characterization about the technique that a character uses.

Yeah.

And I think that like they do a really good job of reflecting that in the talk.

There's a talk between Yamcha and Tien where Tien talks, it's after Yamcha wins his preliminary match in the like third episode we watched, and he talks about how it's like, oh, you missed this opportunity to do this thing that I would have done.

And Yamcha's like, yeah, if I had done that, the guy would have died.

I don't fight to kill.

And it's like very explicitly mentioning it, but it like, in that is still a good way of doing it, is to show like

this character's fighting style is well they will go this far but not to the edge and then like with things like the uh

um

the wrestler in particular you can glean stuff from the character where it's like oh yeah he just uses brute force to get through everything he's just gonna squeeze or break anything in his way that's how he moves through the world you can like extrapolate from the fighting style

um

yeah and then this leads to i think the like, I think this is

the trope, the, the, the, the trope of like

antagonists becoming allies through direct violence with the protagonist.

Yeah.

Um, this is like Naruto is famous for this.

This is like the thing that Naruto is about

more than probably any other taking shit out of someone and then them going, actually, I, we now have the same ideology.

Yeah, like you have to,

we're friends now.

I know there's good in you because I felt it in your punches or whatever.

This is so funny because I want to talk about Goan versus Hanzo, which is the emptiest, most nihilistic version of this, right?

This is,

you know, you could read that scene.

I'm talking about the scene where Hanzo tortures Goan and Goan just refuses to give up, as like Hanzo or Goan Goan making an attempt to do this kind of ideological move, this sort of like fight as discourse or whatever,

and it just failing.

I mean it succeeds for Goan,

but it's such a period victory.

It is such a violent,

empty, destructive way of that happening.

When you sort of get the impression that the Goan's dream, right, is that Hanzo would go like, you know what?

You're right.

I do surrender.

I, you know, I give up or whatever.

Well, he did try to give up, and that wasn't really enough for Goan either.

I think

Gohan would want to sort of like

have the ideology fight,

a literal ideology fight, to the point where Hanzo would surrender.

Goan would want to beat Hanzo physically and then also say, you know, we feel the same way about this, and you see the world the way I do or whatever.

But yeah,

Tagashi just shreds this in that fight completely.

Oh, and also in the canary fight, crossing the line into the Zelda estates.

And so another thing that we talked about

on an upcoming episode of the podcast is

how willing Tagashi is to skip the nuts and the bolts of these fights.

Like setting up a tournament.

And then like you can see from watching the Dragon Ball how the show is literally about the nuts and bolts of the fight.

Like the plot beats are the things that happen during the fight.

And that is not uncommon, although, you know, 20 episodes for a tournament arc is like not

exactly typical these days.

You can see how

wild it would be to like

for this to be sort of normal, especially coming off of Tagashi's last anime, which was Yuhaka Show, where there's multiple tournament arcs, one of which is about a third of the runtime of the whole series.

And, you know, by far everyone's favorite one, also, usually.

And then to get to a thing where it's just like

at the beginning of the tournament, we're telling you who won, and then we're going to flash back to show you little bits of things.

Or we're going to get to the part where the tournament arc would really open up.

It's like, In

Heaven's Arena, they make it past the

preliminaries like they do in episode 3 of Dragon Ball that you watched today, and then they go, that's basically good enough for us.

Yeah.

Yeah, we don't need to go any further than that.

You've got it, right?

Yeah, you got it.

So, anyway, just very bizarre.

Just very bizarre.

Like, it just seems kind of like on some level, and I think that there's more to it.

It just sort of seems like

being fucked with is what it feels like.

Yes.

By Tagashi.

By Tagashi.

Yes.

By Tagashi.

The girls can't fight.

They are not allowed to take part in this tournament, so they sit outside under

these sort of parasols.

This, sitting outside under the parasols, me get some great shots of people under these colorful umbrellas later.

This was my experience

going to the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach in August 2019, where I just sat beneath a parasol on a beach and watched people surfing.

It was fucking great.

I could get a hot dog.

I could get a beer.

This is exactly what I would be doing if I was in the Dragon Ball world.

Would be going to this tournament and sitting under a parasol.

The crane guy comes and tries to, you know,

be creepy to lunch and

Bulma.

Lunch produces automatic machine gun and shoots him.

He catches all the bullets.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately, at this point, still not knowing who she was, I wrote down, I would kill or die for the blonde lady with the bow in her hair.

I'm in love with her.

Yeah.

I have no idea who she is.

I don't know what her deal is.

She's just a...

She's Roshi's roommate.

She's Roshi's roommate from New Jersey.

And she tries to kill him often.

Yes.

Can I just talk really quickly about how I won?

I love her voice when she's in her angry blonde form, how she talks like she

smokes at least two packs a day and is like from like, like I said, she's from Jersey, which is like great that she just has a silly accent.

She gains an accent.

It's

they don't make them like this anymore, folks.

They don't.

They don't.

They don't.

They don't have weird shit like this on TV at all.

I don't know.

For the

dub?

I'm assuming it's the same actress for

both forms of her, but I'll check.

Anyway,

I watch the show about launch.

I do too.

My broader point, really quick, because I promised you all before we started that I'd have voice acting hot takes, is that we need to bring back voice acting like the way they voice act lunch or the Italian chef in the show.

I agree.

Or

the big fake Andre the Giant or Konkichi.

Or Konkichi.

I just want characters back weird everybody sounds like a everybody in modern anime dubs they sound like a Vtuber or a Genshin Impact uh character if you pay enough you can get acting that sounds like real acting um yeah but I would much prefer this

uh Dragon Ball to the Vtuber thing yeah get a little wackier with it is all I'm saying

This is my old lady yells at a cloud moment of the day.

I just wanted to get it out before I exploded.

No, you're so right, though.

Yeah, that's totally right.

I mean, that's

really one of the things that I feel like I now want to watch Dragon Ball for is that in Dragon Ball Z,

there is like no cool little animal people like there is in Dragon Ball.

It seems like

they are just everywhere.

Yeah, yeah.

What happened?

Yeah, they get like, yeah, I don't know.

Like, it's weird

how there's just like Tiger Man martial artists here.

That's it.

And there's none.

There's none.

So this is like slightly a myth, I think, but I think it is broadly kind of true.

We mentioned before characters sort of being left in the dust.

Dragon Ball Z scope really broadens.

The characters who are like allowed to get screen time because of that new scope narrow.

And at one point uh kiritoriama just was like someone asked him about lunch and he was like oh yeah at some point i realized that i had just kind of forgotten about her yeah so

i just how i just wrote her out of the show

how i don't know how i don't know how i don't know how you go like

you draw roshi and then you're like and he he doesn't live with anyone besides a turtle right i haven't been drawing him with a girl that he lives with with the perfect woman for years

yeah i'm furious a girl who furiously do all your dishes and sometimes blow you up with a grenade launcher i i need it in my life

um the first fight begins this is yamcha versus uh some guy uh you know just some guy right just some guy

and uh uh

We get right into

sort of shonam martial arts combat that we've seen a bit of in Hunter Hunter.

The thing that's notable for me here is that a lot of the way the martial arts is shot in this show, in Dragon Ball, is this hyper-exaggerated movement, dashing behind someone so quickly that it appears as if you teleport,

appearing suddenly, moving from place to place.

Now, hands drawn a lot of cost-saving techniques for

hand-drawn show weekly.

We get some magic, like actual legit magic in the later fights, but it seems like what's happening here early is a sort of abstraction of skilled martial arts into these animation techniques that Keith's describing.

And it makes me wonder how much of sort of the invention of Nen in

Hunter Hunter is as a way of making these motions text.

You know, people actually are teleporting.

There is something actively magical that almost all these martial arts fighters have that enables them to move

as though they are being animated.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

I'll say characters do legitimately teleport later on in

the...

Oh, yes, but I'm thinking of specifically in these early fights between the more normal fighters like Rancher or

something so fast you can't see them.

Yeah, and it's as though Tagashi is saying,

well, they are moving so fast you can't see them, but that's because they have this thing that everybody has called Nen.

Right.

And it sort of lets him...

It lets him have his cake and eat it, right?

Of having these

outlandish

hyper-stylized fight sequences that are also somehow rooted in like an actual real world martial arts, real world in his world, you know, in an actual sort of embodied martial arts philosophy inside the world of Hunter Hunter.

Yeah, I think that makes sense.

I think that there is like a degree of

like wanting to make things that get hand waved and Dragonball

because

sometimes they take things seriously and sometimes they don't and sometimes they do stuff that doesn't make sense as a joke wanting to like mechanize that and like draw

you know want something that you can draw a direct line from thing to thing to thing

instead of like having to hand wave like

okay master and this is this is how you get into we've we've referenced obliquely you know power scaling before um but like this is how you get to

okay Master Roshi in season two is stronger than Goku, he could blow up the moon by the time you get to the end of Dragon Ball.

Goku is like 15 times as strong as he was in season two because he can do this thing, which means that he could blow up a moon at least 15 times the size of that moon.

And then by the time he goes Super Saiyan, we know that that's 20 times stronger than that.

And so that means that

and it's like you get, you start trying to apply math to things that like you can't

it's all made up and they weren't taking it.

Uh

and I think that one of the nice things about

uh hunter-hunter is that it's all pretty spelled out for you.

Um, they tell you how everything works.

Sometimes it's easy to do that, and sometimes the detail is, um, for lack of a better word, word, excruciating.

Yes.

Yes.

Fair enough.

It is sometimes excruciating.

Yamcho wins the fight.

And then the baby is up.

Mafia Baby.

Krillin is fighting a giant.

This giant is huge.

He's called...

Yes, he's an Andrew the Giant.

He's called Anton the Great.

And he does the, this fight goes literally exactly the way you, listener who has not seen this show, think it's going to go.

Anton says, I'm so big, and I'll crush you under my feet.

And Krillin says, Well, good luck.

And then

there's this really great shot of him

holding the giant's finger and throwing him.

He's so good.

He is literally smaller than the index finger of this guy.

And he flings this guy out of the ring

and wins.

After his nasty little trick that he does.

I love his nasty little trick.

What's his nasty little trick?

He pretends to get caught in his in his giant grasp and he's like ah

and yamchu's like oh my god krill and then krillin's like that was my acting

before i became a monk i thought i was gonna become an actor

yes yeah this mafia baby you you know i had no idea that this guy was supposed to be a monk um

so this is that's good to know uh

Castro, after when he sneaks out, we didn't mention this scene, but he and Yam just sneak out to try to get get in some early training to get a leg up on the competition,

not realizing that they actually were much later than everyone else that wanted to do the same thing.

And he puts on his monk garb.

This is like his old uniform.

Castro, Rip, defeated by Hiseker in Hunter Hunter, appears briefly in a background here.

I'm just going to share this image, and you can see Castro.

Oh, my God.

Castro.

And hey, by the way, that guy's name is Castro.

Oh,

oh, that's Ken from Street Fighter.

It also could be.

Also, could be Ken from Street Fighter.

And then it's up for Goku's first fight.

Goku is fighting a guy who looks like Samafiz.

This is someone called King Chopper.

King Chopper, yeah.

I have the notes on the end of this fight because we actually didn't watch it as part of our episodes.

I don't know if anyone else did that.

I would love to know how this goes.

But King Chopper, King Chopper shows up and sort of people recognize who he is, and they're like, oh, this guy is bad news.

We gotta be gotta be really careful.

And not just people, but like Yoshi is Yoshi.

Roshi is afraid.

Jackie Chun is afraid for Goku here.

And

a couple really cool things happen.

I mean, Jackie goes exactly how you think it's going to go.

But there is, again, it's really the

watching the cool fighting ideas is really what these kinds of fights are for um

and uh

so the fight starts uh choppa says like you don't have to be afraid i'll stop before i kill you and then extreme sincerity goes uh thank you

it's so funny

or sorry i thought it's very wrong but it was a little sarcastic the way i delivered it he was more like thank you like it was like it's zero

cynicism, ego, irony.

It is, you know, blank, slight,

you know, very

Goku dying.

He has to be dying in a meaningful way.

What's that?

Can Goku die in a meaningful way?

He can, he can.

It depends what you mean by meaningful.

Is there any consequence to him dying?

No.

Usually it's a very positive consequence.

Oh.

Really?

Yes, he can create meaning in his death.

Oh,

Keith.

I can just tell you.

One of the very first things that happens in Dragon Ball Z is his brother, Raditz,

comes from space to say, your name is not Goku.

Your name is Kakarot.

And you are my brother.

And we are Saiyan warriors.

And our home planet has been destroyed.

And we are two of the last Saiyans left.

And so you have to come join me, or I'll kidnap/slash murder your kid.

And Goku's like, no, I like Earth, and I don't like you.

You're a bully.

Let's fight.

Raditz is too strong, and so he has to team up with Piccolo, who was originally his mortal enemy, and then became his sort of reluctant ally in a movie that takes place between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

And in order to defeat Raditz, Goku holds him in place while Piccolo blasts a hole through both of their hearts.

With the special beam.

With the special beam cannon.

The coolest move in Dragon Ball Z history.

One of the two coolest moves in Dragon Ball Z history, along with Destructo Disc.

I knew you were going to say Destructo Disc.

I was like, Keith's definitely a Destructo Disc guy.

He's not worried about this, Goku.

He's like, I will come back or I won't.

That's how it goes.

Does he feel that?

The vibe I always got from that specific instance was, my friends are going to be safe.

It's one of.

Yeah, but he's saving.

He's doing this to save the earth slash his son.

And then the cruelest joke that

the Dragon Ball public imaginary ever played on Goku was Goku dying for his son and then being like, Piccolo is a better dad than Goku ever was because Piccolo leaves him on a rock to train by himself surrounded by T-Rexes.

That makes him a better dad?

Yes, I don't get it.

Oh, is this sort of there is like a fan response that is like Piccolo is the

dad?

Piccolo is Goku.

Piccolo is Gohan's real dad because Goku is never there.

And it's like, yeah, because Goku is always saving the planet from being destroyed.

He was literally nicer.

Piccolo's nicer later, though.

He does start at leaving him on the rock, but he gets better later.

Piccolo gets better, but Goku never gets worse.

The best

thing to do is start saying fiddle dee D.

Fiddle D, Gohan.

That was pretty good.

People should go back and watch the

hyperbolic time chamber section of Dragon Ball Z and tell me Goku's not a good dad.

Fair.

What the fuck are you talking about?

They go to a time chamber.

They go to a time chamber that lengthens time at a rate of like...

one minute equals one day so that they can spend a year training and it will only be 360 minutes

in

for everyone outside something like that and they do this in order to get strong enough to defeat sell it is so funny that one of the ways that Tagashi would stage a scene like this is the house where everything is heavy

um the house where everything is heavy is dur is directly i think referencing the hyperbolic time chamber but it's such a different implementation of it right like so different yeah tariyama is like we've got a chamber that will change change the perception of time.

And

Tagashi is just like, No, no, no, no.

Everything in this house is heavy.

They do a lot of

gravity stuff in Dragon Ball Z also.

So, like, in the hyperbolic time chamber, the further you go away from it's like you're like in a white void for a year.

They're like in this horrible white void.

And the further you stray out, the head, the heavier gravity is.

So they'll go out and train.

But if they go too far up, then they can get lost in the void forever.

I think

I would go mad in the hyperbolic time chamber.

You have a good time.

No, they don't like it,

but they need to.

No, they don't like it.

I mean, they like it.

No, they love them.

They're sickos.

Gohan is like, this is the most time I've gotten to spend with my dad in a really long time, and I love him.

And Goku is like, I love training and I love my son.

Does Piccolo go in the hyperbolic time chamber?

No.

Vegeta and his son also do, though.

Who is Vegeta quickly?

Vegeta is another evil Saiyan that turns into their ally.

Vegeta is Bulma's husband.

Vegeta is Balma's husband.

Bulma divorces Yamcha.

Bulma divorces Yamcha in order to

marry Vegeta while Yamcha is coming back from the dead.

They're one of my favorite couples in anime.

Vegeta kills Yamcha.

Vegeta kills Yamcha, and then they go in a really long thing to save Yamcha.

But before he can come back, she has dumped him and married Vegeta.

Vegeta looks a bit like Goku.

It is the mortalist wound that anyone has ever inflicted in all of fiction.

And after that, Yamcha is like, fuck this.

I'm going to go play baseball.

Yeah, Yamcha quits being a hero over this, basically.

He doesn't become a villain.

He just becomes a guy that knows Master Roshi.

I am so glad that we picked Hunter Hunter as the show to do,

but

I can't think of a more enjoyable way to learn about.

The way I'm learning about Hunter Hunter is devoting hours and hours to watching and talking about it.

And the way I'm learning about Dragon Ball is it's like you're just upending a box of throws over my head.

Yeah, just like emptying like a.

It's like those word magnets that people have in their fridges, and you can make nonsense phrases out of the word magnets.

Yeah, Gohan is Piccolo's project.

Okay, okay.

Vegeta is

Bulma's evil husband.

Okay.

Yeah,

she basically dedicates her life to being so mean to him that he can't be evil.

It's so smart.

It's fucking so smart.

I got a lot of problems with Dragon Ball Z, especially towards the end.

The Bulma Vegeta dynamic, truly my favorite entire fucking thing.

He goes from actively trying to blow up the earth

to actively trying to kill her best friend Goku

to like blushing over being told to like stop behaving badly in about three weeks.

Ultimate wife guy.

It's amazing.

He's the ultimate wife guy.

In some quick googling that I saw, he also has a shirt that says Batman on it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, he fucking does.

Yeah, he does.

Vegeta's my favorite Dragon Ball character.

I don't know if that's 100%.

I saw people saying

Piccolo's.

What did Piccolo's shirt say?

Postboy?

Postboy, yeah.

Piccolo's postboy shirt versus Vegeta's Batman shirt.

Oh, I'm going to give you a piccolo, just barely edges it out, but yeah.

I think I'm Team Batman.

We are not getting into Vegeta's GT fits.

Can I I just say my favorite thing about Vegeta that

I believe was brought to light

because of a recent super movie?

Not like super movie, like a movie about Dragon Ball Super.

Oh, sure.

So, Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z is Goku's rival, you know, that's constantly the thing as they always fight each other to see who's stronger.

Right, Mario and Luigi.

Yeah.

Is that how that works?

It's 100% exactly Mario and Luigi.

Sure.

Sure.

I'm just going to let you have that one.

Luigi's evil and short and jealous of Mario.

Keith, can you describe Luigi to me?

Green, short,

evil, overalls, Italian, saying

okay.

You know, the short threw me off, but the Saiyan brought me back.

Anyway, they're constantly evenly matched, but Goku always kind of comes out ahead.

And what recently.

Which is an insult because Vegeta, of course, is the Prince of All Saiyans and Vegeta.

The Prince of All Saiyans.

Goku's the son of a lowly

foot soldier.

Yeah, Vegeta

does kind of believe in

the stock of one's birth, which is, you know, his worst trait.

For most of Dragon Ball, he is fully dedicated to fascism.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then he gets a wife.

Anyway,

the thing about Vegeta is that he didn't realize you could train.

And that's why he keeps losing the Goku, is that he didn't realize that training was a thing you could do because he's the like natural talent archetype.

I think that this is true of Saiyans didn't know about training.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just like

Saiyans is they naturally get stronger by fighting, even if they lose.

Right.

That's yeah.

That's like also how power levels come into it, right?

This is like when

Sovereign Immunity told Clementine that she would have to practice in order to be good at things.

Clementine is very Vegeta-esque sometimes, except she doesn't get the face turn.

Yeah, no, she does not.

No.

Let's see.

Oh, as this episode ends and as Goku squares off against King Chopper,

the music plays a sort of

charitably, I could call it an interpolation, and less charitably, I could call it like a thing with the serial numbers filed off of Diaz Ere, which is a famous choral piece.

You're almost certainly familiar with it.

It's like a classic, sort of menacing choral piece.

And this reminded me a lot of the way that the Hunter-Hunter anime, especially around these Zaldics,

interpolated Prokofiev and has like specifically made reference to like big classical or choral or operatic real-world pieces of music uh so it was nice to see it show up here um and uh

it's always fun to hear dsc ray

um

so we are now after

we've done krillin's fight we've oh king choppa so um yeah you were gonna fill us in on

king choppa this is technically in episode four but the fight goes very quickly um but it's uh one of the first like really fun things that happens besides krillin's little goof um

Choppa's like, hey, don't worry, I won't kill you.

Goku's like, thank you.

And

he does like a big leap in the air and he watches King Chopa timing his descent to punch him as he falls.

And then he basically yells at the ground to slow his descent and causes King Choppa to miss.

He lands on the ground and then during Choppa's like missed follow through, he just kicks him in the chin and sends him flying out of the ring, you know, one-hit KO.

That's really good.

It was really good.

Yelling at the ground.

Yeah, it's great.

That scene in Wally where he uses the fire extinguisher to fly around, that's for cowards.

I want to see Wally just screaming into space

in order to move.

There is some business before the kind of the next fight, which is between

Jackie Chun and

Tian Shinhan, and is kind of being set up as a significant fight.

So, what happens

is seven episodes worth of business that we skipped.

Yes,

here's what I think happens.

There are lots of B-tier fights that we see.

We follow sort of our core crew, our Gun, Kilua, Karapaka, and Leorio, as it were, as they go through some fights.

Tian Shan fights Yamcha and breaks his leg.

Yamcha,

when we meet meet Yamcha in Tian Shinyan versus Jackie Chan, he is in hospital and he is extremely mad at Tian Shinhan.

So I have to imagine that that is sort of the big pivot point.

Yeah, that's got a lot of do it for T if do it for Yamcha chat from

the crew.

Yeah.

Yeah, we miss

like a montage of everyone making it through the preliminaries.

We miss Jackie having a really fun fight with a man-wolf

that is who turns into a man, a wolf who turns into a man by the full moon.

He has a grudge against Jackie because Jackie blew up the moon.

Oh, really?

That makes sense.

He made him stuck as a werewolf.

Yeah.

That's really funny.

That sucks.

That's really funny.

Jackie Chun is basically like, I'm sorry, but it sucks to suck.

And beats him.

Again, it's a fun fight, but it's just like, we had to really not watch all of this stuff.

We can't watch a full season of Dragon Ball.

Then the Yamcha versus Tien fight is really fun.

Yamcha uses the Kamehameha, which, Jack, I don't know if you know, but

this is a move that was invented by Master Roshi.

Very, very few people on Earth know how to shoot an energy ball.

And the Kamehameha is basically the best kind of energy ball

you can shoot.

But it gets basically ruined because

Tien manages to reflect it.

Basically,

Yamcha has no idea what this is.

No one's ever seen it.

I think we get that in a little recap at the beginning of the episode.

We do see that.

We do see that a little bit.

Yeah.

And

we also missed Krillin versus Chao Tzu.

This is a fun fight.

Basically,

they use the

Krillin uses all of the lore stuff about vampires to thwart Chao Tzu, specifically

making him count stuff in order to distract him.

That rules.

Yeah, it's great.

It's very good.

Chao Tzu is interesting.

He can fly and uses.

Flying is something that becomes standard in Dragon Ball Z.

But for a long time, Tian and Chao Tzu are really the only, and Baba are the only characters we ever see flying anywhere.

Never mentioned this.

Baba is Master Roshi's sister.

What?

Yub would never, would never have guessed that.

I didn't realize that.

The season right before this season is a season where they basically invent a reason why

Goku has to go and fight his way to Baba, who then is like...

Yeah, I'll do what you want.

Including you learn about the afterlife.

You learn that

people

live after they're dead in the afterworld.

And Baba has given Grandpa Gohan a day pass to come and fight Goku and say goodbye.

It's very sweet.

It is,

I would call it legitimately moving watching Goku see his grandfather for the first time in

anyway.

That's just that's just a

one of many superfluous bits of information for people.

Chao Tzu's bouncing all around the ring, shooting.

He has a Dodon Ray

that is like, it's sort of like a shitty special beam cannon for anyone who's seen a special beam cannon.

I used to really like Chao Tzu for, I don't know why, I just thought he was fun.

I always liked Chiao Tzu too,

especially because I liked using the small weirdos in the fighting games for the PS2.

Yeah.

Anyway, it is really fun watching

Krillin make him count and then then beat him because he can't count.

And because he, you know, this is the Jian Shi sort of thing,

you know,

stopping to count things to get away from the vampires.

And then Goku one-shots another character.

Pomput is like an action movie star/slash athlete.

And that is where you come into Jackie Chun and Tian.

Yes.

And let's see.

So the next two episodes are...

This is a fight spread across two episodes.

And the fight is essentially in two phases.

The first is...

Let's say the fight is in three phases.

The first is

standard anime punching and kicking.

Zipping around.

I think it'd be so much fun to leap around like these characters do.

I think it would be very exhilarating.

That's a big draw.

That's a big draw to the genre.

Wouldn't it be fun to leap around like these characters?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it is, you know, everyone knows the

wow cool robot meme from the Gundam thing.

Like, Dragon Ball is so wow cool robot.

Oh, yeah.

And I don't think

that makes it a weakness of the show.

Yeah, about leaping around and flying and shooting energy beams and being super strong and changing your hair color to blonde when you want to.

I wish I could have had that power.

Oh my God, it'd be so easy.

When you sneeze.

No,

I just mean Lunch's power.

Listen, she kind of does, though.

She is the first Super Saiyan.

Yeah, she absolutely is.

She gets way stronger.

So I do think that one of the big draws of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball, especially Dragon Ball Z, is the sort of wow, cool robot effect of it

versus Hunter Hunter, which is, I think is...

is

giving you a lot of wow cool robot, but is also giving you whatever the other fucking thing is.

The concept of war is bad.

The war is bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And in Hunter-Hunter, it's the relationships that we have with the people closest to us are our greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.

Yeah.

Yep.

That's.

That's not a bad thesis statement.

Put it on the board.

The war, Hunter.

Yeah, but put it on the board.

Everybody

in this fight reminded me of the painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, which is a 1912 oil painting by Italian artist called Giacomo Balla.

I'm going to put it in the chat now.

This is what this fight looks like to me.

That's very funny.

Hey, I'm going to.

I like to describe this picture.

Yeah, this is the picture of

someone in a dress, a fancy dress, black dress, long floor length.

Or no, are those feet?

Those are feet.

I thought they were the frills of a dress.

But there is a long skirt, but these are feet scuttling around.

Black sort of silhouetted body holding a sort of chain leash.

And on that chain is like

a schnauzer dog or

like a dachshund or something.

And the dachshund is whacking its tail super fast.

And its ears are flopping around.

And its feet are pitter-patterning across the floor.

And the whole thing is just one big blur.

There's a little bit of brown on the dog.

And there's the floor.

There's like the light wood grain of the floor.

and then everything else is like black silhouette and blur.

This is what it looks like when these men are fighting.

At several points, they each get a bunch of arms because they're punching so fast.

Did you watch the other video that I put in the Media Club Plus?

Anybody?

Which video?

It's from season two, Krillin and Jackie Chun fighting.

I don't know if I did.

So, this is one of the all-time best bits of the show.

They are, again, this is season two.

We're like 25 episodes into Dragon Ball as a thing.

And

the fight starts and there's this moment where they both sort of leap and they end up at the other ends of the thing.

And it happens in a blink of an eye.

And the announcer's like, what just happened?

And

none of us could see it.

Everyone's all confused.

And they take fully three minutes to act out everything that they did in that split second.

Literally using the announcer, Roshi's like, pick me up, and like, like, goes into a kick pose and he's like, carry me over there.

I kicked

over there, put me down.

Krillin is like, spin me, pick me up and spin me.

And they do a rock, paper, scissors, and there's this bit of like during the rock, paper, scissors game,

Roshi starts spinning on Krillin

in

It's so funny.

It's hilarious.

This is,

you know, it's funny.

It's funny.

Yeah, Toriama's funny.

One of my favorite things about watching the show, this is less funny,

but is like constantly trying to keep in mind the like

the multiple

times that we're keeping when watching people fight.

We are constantly jumping between like

what it looks like to to you know go in the fight where everything is visible and then we're jumping out to like krillin like what is krillin seeing he can't quite keep up with goku's movements so he's watching go

like sort of this is the this is the um dynamism of a dog on a leash mode where it's like everything's a blur but you can kind of see what's happening

and then then you zoom out further and it's like the reality mode where you're just seeing like flashes of light happening, where it's like they're there, they're there, they're there, they're there, and it's like looks like television.

You can't even see people, you can just see for a brief second something connects.

And so, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are constantly operating on these three separate timelines, and it's like, this is kind of the trade.

It's not very hard to do that, but where Hunter Hunter is like very sophisticated in how it presents a scene showing you seeing things through a character instead of seeing things through a lens.

You're like seeing the character through the lens and then seeing what they're seeing through the frame of them.

Like

instead, Dragon Ball is like, you got to keep time.

You got to make sure you know whose time you're looking at things from.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is its own sort of interest

in terms of like

visual interest and mental sort of gymnastics that you're doing watching the show?

It's fun.

Yeah, it's great.

And then they slow it down because phase two of the fight is talking.

And

perhaps you three will have more interesting stuff to say about this conversation because I can see what it's trying to do,

but it is

very straightforward.

Jackie Chan, Master Roshi,

essentially says to

Tian Shin, you are being used and manipulated by your master.

His exact words are something like, I really like this line.

He said, you've allowed yourself to be led down a short and destructive path,

which is, that is a, that is a good line.

Yeah.

He also says, you're one of the most gifted fighters I've ever faced.

This is the sort of punchline of the thing.

You undermine your own potential with your rotten ethics.

That's like the general thing boils down to that.

And on the face of it, and I think probably under the surface of it as well, this is a fairly standard,

you are better than this and you are wasting your life working for evil conversation that you see all through sort of genre media.

I think it's a little, it's a little more than that.

And this is one of the reasons like I didn't pick the we're watching 10 total episodes or nine total episodes for this.

I can't remember.

Because we're going to do a part two to this.

You know, I didn't pick the 10 best episodes of Dragon Ball

or

the 10 first episodes of Dragon Ball.

Specifically, what I was looking for was like a tournament arc.

that had a bunch of relevant stuff for us from Hunter Hunter to like look at and compare

and that like wouldn't also be too confusing to just jump into for Jack who's never seen anything from Dragon Ball or Dragon Ball Z.

What I really like about this is it kind of

is the it's the text of the subtext of Netero's Hunter exam

where

there is a strength that you can only get to if you're not bad.

And like Hunter Hunter, Dragon Ball doesn't really demonstrate that that's true

ever at any point because, like, you know, we're going to see villains in the course of Dragon Ball that are a billion times more evil than TN and also a billion times stronger.

So it's just like fundamentally not untrue about the world.

And,

but it is still something, it is, it is still like the way that that kind of character is interacting with the world, where it's like,

as long as we're teaching people to be strong,

they can figure out how to be good along the way because the path to strength and the path to a moral life are the same path.

Yes, it is,

and both shows seem to be

do both shows believe this, or do both shows just have characters that believe this?

I think that Dragon Ball

believes it.

Yeah, I think so.

Goku is the avatar of

this being true.

Do you think Hunter Hunter believes it?

No.

Well, I think it...

I think

I don't know.

I don't think it believes it, but it definitely

feels like it's going, like, I'm showing you a character that believes this

more actively.

Like,

when I watch Dragon Ball, it doesn't feel like Akira Toriyam is like presenting me a character with a worldview.

It feels like it's presenting me with a protagonist and an antagonist.

When I watch Hunter Hunter, it feels like

Tagashi is going, this character thinks this.

And I don't know if Tagashi also thinks it, but I definitely get the feeling of like

that

he's giving a character a worldview and not just creating a protagonist.

That's there's ideology afoot.

Yes, yes.

Tagashi knows that there's ideology afoot.

What he's doing with it, I don't.

I'm not at liberty.

That's what the show is for, discussing out what Tagashi might be doing with it.

Togashi is tangling so much stuff up in

alongside strength, right?

Tagashi is sort of maybe not Tagashi.

Deliberately, Tagashi is saying strength is the same thing as goodness, is the same thing as being able to find your father, is the same thing as getting away from your abusive family.

You know, there's this, there's this sort of real knot of thread that he's building up.

And I think that he is, as we go, going to sort of start untangling those pieces

and saying, well, this might not actually be quite as linked to that as these characters believe.

I'm curious.

I think that there's like, okay, so we know about the Nimbus.

We haven't seen the Nimbus.

And I don't think we'll see the Nimbus at all in any of these episodes.

But the way that it gets presented basically is,

I keep saying Yoshi.

Oh my God.

Master Roshi can't ride the Nimbus because the Nimbus can only be ridden by someone with a pure heart, which is why he.

AKA, not horny.

Right.

You can't be horny and you can't be a weird creep about it either.

You can probably be horny, but you can't be a creep about it.

And you.

This is the...

This is like a dolphin in med.

Oh, my God.

It's so like.

Why did I say dolphin?

That's the first image result when I googled Master Yoshi.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Let's see.

Oh my God.

That is Master Yoshi.

This is the unicorn in medieval myth, right?

Like the unicorn is a being that

can only be interacted with if you are sort of of virginal virtue.

The flying nimbus is a cloud that you can only ride if you are not horny and are pure of heart.

Yeah, it is sort of like, and

I do think that the show,

when I think of what

Dragon Ball presents

as like in the same way that Tagashi says like here you go here's a character that believes this sort of thing

I do think that what Tagashi does in a similar thing is like when Goku can ride the Nimbus meaning that he's pure of heart in a way that that Master Roshi isn't I think that that is his

avenue for saying like this is

here I'm presenting this to you this is like my ideological statement is like Goku is the manifestation of a character that's pure of heart.

Does that make him a good person?

I don't think necessarily that is the same thing to

a Kiritoriyama.

I don't know.

I think I might have called Togashi by mistake.

In the same way, I think I brought Kiryu up a lot.

from like it's like a dragon series right when talking about Hunter-Hunter and how

there's this tying of strength to like legitimacy of moral character,

and how like being evil is like a flaw or a crack in your armor.

Like Kiryu, I think also could ride the Nimbus.

This is like, for some reason, this is

important to me that Kiryu.

No, I think you're right.

And

the

we

I think that to Tagashi,

not to Toriyama.

I think that to Toriyama, Netaro could not ride the Nimbus.

But I don't know if that's true for Tagashi.

Tagashi might think that, and I think that is a huge difference.

I think we will have the Nimbus test may come back.

The Nimbus test.

This is my Nimbus test.

I don't know if I agree with you on that, but I don't...

I guess, I guess,

it depends more on

what you think Tagashi views the Nimbus like, or what Tagashi thinks Netaro is like.

I think it is.

Yeah, I think it is.

Sorry, and I think I'll make one more clarifying statement about this.

Tagashi thinks that

in the same way that

I think, and again, this is based off of nothing but vibes and of having seen these shows and having a feeling about how things are being presented.

When I say that Tagashi, in his show,

that

Netaro could ride the Nimbus,

that is

a condom, that is maybe not a condemnation, it's too strong a word.

It is a criticism

of

the conception of pure of heart introduced by

the Nimbus and by Toriama.

Like,

I think it's like, I think that there's like, this is a bad way, this is a,

the purity of heart is like a weird measure of someone

in like in

my world.

Does that make sense?

I sort of lost

that.

I think I get where you're coming from.

Yeah.

It's very complicated.

And then we're working with, we're working with, this is, we are fully in supposition land

yeah we can't we we can talk about this another time i just i

yeah i think i i i read you more now yeah um

i

i really like

i thought the fight was fun for what it was but it was very like i was like oh yeah this is the I'm looking at the blueprint for everything here right now.

Like it's it's this is fun, but it's because it's been expounded upon so much, it is kind of just, yeah, like, it, it, it,

I'll enjoy drinking a glass of water, but I'm not remarking on how flavorful it is.

You know what I mean?

Um, um, the most excitement I got during this episode was when I realized that I had actually seen a clip of this before

from a stupid shitpost video on the internet, um, which I have now put in our chat volume warning.

Yeah,

um, which I got so excited when I realized it was about to happen.

If I were to give us like the best episodes from this, I may have had us watch the next fight, which we are skipping, which is Krillin versus Goku, which is, I think, like

fun and joyful and interesting

in a way.

But like, this

is like plot in a way that that was important

because it's like, it's the TN thing that I wanted us to follow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is funny.

It's really good.

I think do you recognize

the mirror technique?

The mirror technique?

Oh.

Oh, yeah.

The rhythm step.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's the rhythm step.

Rhythm echo.

Rhythm echo, yes.

But

the adapters, and maybe this is in the manga too, the rhythm echo is much scarier than what is happening here.

This really is like, woo, there's Adami.

Wow.

And the rhythm step is like, oh, fucking shit.

He's coming.

Yeah, it's definitely, you need the, like, the evil music and Kiloa's like creepy stare.

So is the rhythm step scary in the comic

of

Hunter Hunter?

Yep.

Yeah, I think it's presented presented very similarly.

Like, the atmosphere always changes to that, like, when Killowski is a little bit more like a dreamy, evil.

Yeah, that it is something from that sort of, like, the way the characters in Hunter Hunter would talk about it, something from, like, the underworld, you know?

Yeah,

but now we say malevolent nen.

Yeah, exactly.

Because Ren was evil in that moment.

I think also something about the aftermath technique might also come across less impactful because one TN sees through it like pretty quickly, and two, it's not presented as a big deal quite as much because

it's not the debut of this ability, right?

It's from season two.

Yeah, he does this against Krillin, right?

Yeah.

The way he sees through it is great.

He's got one extra eye.

Yeah.

I only need one extra eye to see this.

I can just see more stuff, literally.

And then, of course, we move into the final phase of the fight,

Obliteration.

In which

in a shock move,

Tian Shin uses the Kamehameha attack on

which he shouldn't even know how to do.

This was also,

while I miss AT's voice acting, I do not miss AT's wild strobing effects.

Ah, they're fun.

Maybe not in a kid's show.

Yeah.

The like blue and white effect here is really gorgeous once you get over the fact that it hurts your eyes to look at.

It's you know blue, dark blue with bright white highlights.

First in this sort of like awful

stroke flashbang that Tienshin uses, and then in the Kamehameha itself.

Solar flow.

There is a time when

the Kamehameha was one of the most important things in the world to me.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Can you talk about why that is?

Is it because you were 12 years old and...

Alright, okay.

Why is the Kamehameha cool when you're 12?

Obviously, you're drawing your hands.

Right, but why is it more cool than the mirror image or the

mega punch or like throwing the giant through the wall?

Is it that there is something you shout and there's a pose you make and you can do the shout on the pose?

You can obviously magic, too.

Same against.

Blows up the moon.

It's like obviously sort of magic, right?

Like you have to

move.

The big pose of the like putting your hands together and doing the like Hadouken

pose, like everybody loves that.

I'm doing it right now.

I literally did it while saying it.

Kamehameha move before I knew what Dragon Ball was, probably.

The thing I knew about Kamehameha, oh, sorry, the thing that I knew about Dragon Ball was the man's hair catches fire and he gets extremely strong.

And you go like that with your hands.

Yeah.

And it's also Kamehameha is great to say.

It is great to say.

And when you're 12, that counts for a lot.

It does.

The other thing is like the other most important thing was

Force Powers from Star Wars.

So it felt like Force Powers, kind of.

Yeah.

Well, it's sort of like, you know,

you're nine years old.

You're sitting at the dining room table, like finishing your snack, and you've got your empty

cup of juice, and you're just, and you're alone.

It's important that you're alone,

and so you reach out your hand, and you're just like, I can use the force right now.

It's it's it's the same way that like when I was a kid, I thought you could actually fly like in Dragon Ball because they explained it so well.

It's like, Well, yeah, you just feel it in your tummy, and then you'll serve.

I'm like, I'm just gonna do that.

I'm gonna summon the chi and do that.

Yeah, and there is there is this uh like power-up that you have to do for the command manager.

Like, if I did it good enough,

maybe,

maybe,

and if I can't,

you know, it's still fun to pretend.

When my dad was a kid, he would stand on his bed on one leg and then try and raise the leg very gently that he was standing on so that he would be floating.

And when that didn't work, he would try and creep up on it.

So he'd stand on one leg and then lift his leg up really quickly to try and, you know, like sneak up on flight.

And I feel like that's very much this sort of game.

He was doing men who stare at at goats games in his bedroom age nine yes

uh when so so you're you're nine years old you say this was the most important thing in the world for you you uh it's trying to knock over your own cup is it playing games with other people

um

a little bit with uh with uh my cousin kyle who i do run button with we both were super into Dragon Ball Z together.

It's thinking about it a lot, right?

He is rotating it in your head.

And there's nothing more important

than like,

you know, your kid.

So your day is very structured.

You have to spend,

you know, 40 hours a week at your full-time job that they call school.

And then

you've got to

like take a bath and, you know, clean your room.

And you've got to do, you've got to have dinner at the table with your family.

And, And, you know, it really only leaves a few hours of the day to do things that Kamehameha do.

And the two things that I did, or probably three things, was like, I had 90 minutes where I was reading a book.

I had 90 minutes where I was thinking about Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon and Star Wars.

And I had 90 minutes of playing a video game.

And then that's it.

And then on the weekends, I had to spend most of my day outside.

You can think about Kamehameha when you're outside, though.

Oh, that's actually one of the main places to think about it:

doing it in the woods to a tree.

Yes,

and like holding a rock though, isn't it?

You hold a rock in your hand so that when you charge up and then you do the blast, you can sort of like throw the rock forward.

That's that's important.

That's like that's major part of the technique.

So, what is that?

Some sort of projectile.

Yeah, what is the I had a weird little um

uh i had like a kinets um toy set like a

um to like build like you know different it was like a different kind of legos if you don't know about kinets and it came with like these two little plastic half spheres that would snap together and i genuinely don't know what they were for with the kinet set but i would uh carry them around and like throw them at things and pretend it was like an electric shock ball um like I was like a ninja oh it was like it was the projectile that the ninja fired I thought you were gonna say you pretend it was like a capsule corp capsule oh that would have been good I didn't think about that

they didn't they have better toys now I bet they've got like little capsules you can buy but they didn't I bet they have yeah I um

they had like a fortnight collab with Dragon Ball a while back and I bought Bulma just like unseen because I was like she looks cool um she is cool gonna gonna run around the island as her And they added a Kamehameha thing that you could find.

And I remember picking it up and thinking, this probably isn't going to be very cool.

And I think smartly they made it so that if you get the Kamehameha, you will just obliterate basically anybody in your radius.

Yeah, which is how it is.

You should not get a one-hit kill with it.

And that was fun.

It was fun to use that magic.

Is it magic?

It is the same thing that Nen is, I think.

Okay, it's Nen.

I believe that they are the same thing.

Yeah.

That is what I believe.

And Nen works differently a little bit, and you can do more stuff with it.

But in the same way that it's the same thing with Naruto, and it's the same thing with a bunch of them, it is just like the energy that's inside of your body manifesting outside of your body.

And for some reason, in Hunter-Hunter, the rules get

way more specific.

And in Dragon Ball, anyone only ever thinks to shoot fireballs.

But, you know, I think it's basically the same thing.

thing.

Cut to bungee gum.

It's gum with the proper.

No, what does he say?

It has the properties of rubber and gum.

Rubber and gum, yeah.

Is that a Hiseka line, or is that what one of the commentators says?

It's a Hisuka line.

He says it

says it twice and thinks it quietly to himself once.

He looks

as unpleasantly cool as Hiseka.

It's such a goofy line.

It's because he's so proud of his bungee gum.

Yeah.

He's he's very proud of it and then what is the what is the important thing about this kameo though

oh uh

is it that it doesn't really bother jackie chun uh he's fired it at the crowd oh he's too evil so he's he's fired it in a way where jackie chun has to deflect it instead of dodging it or it will legitimately kill dozens of people

This is a short and destructive path that he is down.

Yeah.

And Jackie deflects it.

And he does, he shoots it up in the air.

After sort of taking a little moment to recover.

This is some real cool guy behavior.

Walks to the edge of the ring and leaves, forfeiting the match.

Do you remember what he says?

No.

Right before stepping out of the ring,

he says:

as my season ends, so a new one begins.

Huh.

Teaches again, huh?

Yeah, I just think he goes, he's just like,

you know, this was, it's not important for me to win strongest man in the world.

What's important to me is that Goku has people

that will challenge him and make him

strive to be better instead of accepting being the strongest.

Another thing that is important to me is hot ladies.

That's also.

Yes, and I have more time to read my collection of pornographic magazines.

What a piece of shit.

But it was great.

He came out of this fight looking really cool, I thought.

He looked that fun combination of deeply smug and also very cool at the same time.

To be like, I've won.

I don't need this.

I'm in the right here.

And I also just saved a bunch of people from getting obliterated by my own spell, which wouldn't have looked good.

No, it wouldn't have looked good.

Although I don't think anyone would have blamed him.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah.

Because Tian has other blasts that he can do.

He does that solo flare that blinds everybody in the audience.

Everybody in the audience.

People are crying.

People in the audience are crying.

You can hear tears.

It is really funny when Jackie Chun's like,

if you're going to give me a tan, at least give me sunglasses next.

Yeah, he's just so relaxed about it.

Yeah.

And the other thing is that Tien is essentially like, so during this time,

the crane hermit has

realized that this is not Jackie Chun, or that Jackie Chun is in fact Master Roshi and starts trying to tell this to Tien

and when Jackie Chun steps out of the ring

Shen Master Shen is like he's doing this because he's embarrassed to lose to you because you were going to win and this is when Tien realizes no he wasn't even he wasn't even fighting Sirius yet

yes yeah

this is like the

oh you thought you were really fighting me but in actuality you were fighting the weak the weak goofy version of me it's also the uh i mean it's he hasn't used his left hand for the volleyball game right like it's it's that too for the volleyball game volleyball well he's holding volleyball

in in on the airship i no no you could have described it better it's late the thing is that you said

what you said hasn't used his left hand and what i was thinking of was like princess bride where they do use their left hand to serve fight.

Yeah.

And so I just I just misinterpreted what you were saying and I was like polyball.

Tagashi loves that particular move actually.

I feel like the Netero hasn't Netero's only been using his left hand is the same as Hisaka hasn't stepped away from this spot.

Yeah.

And you know, on the one hand, this is just like a classic sort of fight trope.

But on the other hand, it is deployed with so much more laser focus in Tagashi's version of it than it is here in the in Dragon Ball right whereas in in Dragon Ball it's just like I haven't even been fighting strongly well the strong me the thing that this evolves into which is really funny because it ends up being like way more literal and like that like this is fuzzier than uh than Tagashi is in Hunter Hunter but what it is what it ends up being in Dragon Ball Z is like way more concrete even where instead of saying I haven't even been fighting strongly what you say is, like, I actually can transform into a literal different person that is stronger than this.

And you didn't know that I could do that.

Yeah, fully literalized.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this brings us to the end of this

chunk of episodes.

Yeah.

Is the stuff that we are watching next time directly following this?

Or are we going to jump a little further?

We are skipping two episodes where Goku fights Krillin in the semifinals,

which is sad because those episodes are really fun.

And

for anyone who has time out there,

you know, if you watch these episodes, check those two episodes out.

Those are fun.

Like, it's nice to see a fight between

Krillin and Goku, who are extremely good and close friends.

And it's not in the Hunter exam rules.

They can spar, essentially.

They don't need need to try and kill each other.

Yeah, they're testing each other and having fun, and

Krillin wants to not be weaker than Goku for once, and Goku wants to help his friend be stronger.

Right.

And

so we're skipping those two episodes, and we're going into the,

I think, almost

all

of it.

So we're doing episodes

15, 16, 17, 18, 19, or is it?

I'll double check.

So So we're skipping 13 and 14.

So it's 15 through the end of the season, whatever number that is.

I think it's 19.

And

pretty much all of that is the final fight.

Wow.

Exciting.

Yeah.

Just a wild contrast with Hunter-Hunter.

I mean,

for what we've seen so far in tournament fights, can you imagine a fight going four, five episodes?

No.

The longest that it it goes is two, and even then, it's usually because the fight began halfway through episode one.

Right.

And then

halfway through episode two.

Yes.

So.

Anyway,

those are fun episodes.

I do think that it is a good fight.

You know, it's not, is it my favorite

tournament arc in Dragon Ball?

No.

But I do think it's the easiest to pick 10 episodes from to show what Dragon Ball is,

talk a little bit about Dragon Ball Z and contrast with Hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

Is there anything else we want to talk about before my final question?

Because I have been on the Dragon Ball wiki.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm fresh out of things.

I said way more than I thought that I was going to say about this stuff.

About Dragon Ball.

Well, we got good stuff.

I think so too.

And I like the relaxed vibe of the bonus.

Welcome to the bonus.

Welcome to the bonus.

Because we know it's

the homies here.

Yeah.

Get get concerned.

Hey, it's me, Matt.

Why don't you take your shoes off?

No.

Hey, hold on a minute.

Hey, hold on a minute.

I'm onto your game.

Do you share the bonus odes?

You should go to iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and rate us five stars.

And if you rate us five stars and tell us one way that you played Kamehameha games in the past, we might read it out on the podcast.

And if you rate us four stars, I'm going to cry and I'll record it and post it to Twitter.

I'm going to kill you.

No, I'm not going to kill you.

Wow.

Whoa.

Not Dre.

I'm going to kill the person who gives us four stars.

Yeah, no.

If you had said you were going to kill Dre.

Oh, it would be fine.

Okay.

Well, it's just more appropriate.

If you give us four stars, I'm going to put you in a saw trap because

he gets through the loophole by saying he's never killed anybody because it's their choice to die.

I don't think that would stand up in court.

And you have to stand up in court.

They literally say all rise.

They do say all rise.

I'll just be sad too then.

I won't kill anybody.

Why don't you both just cry and we'll put that up as two separate episodes?

People would like it too much.

I don't want to do that.

What is Snakeway?

Oh.

Oh, I'm.

Okay, Sylvie.

You want to talk about Snakeway?

No, I don't.

Snakeway.

It's...

Part of it.

I'm looking at a picture of it and it looks fucking sick, honestly.

Snakeway is a path

in the afterlife

that by running all the way down, you can reach the home of King Kai.

Did I get it right?

And also,

if you fall off, you go to

the home for infinite losers?

Yeah, you fall off of Snakeway into the home of infinite losers.

That is the world's funniest sensor because everyone's shirt said hell and they didn't want to air it in America.

So they changed it to HIFL or H-F-I-L.

Home for Infinite Losers.

That's so funny.

God, it's especially funny to me because I feel like Home for Infinite Losers is a little too twee for me.

It's a little too lemony snicket.

You know, it's

here's a funny acronym.

However, it being the result of a botched, overzealous censoring attempt

immediately makes it extremely funny.

Yeah, yeah.

It exists for the best best possible reason.

Anyway, yeah, so when you die, you go and

meet King Yama, who is

the afterworlds administrator, and he tells you where you're supposed to go.

And if you're really, really good, you can make it down to the end of Snake Way instead of going to the afterlife and go hang out with King Kai, who is a

semi-interdimensional governing

guy

who

he lives on a Mario Galaxy world?

He lives in a Mario Galaxy world and he teaches you martial arts if you can

not

if you can make it down snake way, basically.

I don't.

Okay, here is what I thought Kinkai would look like.

What do you think he sounds like?

I thought Kinkai would look like a buff

man.

I thought he would look like Regal Yamcha.

Yeah.

No.

He looks like a cross between a catfish,

a

goblin,

and an ant.

He looks a little bit like Green, Green, Jellybean Man, but a catfish.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, I got cricket vibes.

Also, looks kind of like a cricket, yeah.

I'm gonna pull up King Kai's soundboard.

Oh, yeah.

You should do this.

Okay, and we like hanging out with this guy.

And we hang out with him if it's

a homie.

Is King Kai also lecherous and horny?

I think he has his moments.

I think so.

I don't think

it's Roshi, but I feel like it's close if he is.

It's hard to imagine there being a mentor that isn't horny.

Yeah.

I mean, that's why I'm asking.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Hmm.

I didn't find a good soundboard for this.

I only found one that has like Eurobeat in the background.

No, I'm just

listening to other DBZ voice clips.

Ken Kai.

He sounds like he's from PubStar Run.

He does a little bit.

A little bit.

He is voiced by the game.

He's got a little bit of Brothers Chap vibes.

He's voiced by the same guy that voices Goku.

Really?

Yep.

Sean Shemmel or something.

I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but I think it's that.

Yep, same guy.

And who is Mr.

Satan?

Mr.

Satan is the guy who

let everyone think Mr.

Satan is the strongest guy in the world because for some reason they don't want the attention

for saving the planet.

I don't really understand why this is true, and it causes a lot of problems, and it creates situations to have Mr.

Satan be in the show, who genuinely sucks and I hate.

Yeah.

He is the

scapegoat for success.

Yes, but is also later Gohan's father-in-law.

Yes, he becomes Gohan's father-in-law.

Yeah.

I guess that is like the most interesting thing that Mr.

Satan does, which is be the father to someone who is for a brief period genuinely cool.

I think that's the point of Mr.

Satan is to have the like, to do the funny, like,

oh, this, my kid's dating the daughter of a normal human who has this reputation, but is a coward.

He is infuriating because not only is he a total fraud and know that he's a total fraud, he is also completely unsubtle and

braggadocious.

Huh.

We don't like him.

I mean,

I just think he's annoying.

He gets better, but yeah, he's never good.

Yeah, he's annoying.

Here's a non-canon fusion of him and and Goku.

Yeah, there's just like no way that you could convince me that it doesn't make sense to just let everyone know that Goku saved the world because they already knew that he does that from other times that he saved the world.

Huh.

Also, like, I feel like Mr.

Satan's really the only funny thing about him is the name.

Yeah.

And it is very funny.

They don't even call him Mr.

Satan.

Well, Hercule is his first name.

His name is Hercule Satan.

Well, they just never say Satan in the dub, I don't think.

I think they censor that his last name is Satan.

Apparently, his real name is Mark.

Mark Satan?

Yeah, his name is Mark Satan.

Okay, that's kind of pretty good, though.

That is a true, like, bidality of evil name.

Yeah.

Also, a very good, shitty wrestler name, which is what he is.

Mark Satan.

Mark Satan.

Mark the Undertaker.

Fuck on Kirk.

It's Mark Satan's music.

Oh, that sounds kind of good, Hercule.

Yeah, that's kind of what Hercule sounds like.

Have we got anything else before we go?

Any more questions, Jack?

Any more lingering Dragon Ball thoughts?

I don't think so.

I think if I have any, I'll save them for next time.

Yeah, we will get into it next time.

Which, what are we watching next time?

Next time, we are watching episodes

15 through 19.

I can get the episode names in one second.

The end, essentially, of the last five episodes of season seven.

Oh,

I forgot that my Plex doesn't have episode titles because Plex is not a fan of

Dragon Ball.

Yeah, Plex is not a fan of Dragon Ball.

It numbers everything wrong.

It makes the seasons weird.

So that is frustrating.

Yeah, mine's just all one season.

Yeah, your your season numbering was wild.

Yeah.

So

I'll say for Dre, for your benefit, because I know that you don't have

the, so it's episode 97 through 101 or season 7, episodes 15 through 19, titled The Finals.

World's Greatest Martial Artist is Final Match, Goku versus Tien.

And the secret.

These episode titles are so long.

The secret technique.

High Q Ken versus Fighting Power.

Victory's Edge Battle Power.

Tien Shinhan in Distress.

Tien's Insurrection.

Life, Death, A Last Resort, The Spirit Cannon.

And finally, the martial arts tournament comes to an end.

And then

slash the fallen.

wow that sounds like more because there are multiple titles for those names that's why each episode pair is just for everybody's reference yeah each episode is two or three different titles I don't I don't know why it mainly has to do with the modern distribution titles

yeah could be that I would bet it because the publishing rights has changed have changed for Dragon you're saying different

subs and dubs have different titles so they just feel like

I think one of them is the Japanese title that's translated, and one of them is the

English release.

They just present it all as one title here.

Yeah, it's you know,

it's not the cleanest thing.

No, this information's never really kept great.

No,

um, all right, yeah.

Well, just to just to say,

season that follows, write this: King Piccolo Saga.

That's a good one.

Is that true?

Fiddle D,

Fiddle dee D.

Fiddle D.

I'm that guy's dad.

Fiddle de dad.

Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dad.

When you'll fight me, oh, now you've made me really mad.

Two

people.

That's him if he wasn't elves.

Have a good night, everybody.

Bye-bye.