To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Dragon Ball Z TV series, as well as the release of a dreadfully mishandled live action adaptation, Fuji TV and Toei Animation have gone back to the original 80s shows for a tinker. Not content to simply spruce up the show's AV presentation for HD re-broadcast, the duo have instead undertaken a substantial reorganising of the series to better depict author Akira Toriyama's manga. Exciting! This new studio cut has been dubbed Dragon Ball Kai - Kai meaning updated, or altered.
Dragon Ball Z has always been rather poorly represented by its animated offspring. The demands of stretching thirteen pages of weekly serial into twenty odd minutes of televised motion meant substantial embellishments had to be made along the way. New situations and continuity were invented to stretch out the programming. Indeed, whole arcs were specifically dreamt up to allow Toriyama time to drive his paper series further forward, without the animators breathing down his neck. Unfortunately, most of the new material rather diluted the spectacle.
A substantial amount of the original manga is super-fighting. Leone-esque pose downs by way of Chinese martial arts, and 80s nuclear-man calamity. A typical mid-fight instalment of Toriyama's manga would be a rash of squinting posturing, with a few bursts of splash-page world ending. Great on paper, but blown up for television you get mind-numbing minutes of frowning and staring, occasionally enlivened with prat-fall interludes. The extinction fight on Namek between series hero Son Goku, and intergalactic despot Freeza, becomes an almost abstract exercise in anti-fight minimalism. The two encircle each other continuously, tiny peaks of action amidst endless minutes of straining and flexing. Any sense of pace and time is completely and utterly jettisoned. The dying minutes of the planet Namek are stretched out to literally hours of television. All tease, with very little actual content. It was bad enough watching the fight unfold all in one go, captured on VHS by a cable subscribed friend of mine, never mind the pain Japanese fans experienced waiting week-to-week during the original broadcast. They must have been a state of perpetual hysteria. Was anything going to happen this week?
This anti-fun was further compounded when Dragon Ball Z took a journey to the West. The companies who licensed Z decided they wouldn't even attempt to translate the knowing formal irony that creeps into Toriyama's series. Instead they kept the characters as one-note action figures. The genius of Toriyama's manga is he knows the series is completely absurd. He knows the characters are verging on monstrous. He knows the fate of the universe is in the hands of a gang of mega-powered idiots. The failing of the US adaptations is they never allow those ideas to come through; instead everything is presented at face value. No wonder the series has such an atrocious reputation. Read the original manga and you'll see a creator baffled by the attention his creation is receiving. Confusion later leading to exasperated undercutting, and eventually a kind of revulsion. The last arc of the series, in which the heroes fight a demented God killing Genie is over-run with last minute gambits and tonal volte-face. Major characters are transformed into candy and eaten, everyone on Earth is murdered, a Pro Wrestler takes credit for all our heroes achievements, pretty love interests are beaten into comas by Satanists, and the big bad vomits up an even eviler version of himself when he learns his pet dog has been killed. It's designed to be farcical.
What has any of this got to do with Dragon Ball Kai? Well, part of the remix remit is the junking of non-manga sequences. So far, so good. Unsubstantiated rumours have it that the original run of 291 episodes has been dwindled down to just 100. That should account for a great deal of filler. The opening episode does stray in its first few minutes though, bogging itself down by reorganising the unfolding story into a much later learned context of intergalactic warfare. Illustrative footage borrowed from a 1990 TV special focusing on Goku's father Bardock, who appeared for a single panel in the manga. Turns out Goku isn't just a re-imagining of The Monkey King, he is instead one of the last of the alien Saiyajin race. The Saiyajin were space-brigands in the employ of the intergalactic imperialist Freeza. When the Saiyajin started to get a little too big for their boots, Freeza single-handedly destroyed their home world. An infant Goku escaping the dying planet in a space-pod.
Upfront, as info-dump context, the Superman homage looks a little cheap. It is much better learned as a colourful aside that Goku refuses to acknowledge. It's an impression of an origin, rather than strict event. This disconnect is exasperated by the need for another montage of previous events to explain away the storylines of Dragon Ball, the prequel series, in which Goku battles God's evil half Piccolo. It's a hard lump to swallow upfront. Better to limit yourself to one recap surely? Another remit-defying sequence of non-text creeps in immediately after this, explaining the hidden potential of Goku's timid son Gohan. He can only use his considerable strength when placed under severe emotional stress. This is illustrated by a misadventure with a waterfall. It's your typically neat Hollywood narrative foreshadow. By way of contrast, Gohan's powers are explained rolling in the manga; another ridiculous bet-you-didn't-see-that-coming! incident in a doggedly absurd series. I do hope this doesn't become habit for this Kai rejuvenation. The Dragon Ball saga shouldn't make a lick of sense. It's not supposed to. Instead it's about wild escalation.
More aliens! More fights! More Earth-shaking hyper hair!
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