Dragon Ball Z Kai

[Rurudyne]

For those not familiar with it, Nickelodeon is airing Dragon Ball Z Kai ... a reworking of the venerable Dragon Ball Z into a new show with 191 fewer episodes out of the original 291 episode anime.

I'm kinda at a loss to describe how ... short it seems.

Back in the day I started watching the real Dragon Ball Z just to see how long they could drag out the fight with Freeza (that was before I got hooked) but now it's looks like, based on the episode list, Freeza'll be over in done with in only 13 30-minute shows once he actually starts fighting.

I'm not even sure his fight with Nail will survive the cutting room floor.

Any thoughts on this highly abbreviated ... show?

[Sades]

Well, I watched the show for awhile because my brothers were watching it... I thought it was okay at first, but I seem to remember slowly growing to dislike the show, possibly because it seemed that things happened at a snail's pace. I could flick the channel, watch something else for a few minutes, flick back and they'd still be doing the same thing. If this cuts out most of the bull, then maybe it'd actually be watchable. Not that I'm going to try.

[Gouki]

Kai does cut out most of the bull. Goku and Freeza fight on Namek in the 90's in DBZ, and in the 40's in Kai.

And it's only a rumour that it's going to be 100 episodes long.

[DrSpengler]

It cuts out everything that wasn't in the manga, more or less, and as a result is paced extraordinarily better. Been watching it on NickToons and found that I didn't miss much of anything that was removed, at least from what I could remember.


Though my love for DBZ extends little further than the old Ocean Dub of the series, which I have a nostalgic fondness for. Never took to the Funimation cast, and even watching Kai now, I still feel like all the voices are "wrong".

Still, voices aside, I think Kai is the much better incarnation of the two versions of Z. The flow is still straight up Japanese "one episode leads directly into the next and there's no such thing as a complete story in 22 minutes", but done at a more reasonable level.

NickToons has just gotten to the Ginyu Force and I haven't found myself missing any of the tripe they cut out. If it wasn't in the manga, it really didn't need to be in the cartoon and Kai rectifies that nicely.

Except the "Goku learns to drive" episode. I'm going to miss that one.

[Rurudyne]

Kai does cut out most of the bull. Goku and Freeza fight on Namek in the 90's in DBZ, and in the 40's in Kai.

And it's only a rumour that it's going to be 100 episodes long.

One episode list I've seen has Androids 16, 17 and 18 show up in #64.

That would allow the whole Android arc over a third of the run at 100.

So maybe keeping 100 shows does seem a bit optimistic.

[Rurudyne]

I've been watching the show a bit more and I've come to the conclusion that they aren't being very careful with what they cut out.

I can understand chopping out Vegeta breaking Burter's neck given the American market; however, Vegeta not explaining to Goku that the artificial full moon technique was Bardok's invention (even while keeping all the techo-babble nonsense)?

Some of the stuff that's been cut isn't just whole episodes (I disagree with the view that only manga is really legitimate because a cartoon is it's own entity in its own right, and need not merely repeat manga ... only not contradict manga) but tiny parts of episodes that sometimes add up too.

And, yes, I'll miss the Goku learns to drive episode a lot myself.

EDIT: just saw Eps.17 of Z Kai and King Kai had a great line about the address book while looking up Namek that I'd not noticed before: saying that the thing was hard to understand and may as well been in Japanese.

Which makes me wonder what the original language version said, if anything comparable was said?