Media Club Plus Bonus - Dragon Ball pt 1
Transcriber: robotchangeling
Dragon Ball Impressions [0:06:10] 6
Explaining Dragon Ball to Jack [0:18:00] 16
Preliminary Fights [2:01:04] 100
In Between Episodes [2:19:44] 114
Jackie Chun vs. Tien Shinhan [2:25:50] 118
Keith: Hey, everyone. At the beginning of this episode, we talk about which Hunter × Hunter episodes we may or may not discuss, and because we hadn't recorded the episode, we were unsure, but fear not, we talk about almost no Hunter × Hunter at all in this episode. If you want to be really careful, you can watch the first three episodes of the Heavens Arena arc, which we will cover in next week’s Media Club Plus episode. Other than that, we only say the name of two characters who get in a fight a couple of episodes after that, and other than that, this is basically Hunter × Hunter-free except, like, talking around Togashi and his intentions and the way he handles tournaments. Okay, enjoy. Bye.
[cut]
Jack: I am also— I have extrapolated what I think Dragon Ball is about from watching five episodes.
Keith: Oh, we are gonna absolutely get into “what is Dragon Ball about?”
Sylvia: Oh, that’s such an important segment.
Keith: Because there’s about 110 episodes that happen before this. This is a terrible— 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.
Jack: Mm, mm-hmm.
Keith: Like, if you're gonna 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.
[“The Boy in Green” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Jack: Okay.
Keith: You know, one to five minutes. Okay, there we go.
[song continues]
Keith: 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 are brought to you by Friends at the Table. This bonus, we're watching 1986’s Dragon Ball, based on the manga by Akira Toriyama.
Jack: Wow!
Keith: My 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. [song ends] 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 at the Table feed on friendsatthetable.cash, maybe check out that podcast and watch some Hunter × Hunter and then come back to this afterwards.
Sylvia: Uh—
Keith: With me— ooh, Sylvi?
Sylvia: 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— how many—
Keith: We should not restrict—
Sylvia: When we compare this to Hunter × Hunter, how careful should we be?
Keith: We should not restrict what we talk about.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: We should talk about it as if the people watching have seen all of Heavens Arena arc.
Sylvia: Okay
Keith: And I'll say that this might come out a little sooner than that—I haven't decided—and I just think that’s not that big of a deal.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: And if people want to watch ahead five episodes, then they should do that.
Sylvia: Especially if you're some of the people who watched ahead the entire series already. Thanks for listening. [Jack laughs]
Keith: 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—
Sylvia: Yeah, absolutely.
Keith: That this was a good idea of a show to cover.
Jack: I also, before we get any further, I want to say that if you are listening to this, thank you for supporting us.
Keith: Yeah, that’s awesome.
Jack: 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.
Keith: And Jack, do you want to finish introducing yourself there?
Jack: And I'm Jack. You can find me on Cohost at @jdq, and you can follow me— no. What? What’s happening? [laughs quietly] You can get any of the music 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 [Keith: Yeah.] as an outfit.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: 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 theme yet, talking about what will it be.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, it was the last episode to be released before we started releasing episodes. [Dre chuckles]
Sylvia: Wow.
Jack: 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, “[clicks tongue] But you did it.”
Keith: But you did it.
Jack: “What were you complaining about?” But there’s always more music to write, and that’s what the complaining is for.
Keith: Yeah. Hey, look, that boulder’s gotta get back up that hill. Doesn't matter how many times it falls.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. [laughs] That’s how it goes.
Keith: Uh, Andrew Lee Swan?
Dre: Hey, you can find me on Twitter at @swandre3000. You can check out our merch shop at friendsatthetable.shop.
Keith: Hell yeah.
Jack: [sighs] It’s so exciting.
Keith: Lot of stuff up there. If you've checked that out recently, it 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 Sylvi Bullet.
Sylvia: Hey, I'm Sylvi. You can find me everywhere at @SYLVIBULLET. Check out the TikTok. TikTok dot…whatever the app is, @friends_table. I always go to say a URL, and I don't think it really translates well to that.
Keith: No. Tiktok.com/@friends_table, if you're…
Sylvia: Yeah, no, I just—
Keith: If you're weird, and you're going to browser TikTok. If you're going to browser TikTok…
Sylvia: I've absolutely posted things from browser TikTok to the show account, okay? [Jack laughs quietly]
Keith: That’s different, because it’s like, a link is different.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: But if you're saying, like, “You should go to tiktok.com and search me on tiktok.com.”
Sylvia: Fair enough.
Keith: It’s just so not a website.
Sylvia: You're right. You're right.
Keith: Yeah. It’s not a website, it’s an app. Anyway, I don't think I said. You can find me on Twitter at @KeithJCarberry, also Cohost, and you can find the let’s plays that I do at youtube.com/runbutton.
Keith: We’re talking about Dragon Ball today, and Jack, I know that you don't know anything about Dragon Ball.
Jack: Nothing at all.
Keith: Sylvi, I know that you do know about Dragon Ball. Dre?
Sylvia: Yeah, I think less than you, but yeah.
Keith: Dre, how Dragon Ball are you?
Dre: I've watched every episode of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super and all of the movies associated with those. I have never watched Dragon Ball.
Keith: Wow. Wow.
Dre: Or GT for that matter, but.
Keith: Sure. But that’s the one to miss.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Ooh. Ooh, are we able to bring up GT? Because I love GT.
Dre: Fuck yeah we are.
Keith: Really?
Sylvia: Yeah, I think GT—
Keith: I mean, GT’s crazy.
Dre: You want to talk about Baby Vegeta?
Sylvia: No, GT’s fun as hell.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. Yeah, exactly!
Keith: GT is really fun.
Sylvia: Baby’s a cool villain. I think it’s great that they make Goku a child again.
Keith: They’re gonna do that again!
Dre: They’re doing it again.
Sylvia: Yeah, because GT was good, and they’re righting the wrong of making it non-canon.
Dre: I'd believe that GT was good. I'd believe it.
Sylvia: I've also seen, like, some Dragon Ball, but it was, like, when I was a child.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvia: 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 here?
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: But I do like it.
Keith: Yeah. Dragon Ball— I grew— I was a huge Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z fan growing up.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: 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 the show.
Sylvia: That’s really weird.
Keith: [laughs] Yeah, it’s like—
Sylvia: That’s really weird.
Keith: 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? [Dre laughs] And I always loved both, but it wasn't until I rewatched 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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 impression, maybe, of these episodes? Oh, I should say, for the people…no, we're gonna do first impressions in two steps. The first step is I'm going to tell the people who listen what we watched, just in case you haven't been following along. We watched season seven of Dragon Ball, the Tien Shinhan World Martial Arts Tournament arc, episodes one, two, and three, so everyone getting to the tournament; and then we watched episodes 11 and 12, which is Jackie Chun’s fight against Tien Shinhan, 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.
Sylvia: Yes. I want to know what Jack thinks Dragon Ball is about before you give any sort of summary.
Keith: Yes, right. Yes, totally.
Jack: 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 [Sylvia laughs] called Master Roshi.
Dre: Uh huh.
Jack: Who maybe turns into a turtle or is 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.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: 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.
Keith: What is a Dragon Ball?
Jack: Oh, that’s not important. [Keith laughs]
Dre: True. It’s not. Don't fucking matter.
Jack: Uh, I don't know. They didn't come up at all. I have to imagine…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.
Keith: Hmm.
Sylvia: Hmm.
Jack: His friends are a kind-hearted muscle himbo called Yamcha. [quiet laughter]
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: And a mafioso baby? Called Krillin? [Sylvia and Keith laugh loudly]
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Uh huh.
Keith: Krillin is a monk. Krillin’s a monk. Or was a monk, until he—
Dre: Was a monk, yeah, I think.
Keith: He got bullied out of the monastery and chose to become a…
Sylvia: [quietly] Holy fuck.
Keith: Chose to become a martial artist.
Jack: He’s not a baby?
Keith: He is the same age as Goku. He might even be slightly older.
Sylvia: Yeah. He is Goku’s Killua.
Jack: Ah.
Sylvia: If you want to put it that way, you know?
Jack: Sure. Okay.
Dre: Sure.
Jack: And—
Dre: Well…
Sylvia: No, he’s not, like, relationship-wise, but he’s, like, the best friend to the protagonist, you know?
Dre: Yes, he is Goku’s best friend.
Sylvia: The same age best friend, like, the peer.
Keith: You could make the argument that actually Bulma is Goku’s Killua.
Sylvia: That’s a good point.
Dre: That is a good point.
Jack: Okay.
Sylvia: She’s also my favorite.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: So, it is worth saying that all these—
Keith: And Krillin is Leorio. Sorry, Krillin.
Jack: All of these characters—
Dre: No, because we know Krillin canonically gets to have sex at some point. [Keith laughs]
Jack: Mm.
Keith: That is true. That is canon.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: All of these characters show up, in their first appearance in these chunks, dressed up nicely to go on, like, a plane ride, but the vibe is so mafioso that I genuinely thought they were mafiosos who had arrived to threaten Master Roshi. [laughs quietly]
Keith: Yeah, they’re really just, for no reason, just in their sunday best, in a way that is odd. Because it’s sort of— this is sort of like— this is your introduction, but it really is like the gang’s getting back together is, like, the thing.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: They haven't seen their friend Goku in three years.
Jack: I did not appreciate this for a while.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: There’s also a pig who wears suspenders.
Keith: Yep, Oolong.
Dre: Uh huh.
Jack: Okay. Not named in these episodes.
Keith: No.
Jack: So throughout my notes, he’s just “the pig.”
Keith: [laughs quietly] Yep.
Sylvia: Yep. That’s a fair descriptor.
Jack: There’s a floating…?
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: These people talk. The dopey turtle talks. His name is Turtle.
Jack: The pig talks.
Keith: The pig talks. His name’s Oolong.
Jack: There is a floating cat?
Sylvia: Yep.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: That can possibly shapeshift?
Keith: This is Yamcha’s best friend slash [Jack: Okay.] husband named Puar.
Jack: Okay.
Keith: The pig can also shapeshift. They never bring this up.
Jack: Oh, interesting. [Sylvia laughs] There is Bulma, [Keith: Yep.] who is a blue-haired lady in a yellow jacket. She seems fairly normal.
Keith: She’s the richest woman in the world.
Sylvia: She’s also, like, the smartest woman in the world too.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Canonically.
Keith: She’s the richest and smartest woman in the world.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: And then there is woman… [laughs quietly]
Sylvia: Oh my god, my wife.
Dre: Uh huh. Yeah.
Keith: A woman?
Jack: Well, there is a woman who— and this is genuinely— this was genuinely baffling to me with no context. [Dre laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: 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, “Welp, guess that’s the way it is.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This genuinely confused me. There is a blue-haired woman who, I think when she sneezes, turns—
Keith: What’s her temperament like?
Jack: She’s lovely. [Keith laughs] She’s so nice, and she has, like, a metered, careful, pleasant voice, and she doesn't want to kill. [Keith laughs quietly] And then, when she sneezes, [Keith: Huh.] she turns into a blonde-haired woman with a bow in her hair who regularly produces, like, high-caliber weapons?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Uh huh?
Jack: 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 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 of these episodes with this nightmare lady, only knowing her as the woman who occasionally changes shape. [laughs quietly]
Keith: 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.
Jack: No, you're kidding me.
Keith: No. Her name is Lunch.
Jack: L-U-N-C-H?
Sylvia: It’s commonly localized as Launch.
Keith: Yes.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: But it…
Keith: It’s Lunch.
Sylvia: It’s Lunch.
Keith: Her name literally is Lunch, yeah.
Jack: Okay.
Keith: But it is commonly— they say Launch a lot in the English dubs.
Jack: And we won't get into this in these episodes, so I don't feel like it’s jumping ahead.
Keith: No.
Jack: What’s her deal?
Keith: So, I can explain— I can explain first— yeah, let’s explain Lunch first. Here’s the explanation for Lunch.
Sylvia: It’s the second meal of the day.
Keith: They never explain it.
Jack: Oh, really? [laughs quietly]
Dre: Uh huh.
Keith: Yes, they just ne— 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 inappropriate lecherous boyfriend.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And she sneezes and attacks him and brutally hurts him instead, and that’s the only— that is the only thing that she does.
Jack: But they kind of lose track of that as the impetus for the character, and instead she—
Keith: Yeah, she’s just there. She just lives with him.
Jack: Just exists 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’s evil.
Keith: She tried to kill a few people, it’s just that they blocked the bullets.
Jack: They can't die. Nobody can die in this story, unless it is, like meted. [laughs quietly] Unless it is prophesied. That’s 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, [Keith: Yeah.] is this crew goes rolling around. I'm a little confused about, like, where the aliens get involved. [Jack and Keith laugh]
Keith: Okay, so, weirdly, it’s right after what we're gonna watch.
Jack: You're kidding me. Really?
Keith: Yeah. Well, okay. So, 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.
Jack: Okay.
Keith: 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 can shapeshift but totally can.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Dragon Ball is the story of Goku. Goku is an alien.
Jack: No!
Keith: 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.
Jack: Which did not appear at any point in these episodes.
Dre: No, no.
Keith: Well, it happens during the full moon.
Jack: He’s a werewolf?
Keith: He’s a were…
Sylvia: Wereape.
Keith: He’s a wereape, yeah.
Jack: Oh. [Sylvia laughs quietly]
Keith: 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.
Sylvia: Yes.
Keith: To death. 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.
Jack: Does he want his granddad to come back?
Keith: No, that never comes up.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I believe in—
Keith: They bring a lot of people back to life with those balls.
Sylvia: Yeah. Never his grandpa, but part of it is, like, he joins Bulma who’s looking for them, [Dre: Yeah.] I believe, in Dragon Ball. Also—
Keith: Yeah, Bulma wants to wish herself the perfect boyfriend.
Sylvia: Yeah. She’s very Cathy “Ack!” in Dragon Ball sometimes, [Jack: Mm.] but that’s fine. The, like, newspaper comic strip Cathy.
Jack: Yes, who says “Ack!”
Sylvia: 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’s Z where that gets added, right?
Keith: Um…no.
Dre: Um, I don't think it’s added, per se, but I think it is explained and fleshed out.
Keith: It’s deeply explained, and it sort of becomes all about that.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: But he is, I believe in Dragon Ball, he is found, like, in a spaceship.
[cut]
Keith: 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.
[cut]
Sylvia: Okay. Okay.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I just wanted to check on that, because like I said, I don't have as much experience with Dragon Ball other than bits and pieces here and there.
Keith: Yeah. So, the—
Dre: Maybe we want to save this for later discussions, but Keith, since you brought up the moon and Goku turning into a big ape, [Keith: Yeah.] did anybody happen to notice a reference about the moon that was dropped in one of these episodes?
Sylvia: Yes, I did.
Keith: Yes, I have the quote written down, yeah.
Jack: This baffled me. I didn't know how literally to take it.
Dre: Sure—
Keith: So, in the—
Dre: Oh.
Keith: Sorry, Dre, you can tell the story.
Dre: Well, no. Jack, what was baffling to you?
Jack: 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?
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Sure, yeah. No, he did.
Keith: He did.
Jack: Jackie Chun is a martial artist who is a unique character. [sarcastic] He is definitely not someone in disguise, and we definitely won't get into that.
Keith: Yes.
Dre: [sarcastic] Absolutely not.
Jack: But yes, Jackie Chun destroyed the moon?
Dre: Yes, because at the 21st World Martial Arts Tournament—
Keith: Season two.
Dre: The full moon 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 [ka-MAY-ha-MAY-ha] or a Kamehameha [KA-may-HA-may-HA].
Jack: Okay. That’s interesting.
Dre: Or a Kamehahama if you're a Fortnite kid.
Jack: Oh, yeah, sure. [Keith and Jack laugh] And the moon is gone now? Just gone?
Keith: Uh, yeah, until they wish it back at some point, yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Okay, so, one wish per person? Or one wish per each time you get all the Dragon Balls?
Keith: So, when you collect all the Dragon Balls—
Jack: And how many are there?
Keith: You get one wish per time that you collected them, and then what happens is 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.
Jack: Is there some sort of device that helps them find Dragon Balls?
Keith: There sure is.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yes, Bulma invents it.
Keith: Bulma invented a Dragon Ball radar.
Jack: Okay. [laughs quietly]
Keith: 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.
Jack: Do the Dragon Balls regularly sort of get, like, snatched up by villains and then they have to go to the villain’s lair?
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Or do they tend to stumble upon the Dragon Balls sort of in situ in a creekbed or something?
Keith: 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.
Dre: Um, for the most part.
Keith: Or usually it is they’re trying to get them from—
Dre: Once we get into Super, it’s like, “I don't know, I want ice cream. Let’s go find the Dragon Balls,” and then we just jump in a jet and do it really quick.
Keith: Okay, yeah, but Super doesn't really count.
Dre: But yeah, during Z and Dragon Ball, yes, it is— the Dragon Balls are way more important.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: Okay. How many are there?
Keith: Seven.
Jack: That doesn't sound like a lot.
Keith: No, but they are scattered to the four winds.
Dre: They could be hidden anywhere. Yeah, across the whole world.
Keith: And they’re the size of your fist. They’re pretty small.
Jack: Okay, but luckily—
Keith: And usually a bad guy has some of them.
Jack: Mm. Is there, like, a— can they tell how many have been found at any given moment?
Keith: Um…
Sylvia: Uh…
Jack: Like, can I—
Dre: I don't think so.
Sylvia: Only if they’ve got them in their possession, I think. There’s no, like, counter in the top right corner of the Dragon Ball radar that’s like, “four people have these.”
Jack: Right, there’s no, like, “Michael has five.” Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah, there’s no scoreboard.
Keith: Right.
Jack: Okay. Okay. But the Dragon Balls—
Sylvia: 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, I believe, a loose adaptation of the, like, classic story Journey to the West.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvia: Like, a lot of the characters are based on that. Just getting that out of the way before the time passes to mention it.
Jack: This is something that— 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.
Keith: Mm.
Jack: I was like, “Oh, shit, he’s got the staff. He’s got the—”
Sylvia: Yeah. He’s Sun Wukong.
Keith: He’s got the cloud.
Jack: Yeah. Absolutely.
Keith: There’s the hopping vampire.
Jack: Oh, is there?
Keith: Uh, Chiaotzu is [Sylvia: Chiaotzu!] based off of that little vampire dead guy.
Jack: I don't know who—
Sylvia: Jiangshi.
Jack: Oh, Chiaotzu is— right. I wrote down—
Sylvia: Chiaotzu is the one who says the slur at Krillin.
Keith: Yes, yeah, yep.
Jack: The little boy.
Sylvia: We watched the dub too. Should we say that?
Keith: Say again?
Sylvia: That we watched the dub, so people know that we’re getting stuff from that?
Keith: Oh, yes. We watched the dub. 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.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: So. But yeah, the Jiangshi is Chiaotzu.
Jack: Shall we start at the beginning?
Sylvia: I believe that’s a good idea.
Jack: Because the episodes open with an absolutely banger narrator.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: If Hunter × Hunter’s narrator is an omniscient, faintly menacing guide to the viewer and Gon…you know, this person is saying— the Hunter × Hunter narrator comes in and says, [imitating] “Gon has just had his first fight with Hisoka, but he has not yet realized the full extent of his power. What will Gon do when Hisoka’s power is revealed?” and you're like, “Shit, what will he do?” This narrator arrives, and he says, [imitating] “The greatest of all teachers is life.” [Keith laughs] This guy has the affect and tone of a ‘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—
Sylvia: God.
Jack: He gives a brief pitch for the ocean as a concept. [laughter] It’s all real big, you know, like, you know, “The mighty Amazon River stretches from…” as you hear the projector clicking. This guy’s fantastic.
Keith: Yeah, I love the narrator. Yeah.
Jack: 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.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Whereas the Hunter × Hunter guy’s sort of just like, “Will Gon die? Let’s find out.”
Keith: [laughs] Don't watch this.
Jack: No. And we begin with a classic…just a classic image in fiction: animals driving little cars.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: God, it’s so good.
Keith: It’s so good. So, this is a filler episode. This is not in the manga. Konkichi, who we’re gonna meet in a minute, is not— is 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. Big animals driving tiny little cars.
Jack: Yeah, we have a bear. We have, I think, a hippopotamus or something, a rhino, and a tiger or something?
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvia: Definitely a tiger.
Keith: Definitely a tiger, and there’s an ape, I think.
Jack: Oh, yes.
Sylvia: It’s a tiger, an ape, and a boar.
Keith: A boar.
Jack: And they are driving a little car, and they’re chasing a…like, a…what’s the word I'm looking for? Kitsune?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, yeah.
Keith: Little fox guy.
Jack: 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, “Beatings for breakfast!” [laughter] and then, as they’re beating him up—
Sylvia: Beatings for break— oh my god. [Keith laughs]
Jack: The background dialogue— there’s just some really good background dialogue. In the background dialogue, one of them says, “Beatings, the breakfast of champions!” as they beat him up. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: So good!
Keith: It’s so good. And it’s like, it just, like, I mean…this guy plays 9000 background characters in Dragon Ball. Like, it’s just like, “Oh, it’s the guy that plays the big guy? Yeah.”
Jack: And these lines— a lot of the background lines seem to be ad libbed.
Keith: They do. [laughs]
Jack: Or at least that’s the impression that I get. You know, the vocal director said, “All right, we just need five lines from you beating a guy up,” and they’re like, “Yeah, beatings, the breakfast of champions.” 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 very pleasant. Goku arrives and, presumably— is this fair to say about Goku? He cannot stand to see injustice.
Keith: Um…
Jack: Or does he just like kicking the shit out of people and sees an opportunity? [laughs]
Keith: I'm gonna say that it’s a little bit less of A and a little bit more of B than you would think.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: But it is true.
Sylvia: There’s definitely still A there though.
Keith: Yeah. 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 lives his entire life as a human on Earth and never really gets used to it. [Sylvia laughs quietly] And it just— he’s just— if someone’s getting beat up, he would be like, “Why are you doing this?” if he can. You know what I mean?
Jack: Yes. Yes.
Keith: But he will just stop, like, “Hey, everybody chill out! Let’s see what— what’s going on here?” That’s not what happens here. He kind of just escapes with Konkichi, but.
Jack: Yes, he—
Keith: Yeah, Goku is, like, kind of a weird character in that he’s not super consistently a justice seeker.
Jack: What is interesting is that— and we should get right to Goku and Gon as similar protagonist characters. I think Gon is an extremely consistent character, at least in terms of what we have seen. Gon 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 Gon’s characterization, and this might just be that I've spent more time with Gon than I had with Goku, but I think consistency and specifically sort of consistency in his actions [Keith: Mm.] is something that I really associate with Gon. He knows what he wants to do. He points himself in that direction. He hits it with his head as hard as he can.
Keith: Yeah, and I think that that’s also true with Goku. You know, 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? Should I— does that make sense?
Jack: I think so. Do you think that that’s about right, Sylvi and Dre?
Dre: Yeah, I think so.
Sylvia: Yeah, sure.
Jack: I'm so curious about— and we might get into this one day. Dragon Ball Z, Goku is older, right?
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, he’s fully an adult.
Sylvia: Yeah, Goku’s an adult.
Keith: He’s got kids.
Jack: And I doubt that we’re going to see Gon as an adult, but I am very curious about what a Gon-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 Gon looks like Ging.
Sylvia: Yeah, I was gonna say.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: But I don't want that to be true, you know?
Keith: You mean literally look? You mean is like?
Jack: No, I mean is like in personality.
Sylvia: Behaviorally.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Sure, sure.
Jack: 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 other people.
Sylvia: [laughs quietly] Some could argue Goku is like this.
Keith: Yes.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Goku is very much like this.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Do people like Goku? In the world, I mean?
Keith: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: Other than being like a protagonist? He is a very well-liked protagonist?
Keith: Yeah, people love him. Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, Goku’s great.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Goku’s fine.
Jack: Ha!
Keith: It’s sort of like…it’s hard to even talk about how closely aligned I think Gon is written as a Goku-like.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Keith: And I think it’s not just deliberate, but it’s like…it’s, like, purposeful. Like, it’s like…I think that, over the course of Hunter × Hunter, we’ll see Togashi, like, doing things with what his idea of a Goku character would do and be like.
Jack: Goku does not know that he can't run to an island.
Keith: [laughs quietly] No.
Dre: No.
Jack: And I think that this— Gon would know that fully.
Keith: Oh!
Jack: I think that Gon would be like—
Keith: I take it back. He can run to an island. That’s the—
Jack: Yeah. He can and he does. Yes, I suppose—
Keith: He’s confused that he’s being told that he can't do this, because he can.
Jack: And I didn't know that, at that point.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: 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. [laughs quietly] Boy did I have egg on my face in a later episode.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Jack: But also, I knew we were going to a tournament arc, but I didn't know why, and—
Keith: Because there is one.
Jack: 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.” [Keith laughs]
Dre: Mm.
Jack: And that cleared that up for me.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: But Konkichi is like, “All right, we need to get you some plane tickets to get you to Papaya Island, where the World Martial Arts Tournament is taking place, and it’s going to cost a lot of money, but you helped me out of a bind, so I'm gonna make sure that I get you there.”
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. And— okay, we gotta do the accent. We've gotta talk about the accent.
Sylvia: We do.
Keith: He talks like a heavy New York Oliver Twist.
Jack: For some reason. You know, I don't know why he does this.
Keith: No, there’s no reason why he should sound like a tiny little New York Oliver Twist, [Dre laughs] but he does.
Jack: The Brooklyn Artful Dodger.
Keith: Yeah. [Dre laughs]
Jack: Yeah, and it makes the episode.
Sylvia: [Konkichi voice] Hey there, brother!
Dre: Whoa, that was good.
Sylvia: Thank you.
Keith: [Konkichi voice] You saved me! You're my brother!
Dre: Whoa!
Sylvia: This fucker talks like Hulk Hogan. [Keith laughs]
Jack: 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.
Keith: Yeah, who can't shut up.
Jack: [laughs] 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, like, beating people up.
Keith: Right.
Jack: As far as we can tell.
Dre: I don't know if he really robs. I think he just steals.
Sylvia: Pickpocket.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, he’s a pickpocket.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: It seems like he got in bad with these bigger, tougher animals, [Sylvia: Yeah.] and they put him up to crimes, because he doesn't have a family.
Dre: Yeah, he’s a nonviolent offender.
Sylvia: Though when he pickpockets the guy in the airport, it does look like he’s punching him square in the dick. [Keith and Jack laugh]
Dre: I mean, that’s a pretty good way to distract someone so you can pickpocket them.
Sylvia: Fair enough!
Keith: So—
Jack: 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. [laughs quietly]
Dre: Sure.
Keith: I wish.
Jack: Save them all up. I wish.
Keith: So, Konkichi 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 Konkichi, like, “No, I can get to the island,” he just is kind of a go-along-to-get-along guy.
Sylvia: He’s excited to go on a plane too, in the dub.
Keith: Yeah, he wants to go on the train. The plane, yeah.
Sylvia: He’s very like, “Oh, I get to go on a plane?” Like. We find out later that he’s already got the Flying Nimbus.
Keith: Right. [laughs quietly]
Sylvia: When he eventually gets there and talks to Master Roshi.
Jack: So flying is not the exciting bit for him.
Keith: It’s the plane.
Jack: The being in a plane. [laughs quietly]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And I would— I get it too, because it’s an Akira Toriyama plane, and he just draws the greatest vehicles of all time.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, untouchable.
Keith: Absolutely untouchable in terms of vehicle design. It is, like, deeply like what if the compound cars of the ‘90s were squished down into these little things, but then also, like, he’s doing the same thing with, like, fighter jets and helicopters and tanks. They’re just like…everything is compact and tiny and squished but also futuristic but also ‘90s.
Sylvia: I think, like, every Capsule Corp design in the show, like the technology that they have is just fantastic, like you're saying. They do all these really wonderful rounded, like, sides to everything. I'm thinking specifically of, like, a motorcycle that Bulma has in the manga that I read.
Keith: Yes.
Jack: It reminds me a lot—
Sylvia: But— yeah.
Jack: Oh, go on, Sylvi.
Sylvia: 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 boardwalk impressionist was doing a portrait of them. Oh yeah, Keith has linked it in the chat, the bike that I had in mind.
Jack: God, look at this.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: They’re so good.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: The things it reminds me of are— 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 ligne claire style of illustration that you see in, like, TinTin comics. There’s something very, like, ‘50s Europe about the way a lot of these vehicles are designed. I'm linking some of the art now.
Keith: Oh, sure.
Jack: This is a piece of art by Yves Chaland 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.
Keith: Real quick, just—
Sylvia: I mean, they’re contemporaries, right? Oh, sorry, go ahead, Keith.
Keith: Oh, just to get this out of the way. Sylvi mentioned Capsule Corp. Bulma’s family invented and owns the company slash technology. Capsule Corp puts anything you can think of into these tiny little capsules, like pokeballs, but they’re shaped 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—
Jack: Wow.
Sylvia: It’s very Jetsons-y.
Keith: It’s very Jetsons-y, yes. And also, there’s dinosaurs! [laughs]
Jack: Yeah, there’s all sorts of interesting creatures in this world, and that is consistent with Hunter × Hunter too, you know?
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Jack: This vibe of, like…well, at first I thought it was just people and animals.
Keith: Mm.
Jack: 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 of like—
Keith: And there’s email.
Jack: And there’s email! Is there email?
Keith: In Hunter × Hunter?
Jack: Oh, no, in—
Keith: Oh, sorry, sorry.
Jack: I was talking about in this.
Keith: No, I mean there is email in Dragon Ball—
Sylvia: [crosstalk] I mean, Dragon Ball is in the ‘80s.
Keith: —once they invent email during Dragon Ball Z.
Jack: Yes. Is this a thing that is consistent with shonen anime generally? This sort of, like, breadth of character designs beyond the human? Or is this really a Dragon Ball thing that Togashi is picking up on when he makes these incredible Hunter × Hunter background characters?
Sylvia: I think something that it kind of comes back to is how we talked about that Dragon Ball is way more of an adventure series than a, like, battle series.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: In terms of, like, other shonen 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 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?
Keith: Yeah. Becomes so much less about, like, weird guys.
Sylvia: Yeah, there’s less exploration, and part of that— like, there’s some of that. I'm not gonna say that’s completely gone in Dragon Ball Z.
Keith: Right.
Sylvia: I just think that it’s, like, the beginning of that trend in the sort of, like, industry, I guess. I might be talking out of my ass here, but at least that’s how it looks to me.
Keith: 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 Dragon Ball highlights really well because of, like, just the stuff that Akira Toriyama seemed interesting in drawing in the ‘80s.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: That then kind of fades as, like, in the ‘90s, 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.
Sylvia: Yeah. I wonder if we're gonna ever talk— like, I'm sure we will, at some point, talk about more modern shonen, but it’s in a really interesting place right now, I think.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Hmm.
Sylvia: Where a lot of stuff is sort of recurring from earlier, like, trends.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Which may have a lot to do with the massive popularity of the 2011 Hunter × Hunter series.
Sylvia: I mean, yeah.
Keith: Could be. [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: I think that it’s all, like, part of it. I think the, like, 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, you know.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: No one wants that comparison thrown in their face.
Sylvia: Fair.
Keith: Dragon Ball Super is fine.
Sylvia: Um…I forgot what I was saying, but.
Keith: Sorry, I interrupted.
Sylvia: 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 feel, like, kind of hacky for using Naruto as a measuring stick, but I think it is very much, like, a—
Keith: It’s such an important delineation. Like…
Sylvia: It was a hugely popular— like, the number one most popular one 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, [Dre and Keith laugh] 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 shonen anymore though, [Keith: No.] to have this sort of, like, worldbuilding that doesn't really necessarily— or, like, character designs in the world that gesture at worldbuilding but aren't really ever expanded upon. It’s just, yeah, of course there’s tiger people here. What are you— there’s always been tiger people.
Keith: Yeah, it’s part of the tapestry of the world.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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, uh…it’s just, like, part of the vibe of it. And I think a good way to answer this question really briefly is, like, if you watched a bunch of the anime in the genre in the last 20 years and then went to go watch Dragon Ball, you'd be like, “Wow, this feels way different.”
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: 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.
Jack: They do a little crime at— or rather, Konkichi does a little crime at the airport.
Sylvia: Konkichi does. [Dre laughs]
Jack: It falls apart in just a, like, sort of classic farce 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 has already scarpered. He’s run off. He’s scared.
Keith: 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?
Dre: Yeah, I think it was the latter.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: It’s a little bit unclear. Well, he has the monologue later on about— because he hands the stuff over so quickly. He’s like, “Ah, somebody dropped this,” and then later on, he does have the monologue about, like, [Konkichi voice] “When I met you, and you let me call you brother, you know, it changed me. You know, I thought I could be a good person for the first time.”
Jack: Like, this is him turning away. This is his first sort of refusal of crime. Yeah, possibly.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: But, well, only one thing for it: gotta go to the elephant parade. A circus is happening.
Keith: Gotta go to the elephant parade to scam scammers.
Jack: 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.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Dre: Scamming the scammer.
Jack: And you're stronger than he thinks you are, and you hit it, and it breaks the machine.
Keith: Yeah. I just love how Goku’s just being, like, totally led by the hand from place to place by Konkichi. He’s just like, [Konkichi voice] “Okay, you gotta hit this thing with the hammer,” and he’s just like, [Goku voice] “Okay!” [laughs]
Sylvia: That’s kind of been Goku’s thing, right?
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: It totally is.
Sylvia: In OG Dragon Ball, that he's just like, “Oh yeah, I'll tag along. I like hanging out with you.”
Keith: Yeah. 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.”
Jack: I like to be at the circus.
Keith: I love Goku sort of starting to awkwardly call him brother back.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: Like, it just doesn't sound natural coming out of his— [Dre laughs]
Sylvia: It’s a really cute performance.
Keith: It’s very, very funny. I love, love Goku in Dragon Ball, the English VA from the Funimation dub is so good. He’s like, [awkwardly] “Okay, brother.” [Keith and Dre laugh]
Jack: Yeah. This guy, you know, I'm very easygoing. I'm just going go along with this guy. They win some money from this game and are about to leave when, like, a cadillac pulls up, and inside this cadillac is a witch, an actual—
Keith: Okay, we'll explain her too, yeah. [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: [laughs] Yes. Konkichi says, “Brother, who is this woman?” and I wrote down, “Mm, it’s important to have an audience insert character,” because he said exactly what I was just thinking in that moment.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This witch is— she’s wearing a 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.
Dre: Potato po-tah-to.
Jack: Potato po-tah-to. I think I wrote down her name. Her name is Baba.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: She’s a witch, and she sort of looks Konkichi dead in the eye and is like, “I know your deal.” Goku, in a sort of very Gon-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 Konkichi to have a really good, very, uh…I’ll finish my sentence, and then I'll talk about that. It causes Konkichi 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 Togashi does all the time where he just positions the camera behind somebody else, or rather, 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.
Keith: Yeah. The other Dragon Ball move is just, like, having characters say things out loud.
Jack: Oh, just being like…
Keith: Yeah, they'll just be like—
Jack: “I don't trust you, since you did the whatever.”
Keith: Yeah, or, you know, there’s the part— he runs around around the corner with his little drink 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 Baba was there, he just starts saying all that stuff out loud, like “Ah, I can't believe she didn't know—” you know.
Jack: Right.
Keith: “She knew who I was! Blah blah blah!” or whatever.
Jack: I think that, in this scene, we do get a little bit more of the sort of more involved Togashi approach, where the camera follows Konkichi 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,” et cetera, 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. It does speak—
Keith: We do have a lot of Tien thought bubbles, when…Tien and Roshi’s fight, we get a lot of, like, thinking back and forth to each other.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Like, Tien will think, like, “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! [laughs]
Sylvia: They say it straight up. Like, he says it to the guy while signing up.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Jack: That was so funny.
Sylvia: I remember it being way more of a, like, thing, but I guess that was the first time around.
Keith: No, that’s the only person that he reveals it to, just because he only has five minutes to sign up or he’s disqualified. So he’s like, [Roshi voice] “It’s me! You know, don't tell them!”
Sylvia: Yeah. Oh…
Keith: Are you saying—
Jack: Quite a scary voice.
Keith: You said “oh,” because it was perfect Roshi?
Sylvia: I just went “oh” because your voice was so good, yeah.
Keith: Yeah. [Dre laughs]
Jack: 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 sequences of drifting perspective in the show, you know, where [Keith: Yeah.] it will become Tonpa’s episode for a while.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Or it will become— I think a good example of this is in the fight with Hisoka and Kastro. Although our protagonist 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 Gon or Killua or Wing’s eyes. You know, we are there with Hisoka or we're there with Kastro, depending on who is playing the move at that time.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: 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?
Keith: Krillin, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, Krillin is mafia baby.
Jack: And Goku.
Sylvia: Is the boss baby.
Keith: Yeah. [Dre laughs]
Jack: Yes. Standing in the sidelines, you know, watching.
Keith: Yeah, just sort of, like, vaguely kind of embedded in the audience, sometimes with Bulma, sometimes with Goku and Krillin. It is like— it becomes apparent— it is just like, as far as how the show is presenting the frame, much less sophisticated.
Jack: Yes. And I’m…I think I want to talk about that a bit later, in terms of, you know, 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.
Keith: Sure.
Jack: Then we cut to the Kame House, a house on an island. It’s the only thing on the island.
Keith: Uh—
Jack: There’s palm trees.
Keith: This is literally the turtle house.
Jack: Oh, kame means turtle?
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And it has “Kame House” written on it.
Keith: It also means god? Am I…
Sylvia: Uh, kami.
Jack: That’s kami.
Keith: Kami.
Sylvia: Yeah, with an I.
Keith: Oh, but they use kame, K-A-M-E, to describe something else too. Maybe not— maybe I'm mistaken. Anyway, go ahead.
Jack: And this is when the mafia shows up to wait for Master Roshi. Master Roshi is a kind of Netero.
Keith: [laughs quietly] Or, swap it.
Jack: [laughs quietly] 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 Yamcha’s husband.
Sylvia: Every squad got the girl who’s two girls, the pig, the turtle. [Jack and Keith laugh]
Dre: Uh huh.
Keith: Hey, if your squad doesn't have the girl that’s two girls, then [in unison] you're the girl that’s two girls.
Sylvia: [in unison] You're the girl that’s two girls. [Keith and Sylvia laugh]
Jack: Is it when she sneezes, or is sneezing, like, one way that it happens?
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: It’s when she sneezes, yeah.
Jack: Okay. That’s very funny. Do they— are there bits where they try and make her sneeze, et cetera?
Sylvia: Almost definitely.
Jack: Yeah, I could just sort of— I can write out one of those episodes very quickly. [laughs quietly] I don't think it’s very good, but you know. Let’s talk about Roshi.
Keith: I found my mistake here from a second ago. One of Master Roshi, who is also known as the Turtle Hermit, is also known as God of Martial Arts, and then there’s the two— there’s kame and kami in those two nicknames, and they just swapped them
Sylvia: Yeah, okay.
Keith: You can't be calling yourself a god and a turtle. It’s confusing.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Uh…I disagree.
Jack: 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 Netero had, instead of saying, “I'm going to build a death game,” said, “What if I actually mentor these people individually?”
Keith: Slash sexually harass them.
Jack: 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 Netero is specifically a play on Master Roshi or whether this Roshi character is a shonen stock character [Keith: Mm.] or whether it’s some combination of those.
Keith: It’s both. This is definitely a stock character; the Roshi, the lecherous, like, hermit.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: The lecherous martial arts master guy, the, like…this shows up in a lot of stuff, this kind of thing of, like, the extremely competent unserious mysterious powerful guy that you underestimate.
Sylvia: 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.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: Right. 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 Roshi?
Keith: He’s so famous.
Sylvia: For a generation, at the very least, yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I mean, like, I'd give him…
Keith: I think, at this point, for three generations.
Sylvia: Yeah. I mean, I can kind of just, like, start naming off, like, the Roshi ripoffs. Or not ripoffs, but like, [Keith: Flavors.] that are doing this exact stock character, like you said. Like, there’s Jiraiyah in Naruto. We've got Netero. Um…oh, fuck. I really thought I had more. There are more. Hold on. I'm gonna find more.
Jack: [laughs] It is interesting, then, that Togashi 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 Netero is at the helm of a game of hundreds of people.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Rather than just being, like, five unfortunate brilliant students.
Keith: So, this is something that— this is gonna come up. The Roshi-Netero, 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…what happens when you take Roshi off of the island that he lives on? He’s not a hermit. You know, like, put him in the real world. What really is the world’s reaction to someone who can blow up the moon?
Jack: Yes.
Keith: And, you know, Hunter × Hunter is like, “Well, there would obviously be a society of them, and they would, you know, have this bizarre outsized influence on public policy”? [laughs]
Jack: Yeah. They would run infrastructure.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Jack: And what’s—
Keith: 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.
Jack: And in the case of Netero, he wants to be the president of a death game slash secret society that is about as un-secret as it can be.
Keith: It is very funny watching the fight with Hisoka and, um…Yamcha, fake Yamcha?
Jack: Uh, that guy is called, uh…I said his name earlier.
Keith: You did.
Jack: He’s not called Carlos. What’s his name? [Jack and Keith laugh]
Keith: It’s Carlos, yeah. And being like, the people in the audience can't see the Nen. What are they even watching? What do they— do they even see the second guy? Like, what is going on? You know…you know, Killua’s in the audience, like, yelling stuff out, like, talking about Nen. Like, “Use your Gyo!” and it’s like— [Keith and Dre laugh]
Jack: Yeah. Everyone’s just like, okay, yeah.
Keith: This is— it’s really, like, the one— it is the biggest sort of suspend your disbelief thing in Hunter × Hunter is just, like, how is Nen secret? How are Hunters secret? They just are. Trust us. It’s fine.
Jack: 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 Gon thwarts it, and Konkichi tearfully says that he is going to sort of go good.
Keith: Not Gon that thwarts it.
Jack: Did I say Gon?
Keith: [laughs quietly] Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yep.
Jack: Goku. Goku thwarts it, and Konkichi tearfully says that he is going to become a teacher now, which is—
Keith: Because there’s the little boy from the circus that he gave a lollipop to [Dre: Yeah.] and consoled him when his balloon popped.
Dre: Sure, that’s his stepson now.
Jack: Oh.
Keith: That’s his stepson now.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Okay.
Keith: Because he got married to the mom.
Jack: Oh, right, offscreen, okay. Maybe this is in episodes I haven't seen where we flashback and learn about Konkichi’s…
Dre: Yeah, this is the first episode of Dragon Ball Super is actually Konkichi’s wedding. It’s very touching.
Keith: Yeah, they solve— Dragon Ball Super finally tackles the Konkichi plothole.
Sylvia: Oh, thank god.
Jack: So, there’s Dragon Ball: Goku baby. Dragon Ball Z: Goku adult.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This is where…Vegeta is?
Sylvia: Yes.
Dre: Yes.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: That’s where Vegeta lives.
Dre: Vegeta is Dragon Ball Z.
Jack: And then there’s Dragon Ball Super?
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yes.
Jack: Which is after Z?
Dre: Yes.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yes.
Jack: Okay. Is Roshi in Z?
Keith: Uh, yeah, Roshi’s in both.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Oh, huh. Because he can't die or something, or— and it doesn't matter if he dies, because they’d just get the Dragon Balls and then—
Keith: He did genuinely drink from the fountain of youth.
Jack: [laughs quietly] Okay, sure.
Dre: Oh, yeah. Sure.
Jack: Did he drink from the fountain of youth kind of late and that’s why he’s an old man, or…?
Keith: [laughs] No, I just think he’s really old.
Jack: He’s just thousands of years old or whatever.
Sylvia: Well, yeah.
Keith: I think that he’s, like, approaching 100.
Jack: Sure. Okay. RIP bozo Henry Kissinger, who approached 100 and then died.
Keith: And then died.
Sylvia: Yeah. You would not last at the Number One Under Heaven Martial Arts Tournament.
Jack: No.
Keith: Master Roshi’s around 300 years old in Dragon Ball.
Sylvia: Fuck!
Jack: Wow!
Sylvia: I mean, that’s gotta be, like, the tortoise thing, right? Like, tortoises live to be super old?
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Oh, yeah!
Sylvia: It’s gotta be that type of riff.
Keith: He claims to be immortal by eating the Paradise Herb, which is the fountain of youth thing I was talking about.
Sylvia: Oh, we smoking Paradise Herb.
Jack: Paradise Herb with Master Roshi. Terrible. Nightmare blunt rotation.
Sylvia: Oh, I— [Dre laughs]
Jack: Me, Master Roshi, the pig.
Keith: I would— it depends who else is there. It could be a nightmare or a dream.
Sylvia: The first dispensary I ever went to had a lovingly done painting of Master Roshi smoking a bong on the wall.
Dre: Hell yeah, dude! [laughs]
Sylvia: 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. Good vibes.
Jack: I guess I'm gonna start noticing Master Roshi out in the world now.
Sylvia: Oh, yes, you will.
Jack: Huh.
Sylvia: You will also start noticing Goku.
Keith: Goku’s everywhere, yeah.
Sylvia: Though I'm sure you already knew Goku.
Jack: I know who Goku is. I know who Goku is.
Keith: You know what he looks like as an adult?
Jack: In fact, adult version of Goku is the one that I think of when I think of Goku, to the point where [Keith: Sure.] I actually had to check: is this the same guy?
Keith: Right.
Jack: Answer: yes.
Keith: Yes.
Jack: But he’s missed his plane. Goku has missed his plane. I wrote down— because they’re standing on, like, a dockside, and they explain that Papaya Island is on the other side of the world, and you need— 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.”
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: 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 that’s the end of the episode.
Sylvia: And he does!
Keith: And we can solve that question. He does, yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: He beat up those tigers. He skinned them and started wearing them and new clothes, and he still made it on time.
Jack: Yes, he meets some tigers. He arrives on an island and is menaced by some tigers, and his reaction to the tigers—
Keith: He tried very hard not to have to kill them.
Dre: Yeah, he tried to give them papayas.
Keith: And they said no.
Jack: He says, “Oh, look at the tigers,” which is a great line. [laughs] When you see the tigers, and yes, when he shows up later, he is wearing tiger skin. He has—
Keith: “Aren't you hungry, kitty?”
Jack: 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?
Keith: Goku was given the task by Master Roshi, instead of continuing direct training alongside Yamcha and Krillin, he should go and train on his own in the wilderness for three years.
Jack: 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 and, like, walked 50 fight away?
Keith: Oh, that character has not been born yet, and it’s, uh…
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: That is Gohan’s son.
Dre: It’s Goku’s son.
Sylvia: Or Goku’s son, Gohan.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Gohan.
Keith: Goku’s sun, Gohan, and—
Jack: Goku is the guy who puts him on the rock and says, “Good luck, bud”?
Dre: Well, no.
Sylvia: No, he leaves him with the guy who does that.
Keith: Yes.
Dre: Well, okay, no. No, no, no. Goku dies.
Keith: Goku dies.
Jack: [sarcastic] Oh no, definitely permanently.
Dre: And then Piccolo—
Sylvia: He’s not that torn up about it, though.
Dre: Well, yeah, and then Piccolo is like, “Well, your son is super strong, so I'm gonna go train him,” and so Piccolo leaves him alone on a rock.
Jack: The guy who looks like a fiddle dee dee elf man.
Dre: The green man?
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: No, he’s a big green tough guy.
Sylvia: He’s a— yeah.
Dre: Yeah, he’s not a fiddle dee dee.
Jack: Piccolo DBZ. I'm looking him up.
Sylvia: If you call Piccolo— I'm so— he’s doesn't have fiddle dee dee vibes.
Keith: Yeah, he’s got—
Dre: Yeah, like, when you said elf, I thought like, oh yeah, like, because he’s got big green ears like Lord of the Rings elf. I could see that.
Sylvia: Well, like, this is partially because Toriyama did the art for both, like, Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, to me, but like, Piccolo always reminded me of I think his name’s Magus from Chrono Trigger.
Dre: Sure, yeah.
Sylvia: Who’s the, like, evil elf man.
Dre: I mean, he’s kind of more Vegeta-y than Piccolo-y, but I see it.
Sylvia: Eh, yeah.
Jack: Okay, yeah. Okay.
Sylvia: I don't— I—
Jack: Maybe it’s because I've never seen him move or talk.
Sylvia: He is elfin.
Keith: [Piccolo voice] He talks [grumbles]. He kind of growls.
Sylvia: Yeah, he’s— 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 sometime.
Jack: Is he a nice man?
Sylvia: I really liked early Dragon Ball Z.
Dre: And then he takes over as Gohan’s daughter’s dad too in Super, [Keith: Yeah.] is a thing that happens. [laughs]
Jack: Do we like him, Piccolo?
Keith: Oh, we love him, yeah.
Dre: Piccolo fucking rules.
Sylvia: Yeah. We adore Piccolo.
Jack: He’s good? He’s got his heart in the right place?
Sylvia: Yeah. He is—
Keith: Not only does he have his heart in the right place, he has all of his very strong muscles in the right place.
Dre: Sure.
Jack: And he uses them for good.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: He uses them for good, yeah.
Sylvia: He was Vegeta before Vegeta, like, was around and…
Dre: Yeah, 100%.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I don't know who Vegeta is either, but in any case.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This is all in the distant future, not even born yet, maybe born on an alien planet. I'm not sure.
Keith: Uh, actually, we’re about… [laughs] We’re about to meet his dad.
Jack: What? [laughs] What? I've met his dad?
Dre: No.
Keith: No.
Jack: Oh, oh. Oh, I see.
Sylvia: No.
Keith: No, no.
Sylvia: We'll meet Piccolo’s dad, though.
Jack: God, this is the inverse of the Hunter × Hunter game where you're not worried about spoiling things for me—
Keith: Yeah. [laughs]
Jack: So I'm just seeing the story just, like, slotting into place.
Sylvia: Yeah. We just get to tell you shit. Hey, do you want to know how many forms of Goku there are?
Jack: Uh, yes, and what is a form?
Keith: Oh, god. Pull up a list. Okay.
Sylvia: Do you want to guess how many Goku forms there are?
Jack: Okay, so, here’s my guess. Goku—
Keith: Up through Super, Sylvi? Is that what you're…?
Sylvia: Through Super, yeah.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvia: That’s the— when I looked this up, that’s the answer I got, and it might even be out of date now.
Jack: 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…
Dre: Sure.
Keith: It’s so funny, because I'm gonna just tell you this now: Sylvi may not have even been counting the ape.
Sylvia: I'm— I— [Jack laughs] You know what? I don't know if it is.
Jack: Okay.
Sylvia: No, it’s not. [Sylvia and Keith laugh] Okay, wait. I'm adding the ape.
Keith: Adding one, yeah.
Sylvia: And I'm adding…there’s another one that they missed.
Jack: But we are talking about, like, it’s ape mode, but then it’s also, like, when he goes Goku mode, and his hair catches fire or something. Right?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Sure.
Jack: Yeah. 16.
Keith: Do you know what that’s called?
Jack: No. Oh, yes! That’s called going Super Saiyan, right?
Keith: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, you also undershot it.
Jack: Oh, really?
Sylvia: Yeah. So, there are 21— according to IMDb, there are 21 canon Super Saiyan transformations.
Keith: Wow.
Dre: It’s from a Screen Rant article, apparently.
Sylvia: Oh, okay. I'm looking at an IMDb list.
Keith: I couldn't even tell you. So, obviously you've got the griddy.
Dre: Now, hold on.
Sylvia: But also—
Dre: I'm gonna guarantee they at least left one out.
Sylvia: They also didn't add on the Oozaru, which is the giant ape. They don't have Kaio-ken, which I would count as, like, a…
Keith: Kaio-ken, chronically underappreciated.
Dre: Then they probably also don't have Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken
Sylvia: Cool as hell in fighting games, not gonna lie.
Dre: Oh, no, they do have Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken.
Jack: But no Kaio-ken original.
Dre: Wait.
Sylvia: 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.
Keith: Sure, but that was also— that was a wish.
Dre: Um, Sylvi, this list is all Super Saiyan transformations, not just Goku.
Sylvia: Oh, god damnit. Really?
Dre: 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?
Sylvia: I believe so, yeah.
Keith: Which Super Saiyan?
Dre: Uh, false Super Saiyan? It’s when— it’s the Garlic Jr. movie where basically it— which takes place before the Frieza arc. Goku almost goes Super Saiyan.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I'm looking at a list that is 20, and it is just Goku.
Dre: I believe it.
Sylvia: Unless we're not counting fusions. Are we not counting fusions?
Dre: Eh, we can count fusions.
Keith: We can count fusions.
Sylvia: Because I was gonna say Gogeta and Vegito fit in there, and I'm just [Dre: Sure.] saying these to have these words bounce off Jack’s brain. [laughs]
Dre: Mm-hmm. [Jack laughs quietly]
Keith: Okay, this list is older. Oh, no, it’s not older. This one has 13. It’s got Oozaru, Kaio-ken, Super Saiyan, Super Saiyan 2, [Sylvia: Yeah.] Super Saiyan 3, Super Saiyan 4—does include Super Saiyan 4—Super Saiyan God, Super Saiyan Blue—which comes after God, Jack.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Super Saiyan Blue Kaio-ken. Ultra Instinct Sign.
Dre: Uh huh.
Sylvia: This is where they lose me.
Dre: Yeah?
Keith: Perfected Ultra Instinct. Divine Ki Giant Battle Avatar. That can't be real.
Sylvia: What? I don't know.
Dre: No, I think that’s from the Super manga.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvia: I like Super Saiyan 4 a lot, when they get, like, weird and covered in—
Keith: They turn furry.
Sylvia: They’re furries, yeah. It’s good. We should probably just talk about regular Dragon Ball.
Keith: Yes, we should.
Sylvia: 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 FighterZ community about how many different Gokus are in that game.
Dre: Sure.
Sylvia: And it’s just sort of funny to talk about as part of the staying power of the character is just how many different Goku colorways there are. [Jack laughs]
Dre: Yeah, sure.
Keith: Great branding.
Dre: We haven't even started talking about Gohan Blanco, so. [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: Wow. This is probably— the experience that I am probably having right now is what the world feels like to dogs. [Keith and Dre laugh]
Sylvia: Yeah?
Dre: Yeah. That’s true. I feel like, yeah, we all just went into a fugue state saying words that don't make any sense. [laughs]
Keith: Yeah, [indistinctly] blah blah blah blah blah blah outside? Blah blah blah blah. [Jack laughs]
Dre: Garlic Jr. Blah blah blah blah blah. [Keith and Dre laugh]
Jack: All right, let’s see. The mafiosos arrive. I thought that— I went through a real rollercoaster. 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.
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Jack: This is not the case, right, Sylvi? Neither of these are true.
Keith: I think—
Sylvia: No, so—
Keith: So, it is so— before Sylvi reveals what this is, I want to say…
Sylvia: Yes.
Keith: It is so hard to understand what is going on just from the dub.
Sylvia: It’s confusing.
Keith: 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.
Sylvia: Would you like me to explain multiple things that have changed— specifically changed in the Funimation dub of this?
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: Okay. First of all, there’s a part where they’re talking about Jackie Chun and Launch starts getting really mad about it. Sorry, Lunch. I always called her Launch, because that’s how people call her, because they think it makes it more cool, but no, Lunch is a better name. Anyway.
Jack: It makes it more cool for her to be called Lunch, yeah.
Sylvia: In the—
Keith: Dragon Ball is known for its food-based names. Almost everyone’s name is food-based in some way or another.
Sylvia: Yeah. She, in the original Japanese dub 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, which is why, like…the way that the— I wanted to look this over on the wiki 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.
Jack: Huh.
Dre: Hmm. Okay.
Sylvia: And the stewardess is like, “We’re almost there. Can you just hold it?”
Jack: And he’s like, “No.”
Sylvia: And he’s like, “No,” and then he, 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.
Dre: That’s why they’re all like, “Where is he? He’s taking so long.”
Sylvia: Yeah. Yeah.
Dre: Okay.
Sylvia: 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, but you know.
Keith: Yeah, there's a lot of censorship in this era of anime.
Sylvia: Oh yeah.
Keith: 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 [Sylvia: Mm-hmm.] or characters who take their pants off. There’s actually a lot of that that gets left in at the beginning 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, “Ah, take the gross poop stuff out.” [laughs quietly]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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 Roshi being an extremely horny grosso, like, walking down a shop street.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And the camera is showing him being a gross horny old man, but they've cut out all of the, like, dialogue of him noticing girls wearing t-shirts.
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Keith: So it’ll just— he’ll just be, like, ogling a girl obviously and then being like, “Nice shoes!”
Sylvia: It’s really weird. I mean, it speaks to, like, one, just different, like, standards for what constitutes as children’s television, I guess, in different countries, but also, like, very much the idea 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 cartoons seriously” type thing—
Keith: Right, this is a—
Sylvia: But they didn't really recognize the broader audience for the comedy that Toriyama was, like, going for with the series.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: But yeah, it is very funny to, like, leave in all the ogling but take out him calling the girls cute.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: [laughs] Like, it’s so— such a weird—
Sylvia: It just makes the, like, show feel more lecherous than him.
Jack: It does, yeah.
Sylvia: Like, it’s really weird.
Keith: Right, yeah. It’s very weird, yeah. Master Roshi is, like, gross. [laughs] He’s so bad.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, he’s a disgusting man.
Dre: He’s a pretty nasty man.
Keith: He’s so much worse than anything that ever happens in— like, this makes Leorio, Leorio’s worst moment, like, Master Roshi is pulling that three, four times an episode.
Sylvia: Every day, yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: He’s also— although, he is also such a heightened stock character that it almost comes across as pantomime.
Sylvia: It’s like Pepé Le Pew.
Keith: Yes, it’s like Pepé Le Pew.
Jack: It’s exactly like Pepé Le Pew.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: A character so utterly powered by the bleak engine of his own lasciviousness [Keith: Right.] that it just drives him from scene to scene.
Keith: Right, and like, the…he’s…it is supposed to be, I think, inherently funny, the contradiction between the discipline that it takes to become a sort of hermetic martial artist at 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, [laughs quietly] somehow.
Jack: 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’s very hungry and he likes to eat food?
Dre: Oh, god. Yeah.
Keith: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah. Oh my god.
Jack: Have I barely begun to scratch the surface here?
Keith: Yeah, barely scratch the surface. 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.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Okay, sure. And Gon doesn't really have a trait like this, right? I don't think that Gon 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.
Keith: 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.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: 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.
Jack: Yes, it really is, and we’ll get into Nen later as the fighting starts. I wrote down, “The old man is cruel to the turtle.” Is this something that happens consistently?
Dre: It’s true.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Sort of. Yeah, they’re sort of husbands in a sort of Rodney Dangerfield way, I find is the dynamic I'm getting.
Jack: Much like Yamcha’s husband to the flying cat?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, a little bit.
Keith: The turtle is constantly not picking up on subtle cues that… [laughs quietly]
Jack: And Roshi is berating him for it.
Keith: Right, yes, yeah.
Jack: Okay. That’s fair enough. They all get into matching pajamas. It’s very cute. There is a kind of, like, almost like children’s story companionship to this dorm room full of nine beds.
Keith: [laughs] Sorry, I just looked over to the Discord and saw the picture of grumpy Piccolo with his arms crossed, and underneath says “fiddle dee dee.” [Keith, Dre, and Sylvia laugh]
Jack: Wait, 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've got here. Piccolo soundboard Dragon Ball. Number 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.”
Keith: Sure. I can play these so that we get— just tell me which one you're gonna play, and I'll hit it on my end too. It’ll get brought into the— it’ll record it, so it’ll be in the episode.
Dre: Oh, nice.
Jack: Okay. Cool. Will we be able to hear it?
Keith: Uh, no. Uh, hmm. I could have that happen, if we wanted, for a second.
Jack: No, no, no, no, no.
Keith: Okay.
Jack: I'm gonna make him say, uh, “You again.”
Keith: Okay.
Jack: Ah.
Piccolo: You again.
Jack: Fiddle dee dee, I see. Now he’s going to say…ok, he said, “You’ll never succeed. You're too weak.”
Keith: Oh, is that near the bottom? “You’ll never succeed. You're too weak.” It’s sort of in alphabetical order.
Jack: Yeah. And now, finally, he’s going to say, “Goku.”
Piccolo: Goku.
Jack: [imitating] Goku! Okay.
Keith: Yeah, he’s so grumbly and, like, a baritone. [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dee.
Jack: [Piccolo voice] I've been keeping an eye on your last visitor.
Dre: Now, hold on, there is a version of Piccolo that is fiddle dee dee. Let me go find it.
Keith: [laughing] There’s a version, yes. Oh, you mean Big Green. [Jack laughs quietly]
Dre: No, I mean, postboy.
Keith: Postboy?
Sylvia: Oh! Yeah. Should we show…? Okay, yeah, just postboy.
Keith: Oh. Sorry, I thought—
Sylvia: God, dripped the fuck out. [Dre laughs]
Keith: I love postboy.
Jack: Postboy! Whoa! Holy heck.
Sylvia: We should watch that filler episode sometime.
Keith: Yeah, we should.
Dre: We should.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an episode—
Jack: Okay.
Sylvia: Even if it’s not for the show, we should just watch it.
Keith: Okay.
Jack: So, Dre has shared a still from Dragon Ball Z. It shows Piccolo, who is a huge green elf, [Sylvia laughs] wearing a baseball cap backwards and a huge yellow shirt that says “POSTBOY” on it in purple. And then there’s a redhead lady in a shirt and tie looking happy in the background. Is Piccolo an elf?
Dre: Uh, he’s a Namekian.
Jack: Okay. Fine. Oh, that lady works for Capsule Corp. She’s got the little logo on her chest.
Keith: Oh. Sorry, did we say what this episode was about?
Jack: No.
Keith: Do we want to? I mean, it’s not— who cares, I think, right?
Jack: I mean—
Keith: Unless—
Sylvia: Oh, the filler episode?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, they’re— what do you think they’re doing, Jack? Why do you think Piccolo would dress like this? You got anything? It’s fine if you don't. I'm putting you on the spot.
Jack: He’s trying to look cool. He’s trying to look like the youth.
Sylvia: Okay. So he’s, like, on a date.
Jack: I wouldn't have said he’s on a date. I would have said he’s—
Sylvia: No, he’s learning how to drive is what’s happening.
Keith: Yeah, so he’s trying to look normal.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: [laughs] That’s a driving instructor?
Keith: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, he and Goku have to learn how to drive.
Sylvia: It’s a really good bit.
Jack: Oh my god.
Keith: Yes, his horrible wife is making him learn how to drive, and so he and Piccolo go learn how to drive?
Jack: He has a horrible wife?
Keith: Goku has a horrible wife, yeah.
Dre: I don't think that’s fair.
Sylvia: Goku has a wonderful wife and does not realize what he has at home.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: 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.
Sylvia: Fair.
Dre: Okay, fair.
Keith: He does Chi-Chi a massive disservice, but his hands write the words, and they are bad words. She is terrible.
Sylvia: That’s fair. Yeah, Toriyama’s got…Toriyama never quite figured out the woman thing [Keith: Yeah.] for extended periods of time. He gets it sometimes! Like, all my love in the world for Bulma, but also, mm, you know.
Keith: I love Bulma.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Bulma’s the closest to being the best, and she is able to maintain that for a pretty long time.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Are we going to meet a Piccolo in Hunter × Hunter?
Keith: Yes.
Sylvia: Yes. Yeah? Yes.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: 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 Troupe don't count, because there’s fucking tons of them. Even setting them aside.
Sylvia: But like, even then, I was rewatching…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.
Jack: Yeah. Totally.
Sylvia: And not just including the Phantom Troupe.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Because there’s tons of them. [laughs quietly]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: If you were to evenly divide out, like, let’s just pretend— like, 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. [Jack laughs]
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Okay. Let’s see. Oh yes, I was saying that there is something, like, kind of children’s story…there is a children’s story sort of companionship in the matching pajamas and the nine-bedroom dorm—
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: That all the boys got a bed in.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: It’s tempered slightly by Master Roshi doing exactly what you think he does, sneaking into the girls’ dorm and, like, getting kicked out or whatever. But there’s this 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 a 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 Togashi really takes time to show Gon and Killua as friends who are also, like, 12-year-olds. You know, like, whether they’re [Keith: Yeah.] 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…
Keith: By slightly removing his glasses.
Jack: 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, “Ah, shit, Jackie Chun’s here!”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: “I love that guy! [laughs] Let’s hang out with him!”
Sylvia: Gene Parmesan.
Jack: It is. It’s Gene Parmesan, through and through. [Dre laughs]
Keith: It is, yeah, 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 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 in the top five strongest people on the planet right now. You know, maybe back then it was more like top 15. He can't win the World Martial Arts Tournament. I have to stop him from thinking that he has hit his pinnacle.
Jack: He needs, uh…
Keith: He needs more obstacles.
Jack: However, without me, the strongest and most lecherous man in the world, he kind of wouldn't have obstacles.
Keith: Right, yeah. And, you know, this is like…the long view on this is that sort of shenanigan pulled by Master Roshi 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 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.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Hey, it works here. It works in Hunter × Hunter. You know. [Keith laughs]
Jack: Yes, there is—
Sylvia: [sighs] Does it?
Keith: It is a very— it is the Netero-est thing that he could have done.
Jack: 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 Netero, the god-king of a death game, and then even the way that Hisoka sort of views cultivating Gon. There’s something to be—
Keith: I think it’s totally legitimate to include Hisoka, which is a condemnation of Netero.
Jack: Uh, Hisoka. Oh, yeah. Yes.
Keith: Like, that Hisoka belongs in the competition of teachers I think is, like, a really disgusting but accurate look at, like, [Dre: Yeah.] what Netero is doing.
Jack: Yes, the way that these shows talk about teachers as interested in cultivating power and having very particular sort of ideologies about how that power can and should be best cultivated, whether that is Wing’s sort of…Wing is sort of more insidious about it than, for example, Roshi or Hisoka, and Hisoka is also pretty insidious about it, which is saying something. Let’s 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.
Keith: It’s a great plan.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: Doesn't matter, because—
Dre: I mean, they're not checking IDs or anything, so.
Keith: No.
Jack: No. Then Goku shows up, and they're all like, “Yay, Goku, you did it.”
Keith: Realistically, they could have had just Yamcha go over there and say, “I'm Goku.”
Jack: “I'm Goku.” Yes.
Dre: Or 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.”
Jack: Yeah, he registers him automatically at that point, really. [Dre laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It’s so funny.
Keith: We maybe are underselling that Goku’s kind of famous for being the nine-year-old who came in second place in the last tournament.
Jack: In much the same way that Gon and Killua and, to a slightly lesser extent, Zushi, are [Keith: Yeah.] hailed as, like, [Sylvia: Yeah.] the children who made it to floor 200 or whatever.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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 gotta, like, artificially keep him away from the fight for 10, 15, 20 episodes. [laughs quietly]
Dre: Depending on if you're watching Kai or original. [laughs]
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Jack: These stakes did nothing for me. At no point, really— and this could be because I was watching these episodes out of context and didn't really have any connection to these characters.
Keith: The stakes of him not showing up?
Jack: Barely any of the stakes in these episodes.
Keith: Sure.
Jack: 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 in 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 then everyone’s going to be like, “Okay, good!”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And that's exactly what happened.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Uh, at the—
Keith: We did miss— we missed one thing, which is the introduction of the antagonists.
Jack: Oh.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Really?
Keith: Yeah. Master, uh…
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I'm pretty sure.
Keith: Master Shen, Chiaotzu, and Tien show up while they’re waiting for Goku.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Oh, yes.
Sylvia: 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 a bit.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: And then, at a certain point, they start calling him Hermit Crane, but I heard it as Herman Crain. [Keith, Jack, and Sylvia laugh]
Dre: Sure. Famous politician, Herman Crain. Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: RIP bozo.
Sylvia: So, I was just like, “Did the dub really name this guy Herman Crain?” [Jack laughs quietly] No. That was something I genuinely had to check while we were recording.
Jack: That’s great. I like that a lot. These are our villains. We have a sort of Master Roshi analogue, Herman Crain. [Sylvia laughs] 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—
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: I don't like this guy very much, but I do like his hat. His hat looks great.
Keith: I think it looks stupid. [laughs]
Jack: Keith!
Keith: It’s a dumb hat.
Dre: It’s a very dumb hat.
Jack: He is joined by a small doll boy?
Keith: Yep.
Jack: Called Chiatzu?
Keith: Chiaotzu, yeah.
Jack: 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 Togashi school of character design of like, just throw a real weird-looking character in.
Keith: Yeah. This is the character that’s based on the jiangshi—
Jack: The jumping zombie.
Keith: The vampire from Journey to the West.
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Ohh.
Sylvia: Oh.
Jack: And then there is the—
Keith: Who hangs around with a three-eyed god named Shen.
Dre: Oh.
Jack: The muscle of this crew is a man named Tien Shinhan. He has three eyes, and they are where you would put three eyes. [Keith chuckles] If you had to—
Keith: In a row?
Jack: No.
Keith: Huh.
Jack: His third eye is where the third eye is on your head, and I don't know, I have to imagine that this guy’s a famous Dragon Ball character.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: 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 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.
Keith: Uh, 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.
Jack: Was he blessed? Is it like a blessing type thing?
Dre: No.
Keith: He’s from a race of people called the Triclopses [Sylvia laughs] that came to Earth centuries ago that had super strength and interesting powers.
Sylvia: Okay.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And Tien is the last of them.
Dre: And specifically he is a Triclops/human hybrid.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvia: So, someone calls him Triclops during the episodes.
Keith: Yes, it’s a literal… [laughs]
Jack: Yeah. I thought that that was a joke.
Sylvia: Okay, sure.
Keith: Although, to be fair, I believe that that is maybe a joke that then gets retconned in a lore book into being real.
Sylvia: Okay. That would make sense to me, [Keith: Yeah.] because in Dragon Ball Z, Tien kind of becomes more of a comedy character.
Keith: Tien is the—
Jack: Tien—
Dre: Aww. Boo.
Keith: Again, this is Dragon Ball’s fault. The same that Chi-Chi is a horrible racist— or not racist, sexist caricature, but that doesn't make her not a bad wife… [Jack laughs quietly] 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.
Dre: True.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Now, he does sacrifice his life trying to buy time for people to get strong enough to kill Cell.
Keith: It’s one of the best scenes in the whole Dragon Ball Z.
Dre: Absolutely. Yeah.
Keith: Unbelievable.
Sylvia: Yeah, and then he’s the Statler to Yamcha’s Waldorf for most of the series after that.
Keith: Yes, yeah.
Dre: Well, yeah, that’s true.
Jack: Tien Shinhan is sort of the Goku of the crane man, Hermit Crane.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, absolutely.
Keith: He is like…
Sylvia: Like the…go ahead, Keith.
Keith: The thing we 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.
Jack: He also wears sunglasses.
Keith: He also wears sunglasses, and he has— his crop of students are, like, you know, they’re sort of evil mirror images of Roshi’s students. You've got the kind of obnoxious little one, and you've got the really really strong one, but this one’s mean.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Tien sort of fills the role of both Yamcha and Goku.
Dre: Sure.
Sylvia: Because he does, like—
Keith: Because he’s tall.
Sylvia: Like, we get this in the— I mean, yeah, but in the later episodes, like, we see that in the aftermath of his fight with Yamcha, [Keith: Yeah.] and like, he and Yamcha snipe at each other a lot during the episodes we watched, [Keith: Yeah.] and it’s like, he is sort of—
Keith: There is such a sadness to Dragon Ball Z. Like, especially early on, you just have this horrible section of that show where every character realizes that they aren't strong enough to continue being relevant.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: It sucks.
Keith: And they have this, like, weird phase where they're being phased out as people who get screentime, and the characters feel like they recognize this. It’s bizarre.
Jack: Huh. Everybody in this crane crew does seem to be a little afraid of Tien Shinhan, and we see this kind of further on. His anger or his frustration sort of causes both Chiaotzu 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 Tien Shinhan who is kind of fashioning him as his protege for his own sort of evil ideology. But yeah, they arrive. They sort of— we get some nice trash talk, and then the tournament begins.
The tournament is taking place in a…mm, 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 Heaven's Arena. It’s like a low building that has several rings in, and there’s hundreds of competitors, everybody sort of clamoring around. And then, outside, you can see these carved walls that are sort of semi-ruins, sort of have fallen apart. 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. 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’ve got a referee called Jim around. He’s being paid a small salary.
Keith: Yeah, this is intramural.
Jack: Exactly, and 180 bruisers have arrived [Keith: Yeah.] 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 in comparison.
Keith: It’s like 250 floors.
Jack: Is this something that Togashi does a lot? Just turns the dial until it breaks and then plays off, well, what happens when we have spun this out to its most outlandish sort of conclusion?
Keith: Yeah, I think that’s totally true. I think, like, have you played Forza Horizon?
Jack: Yes.
Keith: So you know how there’s just this bizarre vibe of, like, everything in this entire world revolves around psychotic race games?
Jack: [laughs quietly] Yes, that really is what it feels like.
Keith: [laughs] And in order— so, that is Dragon Ball, and then, to me, Hunter × Hunter is like, constantly being 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 nonstop fighting everyday instead of once every five years.
Jack: Byzantine rules or whatever. Yes.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yes, if Dragon Ball is Forza Horizon, Hunter × Hunter is what happens if you, you know, zoom the camera out and go to a normal open world game in that world.
Keith: That would really—
Jack: You have to complete quests.
Keith: I would play a Forza Horizon Disco Elysium, though. I don't know what that would be, but that's what I'm thinking, and that’s what I want.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Jesus.
Jack: It would also be…you’d have to get, like, David Cronenberg’s Crash in there as well.
Sylvia: Oh my god!
Keith: [laughs] I don't know.
Jack: Because there would be car fetishism immediately, right?
Sylvia: Oh…
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
Jack: A literal eroticism of cars and vehicles.
Keith: You’d have an evil clown car fucker.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, or in the case of—
Sylvia: That’s Twisted Metal.
Jack: That is— shit, that is Twisted Metal! [laughs]
Keith: That is Twisted Metal.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: That’s Twisted Metal. That’s Sweet Tooth, played by Samoa Joe.
Keith: But again, that is even less interested in the reality of the world than Forza Horizon is.
Jack: Oh my god.
Sylvia: I mean, yeah, that— though, connected to Dragon Ball, they are all trying to get one wish from…
Keith: That is true. That’s true.
Sylvia: Some sort of, uh, otherworldly entity.
Jack: It begins, and the narrator says, you know, 180 fighters are here, each with their— 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Each weirdo possesses a unique fighting style. Let’s smash them into each other.
Keith: There’s—
Sylvia: I think you could even go further [Keith: Yeah.] and say, like, that’s just the fun of shonen anime for a lot of people—and like, to me to an extent—is like, how do different abilities match up? How does, like, how will our protagonists 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.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: I would love to do a bonus of that at some point.
Jack: We should do one of these. Yeah.
Sylvia: Oh, I would— I'm gonna just say it now. We're gonna talk about JoJo on the bonus episodes. I'm gonna make this happen. [Jack laughs]
Keith: Before we get so deep into Nen, I would like to watch something that teaches me what a stand is.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: You mean we're not deep into Nen?
Keith: No. [laughs quietly] Not even close.
Dre: No. No. [Jack laughs]
Keith: We are— we have dipped our toes into Nen only. Real quick, I want to add to what Sylvi just said and say that I think the other thing, like the thing that Dragon Ball and shonen does as, like, 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 Yu Yu Hakusho: 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 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 analogue and metaphor for, like, testing, you know, personal ideologies against each other. We see that with the—
Jack: Yes.
Keith: We’re going to get to the Roshi fight. Like, that is not just what’s happening in that fight. That is, like, what, to me, a tournament is about in a shonen, is like, [Sylvia: Mm-hmm.] we’re fighting and talking. We're having our own ideas. We're punching each other, and those punches are changing out ideas about the world.
Sylvia: Well, here’s the— it’s what makes a good— I'm gonna, like, kinda— 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, wuxia films and stuff, and I think that’s something that also comes into shonen is, when it’s done well, you should be able to get some sort of characterization about the technique that a character uses.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: And I think that, like, they do a really good job of reflecting that in the talk between— 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, that is still a good way of doing it is to show, like, this character’s fighting style is they’ll go this far but not to the edge, and then with things like the, 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 going to squeeze [Jack: Right.] or break anything in his way. That’s how he moves through the world. You can, like, extrapolate from the fighting style.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: And then this leads [Sylvia: Yeah.] to, I think, the, like…I think this is the trope, the trope of like, antagonists becoming allies through direct violence with the protagonist.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: This is, like, Naruto’s famous for this. This is, like, the thing that Naruto is about.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Keith: More than probably any other show.
Jack: Kicking the shit out of someone and then them going, “Actually, we now have the same ideology”?
Keith: Yes. Yeah, like…
Sylvia: It’s like, you have to— we're friends now. I know there’s good in you, because I felt it in your punches or whatever.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Oh, god. This is so funny, because I want to talk about Gon versus Hanzo, which is the emptiest, most nihilistic version of this, right? [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: This is…you know, you could read that scene—I'm talking about the scene where Hanzo tortures Gon and Gon just refuses to give up—as, like, Hanzo or Gon making an attempt to do this kind of ideological move, this sort of, like, fight as discourse or whatever.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And it just failing. I mean, it succeeds for Gon, but it’s such a pyrrhic victory.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: It is such a violent, empty, destructive way of that happening, when you sort of get the impression that Gon’s dream, right, is that Hanzo would go like, “You know what? You're right! I do surrender.” You know, “I give up,” or whatever.
Keith: Well, he did try to give up, and that wasn't really enough for Gon either.
Jack: I think Gon would want to sort of, like, have the ideology fight, a literal ideology fight, to the point where Hanzo would surrender. Gon would want to beat Hanzo physically and then also say, you know, “We feel the same way about this. You see the world the way I do,” or whatever. But yeah, Togashi just shreds this in that fight completely.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: Oh, and also in the Canary fight, crossing the line into the Zoldyck estate.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. And, so, another thing that we talked about on an upcoming episode of the podcast is, like, how…how willing Togashi is to, like, 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 not exactly typical these days.
You can see how, like, wild it would be for this to be sort of normal, especially coming off of Togashi’s last anime, which is Yu Yu Hakusho, where there’s multiple tournament arcs, one of which is about the 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 flashback 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 three of Dragon Ball that we watched today, and then they go, “Eh, that’s basically good enough for us.”
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. We only need— we don't need to go any further than that. You've got it, right?
Keith: Yeah, you've got it. So, anyway, just very bizarre.
Jack: The girls—
Keith: 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. [laughs quietly]
Jack: Yes. [Dre laughs] By Togashi.
Keith: By Togashi, yes. By Togashi.
Jack: 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 parasols— we 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 an automatic machine gun and shoots him. He catches all the bullets.
Keith: Goku-style.
Sylvia: Unfortunately.
Jack: At this point— unfortunately.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: 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.” [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: I'm in love with her.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I really—
Jack: I have no idea who she is. I don't know what her deal is.
Sylvia: She’s just a…
Keith: She’s Roshi’s roommate.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: She’s Roshi’s roommate from New Jersey.
Jack: And she tries to kill him often.
Keith: Yes, often.
Dre: Eh, but deserved.
Sylvia: Can I just talk really quickly about how, one, I love her voice when she’s in her angry blonde form, how she talks like she, like, smokes at least two packs a day—
Jack: [laughs] Yes.
Sylvia: And is, like, from— like I said, she’s from Jersey, which is like, great that she just has a silly accent.
Keith: That she gains an accent.
Sylvia: It’s…they don't make ‘em like this anymore, folks! [Jack laughs]
Keith: They don't. They don't. They don't. They don't have weird shit like this on TV at all.
Sylvia: I feel like, uh…well, just in—
Jack: Is it the same actress?
Sylvia: I don't know.
Keith: For the dub?
Jack: Uh, no.
Sylvia: I'm assuming it’s the same actress [Jack: Yeah.] for both forms of her, but I'll check. Anyway, my—
Jack: She’s great. I want to watch a show about Launch.
Sylvia: 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 [Keith: Yeah.] or the Italian chef in this show.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: I agree.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Sylvia: Or the big fake Andre the Giant, or like—
Keith: Or Konkichi.
Sylvia: Or Konkichi. I just want characters back. Everybody sounds like—
Keith: Weird choices.
Sylvia: Everybody in modern anime dubs, they sound like a VTuber or a Genshin Impact character, and I'm just tired of it.
Keith: If you pay enough, you can get acting that sounds like real acting.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: But I would much prefer this, Dragon Ball, to the VTuber thing.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: 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.
Dre: No, you're so right, though.
Keith: Yeah, it’s totally right.
Dre: I mean, that’s generally—
Sylvia: I will say— oh, go ahead.
Dre: 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.
Sylvia: Yeah, no.
Keith: You get the turtle every once in a while.
Dre: Seems like in Dragon Ball, animal people are just everywhere.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. What happened to them?
Sylvia: Yeah, we get like— yeah, I don't know. Like, it’s weird how there’s just, like, tiger men martial artists here.
Dre: They get Goku spirit bomb energy, and that’s it.
Sylvia: [sighs] And there’s none. There’s none.
Keith: 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’s scope really broadens. The characters who are, like, allowed to get screentime because of that new scope narrow, and at one point, Akira Toriyama 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.”
Sylvia: Yeah. How?
Keith: [laughs] “So I just wrote her out of the show.”
Jack: Tragedy.
Keith: Yeah, how? I don't know how. I don't know how you go, like…
Sylvia: How you could ever forget…
Keith: You draw Roshi, and then you're like, “And he doesn't live with anyone besides the turtle, right? I haven't been drawing him with a girl that he lives with.”
Sylvia: With the perfect woman, for years. [Keith laughs quietly]
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I'm furious. I'm furious, Toriyama.
Keith: A girl who sometimes will do all your dishes and sometimes blow you up with a grenade launcher.
Sylvia: I need it in my life! [Jack laughs]
Jack: The first fight begins. This is Yamcha versus, uh, some guy, you know. Just some guy, right?
Keith: Just some guy.
Jack: And we get right into sort of shonen 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, you know, hyper exaggerated movement. You know, dashing behind someone so quickly that it appears as if you teleport, [Keith: Yeah.] appearing suddenly, moving from place to place. Now, sort of magic—
Keith: Hand drawn, a lot of cost saving techniques for hand drawing a show weekly.
Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and a lot of— 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?
Keith: Yeah. I'll say, characters do legitimately teleport later on in Dragon Ball.
Jack: Oh, yes, but I'm thinking of specifically in these early fights between the, like, more normal fighters like Yamcha.
Keith: Right, where they’re just—
Jack: “More normal fighters like Yamcha.”
Keith: They’re moving so fast you can't see them speed.
Jack: Yeah, and it’s as though Togashi 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, that…”
Keith: Right.
Jack: And it sort of lets him…it lets him have his cake and eat it, right? Of having these, like, outlandish hyper-stylized fight sequences that are also somehow rooted in, like, an actual real world martial arts— real world in his world, an actual embodied martial arts philosophy inside the world of Hunter × Hunter.
Keith: Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think that there is, like, a degree of…like, wanting to make things that get handwaved in Dragon Ball 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 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 handwave, like, okay, Master— and this is how you get into— we've referenced obliquely, you know, power scaling before, but like, this is how you get to “Okay, Master Roshi in season two is stronger than Goku. He could blow up the moon.”
Jack: Ah.
Keith: “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 blah blah blah blah blah blah.” And it’s like, you start trying to apply math to things that, like, you can't…it’s all made up, and they weren't taking it that serious.
Jack: It’s all made up.
Keith: And I think that one of the nice things about Hunter × Hunter is that it’s all pretty spelled out for you. They tell you how everything works. Sometimes it’s easy to do that, and sometimes the detail is, for lack of a better word, excruciating.
Jack: [laughs] Yes. Yes. Fair enough. It is sometimes excruciating. Yamcha 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 Andre the Giant. He’s called Antoine the Great.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: 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. Antoine says, “I'm so big, and I'll crush you under my feet!” and Krillin says, “Well, good luck,” and then he— there’s this really great shot of him holding the giant’s finger and throwing him.
Keith: Oh, it’s so good. He is literally smaller than the index finger of this guy.
Jack: And he flings this guy out of the ring and wins.
Keith: After his nasty little trick that he does.
Sylvia: I love his nasty little trick.
Jack: What’s his nasty little trick?
Keith: He pretends to get caught in his giant grasp, and he’s like, “Aaah!” and Yamcha’s like, [voice] “Oh my god, Krillin!” and then Krillin’s like, [voice] “That was my acting!”
Jack: [Krillin voice] How did you like my acting?”
Dre: [Krillin voice] Before I became a monk, I thought I was gonna become an actor.
Jack: Yes. Yeah. This mafia baby…you know. I had no idea that this guy was supposed to be a monk, so that’s good to know. Kastro—
Keith: After— when he sneaks out— we didn't mention this scene, but he and Yamcha sneak out to try and 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, like, monk garb. This is his, like, old uniform.
Jack: Oh, yes. Kastro—RIP, defeated by Hisoka in Hunter × Hunter—appears briefly in the background here. I'm just gonna share this image, and you can see Kastro.
Sylvia: Oh, really? Oh my god!
Keith: That does look like Kastro!
Sylvia: Damn.
Dre: Oh!
Keith: And hey, by the way, that guy’s name is Kastro.
Jack: Yeah, that guy’s name is Kastro.
Dre: Oh, I was like, “Oh, that’s Ken from Street Fighter.”
Keith: It also does look a bit like Ken.
Jack: Oh, it could. It 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 Samothes. [someone snorts] This is someone called King Chappa.
Keith: King Chappa, yeah. I have the notes on the end of this fight, because we actually didn't watch it as part of our episodes.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: I don't know if anyone else did that.
Jack: I would love to know how this goes.
Keith: Sure.
Jack: But King Chappa shows up, and sort of people recognize who he is and are like, “Oh, this guy is bad news. We gotta be really careful.”
Keith: And not just people, but like, Yoshi is— uh, Yoshi. [Keith and Jack laugh] Roshi is afraid. Jackie Chun is afraid for Goku here. And a couple really cool things happen. I mean, Jack, it goes exactly how you think it’s gonna go, but there is, again, it’s really watching the cool fighting ideas is really what these kinds of fights are for, and…so the fight starts. Chappa says, like, “You don't have to be afraid. I'll stop before I kill you,” and then, extreme sincerity, Goku goes, “Thank you!” [Jack and Keith laugh]
Sylvia: It’s so funny.
Jack: That’s a very Gon move.
Keith: Or, sorry, I got the tone wrong. It was a little sarcastic the way I delivered it. It was more like, [sincerely] “Thank you!” Like, it was— [Jack laughs] zero cynicism, ego, irony. It is, you know, blank slate, you know, very…he has to be…he has to be pure of heart.
Jack: Can Goku die in a meaningful way?
Keith: What’s that?
Jack: Can Goku die in a meaningful way?
Keith: He can…
Sylvia: Eh.
Keith: It depends on what you mean by meaningful.
Jack: Um, is there any consequence to him dying?
Sylvia: No. [Jack laughs quietly]
Keith: Uh, usually it’s a very positive consequence.
Jack: Oh. Really?
Keith: Yes, he can create meaning in his death.
Jack: Oh, because—
Sylvia: We all do, Keith. [Jack laughs]
Keith: I can just tell you real quick—
Jack: Always a fun time at the Smalls’.
Keith: 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.
Jack: Whoa!
Dre: With the Special Beam Cannon.
Keith: With the Special Beam Cannon.
Sylvia: The coolest move in Dragon Ball Z history.
Jack: Whoa.
Keith: One of the two coolest moves in Dragon Ball Z history, along with Destructo Disc.
Sylvia: I knew you were gonna say Destructo Disc. I was like, Keith is definitely a Destructo Disc guy.
Jack: He’s not worried about this, Goku. He’s like, “I will come back or I won't. That’s how it goes.”
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s like my—
Jack: Does he fear death?
Sylvia: The vibe I always got from that specific instance was “my friends are gonna be safe.”
Keith: It’s one of—
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: But.
Keith: Yeah, 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’s a better dad then Goku ever was,” because Piccolo leaves him on a rock to train for himself surrounded by T-rexes.
Jack: That makes him a better dad?
Keith: Yes! I don't get it! [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: Oh, is this sort of— there is, like, a fan response that is like Piccolo is a better dad than Goku?
Keith: Yeah, Piccolo is Gohan’s real dad, because Goku was never there, and it’s like, yeah, because Goku was always saving the planet from being destroyed.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s…
Keith: He was literally dead!
Sylvia: He’s nicer to him la—
Keith: He died for his son!
Sylvia: Piccolo’s nicer later, though. He does start at leaving him on the rock, but he gets better later.
Keith: Piccolo gets better, but Goku never gets worse.
Sylvia: That’s fair.
Jack: When does he start saying “fiddle dee dee”?
Keith: [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dee, Gohan.
Sylvia: That’s pretty good.
Keith: People should go back and watch the Hyperbolic Time Chamber section of Dragon Ball Z and tell me Goku’s not a good dad.
Sylvia: Fair.
Jack: Fuck are you talking about? [Keith laughs quietly]
Dre: Oh, the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.
Keith: They go into a chamber. They go into 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 the—
Sylvia: For everyone outside.
Keith: For everyone outside. Something like that.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And they do this in order to get strong enough to defeat Cell.
Jack: It is so funny that one of the ways that Togashi would stage a scene like this is the house where everything is heavy. It’s like—
Keith: The house where everything is heavy is directly, I think, referencing the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: But it’s such a different implementation of it, right?
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: It’s so different, yeah.
Jack: Toriyama is like, “We’ve got a chamber that will change the perception of time,” and Togashi is just like, “No, no, no. No. Everything in this house is heavy.”
Keith: They do a lot of gravity stuff in Dragon Ball Z also, so like, in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, the further you go away— it’s like, you're in, like, a white void for a year. They’re, like, in this horrible white void. And the further you stray out, the heavier gravity is, so they'll go out and train, but if they go too far out, then they can get lost in the void forever.
Jack: I think I would go mad in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.
Keith: [laughs quietly] Yeah, for a year?
Dre: Yeah, it’s not a good time.
Jack: No, they don't like it, but they need to.
Keith: No, they love it.
Sylvia: I mean, they like it, but they're sickos.
Dre: No, they love it. Yeah. [Jack laughs]
Keith: They’re sickos. They love it. 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.”
Jack: [laughs] Does Piccolo go in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber?
Keith: No. Vegeta and his son also do, though.
Jack: Who is Vegeta, quickly?
Keith: Vegeta is another evil Saiyan that turns into their ally.
Sylvia: Vegeta is Bulma’s husband.
Keith: Vegeta is Bulma’s husband.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Wait, literally? I'm looking up Vegeta.
Keith: Bulma divorces Yamcha.
Sylvia: Literally, yeah.
Keith: Bulma divorces Yamcha in order to marry Vegeta while Yamcha is coming back from the dead.
Dre: Uh, hey, who killed Yamcha?
Sylvia: They’re one of my favorite straight couples in anime.
Dre: Hey, who killed Yamcha?
Keith: Vegeta kills Yamcha, [Dre laughs] and then they go on a really long thing to save Yamcha, [Sylvia: Yeah.] but before he can come back, she has dumped him and married Vegeta.
Sylvia: It’s fucking great.
Jack: Vegeta looks a bit like Goku.
Keith: It is the mortalest wound that anyone has ever inflicted in all of fiction. [Jack laughs quietly]
Sylvia: It’s so good.
Dre: And after that, Yamcha’s like, “Fuck this. I'm gonna go play baseball.”
Keith: Yeah, Yamcha quits being a hero over this, basically. [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: Wow.
Keith: He doesn't become a villain. He just becomes a guy that knows Master Roshi.
Jack: I am so glad that we picked Hunter × Hunter as the show to do, [Dre laughs quietly] but I can't think of a more enjoyable way to learn about…you know, the way I am 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, like, toys over my head.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, just, like, emptying a— it’s like those, like, word magnets that people have on their fridges, and you can, like, make nonsense phrases out of the word magnets.
Jack: Yeah. “Gohan…is…Piccolo’s…project.” Okay. Okay. “Vegeta…is…Bulma’s…evil husband!” Okay! [laughter]
Keith: Mm-hmm! Yeah, she spends— she basically dedicates her life to being so mean to him that he can't be evil.
Jack: Oh. [laughs] Okay.
Sylvia: It’s so smart. [Keith laughs] 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 in the show.
Keith: 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.
Sylvia: He’s the ultimate wife guy! It’s amazing!
Keith: He is the ultimate wife guy.
Jack: [laughs] In some quick googling that I saw, he also had a shirt that says “BADMAN” on it. [Keith laughs]
Dre: Uh huh. Uh huh.
Sylvia: Yeah, he fucking does.
Dre: Yeah, he does!
Sylvia: Vegeta’s my favorite Dragon Ball character. I don't know if that’s clear.
Dre: 100%.
Jack: I saw people saying Piccolo’s— what did Piccolo’s shirt say? Postboy? [laughs quietly]
Dre: Postboy.
Keith: Postboy, yeah.
Sylvia: Can I—
Jack: Piccolo’s postboy shirt versus Vegeta’s badman shirt.
Dre: Oh, Jack.
Sylvia: Right?
Keith: Oh, I've gotta give it to Piccolo. Just barely edges it out, but yeah.
Sylvia: I think I'm team badman. [Jack laughs quietly]
Dre: We are not even getting into Vegeta’s GT fits.
Sylvia: Can I just say my favorite thing about Vegeta that I believe was brought to light in a recent— because of a recent Super movie? Not, like, super movie. Like, a movie about Dragon Ball Super.
Jack: Oh, sure.
Sylvia: So, Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z is Goku’s rival. You know, that’s constantly the thing is they always fight each other to see who’s stronger.
Keith: Right, it’s Mario-Luigi.
Sylvia: Yeah. Eh…? [Keith laughs] Is that how that works?
Keith: You know.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: I think it’s 100% exactly Mario and Luigi.
Sylvia: Sure. Sure?
Dre: Hmm.
Sylvia: I'm just gonna let you have that one. [Jack laughs] But—
Keith: Luigi’s evil and short and jealous of Mario.
Sylvia: That— Keith, can you describe Luigi to me? [Jack chuckles]
Keith: Green, short, [Sylvia: Mm-hmm?] evil, overalls, Italian—
Sylvia: I don't know if he—
Keith: Saiyan.
Sylvia: Okay. Hmm.
Dre: Okay.
Sylvia: 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 recent— what was—
Keith: Which is an insult, because Vegeta, of course, is the Prince of all Saiyans, and Goku is—
Sylvia: The Prince of all Saiyans, like…
Keith: Goku is the son of a lowly footsoldier.
Sylvia: Yeah, Vegeta does kind of believe in, like, the stock of one’s birth, which is, you know, his worst trait.
Keith: For most of Dragon Ball, he is fully dedicated to fascism.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: But then he gets a wife. Anyway. The thing about Vegeta is that he didn't realize you could train.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Ha!
Sylvia: And that’s why he keeps losing to Goku is that he didn't realize that training was a thing you could do, because he’s the, like, “natural talent” archetype.
Keith: I think that this is true of Saiyans didn't know about training.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s just, like, not a thing.
Dre: Yeah, because the thing with Saiyans is they naturally get stronger by fighting, even if they lose.
Keith: Right. Yes. Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, that’s, like, also how power levels come into it, right?
Jack: This is like when Sovereign Immunity told Clementine that she would have to practice in order to be good at things.
Sylvia: Yes. Clementine is very Vegeta-esque sometimes, except she doesn't get the face turn.
Jack: Yeah. [laughs] No, she does not.
Sylvia: No.
Jack: Let’s see. Oh, as this episode ends and as Goku squares off against King Chappa, 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 “Dies Irae”, 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 the Zoldycks, interpolated Prokofiev and has, like, specifically made reference to, like, big classical, choral, or operatic real world pieces of music. So it was nice to see it show up here, and it’s always fun to hear “Dies Irae”.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: So, we are now after— we've done Krillin’s fight. Oh, King Chappa, so…
Sylvia: Yeah, you were gonna fill us in on how the Chappa fight went.
Keith: I was gonna fill us in on King Chappa. This is technically in episode four, but the fight goes very quickly. But it’s one of the first, like, really fun things that happens besides Krillin’s little goof. Chappa’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 Chappa timing his descent to punch him as he falls, and then he basically yells at the ground to slow his descent. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: It rules.
Keith: And causes King Chappa to miss. He lands on the ground, and then, during Chappa’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.
Jack: That’s really good.
Keith: It was really good.
Jack: Ah, yelling at the ground.
Keith: Yeah. It’s great.
Jack: [laughs] That scene in WALL-E where he uses the fire extinguisher to fly around. That’s for cowards. I want to see WALL-E just screaming into space [Keith and Dre laugh] in order to move.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: There is some business before kind of the next fight, which is between [Keith: Yeah.] Jackie Chun and Tien Shinhan and is kind of being set up as a significant fight.
Keith: So, what happens is seven episodes worth of business that we skipped.
Jack: 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 Gon, Killua, Kurapika, and Leorio, as it were—as they go through some fights. Tien Shinhan fights Yamcha and breaks his leg. Yamcha…when we met Yamcha in Tien Shinhan versus Jackie Chun, he is in hospital, and he is extremely mad at Tien Shinhan, so I have to imagine that that is sort of the big pivot point in these episodes.
Keith: Yeah, that is a fun fight.
Sylvia: We get a lot of “do it for Yamcha” [Keith: Yeah.] chat from Bulma and the crew.
Jack: Right, right.
Keith: 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, [Sylvia: Oh.] a wolf who turns into a man by the full moon.
Sylvia: Oh.
Keith: He has a grudge against Jackie, because Jackie blew up the moon.
Jack: Oh, really? [laughs]
Sylvia: That makes sense.
Jack: That’s really good.
Keith: He made him stuck as a werewolf. Yeah.
Sylvia: That’s really funny.
Dre: That sucks.
Sylvia: It’s really funny.
Keith: That sucks. It’s really funny. Jackie Chun is basically like, “I'm sorry, but it sucks to suck,” [Sylvia laughs] 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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 Kamehameha is basically the best kind of energy ball you can shoot.
Sylvia: True.
Keith: But gets basically ruined because Tien manages to, like, reflect it, basically. Yamcha has no idea what this is. No one’s ever seen anything like this.
Sylvia: I think we get that in a little recap at the beginning of the episode.
Keith: We do see that. We do see that a little bit, yeah. And we also missed Krillin versus Chiaotzu. This is a fun fight. Basically, they use the…Krillin uses, like, all of the lore stuff about vampires to thwart Chiaotzu.
Sylvia: Oh, that’s good.
Keith: Specifically, like, making him count stuff in order to distract him.
Sylvia: That rules!
Keith: Yeah, it’s great.
Dre: That’s great.
Keith: It’s very good. Chiaotzu is interesting. He can fly and use his— flying is something that becomes standard in Dragon Ball Z, but for a long time, Tien and Chiaotzu are really the only— and Baba are the only characters we ever see flying anywhere. Never mentioned this: Baba is Master Roshi’s sister.
Jack: Oh.
Sylvia: What?
Keith: Yep.
Jack: Would never— would never have guessed that.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: I didn't realize that.
Keith: The season right before this season is a season where they basically invent a reason why Goku has to go and, like, 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.
Sylvia: Oh my god.
Keith: It’s very sweet.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: It is— I would call it legitimately moving, watching Goku see his grandfather for the first time in…since he died.
Sylvia: Oh, I bet.
Keith: And anyway, that’s just one of many superfluous bits of information for people. [Sylvia laughs] Chiaotzu’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 Chiaotzu for— I don't know why. I just thought he was fun.
Sylvia: I always liked Chiaotzu too, especially because I like using the small weirdos in the fighting games on the PS2.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it is really fun watching Krillin make him count and then beat him because he can't count and because he— you know, this is the jiangshi sort of thing. You know, stopping to count things to get away from the vampires. And then Goku one-shots another character; Panput is like an action movie star slash athlete. And that is where we come into Jackie Chun and Tien.
Jack: 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— mm. Let’s say the fight is in three phases.
Keith: Okay. [Sylvia laughs quietly]
Jack: 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.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I think it would be very exhilarating.
Keith: That’s a big draw. That’s a big draw to the genre.
Jack: [laughs quietly] What, wouldn't it be fun to leap around like these characters?
Keith: Wouldn't it be fun? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is— you know, everyone knows the “wow, cool robot” meme from the Gundam thing.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: Dragon Ball is so “wow, cool robot”.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: For leaping around.
Keith: And I don't think that makes it a weakness of the show. Yeah, but leaping around and flying, shooting energy beams and being super strong and changing your hair color to blond when you want to.
Sylvia: I wish I could have that power. Oh my god, it’d be so easy.
Jack: When you sneeze.
Dre: Yeah, uh huh.
Keith: [laughs] No, I didn't mean Lunch’s power.
Sylvia: Listen, she kind of does, though. Like…
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: She’s the first Super Saiyan.
Dre: That’s true.
Sylvia: Yeah, she absolutely is.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: She gets way stronger. Yeah.
Keith: So, I do think that one of the biggest draws of Dragon Ball and especially Dragon Ball Z is the sort of “wow, cool robot” effect of it, versus Hunter × Hunter which I think is giving you a lot of “wow, cool robot,” but is also giving you whatever the other fucking thing says.
Sylvia: The consequences of—
Keith: Oh, the “war is bad” going—
Sylvia: War is bad. The “war is bad,” yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: And in Hunter × Hunter, it’s “the relationships we have with the people closest to us are our greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.”
Keith: Yeah. Yep.
Jack: [laughs quietly] That’s…
Keith: Hey, that’s not a bad— that’s not a bad thesis statement. Put it on the board for Hunter × Hunter.
Jack: Yeah, 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 an Italian artist called Giacomo Balla. I'm gonna put it in the chat now. This is what this fight looks like to me.
Keith: [laughs] That’s very funny. Hey, I like this.
Jack: Can we quick describe this picture?
Keith: 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.
Dre: Those are feet, like, moving around.
Keith: 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 wagging its tail super fast, and its ears are flopping around, and its feet are pitter-pattering across the floor, and the whole thing is just one big blur.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: There’s a little bit of brown on the dog, and there’s the floor, there’s the light wood grain of the floor, and then everything else is, like, black silhouette and blur.
Jack: This is what it looks like when these men are fighting.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: At several points, they each get a bunch of arms, because they're punching so fast.
Keith: Did you watch the other video that I put in the Media Club Plus, anybody?
Jack: [quietly] Did I watch this?
Sylvia: Which video?
Keith: It’s from season two: Krillin and Jackie Chun fighting.
Sylvia: I don't know if I did.
Jack: Oh.
Keith: 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 the 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.
Jack: [laughs] I’m looking at this now.
Keith: Literally using the announcer. Roshi’s like, [voice] “Pick me up!” and like, goes into a kick pose, and he’s like, “Carry me over there. I kicked to over there. Put me down.” Krillin is like, “Spin me. [laughs] Pick me up and spin me.”
Sylvia: Oh, I found it.
Jack: [laughs quietly] I'm checking this now. This is so funny.
Keith: And they do a rock paper scissors, and there’s this bit of, like, during the rock paper scissors game, Roshi starts spitting on Krillin, [laughs] in order to distract him.
Jack: Yeah, this is great.
Keith: It’s so funny. It’s hilarious, and it— this is the sort— this is, you know, it’s funny. It’s funny.
Sylvia: Yeah, Toriyama’s funny.
Keith: One of my favorite things about watching the show— this is less funny, but is 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, you know, Goku 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 Goku, like, sort of— this is the 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 you zoom out further, and it’s like, the reality mode, where you're just seeing, like, flashes of light happening, [Jack: Yeah.] where it’s like, they’re there, they’re there, they’re there, they’re there. And it’s like, looks like— 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've gotta keep time. You've gotta make sure you know whose time you're looking at things from.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: 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.
Jack: Yeah. It’s great. And then they slow it down, because phase two of the fight is talking, and… [sighs] 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…it is very straightforward. Jackie Chun, Master Roshi, essentially says to Tien Shinhan, “You are being used and manipulated by your master,” and 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 good line.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: He also says, “You're one of the most gifted fighters I've ever faced, yet you—” this is the sort of punchline of the thing. “You undermine your own potential with your rotten ethics.”
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: That’s, like, the general thing boils down to that.
Jack: 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.
Keith: I think 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 gonna 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 be too confusing to just jump into for Jack who’s never seen anything from Dragon Ball or Dragon Ball Z.
Jack: Right.
Keith: 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. [Dre laughs]
Jack: Yes.
Keith: 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 Tien and also a billion times stronger. So it’s just, like, fundamentally untrue about the world, and…but it is still something— 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.
Jack: Yes. It is…and both shows seem to be…do both shows believe this or do both shows just have characters that believe this?
Keith: Um, I think that Dragon Ball believes it.
Sylvia: Yeah, I think so.
Keith: Goku is the avatar of this being true, because—
Jack: Do you think Hunter × Hunter believes it?
Keith: 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 Toriyama 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 Togashi is going, “This character thinks this,” and I don't know if Togashi 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 how I think of it.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: There’s ideology afoot.
Keith: Yes. Yes. [Keith and Jack laugh]
Jack: There is ideology afoot.
Keith: Togashi knows that there’s ideology afoot.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: What he’s doing with it, I don't…I’m not at liberty to say.
Sylvia: We'll kind of have— that’s what the show is for, is sussing out what Togashi might be doing with it.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Togashi is tangling so much stuff up in alongside strength, right? Togashi is sort of— uh, maybe not Togashi.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Deliberately, Togashi is saying strength is the same thing as goodness is the same thing as being able to find your father [Keith: Yeah.] is the same thing as getting away from your abusive family. You know, there’s this sort of real knot of thread that he’s building up.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I think that he is, as we go, going to start untangling those pieces and saying, “Well, this might not actually be quite as linked to that as these characters believe.” I'm curious.
Keith: 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 Yo— Roshi— 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—
Dre: A.K.A. not horny.
Keith: 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. [laughs quietly]
Jack: And you…this is like a dolphin in— oh my god. It’s so late. [Keith, Dre, and Jack laugh] Why did I say dolphin?
Sylvia: This was the first image result when I googled “Master Yoshi.”
Keith: Oh my god. Oh my god.
Jack: 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 [Keith: Yeah.] if you are sort of of virginal virtue.
Sylvia: Yeah. [laughs]
Jack: The Flying Nimbus is a cloud that you can only ride if you are not horny and are pure of heart.
Keith: Right. 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 Togashi says, like, “Here you go. Here’s a character that believes this sort of thing,” I do think that what Togashi does in a similar thing is, like, when Goku can ride the Nimbus, meaning that he’s pure of heart in a way 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 Akira Toriyama. I think I might have called him Togashi by mistake. In the same way, I think I brought Kiryu up a lot from the Like a Dragon series.
Jack: Right.
Keith: We talked 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, [Sylvia: Yeah.] this is important to me, that Kiryu—
Jack: No, I think you're right.
Keith: And the…I think that to Togashi, not to Toriyama. I think that, to Toriyama, Netero could not ride the Nimbus, but I don't know if that’s true for Togashi. Togashi might think that—
Sylvia: Huh.
Keith: And I think that that is a huge difference.
Sylvia: I think we will have— the Nimbus test may come back.
Keith: The Nimbus test. This is my Nimbus test.
Sylvia: Because I don't know if I agree with you on that, but I don't…I guess it depends more on, uh…
Keith: Sorry—
Sylvia: What you think Togashi views the Nimbus like or what Togashi thinks Netero is like. Does that make sense?
Keith: I think it is a— yeah. I think it is— sorry, and I'll make one more clarifying statement about this. Togashi thinks that, in the same way that I think— and again, this is based off of nothing but vibes and having seen these shows and having a feeling about how things are being presented. When I say that Togashi, in his show, that Netero could ride the Nimbus, that is a condem— maybe not a— condemnation’s too strong a word. It is a criticism of the conception of “pure of heart” introduced by the Nimbus and by Toriyama.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: 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—
Sylvia: I think that makes sense.
Keith: I sort of lost it at the end.
Sylvia: I think I get where you're coming from.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I—
Keith: It’s very complicated, and we're working with— we're working with— we are fully in supposition land, but.
Sylvia: Yeah. We can't— we can talk about this another time. I just— yeah, I think I read you more now.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: 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.”
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, this is fun, but because it’s been expounded upon so much, it is kind of just, like…
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It…I’ll enjoy drinking a glass of water, but I'm not remarking on how flavorful it is. You know what I mean? [Dre laughs] 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, which I have now put in our chat. Volume warning.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I see.
Sylvia: Which I got so excited when I realized it was about to happen.
Keith: 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, [Sylvia: Yeah.] fun and joyful and interesting in a way— but like, this was, like, plot in a way that was important, because it’s like, it’s the Tien thing that I wanted us to follow.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. [Keith and Sylvia laugh]
Sylvia: It’s really good. [crosstalk] I think the thing that’s—
Keith: [crosstalk] Do you recognize the mirror, uh, the mirror technique?
Jack: The mirror technique?
Sylvia: The…
Jack: Oh!
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Dre: The rhythm step, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, it’s the rhythm step. Rhythm Echo.
Dre: Rhythm Echo, yes.
Sylvia: Oh, okay.
Jack: But, uh, the adapters…and maybe this is in the manga too. The Rhythm Echo is much scarier than what is happening here.
Dre: Oh, sure, yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This really is like, “whoo, there’s eight of me! Wow!” and the rhythm step is like, [scared] “oh, fucking shit, he’s coming.”
Keith: [laughs] Yeah, it’s definitely you need the, like, evil music and Killua’s creepy stare.
Jack: Sylvi, is the rhythm step scary in the comic?
Sylvia: Of Hunter × Hunter?
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Uh, yeah, I think it’s presented very similarly. Like, the atmosphere always changes to that, like…like when Killua first does it, that it’s…
Jack: Dreamy evil.
Sylvia: Yeah, that it is something from that sort of like— the way characters in Hunter × Hunter would talk about it, something from, like, the underworld, you know?
Jack: Yeah, but now we say malevolent Nen.
Sylvia: Yeah, exactly.
Jack: His Ren was evil in that moment.
Sylvia: I think also something about the Afterimage Technique might also come across less impactful, because, one, Tien sees through it, like, pretty quickly, and two, it’s not presented as a big deal quite as much, because it’s the—
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: It’s not the debut of this ability.
Keith: Right. It’s from season 2.
Sylvia: Yeah, he does this against Krillin, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: The way he sees through it is great. He’s got one extra eye.
Keith: Yeah. [Jack and Dre laugh]
Jack: It’s not a problem for him.
Keith: I only need one extra eye to see this.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: I can just see more stuff, literally.
Jack: And then, of course, we move into the final phase of the fight: obliteration, in which, in a shock move, Tien Shinhan uses the Kamehameha attack on Jackie Chun.
Keith: Which he shouldn't even know how to do.
Jack: Which he shouldn't even know how to do. This was also, while I miss ‘80s voice acting, I do not miss ‘80s wild strobing effects. Eh, they’re fun. Maybe not in a kids’ show.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: 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 strobe flashbang that Tien Shinhan uses and then in the Kamehameha itself.
Sylvia: Solar Flare.
Jack: Solar Flare!
Keith: There was a time when the Kamehameha was one of the most important things in the world to me.
Dre: Yeah. Uh huh.
Jack: Can you talk about why that is? Is it because you were 12 years old and— all right, okay. Why is the Kamehameha cool when you're 12? Obviously it’s cool.
Sylvia: It’s a laser from your hands.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Right, but why is it more cool than the mirror image or the, like, mega punch, or throwing the giant through the wall? Is it that there is something you shout and there’s a pose you make, and you could do the shout and the pose?
Keith: Yes. You can do that.
Sylvia: Like, obviously magic, too.
Dre: Yes.
Keith: Say that again, Sylvi?
Dre: And it blows up the moon!
Sylvia: It’s, like, obviously sort of magic, right?
Keith: Right.
Sylvia: Like, you have to—
Keith: It’s a move.
Sylvia: The big pose with the, like, putting your hands together and doing the, like, Hadouken pose. Like, everybody loves that shit.
Jack: I'm doing it right now.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I literally did it while saying it.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I knew the 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.
Keith: Yeah. It’s also, like—
Sylvia: Also, Kamehameha is great to say.
Keith: It is great to say. The—
Jack: And when you're 12, that counts for a lot.
Sylvia: It does.
Keith: The other thing is, like, the other most important thing was Force powers from Star Wars.
Jack: Oh, it felt like Force powers, kind of?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: 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.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: And so you reach out your hand, and you're just like, “I can use the Force right now.”
Sylvia: 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.
Dre: Mm-hmm. [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: It’s like, well yeah, you just feel it in your tummy, and then you'll start— [Keith laughs] I'm like, “I'm just gonna do that.”
Keith: That’s real.
Sylvia: “I'm gonna summon the chi and do that.” Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. And there is this, like, powerup that you have to do for the Kamehameha, and it’s just like, if I did it good enough, maybe…maybe…and if I can't, you know, it’s still fun to pretend.
Jack: 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. [Keith laughs] 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, sneak up on flight. And I feel like that’s very much this sort of game.
Keith: He was doing Men Who Stare at Goats games in his bedroom?
Jack: [laughs quietly] Age nine, yes. When— so, you're nine years old. You say this was the most important thing in the world for you. It’s trying to knock over your own cup. Is it playing games with other people?
Keith: Um…a little bit with my cousin Kyle who I do Run Button with. We both were super into Dragon Ball Z together.
Jack: It’s thinking about it a lot, right?
Keith: Thinking about it a lot.
Jack: It’s rotating it in your head.
Keith: And there’s nothing more important than, like, you know, you're a 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.
Jack: It fucking sucks.
Keith: [laughs quietly] And you've gotta, like, take a bath and, you know, clean your room, and you've gotta have dinner at the table with your family, and, you know, it really only leaves a few hours of the day to do things that you want to do.
Jack: [laughs quietly] To think about Kamehameha.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: 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 Pokémon and Star Wars; and then I had 90 minutes of playing a video game, [Jack laughs] and then that’s it.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And then, on the weekends, I had to spend most of my day outside.
Jack: You can think about Kamehameha when you're outside, though.
Keith: Oh, that’s actually one of the main places to think about it is, like, doing it in the woods to a tree.
Jack: [laughs] Yes! Oh, it is really cool, though, isn't it?
Keith: And, like, holding a rock in your hand. 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 at the tree.
Sylvia: Yeah! That’s important.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: That’s, like…that’s a major part of the technique.
Keith: So, what is the—
Sylvia: Is some sort of projectile.
Keith: [laughs] Yeah. What is the— I had a weird little— I had, like, a K’nex toy set, like a…to, like, build, like, you know— it was like a different kind of Legos, if you don't know about K’nex. 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 K’nex set, but I would carry them around and, like, throw them at things and pretend it was, like, an electric shock ball like I was, like, a ninja.
Jack: Oh, it was like…it was the projectile that the ninja fired.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I thought you were going to say you pretended it was like a Capsule Corp capsule.
Keith: Oh, that would have been good. I didn't think about that.
Jack: Ah.
Keith: They have better toys now. I bet they've got, like, little capsules that you can buy. They didn't.
Jack: I bet they have.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: They had, like, a Fortnite collab with Dragon Ball a while back, [Keith: Mm-hmm.] and I bought Bulma sight unseen, because I was like, “She looks cool.”
Keith: She is cool.
Jack: 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, which is how it should work.
Keith: Yeah, it is hard to not get a one-hit kill with it.
Jack: And that was fun. That was— it was fun to use that magic. Is it magic?
Keith: It is the same thing that Nen is, I think.
Jack: Okay. It’s Nen. [laughs quietly]
Keith: I believe that they are the same thing, yeah. That is what I believe.
Jack: Hmm.
Keith: 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. [Jack chuckles] But, you know, I think it’s basically the same thing.
Jack: Cut to Bungee Gum: it’s gum with the proper— [Keith laughs] no. What does he say?
Sylvia: [crosstalk] It has the properties of both—
Keith: [crosstalk] Uh, it has the properties of rubber and gum.
Sylvia: Rubber and gum, yeah. [Sylvia, Jack, and Dre laugh]
Jack: Is that a Hisoka line, or is that what one of the commentators says?
Keith: It’s a Hisoka line.
Sylvia: It’s a Hisoka line.
Keith: He says it twice, and then thinks it quietly to himself once.
Sylvia: He loves to say it.
Jack: For someone as unpleasantly cool as Hisoka, it’s such a goofy line to—
Keith: It is.
Jack: It’s because he’s so proud of his Bungee Gum.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, he’s very proud of it. Uh, what is the—
Jack: And then Jackie—
Keith: What is the important thing about this Kamehameha, though?
Jack: Oh, uh, is it that it doesn't really bother Jackie Chun?
Keith: Uh, he’s fired it at the crowd.
Jack: Oh, he’s too evil.
Keith: So 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.
Jack: This is a short and destructive path that he is down.
Keith: Mm. Yeah.
Jack: And Jackie deflects it.
Keith: Yeah, he does. He shoots it up into the air.
Jack: And then, 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. [Dre laughs]
Keith: Yeah. He says— do you remember what he says?
Jack: No.
Keith: Right before stepping out of the ring, he says, “As my season ends, so a new one begins.”
Jack: Huh. Teaches again, huh?
Keith: Yeah, I just think he goes— he’s just, like, uh, 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.
Jack: Another thing that is important to me is hot ladies. That’s also what he thinks.
Keith: Yes, and I have more time to read [Sylvia: You know?] my collection of pornographic magazines.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: [laughs quietly] 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, [Keith: Mm-hmm.] which wouldn't have looked good.”
Keith: No, it wouldn't have looked good, although I don't think anyone would have blamed him. Maybe I'm wrong.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Because Tien has other blasts that he can do.
Jack: He does that Solar Flare that blinds everybody in the audience.
Keith: [laughs quietly] Blinds everyone in the— people are crying. People in the audience are crying. You can hear tears.
Sylvia: It is really funny when Jackie Chun’s like, “If you're gonna give me a tan, at least give me sunglasses next time.”
Keith: [laughs quietly] Yeah.
Jack: Yeah, he’s just—
Sylvia: Pretty good.
Jack: He’s so relaxed about it.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: 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 fighting serious yet.
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: This is like the, “Oh, you thought you were really fighting me, but in actuality, [Dre laughs] you were fighting the weak, goofy version of me.”
Keith: The weak me.
Sylvia: It’s also the, uh…I mean, it’s “he hasn't used his left hand” for the volleyball game, right?
Keith: Yeah. Right.
Sylvia: Like, it’s that too.
Keith: For the volleyball game?
Sylvia: Volleyball—? Well, he’s holding a volleyball in—
Keith: Oh, sorry. [laughs] No, no, no.
Sylvia: On the airship. I could have described it better.
Keith: No, no. You're 1000% right.
Sylvia: It’s late.
Keith: No, no, no.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: The thing is that you said— you said, “hasn't used his left hand,” and what I was thinking of was, like, Princess Bride, [Sylvia: Yeah.] where they do use their left hand to swordfight.
Sylvia: Oh, that. Yeah, that’s also…
Keith: So I just misinterpreted what you were saying, and I was like, “volleyball?”
Sylvia: Yeah, no. Okay.
Jack: Togashi loves that particular move, actually. I feel like the Netero hasn't— Netero’s only been using his left hand is the same as Hisoka hasn't stepped away from this spot.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: 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 Togashi’s version of it than it is here [Keith: Yeah.] in Dragon Ball, right? Whereas, in Dragon Ball, it’s just like, “I haven't even been fighting strongly. You haven't even seen the strong me.”
Keith: Well, the thing that this evolves into, which is really funny, because it ends up being way more literal. Like, this is fuzzier than Togashi is in Hunter × Hunter, but 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 can do that.”
Jack: Oh, yes. Yes, fully literalized.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Jack: And this brings us to the end of this chunk of episodes.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Is the stuff that we are watching next time directly following this, or are we gonna jump a little further?
Keith: We are skipping two episodes where Goku fights Krillin in the semifinals.
Jack: Okay. [laughs quietly]
Keith: Which is sad, because those episodes are really fun, and it’s…for anyone who has time out there, you know, if you watched 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.
Jack: And it’s not in the Hunter Exam rules. They can spar, essentially. They don't need to try and kill each other.
Keith: 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.
Jack: Right.
Keith: And so we’re skipping those two episodes, and we're going into I think almost all— so, we're doing episodes 15, 16, 17, 18, 19? Or is it—? I'll double check. 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.
Jack: Wow. Exciting.
Keith: Yeah. Just a wild contrast with Hunter × Hunter. I mean…
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: For what we've seen so far in tournament fights, can you imagine a fight going four, five episodes?
Jack: No. The longest that it goes is two, and even then, it’s usually because the fight began halfway through episode one.
Keith: Right, and then ends towards the beginning, yeah.
Jack: And will end halfway through episode two, yes.
Keith: 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.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Is there anything else we want to talk about before my final question? Because I have been on the Dragon Ball wiki.
Keith: Okay. [laughs]
Sylvia: Okay. I'm fresh out of things to talk about.
Keith: I said way more than I thought that I was going to say about this stuff.
Jack: About Dragon Ball. Well, we got good stuff. I think it’s—
Keith: I think so too.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And I like the relaxed vibe of the bonus.
Jack: Welcome to the bonusode.
Keith: Welcome to the bonus.
Sylvia: It’s because we know it’s just the—
Keith: Take your shoes off.
Dre: Bonusode.
Sylvia: It’s the homies here. Yeah, get comfortable. We’ve got beanbag chairs.
Keith: Hey, it’s me, Master Roshi. Why don't you take your shoes off?
Sylvia: Don't— no, hey, hold on a minute. [Keith laughs] Hey, hold on a minute.
Dre: Whoa, hey.
Sylvia: I'm onto your game. You get out of here.
Jack: Do you enjoy the bonusodes? 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.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: And if you rate us four stars, I'm gonna cry, and I'll record it and post it to Twitter.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: No, I don't—
Sylvia: I'm gonna kill you.
Jack: Wait, no, hold on.
Keith: And every—
Dre: Wow! Whoa!
Sylvia: Not Dre, I'm gonna kill the person who gives us four stars.
Dre: No, I know. No!
Keith: Yeah, no, I was— if you had said you were gonna kill Dre… [Jack and Keith laugh]
Dre: Yeah, that’s reasonable.
Sylvia: Oh, it would be fine? Okay.
Keith: No, it’s just more appropriate.
Jack: No threatening listeners.
Sylvia: If you give us four stars, I'm gonna put you in a Saw trap, because he’s never— he gets through the loophole by saying he’s never killed anybody, because it’s their choice to die, so I'll do that.
Jack: I don't think that would stand up in court.
Sylvia: [reluctant thoughtful noise] Yeah.
Keith: And you have to stand up in court. They literally say, “all rise.”
Sylvia: Yeah, okay.
Jack: They do say, “all rise.” Yeah.
Sylvia: [exaggerated disappointment] I'll just be sad too, then.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I won't kill anybody.
Keith: Why don't you both just cry, and we'll put that up as two separate episodes?
Sylvia: People would like it too much. I don't want to do that.
Jack: What is Snake Way?
Sylvia: Oh.
Keith: Oh. I— okay, Sylvi, do you want to talk about Snake Way?
Sylvia: That’s not what I expected. No, I don't— Snake Way— it’s part of the…
Jack: I'm looking at a picture of it, and it looks fucking sick, honestly.
Sylvia: Snake Way 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?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: And also, if you fall off, you go to [Dre: Yeah.] the Home For Infinite Losers?
Keith: Yeah, you fall off of Snake Way into the Home of Infinite Losers. That is a really— the world’s funniest censor, because everyone’s shirts said “HELL,” and they didn't want to air it in America, [Jack laughs] so they changed it to “HIFL” or—
Sylvia: HFIL, yeah.
Keith: Hfil, Home For Infinite Losers.
Jack: Hfil. [laughs quietly] 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?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: It’s: here’s a funny acronym. However, it being the result of a botched overzealous censoring attempt—
Sylvia: That’s why it’s good.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Immediately makes it extremely funny.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. It exists for the best possible reason. Anyway, yeah, so when you die, you go and meet King Yemma, who is Hell— the afterworld’s administrator, and he tells you where you're suppose 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—
Jack: Whoa. He lives on a Mario Galaxy world?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: [laughs quietly] 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.
Jack: I don't— okay, here is what I thought King Kai would look like.
Dre: Oh, man.
Keith: What do you think he sounds like? [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: I thought King Kai would look like a buff man. I thought he would look like regal Yamcha.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Ooh. No.
Jack: He looks like a cross between a catfish, a goblin, and an ant.
Keith: He looks a little bit like Green Green Jellybean Man but a catfish.
Dre: Oh. Yeah.
Sylvia: Oh. I got cricket vibes.
Keith: Also looks kind of like a cricket, yeah.
Jack: I'm gonna pull up King Kai soundboard. [laughs quietly]
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: You should do this.
Jack: Okay. And we like hanging out with this guy, and we hang out with him for eternity?
Dre: If I remember correctly…
Sylvia: That guy’s a homie.
Dre: Is King Kai also lecherous and horny?
Sylvia: I think he has his moments.
Keith: I don't think so.
Sylvia: But I don't think it’s as much of a character trait.
Dre: Not as much as Roshi, but I feel like it’s…
Keith: Not even close, if he is.
Dre: I don't know.
Keith: It’s hard to imagine there being a mentor that isn't horny.
Dre: Yeah. I mean, that’s why I'm asking.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Okay, I'm listening.
[sound clip: “No, stop it, Goku!” over music]
Jack: Hmm. Hmm.
Keith: I didn't find a good soundboard for this.
Jack: He sounds like—
Sylvia: I could only find one that has, like, Eurobeat in the background. [laughs]
Jack: No, I'm just—
Dre: I mean, all right.
Jack: I'm listening to “other Dragon BallZ voice clips: King Kai.” He sounds like he’s from Homestar Runner. [Dre laughs]
Keith: He does sound like he’s from—
Sylvia: Yeah, a little bit. A little bit.
Keith: He is voiced by—
Sylvia: He's got a little bit of Brothers Chaps vibes.
Keith: He is voiced by the same guy that voices Goku.
Sylvia: Really?
Keith: Yep, Sean Schemmel or something.
Sylvia: Huh.
Jack: Wow.
Keith: I don't know if that’s how you pronounce it, but I think it’s that. Yep, same guy.
Jack: And who is Mr. Satan?
Keith: Mr. Satan is the guy who they let think is— they let everyone think Mr. Satan is the strongest guy in the world.
Dre: [crosstalk] Is the strongest man. Yeah.
Keith: Because for some reason, they don't want the attention for saving the planet.
Sylvia: It’s weird.
Keith: I don't really understand why this is true, and it causes a lot of problems.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Who is the “they”?
Keith: And it creates situations to have Mr. Satan be in the show, who genuinely sucks and I hate.
Sylvia: Goku and crew.
Dre: Yeah. Is also—
Jack: Oh, he is their scapegoat for success.
Dre: Yes, but is also later Gohan’s father-in-law.
Sylvia: Yeah, that’s true.
Keith: 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 and—
Sylvia: I think that’s the point of Mr. Satan is to have the, like— to do the funny, like, “oh, my kid’s dating the father of a normal human who has this reputation [Keith: Yeah.] but is a coward.”
Keith: 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.
Jack: Huh. We don't like him.
Keith: I mean—
Dre: No.
Sylvia: No, we don't like him.
Keith: Yeah. I just think he’s annoying.
Dre: He gets better, but yeah, he’s never good.
Keith: Yeah, he’s annoying.
Sylvia: Here’s a non-canon fusion of him and Goku.
Keith: 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.
Dre: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Because they already [Sylvia: Yeah.] knew that he does that from other times that he saved the world.
Jack: Huh.
Sylvia: Also, like, I feel like Mr. Satan’s really the only funny thing about him is the name.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And it is very funny.
Keith: In the dub, they call him Hercule. They don't even call him Mr. Satan.
Sylvia: Well, Hercule is his first name. His name is Hercule Satan, I believe.
Keith: Well, they just never say Satan in the dub, I don't think.
Sylvia: No, they don't.
Keith: I think they censor that his last name is Satan.
Sylvia: Apparently his real name is Mark.
Keith: Mark Satan?
Sylvia: Yeah, his name is Mark Satan. [Jack laughs]
Dre: Okay, that’s kind of pretty good though.
Keith: That is a true, like, banality of evil name.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Also a very good shitty wrestler name, which is what he is.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: [voice] Mark Satan.
Jack: Mark Satan.
Sylvia: [laughs quietly] That’s the Undertaker.
Jack: [contemplatively] Mark Satan.
Dre: [voice] By god, Kane, it’s Mark Satan’s music! [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: Oh. Oh my god.
Keith: That sounds kind of like Hercule.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: That is kind of what Hercule sounds like. Have we got anything else before we go? Anymore questions, Jack? Anymore lingering Dragon Ball thoughts?
Jack: I don't think so. I think if I have any, I'll save them for next time.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: We will get into it next time.
Sylvia: Which, what are we watching next time?
Keith: 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, uh…
Jack: Of Dragon Ball.
Keith: Yeah, Plex is not a fan of Dragon Ball. It just, it numbers everything wrong. It makes the seasons weird, so.
Jack: Oh, that is frustrating.
Sylvia: Yeah, mine’s just all one season.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, I…
Dre: Yeah, your season numbering was wild.
Keith: Yeah. So, I'll say, for Dre, for your benefit, because I know that you don't have…you don't have the— so, it’s episode 97 through 101, or season seven, episodes 15 through 19, titled: “The Finals!! The World's Greatest Martial Artist is...?!” / “Final Match: Goku vs. Tien” and “The Secret—” [laughs quietly] These episode titles are so long. “The Secret Technique Haikyūken vs. Fighting Power” / “Victory's Edge / Battle Power!” “Tenshinhan 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...!!”
Jack: I love Sufjan Stevens.
Keith: Slash, “The Fallen”.
Jack: Wow.
Sylvia: That sounds like more, because there are multiple titles for those names. That’s why—
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, each episode is—
Sylvia: Those were in pairs, just for everybody’s reference.
Keith: Yeah, each episode is two or three different titles. I don't know why.
Sylvia: [crosstalk] It probably has to do with different distributions.
Keith: [crosstalk] Maybe it’s just the manga chapter titles?
Sylvia: Uh, yeah, could be that. I would bet— because the publishing rights have changed for Dragon Ball multiple times.
Keith: Ohh, you're saying different subs and dubs have different titles, so they just include them all.
Sylvia: Yeah, like, I think that the dub— I think one of them is the Japanese title that’s translated, and one of them is the English release title.
Keith: Oh. That’s not clear. They just present it all as one title here.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s, you know. It’s not the cleanest thing.
Keith: No.
Sylvia: This information’s never really kept great. [Jack laughs quietly]
Keith: No.
Jack: All right.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Well.
Keith: Just to say, season that falls right this: King Piccolo Saga. That’s a good one.
Jack: Whoa.
Sylvia: Yep. That’s a good saga.
Dre: That’s true.
Jack: [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dee.
Keith: [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dee.
Sylvia: [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dee.
[“The Boy in Green” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Keith: [Piccolo voice] I'm that guy’s dad. [Jack laughs quietly]
Sylvia: [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dad.
Keith: [Piccolo voice] Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dad. When you fight me, you'll be sad.
Sylvia: [Piccolo voice, breaking] Oh, now you've made me really mad. [Sylvia and Dre laugh]
Jack: Well.
Keith: Two rhymes there. Take your pick.
Sylvia: That’s him if he was an elf.
Jack: Have a good night, everybody.
Keith: Bye.
Sylvia: Bye!
Dre: Bye!
Jack: [laughs] Bye.
[song plays out]