Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans is an updated, shortened redraft of an OAV originally released in conjunction with a NES game. Continuing the interactive tie-in theme, unless you live in Japan, this TV episode length fighter is only available with the Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2 video game. Although stuffed with beefed up versions of the pre-Cell Saga movie villains, Eradicate centres around the throwaway idea that the Saiyans were not indigenous to the planet Frieza destroyed. Eradicate begins with Saiyans, in their monstrous Great Ape form, trashing the science-focused civilisation of the Tuffles. The dying race's greatest scientist, Dr Lychee, constructs a machine powered by grudges that gathers the animosity created by the invading brigands.
Eventually this emotion refining super computer gives birth to an avenging android named Hatchiyack. In this sense, Eradicate is a galactic reconfiguring of Dr Gero's Red Ribbon revenge with Hatchiyack standing in for Cell. Design wise, Hatchiyack isn't really up to the high standards set by Akira Toriyama's bestiary. There are few interesting design flourishes - an executioner's cowl and suspenders, both cerise coloured growths covering his milky pink flesh - but the artificial fighter reads more like a background heavy. Eradicate should be great - a short, concise, rummage through Dragon Ball's well established action tropes - but the show comes off as business-like and impersonal. It's not all drab though, a few wide shots have spikier, off-brand renders of the main cast and Hatchiyack's defeat as at least built out of a Son Goku character moment. The best bit is when all the Z cast line up to throw their ki blasts, their cataclysmic powers warping the short film's visuals into fluid, molten energy.
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