Why Dragon Ball Z Does Not Hold Up, and Kai Didn't Really Help

I used to watch Dragon Ball Z when I was in middle school, which is frankly about the right age for it. I had never seen anything like it, so of course it was very exciting to a mind not yet rendered cynical by time and the national nightmare of the Michael Bay Transformer movies. A few years later I tried to go back to it because I was on a nostalgia binge at the time and wanted to see how it held up. A few hours later, I found myself sitting there thinking, I don't remember it being this bloody slow...and I looked it up, and sure enough they apparently had to drag out the runtime because they had already caught up with the story in the manga and so were having to kill time to let the manga get sufficiently ahead of them that they could safely adapt the next chapters. So that explained that, I thought. Thus, later on when I eventually learned that they were making Dragonball Kai, which would supposedly streamline the show into more concise and tightly-structured stories, I was thrilled. That, after all, was the major complaint I had with them. 

So I sat down and watched Kai...and it still drags. Because here is the thing...these are not really stories that demand huge expanses of time, and you can only have the villain pull previously unrevealed superpowers out of his arse so many times before it starts smelling like a hack job...and arse. It very quickly starts feeling like, however many cosmetic streamlinings the material has undergone, it is still arbitrarily padding out the runtime.

Which is a shame, because the fundamental mythology is something I definitely get. It's something of a dark take on Superman - which makes sense considering how much Japanese Manga as a form was influenced by American comic books that came to the country during the reconstruction period after WWII. The last son of a dying people is sent out into the ether to save his life, he lands on a distant planet and is raised by people not his own who become his new family, while he becomes the champion of his new adopted people. It also gives it enough of a gimmick to make it fresh - apparently the Saiyans, our Kryptonians for the evening, were completely psychotic. Seriously, every other Sayan we meet who is not our hero Goku is a psychopath.

Goku himself is a bit of a dumbass, which to be fair is mostly the fault of a writers' contrivance. There are some bits where they claim he was holding back for reasons of honor or to test his opponent or some other contrived nonsense like that, but those elements are blatantly there just to drag the fight out a little longer. But that is not really the fault of the character but of the writers, which is an arbitrary distinction, I know, but shut up.

Vegeta, on the other hand, is a terrific character. His characterization plays with that classic trope of the person who does not seem to have a single good intention in their entire makeup but is nevertheless forced by circumstances to form an uneasy alliance with our heroes. That is a durable story element, and it works quite well here. Vegeta, for his part, is a compelling character partly because you can never quite predict his actions. He will always act in his self-interest - occasionally abstracted as the interests of his people - but you never know what he will deem to be in his interest or that of the Saiyan race. And so he remains unpredictable while not seeming like a complete loon. And the fact that he is established early on as arrogant makes the bits where he holds back for poorly-explained reasons seem more probable. After all, once he has been established as arrogant and overconfident to the point where he consistently underestimates his opponent, then it becomes easier to justify that he might prioritize toying with them over just winning until it is too late.

There is a somewhat similar character dynamic going on with Piccolo. That switch happens earlier, and the fact that he has taken the child Gohan under his wing, having to train this young boy in a very short period of time to be the greatest warrior this world has ever seen, fuels his character arc and gives it some degree of depth. Young Gohan, in short, becomes Piccolo's gateway to humanity, and that in turn makes him a more intriguing and sympathetic character. Furthermore, the mythology behind the Dragonballs and Piccolo's race and home planet where the bulk of the Frieza saga takes place is really interesting.

But beyond that point, the show just gets really really frustrating. The dialogue is not very well-written at the best of times, and all the exchanges smack to one extent or another of a very immature and boyish male power fantasy. The women in the story, despite generally being the only sensible ones there, are constantly characterized as overcautious nags. And like 300 but with a less consistent tone, its constant emphasis on the glory of masculinity ends up backfiring and making the whole affair unintentionally homoerotic.

There is very little fanservice, thankfully, and I liked the characterization of Bulma generally, though even she is occasionally portrayed as a disapproving nag. All the men look like they've been drawn by Frank Miller, fat stocky slabs of angus beef to a man, which considering that they are all supposed to be immaculately fit Herculean exemplars becomes a bit incongruous, but whatever.

But it just isn't a very compelling show. Broadly, the difference is a matter of pacing, and here is the rub even with Kai...it's like a bad videogame, in that there is a single goal dangled in front of the characters' faces, and the plot basically just consists of more and more implausible obstacles being set in front of them achieving that goal. Occasionally they will throw in new characters, but the upward power curve is handled very badly and is almost entirely dependent on pointless delays.

I am honestly going to go back to Kai when they finish their announced streamlining of the Majin Buu saga, because that is one that I do remember having some affection for when I was younger, mostly because there are enough moments in there that are just so delightfully bonkers that I can't hate them.

For example, by that point they have a power that fuses individual fighters together into one superfighter, which opened the door for all kinds of crazy stuff, and I wish they had used it more, to be honest. And of course there is the bit where Buu turns Vegeto - the fusion of Goku and Vegeta - into a piece of hard candy, but then Vegeto - as a piece of candy, mind - proceeds to beat the crap out of Buu. It is insane, obviously, but in a really delightful way that shows imagination in a way that the previous arcs didn't. The imagination in those first arcs mostly consisted of Oh No, Cell has absorbed someone else and now looks slightly different.

I am here going to compare Dragon Ball Z to Yu Yu Hakusho, which I got into around the same time but stuck with for much longer, and which held up a lot better when I came back to it later. The arc of Yu Yu Hakusho that most resembles Dragon Ball Z is the Dark Tournament arc, and fittingly it is the most videogame-like, building our heroes up in power to confront a seemingly invincible final boss who was constantly revealing bigger and better powers of his own.

Part of the reason that works in Yu Yu Hakusho is because it is established early on that the big bad has a lot more power than he is letting on, and in fact they put a percentage on it every time. Only once - and not until the final fight - do they pull the bullshit of him saying, oh, I said I was fighting at 100%, but I was really fighting at 80%, heres 100%! Dragon Ball Z's plot practically ran on that sort of nonsense.

But the main reason that Yu Yu Hakusho really works is that the characters really do change as they go on and continue fighting. The only character who really changes in the Frieza saga of Dragon Ball Z is Piccolo, which makes him a much more interesting character to spend time with than bloody Goku, but whatever. At the same time, everyone in Yu Yu Hakusho changes pretty drastically by the end of the Dark Tournament. Kurama is brought into contact with his ancient past in ways that we've never seen before, and tries to harness the power of that past even as he fears what it might do to his humanity. We see resident badass Hiei desperate enough for the first time to pull out a super-move that requires him to sacrifice his arm to pull it off. It becomes clear that Kuwabara is the moral center of the group, while Yusuke is forced to mature emotionally through the constant suffering he is put through, most literally when his sensei forces him to agonizingly absorb her spirit energy as his final trial. 

I am not going to sit here and pretend that Yu Yu Hakusho fixes all the problems that Dragon Ball Z had, but it fixes a lot of them. With Yu Yu Hakusho, you have constant turnover with old enemies becoming allies, you have secrets from the pasts of allies coming back to haunt them, and you have all sorts of change shaking up what is ostensibly a linear tournament plot. DBZ, meanwhile, sets all its pieces up at the beginning and promises no real change by the end except that there will be one fewer piece, i.e. the villain.

So my experience with Dragon Ball Z is that it has a solid mythology let down by awful storytelling and frankly shameless amounts of padding, even in the revised version. It is something I am glad I had in middle school and equally glad I have now outgrown.