Review for Dragon Ball GT: Season 1

Introduction

I’ve had my fill of Dragon Ball, or at least I thought I did. After all, Manga Entertainment unleashed the dragon upon the UK last year, releasing all 200 plus episodes of Dragon Ball Z on DVD, and muggins here went and reviewed the whole saga, nine boxsets of hard-hitting, lowest common denominator, shonen action that just went on and on and on, occasionally rising above the morass of mediocrity to deliver something memorable, like the Cell arc, but ultimately losing itself in the levelling up excess of the Majin Buu storyline. By the end of the series, the cute little tale that had started off long before in the original Dragon Ball as a Journey to the West remake, had gone way past the Superman parallel and wandered into battling Gods territory. It’s hard to take a show seriously where the world is destroyed, and only the afterlife is strong enough to host the battle for reality, and wishing on a set of balls brings the world and everyone on it back to life.


So when the Dragon Ball GT check-discs arrived, I swore I wouldn’t touch it. It’s a case of a studio wanting to cash in long after the manga creator had washed his hands of the property. Dragon Ball GT is a wholly original creation, and according to Wikipedia (so it must be right) GT stands for Gomenasai Toriyama-san, an apology to the manga’s creator. But the discs looked at me forlornly for almost a month, occasionally whimpering in their neglect, and my curiosity kept being pricked. Surely anything that Dragon Ball GT could do wouldn’t be worse than the Majin Buu arc! Anyway, I’ve started this review, and if you are reading it, that means I’ve actually watched the discs through, otherwise it will be condemned to forever linger on my hard drive incomplete, as I will have dumped the series to preserve my sanity.


Some ten years have passed since the end of Dragon Ball Z. Son Goku has been off training Buu’s reincarnation, Uub, and is about to test the fruits of that labour. His granddaughter Pan has grown up, and is trying to find a guy to date who isn’t intimidated by her strength, Vegeta’s joined the Village People, and Trunks is trying to avoid his responsibilities as president of the Capsule Corporation.


And this is when Pilaf decides to take over the world again, by sneaking into the heavenly temple and stealing the Dragon Balls. Only he steals the Ultimate (black –starred) Dragon Balls, which the previous Kami-sama had kept under lock and key as too dangerous. One of those fateful coincidences occurs, and Goku gets wished back into a little boy, apparently easier to defeat. Goku doesn’t mind too much having to grow up again, but the thing about these Ultimate Dragon Balls is... the thing about these Ultimate Dragon Balls is that exactly one year after a wish is made, the planet upon which that wish is granted gets destroyed. And worse, when the wish is made, these Dragon Balls aren’t scattered to the four corners of the world, they’re scattered to the four corners of the universe! So now little Goku, Pan, and Trunks have a year to travel around the universe in their space ship, find the Dragon Balls, and undo the wish, or the Earth goes boom!


The first half of Dragon Ball GT is presented across 5 discs from Manga Entertainment, 34 episodes in all.

Disc 1
1. A Devastating Wish
2. Pan Blasts Off
3. Terror on Imecka
4. The Most Wanted List
5. Goku vs. Ledjic
6. Like Pulling Teeth
7. Trunks, The Bride

Disc 2
8. Whisker Power
9. Lord Luud
10. Dance and Attack
11. Lord Luud’s Curse
12. The Last Oracle of Luud
13. The Man Behind the Curtain
14. The Battle Within


Disc 3
15. Beginning of the End
16. Giru’s Checkered Past
17. Pan’s Gambit
18. Unexpected Power
19. A General Uprising
20. The Source of Rilldo’s Power
21. A Secret Revealed

Disc 4
22. The Baby Secret
23. Hidden Danger
24. Discovering the Truth
25. Baby’s Arrival
26. Saiyan Hunting
27. The Attack on Vegeta
28. A Worldwide Problem

Disc 5
29. The Fall of the Saiyans
30. The Game After Life
31. Collapse From Within
32. The Return of Uub
33. The Tail’s Tale
34. Back in the Game

Picture

If there is one thing about this show that makes me smile, it’s original aspect ratio. Having suffered through the decapitating ignominy of Dragon Ball Z’s widescreen reframing (seriously Funimation’s treatment of the show was akin to most of my dad’s photographs of the family), I am glad to say that Dragon Ball GT presents its image in the original 4:3 aspect ratio, and it’s native PAL to boot. You can’t get away from the NTSC source material though, and consequently the image is a little soft. But, there’s been no apparent DNR applied, film grain is apparent, and lines don’t vanish when the image shakes. The image is infinitely better presented than in Dragon Ball Z. The animation is a little more refined and accomplished, although the character designs maintain a continuity of style from the earlier incarnation.

Sound

We get the same deal as with Dragon Ball Z, a DD 5.1 English surround track with the original Japanese music, a DD 2.0 English stereo track with the US broadcast music, and the original Japanese audio in DD 2.0 mono form. You have the choice between translated subtitles and a signs only track to go with it all. I didn’t have time to look at the dub audio in depth, and instead stayed with the Japanese audio throughout, which is on a par with Dragon Ball Z, technically unimpressive but gets the job done. I did notice some dropouts at 1.01:34 into disc 4, and again at 1.04:44 on the same disc.


However that is the least of this release’s audio problems. We’re talking egregious pitch correction to compensate for the PAL speed-up. You’d expect a little QC to go through afterwards and notice the clipping that’s so bad that it distorts not just the background music, but the character dialogue as well. On the other hand, the idea of watching through this entire series to check on the audio would be enough for me to forgive anyone who chose to simply sign it off. Either way, if I was a Dragon Ball GT fan, and that is a big if, I wouldn’t be happy at all with the audio on this release.

Extras

Each disc gets static menus with a jacket picture to look at when the discs aren’t spinning. Each disc gets the old Marathon Mode too, to cut out all of the credit sequences and episode recaps. And that’s your lot. No textless credits here.

Conclusion

I tried. I swear I tried to watch this with an open mind, approach it fresh, as if I’d never seen an episode of Dragon Ball before. I also tried to review it the same way that I do other long running anime, at a pace of two or three episodes a night. I just couldn’t. I’ve been watching Dragon Ball GT for this review at the pace of just one episode a night, and some nights I just couldn’t bear the thought of watching any more, and just left it for the next night. As a result, this series is like the Lord of the Rings novel for me. By the time I finish reading Lord of the Rings, I’ll have totally forgotten the beginning. So too with these 34 episodes of Dragon Ball GT. I can’t even remember how it started. The difference here is that The Lord of the Rings is good.


Dragon Ball GT is to me, just the same old nonsense as Dragon Ball Z, although fans will no doubt be able to find more critical distinctions between the two. It’s the same old low-rent shonen nonsense, the same old levelling up of powers, the same old succeeding through superior willpower, and the same old stupidity of plot. The number of times that Goku gets excited at the prospect of fighting another superior villain! Always he’ll let the bad guy power up, wipe out whole planets full of innocents, just so he can have a fun fight, whereas just beating the guy in the first episode would have saved lives and property. I tell you, by far the most dangerous, and neglectful villain in the Dragon Ball verse is Goku himself.


The problem was with the end of Dragon Ball Z, with the main character so strong that he could only fight in the afterlife without rending reality asunder. They were as Gods at the end of that series, and it leaves the creators with a bit of a quandary getting them relatable as protagonists again. This is done by means of a wish, reducing Goku in age, size and ability so he’s just like he was at the start of the original Dragon Ball series, almost. That’s a win-win situation you might think, getting the original Dragon Ball fans on board, those who first tuned in for a little Journey to the West variation, instead of the constant Superman, Terminator and Star Wars ‘homage’ that it became in the latter series, except that it’s still like that in GT, only the size of main character has changed. They still go into Super Saiyan mode at the drop of a hat, they still fly around all over the place, except when they’re dangling off the edge of a cliff during a battle, and they forget that they can fly. It’s downright depressing that they just repeated variations on the same story, week in and week out, and fans still lapped it up. It’s almost like an episode of CSI.


There are the odd single episodes which can be fun, those which stand alone from the main arcs of the series, little adventures for an episode or two on an alien world as they search for the bad Dragon Balls. But most of the latter half of the series is focussed on the planet of the Terminators, where Trunks gets frozen in carbonite, and where a particularly noxious villain named Baby plots revenge against the Saiyans. He can possess people and take their powers, and control them by laying eggs in them, and when he gets to Earth, he aims for the strongest guy there through whom he can enact his schemes. And so Baby Vegeta is born. Goku kind of dies again, winds up in the afterlife where he has to go through some more training. And all that’s left to defend an Earth rapidly coming under Baby Vegeta’s thrall is Boo’s reincarnation Oob, and the original Majin Boo himself, now turned good guy and Satan’s best friend. At one point, before the trained up Goku returns to fight Baby Vegeta, Majin Boo and Oob literally join forces. To my eternal disappointment, the resulting superbeing isn’t named Boob!


I can’t judge if Dragon Ball GT is good or bad, all I know is that I regretted wasting my time watching it, and I don’t think I can watch Dragon Ball in any incarnation ever again. That’s a shame, as the original Dragon Ball is coming to the UK, back when the series wasn’t about aliens, and super powers, and everybody didn’t fly like Superman. What I do know is that the pitch corrected audio on this release is bad enough that I would consider it faulty.


Look at that! I wasn’t even motivated enough to mention just how annoying a character Pan is, and how much more annoying is the little pet robot that she pick up, Gill.