Now here we go, this is what I’m talking about. We get King Kai’s warning to Goku about Frieza this episode, we get the start of King Kai’s training of Piccolo and the boys this episode (and this, crucially, includes the “making King Kai laugh” challenge), we get the start of the Vegeta/Zarbon fight this episode, it’s a real treat to see an episode this briskly paced after last week’s episode proved a bit of a snoozer.
Let’s start with Goku’s conversation with King Kai and his
old, dead friends. Goku’s conversation with Yamcha goes pretty chill until he
mentions that Krillin, Gohan and Bulma are on Namek with Vegeta, and there’s
another, even stronger group on Planet Namek that he’ll have to deal with when
he gets there. King Kai quickly does a scan of Planet Namek with his antennae,
because he’s a weird, blue cockroach man, and discovers that Frieza is on the planet,
resulting in him having a near-nervous breakdown, insisting that Goku stay the
fuck away from Frieza at all costs, and making Piccolo and the boys swear they
won’t fuck with Frieza either, or he won’t train them. “ABSOLUTELY NOOOOOT!” King
Kai screams at the top of his lungs when Goku gives him pushback on not dealing
with the tyrant.
I don’t remember, because it’s been a while since I watched
this show front-to-back, but I wonder if King Kai knows the full extent of
Frieza’s power or just has a surface-level reading of it, not even being aware
of his transformation abilities. Either way, Frieza easily outclasses any other
fighter in the show at this point, with his power level in his current form
maxing out at a ludicrous 530,000(!), but that’s not even the beginning of
Frieza’s actual maximum power level. We’ll get into this a lot more when Frieza
gets on the battlefield himself, but it cannot be understated how much Frieza
broke the power scaling of this show. Before Frieza showed up, things were
growing quickly but still pretty reasonably, not going extremely higher than
the way things were left at the end of Dragonball. Frieza and his monster of a
fucking power level changed that for good, and necessitated increasingly ridiculous
power-ups and transformations in order to keep the tension going.
But enough about that, it’s time we move on to the important
stuff, the real meat of this episode. I am, of course, referring to King Kai’s
Joke Test, a grand event of significant proportions that requires puns almost
as ridiculous as Frieza’s power level in and of itself. Yamcha and Chiaotzu
manage to skate by pretty easily, we are told, but Tien and Piccolo do not, for
reasons we can immediately infer if we’re even a little familiar with them. You
have to feel bad for poor Tien, he’s really wanting to get this thing done,
unlike Piccolo, who’s just like, “nah.” It’s a testament to how great this show
is that I totally relate to and laugh at these characters’ reactions to King
Kai’s weird little test, even though they’re both approaching this with the
exact opposite intensity. Tien’s studiousness and Piccolo’s sheer apathy are equally
funny for two totally different reasons, and they both make perfect sense for
the characters.
Tien finally does get a joke off—granted, Yamcha gave it to
him, but I guess King Kai’s pretty liberal about the rules of this challenge---and
when Tien tells that joke, my friends, he pulls off the multiform, the
Tri-Beam, he goes all-out and goddamn if it doesn’t work. This is the kind of
high-quality, premium content that filler should be made of. If you’re going to
put filler in your show, at least make it fun, don’t do some tedious shit like
have two fighters stand around and size each other up in some grotesque parody
of a Mexican stand-off, only without Mexicans, or guns. Well, maybe some guns—Android
17 does carry a pistol around, for some ungodly reason.
By the way, the joke Tien tells: “You can tune a piano, but
you can’t tune a fish.” Get it? Like “tunafish”? YA GET IT?
(I haven’t had tunafish in a while, I should get on that.
None of that canned shit, either, I want the fresh kind.)
The boys are then introduced to Bubbles, and are told to
catch him. Everyone who isn’t named Piccolo struggles with the challenge, but
Piccolo catches Bubbles immediately, and with such speed that it embarrasses
the shit out of King Kai. However, Piccolo inadvertently passes the “Make Me
Laugh” challenge when he refers to catching Bubbles as “monkey business.” This just
proves the fundamental adage of DBZ: if you’re better than Goku/Vegeta/Gohan/Piccolo
at something, you won’t be for very damn long. It’s depressing to see play out
in real time, too, folks. Yamcha doesn’t even try to keep up after the Cell
saga, and Tien takes Chiaotzu and bolts for some part of the Earth where there
are least likely to be Saiyans. Piccolo, of course, will face his fate much
later than these tortured souls, but it will be no less bitter to see him
become Gotenks’ babysitter. Hey, that kinda rhymed!
We need to talk about the fight between Vegeta and Zarbon.
Krillin tells Dende that Vegeta is hot on their trail, and at first he is… but
then he senses Zarbon and decides that fucking up another one of Frieza’s boys
is more important than messing with some other random power levels. So off he
goes. You have to love his commitment to the bit—the man is absolutely determined
to kill off Frieza’s men one-by-one as soon as they leave Frieza’s orbit, like
baby birds dumped from the nest after a failed attempt to learn flight. As
viewers, we expect Zarbon to get merc’d in the same exact way Dodoria did.
After all, we get no indication from the show that Zarbon’s considerably
stronger than Dodoria, and our expectations are fully proven when Vegeta easily
counters and kicks Zarbon face-first into the Namekian dirt, making him eat
dirt in the most satisfying way. Even though, y’know, both of these men are
equally evil. Vegeta’s a more fun kind of evil.
Yet… something’s off. Zarbon starts to laugh at the end of
the episode. Dodoria was begging for his life when Vegeta got him in an armlock
a few episodes ago, but Vegeta manages to easily best Zarbon in a round of
battle and… Zarbon laughs? That’s when you know, even the young’uns out there,
that even though Vegeta won the first round, Zarbon is in complete control of
this situation. This is early DBZ, mind you, when transformations had happened
before but were mostly confined to Saiyans transforming into giant apes. We were
still new to the concept that a fighter could change their shape mid-battle and
alter the course of the fight, so we have no idea when this episode closes out
what kind of shit Zarbon has up his sleeves, which by the way are not connected
to his actual under-armor and that really bugs me because what, does he have
some fucking sensitivity to the cold, why is he doing that?
Anyway, few shows knew how to end on a cliffhanger better
than DBZ. In fact, that should be a Top 10 video if it isn’t already—“Best DBZ
Cliffhangers.” If you aren’t wondering what the fuck Zarbon’s going to do after
this episode ends, you are a stronger individual than I.
(4/5)
A Few Final Thoughts:
--I don’t know why, but whoever art-directed this episode
decided to put these weird color patterns over Vegeta and Zarbon while they
talk tough at each other. Someone just bored at the editing station?
--Goku decides it’s time to pump it up to 50g. Even if he
hasn’t said it out loud, he knows it’s going to end up with him alone on the
battlefield with Frieza.
--“I’ve never felt pressure like this!” –Tien, on the
subject of telling King Kai a bad pun.
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