Review for Dragon Ball: Season 4

Introduction

It’s a never ending cycle with this show, collect the Dragon Balls, have a tournament, collect the Dragon Balls, have a tournament... The previous collection injected a little originality into the mix, by having our heroes fight in a tournament so they could collect the Dragon Balls, but with collection 4, we get back to normal service, just a straight up tournament. But Collection 4 is the one that everyone has been waiting for. As first we get to meet everyone’s favourite three-eyed martial artist, Tenshinhan. That’s just the warm-up act for the main attraction, as afterwards, he’s green, he’s obnoxious, and he’s named after the smallest woodwind instrument in the orchestra. Collection 4 of Dragon Ball is where we first meet Piccolo!


A young girl named Bulma wanted a boyfriend. For some reason, she decided to go looking for the seven Dragon Balls, which when collected summon the eternal dragon Shen Long, which will grant one wish. The Dragon Balls are then scattered to the four winds once more, inert for a whole year before they can be gathered and wished upon again. Her search led her to an isolated mountain, where dwelled a young boy named Son Goku, trained in the martial arts by his late grandfather, possessing a magical staff, sporting a monkey’s tail, and suffering from a ‘time of the month’ that you wouldn’t believe. Goku also had the four star Dragon Ball, his last remaining memento of his grandfather, one that he wasn’t too willing to part with. Which is why he wound up travelling with Bulma as she looked for the other Dragon Balls. But they weren’t the only people looking to have their ultimate wishes granted, there are some other, more nefarious characters out there too.


In the previous collection, Goku managed to defeat the terrible menace of the Red Ribbon Army, but at great cost, when his new friend Bora was killed. But that served as a revelation of the true power of the Dragon Balls, that of resurrection. Finding the seven proved to be even harder the second time, and Goku and his friends had to fight in a tournament to earn the aid of a fortune-teller. But as we begin this fourth collection, the real tournament is about to begin. Three years have passed, and the Tenkaichi Tournament to determine the world’s strongest martial artist is upon us, but this time there might be someone stronger than Goku and his friends taking part...


39 episodes of Dragon Ball, plus extras are presented across six discs from Manga Entertainment collecting the Australian releases, The Tien Shinhan Saga and the King Piccolo Sagas, Parts 1 and 2.

Disc 1
84. Rivals and Arrivals
85. Preliminary Peril
86. Then There Were Eight
87. Yamcha vs. Tien
88. Yamcha’s Big Break
89. Full Moon Vengeance
90. The Dodon Wave
91. Counting Controversy
92. Goku Enters the Ring


Disc 2
93. Tien Shinhan vs. Jacky Chun
94. Stepping Down
95. Goku vs. Krillin
96. Tail’s Tale
97. Final Match: Goku vs. Tien
98. Victory’s Edge
99. Tien’s Insurrection
100. The Spirit Canon
101. The Fallen

Disc 3
102. Enter King Piccolo
103. Tambourine Attacks!
104. Mark of the Demon
105. Here Comes Yajirobe
106. Terrible Tambourine


Disc 4
107. Tien’s Atonement
108. Goku’s Revenge
109. Goku vs. King Piccolo
110. Piccolo Closes In
111. Roshi’s Gambit

Disc 5
112. King Piccolo’s Wish
113. Siege on Chow Castle
114. Conquest and Power
115. Awaken Darkness
116. A Taste of Destiny

Disc 6
117. The Ultimate Sacrifice
118. Prelude to Vengeance
119. Battle Cry
120. Goku Strikes Back
121. The Biggest Crisis
122. The Final Showdown

Picture

This takes me back some. Back when I first started reviewing anime on DVD, it all looked like this, sourced from tape masters of varying condition, and mastered on disc with NTSC-PAL standards conversions. The Australian Madman release that is the source of these discs was made 10 years ago, while the anime itself is from the mid-eighties. It’s a simple but effective animation, which does what it needs to get the gags across. The tape origin shows in the transfer, which isn’t overly afflicted by visible interlacing or blended frames. Then again, the softness of the videotape origins tends to mask all that. You might expect that with as many as nine episodes on a disc, that will tell in the compression, but other than macroblocking being a little more obvious in large expanses of colour, the Dragon Ball discs get off pretty lightly.

On disc 2 at 27:57 into playback there is a pixellated frame.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 Stereo English, and what I assume is 2.0 Mono Japanese. Given its vintage, expect a rather thin, and occasionally shrill original language experience with the odd moment of hiss as well. Those early Funimation releases via Madman actually used to come with two subtitle tracks, dubtitles to go with the English dub, and a translated English track to go with the Japanese audio. It’s interesting to see how the anime was re-versioned for the US television audience.

Extras

The discs present their content with animated menus, and there is no Marathon Mode. Oddly enough, Dragon Ball doesn’t need it, with its short, gag filled stories, with a couple of very agreeable (in Japanese) theme songs. You can tell from some of the shows trailed on the discs that they are sourced from a vintage release from Madman.

Disc 1 offers nine character profiles of regulars and arc specific guest characters, and this repeated for disc 2.


Disc 3 offers twelve character profiles, as well as trailers for Beast Wars: Transformers Season 1, and Angelic Layer Collection. Disc 4 has the same character profiles, but trailers for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Season 1 Part 1, and Cromartie High School: Volume 1.

Discs 5 and 6 have the same character profiles as well, but disc 5 has trailers for Beast Wars: Transformers Season 1, and Angelic Layer Collection, while disc 6 has a sole trailer for D. N. Angel Complete Collection.

Conclusion

It had to happen eventually. There had to come a point where Dragon Ball stopped being Dragon Ball, and started being Dragon Ball Z. You might have thought that it happened when the Dragon Ball Z anime began, but it actually happens here, at the start of the King Piccolo Saga. It actually didn’t take long for Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball to realise that the fans of his quick fire gag manga were actually tuning in for the action sequences, and he from an early point began transitioning it into a fighting manga instead, slowly dialling back on the comedy, reducing Muten Roshi’s perverted interjections, and slowly adding more action elements, whether it was the training sequences, the regular tournaments, and of course the increasing intensity of villainy that our heroes faced. Pilaf was a comedy villain, the Red Ribbon Army less so, and there’s very little funny about King Piccolo at all.


The writing was on the wall for my brand of Dragon Ball, the fast paced gag anime, when during the Red Ribbon Army, Oopa’s father Bora was killed, and it was revealed that wishing upon a Dragon Ball could bring the dead back to life. Suddenly the stakes could be raised as high as you cared, and there would be a handy reset button to restore the status quo. After all, a dead friend is a hell of a reason for Son Goku to do battle against a villain. Once you get that level of testosterone infused shonen drama, then there’s less room for Muten Roshi peeking at panties, or Goku having trouble telling genders apart. The funny gets drained from the anime pretty quickly, and everything is all po-faced and serious, comparatively speaking. That happens with the Piccolo saga.


Fortunately we don’t get straight to that point, as we have the Tenshinhan Saga to clear first, and when we encounter him again in this collection, he’s still villainous and unlikeable, sneaky and underhand in the way that he and his sidekick Chaozu manipulate the situation. That situation of course is the next Tenkaichi Tournament where everyone shows off their martial arts to be proved the strongest in the world. The usual suspects enter again, Son Goku, Yamucha, Kuririn, and Jacky Chun, but this time it appears the real challenge is Tenshinhan, especially as his master and Muten Roshi have a long standing rivalry of their own. The tournament progresses to its inevitable conclusion, but there is plenty of silly comedy along the way, and through the process of battling, Tenshinhan stops being the villain, and becomes the grouchy hero we know so well from DBZ.


I enjoyed the Tenshinhan Saga as much as anything else in Dragon Ball so far, but with its last gasp, one of the main characters is killed off, heralding the arrival of King Piccolo and the intense shonen seriousness that would typify Dragon Ball Z in later seasons. Now Goku’s out for revenge, Piccolo’s so insanely strong that Goku doesn’t have a chance, and more of our heroes fall victim to the demon. Piccolo doesn’t just want to rule the world; he wants to destroy it too, so the survivors from Goku’s friends have to train up to avenge the fallen. Tenshinhan tries to learn a forbidden sealing technique, while Goku, after he’s been healed from his previous battering, heads to a remote location to drink a levelling up potion that will unlock his true strength. And just when it looks like the world will start to be destroyed at the hands of Piccolo, our heroes arrive in the nick of time for a rematch.


The twist in this part of the tale is that Piccolo has also despatched Shen Long, so no more Dragon Balls, no more wishes, and the dead might just stay dead. Of course that isn’t the case, otherwise it would have been a very short series, but we’ll have to wait until the next and final collection to see just how the fallen are brought back to life. I wished that they’d saved Dragon Ball Z for Dragon Ball Z, instead of starting it early here, but I still hold out hope that there’s room in Season 5 for some more perverted Roshi antics, and I can’t get enough of Lunch, who even in the most po-faced of moments here still manages to entertain.