Dragon Ball franchise.
Okay, last Dragon Ball review for a while, but again after sitting down to watch this I knew if I didn’t review it now I’d never get round to it. The second, far longer “story arc” in this Promotional Anime feels much like one of the old Dragon Ball Z films, just longer and somehow with even less plot. Do I expect plot out of a series that exists to promote a card-based Arcade game? No, not really, but I thought I’d mention it. Let’s take a look!
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I’ll get round to Gundam Wing in a few weeks, having just watched this on a whim I wanted to get the review written because frankly I’m unlikely to watch it again… So, what is Super Dragon Ball Heroes? Why, it’s a “Promotional Anime”, written right under the logo in the top left of the free online uploads of the episodes. What does that mean? It means it’s nonsense… utter, utter nonsense. It exists to give some slight visual context to some made up cards people can use in the popular (in Japan) Arcade game of the same name. Is it still fun to watch though? Well given it’s been a couple of years and I’m only now just getting round to it, I didn’t think so going in, but…
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Time to wrap up this section of the Dragon Ball story, from Fortune Teller Baba to Grandpa Gohan all the way to the last episode of filler before the three year time skip, there is a lot to cover. In amongst invisible men getting nosebled on and devils fighting in a room adorned with a giant toilet, there is one of the best choreographed fights in the series. Intrigued? Read onwards as we wave a goodbye to the “classic Toriyama gag manga era” of the Dragon Ball series.
Although there is plenty of humour to be had in the next arc (that’s sort of the final part of this overall story…) this part of the Red Ribbon Army arc always feels like the beginning of the turning point towards more action-heavy story telling. Tao Pai Pai is a deadly and serious (until the end) foe, and for the first time Goku decides to use the Dragon Balls to return someone from death. Interested? Let’s have a look then, as the Red Ribbon Army arc draws to a close, but we’re not quite done yet…
How much you enjoy the General Blue portion of the Red Ribbon Army arc will depend entirely on how much you can stomach a rather outdated overly camp gay villain being the butt of all the jokes. That and how much knowledge you have of Akira Toriyama’s previous work: Dr. Slump… Interested? Well, read on!
It’s time for the Muscle Tower part of the Red Ribbon Army arc, a relatively small part of the narrative but one that managed to stick in a lot of fans-of-the-time’s minds, as Muscle Tower itself has managed to cameo in a lot of future games released in the 2000s. Afterwards is a small collection of mostly filler material, but hey-ho, I have to include them somewhere! Let’s take a look…
The Red Ribbon Army arc is certainly the longest in the original series, though it can be easily split into narrative chunks that make up the whole, as I have done here! (and as FUNimation did, using their weird individually titled “saga” method) That being said, to keep the Muscle Tower part of the story self-contained I’ve had to separate these six episodes on their own, which is a bit… odd. Oh well, let’s take a look at a mostly filler-filled prologue!
Now I’m not currently covering Gundam, and no longer covering a Dragon Ball series for Anime UK News, I thought it would be the ideal time to continue my deeper dive into the original series. So after the original 13 episodes we enter a training sequence (featuring the debut of Krillin!) followed by a Tournament arc, two staples of the Shonen genre still in their infancy here. This is also where Dragon Ball was still more leaned towards comedy than action, so how does that blend with a martial arts tournament? Well…
So HERE IT IS, my last Dragon Ball-related anime review for Anime UK News… well, until the inevitable next project, anyway… Now I just wish I had more time to review some older Dragon Ball stuff for this blog…
The other half of the double Anime UK News shonen blu-ray reviews this week, HERE is Part 9 of Dragon Ball Super. So much fighting…. so… so much fighting…
