Preamble: Due to a variety of circumstances, I find myself shackled to a promise to watch and blog the entirety of Dragon Ball. I am watching one episode every weekday morning. In the interests of not flooding this otherwise austere blog with 153 posts about a terrible 80s "kids"1 anime, I will be blogging Dragon Ball weekly, in batches of approximately 5 episodes. Thus, today's post is the first in a 30-part series. Despite the overwhelming and enduring popularity of Dragon Ball (and especially its continuation Dragon Ball Z), I will be writing this in a largely introductory fashion, assuming my audience is comprised of noobs like myself who have never before experienced the classic.
Without further ado, let's start at the beginning!
Son Goku is an extremely small fourteen years old, living on his own in a Mesozoic mountain hermitage with an orange ball he calls "grandfather." Lest readers mistakenly take away from this that humans and dinosaurs coexisted2, we should note that Goku is actually a mythical figure from Chinese legend—not human!
... and then that apology is promptly thrown out by the arrival of Bloomers3, a spunky blue-haired human girl who's really good at motorcycles and really bad at boys. By the second episode we've seen machine guns and television sets. So not only do humans and dinosaurs coexist, but the technology level is basically modern.
It turns out Bloomers wants to collect the Dragon Balls, and that Goku's grandfather is one of them. So the two set out together in an uneasy alliance. (Bloomers doesn't trust Goku to not be a perv; Goku doesn't trust Bloomers to... well, actually, he was never socialized as a human and his thought process is incredibly opaque.) The seven Dragon Balls, when gathered, will grant any wish4.
Within the first four episodes, the pair have already collected five of seven, putting them miles ahead of their competition, a clownishly incompetent military(?) organization of three headed by the unfortunately-named goblin Pilaf. At this rate, Bloomers will have her dream boyfriend within a week, and the show will continue with 145 episodes of filler. This is the equivalent of if Fullmetal Alchemist were titled Lior. Dragon Ball's sense of adventure seems to be its primary redeeming quality, so I hope they find something else to search for.
Mixed into the shockingly incessant stream of urine jokes, fart jokes, crotch-punching, ephebophilia, sex essentialism, and ripoff Looney Tunes bits, Dragon Ball manages to cram a broad spectrum of settings. From mountain wilderness to concrete igloo cities to a Florida-esque beach populated by Hawaiian shirt-wearing geezers, the show thus far is a wild ride between extremely varied climates. The diversity of locales, and also the brevity with which Dragon Ball transitions between them, makes the world seem really big, and that leads to one of two reasons I have to not hate my current marriage to the show—I am excited to see what else creator Toriyama has in store for us. (Though I worry that it'll be largely comprised of borderline-to-blatantly insulting Chinese stereotypes.)
The second reason I am enjoying Dragon Ball is that it is ridiculous to the point of absurdity. The comedy is so juvenile that it starts being funny again. Like if you imagine a "quality" scale wrapped around a Dragon Ball5, you'll notice that "atrocious" and "excellent" are really close together.
This show tries to go the distance in its attempts to outshine the great tragedies of the anime genre, and it certainly gets there. Each new episode lowers the bar, and resets the Goku Penis Clock6. How will Bloomers' objectification deepen next week? How many women will Goku violently molest? It is with grim amusement that I shudder at the possible answers to these questions.
Speaking of next week, when I left our "heroes" on Friday, they had just subdued shapeshifting, girl-snatching Communist pig Oolong. I look forward to reporting on their future hijinks. Stay tuned!