Babidi's Henchmen

 I would like to take a moment to talk about Babidi’s henchmen in the Buu saga.

You know who I’m talking about—the three dudes who come to Earth with Babidi and fight with the Saiyans on Babidi’s ship. Babidi needs energy collected to awaken Majin Buu, he already got half the tank filled up thanks to the efforts of the late Spopovich and Yamu—feel free to pour out a 40 of piss in honor of those two dudes—so now he needs his minions to collect the rest by way of beating the shit out of the Z Fighters. This goes… very, very poorly.

Pui-Pui

To call this guy an afterthought would be an insult to thoughts that occur after things. This is some three-year-old wadded up ball of trash Toriyama had at the bottom of his wastebasket of shame he decided to put to good use as fodder for Vegeta, since Toriyama’s plan for the Saiyan prince involved a lot of battle-cucking, so he needed to get the guy a free eat just to let people know he can still box. Seriously, at no point in this arc is Vegeta anywhere even close to approaching the top of the pile. At least in the last three major arcs, at some point or another he was the toughest guy around. Here? He gets so bitched, even his shining moments fighting against Goku as Majin Vegeta ring hollow once it’s revealed Goku had Super Saiyan 3 in his back-pocket the whole time. I’m tempted to divert from Pui Pui here and go on a whole rant about how Goku fumbled the entire Buu arc, but that’s a subject for a future essay.

There are discussions all over the Internet about exactly how strong Pui-Pui is, and truth be told, I can’t find a credible answer. We don’t even really know how strong Vegeta is in base form at this point in the series, and that’s how he fights Pui-Pui. Doesn’t even bother to power up, doesn’t even stretch or warm up or anything, this fight is essentially coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb. Pui-Pui can take Vegeta’s punches and kicks without being atomized like Frieza fighting Teen Gohan, so we know he’s at least hardier than a low-level Saiyan like Raditz, which is why it staggers my goddamn mind that Babidi or Pui-Pui or anybody thought that a 10x gravity increase was going to tilt the scales in any direction. And you might be trying to say, “well, maybe Vegeta was pulling punches.” No. We just saw Vegeta at the World Tournament annihilate a punching machine while everyone else was doing love taps, there’s no way Vegeta was giving Pui-Pui any mercy beyond not going Super Saiyan, which was probably more about saving the energy than any kind of sport.

No, Pui-Pui had to have been around, I’d guess, Frieza when he first started fighting Goku. When he was still holding back the massive lion’s share of his power, but still had enough gas in the chamber to, say, tank hits from base Vegeta in Babidi’s ship. I base this off little else besides conjecture and am really just looking for a happy medium between Raditz-level, which is just absurdly weak, and Semi-Perfect Cell, who Vegeta did need to be a Super Saiyan Grade 2 to outclass. Semi-Perfect Cell is a level some people have guessed Pui-Pui’s power level to be equivalent to, but I just think that’s too strong, as would one of the Androids be.

Now that I’ve gotten that bit of speculation out of the way, let’s talk about what a total fucking idiot this dude is. As we’ve previously established, Pui-Pui was just getting ragdolled by Vegeta in normal gravity, not landing a single hit, until eventually Babidi transported the fight to Pui-Pui’s home planet, a shitty-looking windy rock with 10x Earth’s gravity called Zoon. This place is where people from Wyoming go so that they can experience homesickness. The giant crab monster from the end of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” would be pissed if it got transported here. If you offered the revived Namekians this place as their new planet at the end of the Frieza saga, they’d ask you to kill them again. To call this place a shithole is an insult to shit, holes, and holes that release shit.

Pui-Pui is, of course, certain that 10x Earth’s gravity is what will give him the edge, and even when Vegeta is dancing in place and smirking, Pui-Pui tries to bum-rush him. I guess at this point he figures, “either I fight Vegeta and he kills me, or I surrender and Babidi inflates me to death like he did to Spopovich. I don’t even want to know what my head would look like in that scenario.” Vegeta disintegrates him with a single unceremonious ki blast, and we move on to…

Yakon

This guy started off much more promising. His intro involved snatching and eating the two dudes who came to wake him up to go fight. I have a feeling the henchmen who get assigned to Yakon duty are the henchmen that Babidi thinks are making fun of his height but he has no proof. Pulling Yakon duty and surviving it is probably a free pass to join the pantheon of the Supreme Kais. Mike Rowe would refuse to do this job, he would throw his whole ass-kiss-the-boss work philosophy in the trash and join the picket line for as long as it takes Babidi to find out and he becomes another victim of Babidi’s latent inflation fetish.

I’m not going to lie, if you gave me the opportunity to have a tiny Yakon as a pet, I’d probably jump on that. It would need to be, like, the size of a rat and we’d need to do routine claw-trimmings, but I’d put him in a cage with some shredded paper and a hamster wheel. He’d probably be a lot like a green iguana, just a belligerent little bastard, but he’s so happy looking! He could be a little buddy! Then again, I wouldn’t be able to afford getting the light eaten out of all the light bulbs in my apartment, so maybe I’m in over my head.

Most of Goku and Yakon’s fight takes place on Yakon’s home planet. This time, we’re fighting on Planet Ankoku, out in the far edge of the universe. The place looks like an RPG map where you’d need to have a bunch of lanterns in your inventory to make it through. Planet Rock Tunnel, that’s what they should’ve called this place. Either way, it, too, is a shithole.

Yakon’s main gimmick is that he sucks light. This is a departure from Pui-Pui, whose main gimmick is that he sucks. Goku’s Super Saiyan transformation is eats for him, as Yakon is able to inhale the glow that surrounds his body. But here’s the thing: there’s a lot of footage of Goku in his Super Saiyan form where he isn’t glowing. Hell, there’s footage of him as a Super Saiyan 2 and 3 where he’s not glowing. The yellow aura is simply to demonstrate that he's increasing his ki. He can relax that shit and Yakon won’t have any light to eat, right?

Well, in any case, since Yakon gets a power-up from eating Goku’s Super Saiyan, he drains that shit on principle when Goku transforms, a fact that Goku takes advantage of by just powering up continuously until Yakon’s greedy ass explodes. One can imagine that his ass would’ve exploded anyway after this fight, and I mean that part of him specifically. What would light-based diarrhea look like, you think? Would it basically be like one of those alien spotlights from the movies when they’re taking a human up for an anal probing? Maybe that’s the alien species that keeps kidnapping us, maybe they just hoover up rednecks using their ass lights to—you know, let’s move on to Dabura.

Dabura

If you showed somebody a picture of Dabura and a picture of Fat Buu side-by-side, nobody would guess that Fat Buu is the primary villain—well, sort of primary villain—in this arc. Dabura’s design is just bad-ass, he’s a big, muscly devil-man wearing a really low-cut blue shirt contrasting with the redness of his skin, his voice is a deep, throaty growl, and all of that shit is basically negated by the fact that he’s taking orders from Babidi.

Can you imagine some little fucker like Babidi giving orders so effortlessly to a guy like this? It makes you wonder what the hell Dabura’s mindset was when he decided to let Babidi take control of his mind, because the Supreme Kai straight-up tells us that he’s the King of the Demon World. Did that job get boring for him? Did he have a midlife crisis like Vegeta? I can’t imagine Dabura sitting on his blood-god throne, drinking wine out of a skull, seriously considering the offer of this little green wizard who looks like the offspring of Steve Buscemi and a booger, thinking to himself, “gee, I could continue to rule the demon world, committing heinous acts to my liking and holding blood orgies nightly in my private chambers, or I could be the servant of this cigarette-voiced goblin and help him wake up an eldritch monster from millions of years ago to blow up the universe.” Then he takes another sip of wine, stands up from his throne, and goes, “juice me up, boss.”

I couldn’t find a clear-cut answer to this on the Dragonball fandom wiki, but I can tell you that Dabura’s utter disgust at Majin Buu makes a lot of sense looking at his father he usurped to become the Demon King. This dude looks like Randy from Trailer Park Boys painted himself red and put on a leotard, I look at this goddamn dude and all I can think of is J-Roc calling Randy an old basketball-eating, walrus-ass motherfucker.

Dabura has a bit of a deep bag, to be honest. The Gohan/Dabura fight had a lot of promise if Gohan were just a little better at fighting and Dabura didn’t decide to call shit off after Vegeta’s titty tantrum. Dabura can generate swords and spears out of nowhere, he’s able to spit on people and turn them into stone, he breathes fire, he has telekinesis, the dude needed more screen time. I kind of wish he’d have survived his encounter with Buu and rebelled against Babidi by joining the heroes, rather than wait until he’s been killed to turn good.

The stone spit thing pissed me off a bit when he used it on Piccolo and Krillin. Well, actually, just Piccolo. Krillin was about to leave the battlefield anyways, but I wouldn’t have minded a chance to see Piccolo throw some hands with the Saiyans in Babidi’s ship. I read somewhere he was originally supposed to be the one Babidi took control of, and while I think that would be an interesting alternate universe exploration, Vegeta was the much more sensible choice. He’s stronger, he’s got more evil in his heart by this point, and he has a reason to reveal the evil as opposed to the more stoic, even-tempered Piccolo.

Now, a fight between Piccolo and Dabura, that might have been fun to see. I don’t know if Piccolo would have been strong enough, the dude was training for seven years unlike Gohan but he was starting from a way weaker position after the end of the Cell arc. Piccolo didn’t get one single good fight in this goddamn arc, though, and he’s probably my favorite Z Fighter. I would love to have seen him take off the cape and throw some hands, even if he lost to Dabura, just to see him put up a fight would have been entertaining.

Dabura’s also the smartest guy in Babidi’s employ, and it’s a testament to Babidi’s stupidity that he decides he doesn’t need Dabura anymore after Majin Buu shows up. Killing Spopovich and Yamu was one thing, they were just low rank mooks that had little else to contribute to Babidi, especially now that the Z Fighters are on to them and can easily stop them. Dabura was loyal to Babidi for centuries, he killed Kibito and took away the Z Fighters’ healing guy, and he recognized that Majin Buu was not going to stay under Babidi’s control for long because not only was he too strong, he was too chaotic. Babidi failed to heed this warning, and within literally a day, Buu had punched off Babidi’s head and sent his ass to hell for good. But, not before allowing Buu to turn Dabura into candy and eat him, throwing away his weaker but more loyal partner and sealing his own fate as well.

And that covers Babidi’s minions, at least the ones worth talking about. The mooks that Gohan and the Supreme Kai easily killed off are basically just Frieza soldiers wearing Pui-Pui outfits, and Majin Vegeta was never really under Babidi’s control, so I don’t count him as a minion. I suppose there’s Yamu and Spopovich, but I covered Videl’s fight with Spopovich in a separate essay, and that’s about the only noteworthy thing that happens with them other than taking Gohan’s energy and being killed. I guess if I had to describe them, Spopovich is the Nappa and Yamu’s the Vegeta, they have a very similar dynamic like that, but it isn’t explored much given their low screen time. Okay, bye now.