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…

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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you enjoy the General Blue portion of the Red Ribbon Army arc will depend entirely on how much you can stomach a rather outdated overly camp gay villain being the butt of all the jokes.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!

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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…

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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!

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