YMMV / Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might

• Awesome Ego: Turles is one of the few DBZ villains who has earned his massive ego, being a Self-Made Man who has spent decades traveling the universe doing whatever the hell he wants, as well as evading Frieza (a not-inconsiderable feat all on its own).
• Evil Is Cool: Turles, even if he was just an evil version of Goku, was loved as a villain for this.
• Fridge Brilliance: Goku's first Spirit Bomb fails against Turles. Why? Because the technique absorbs the energy of the Earth to create itself... and said energy had already been sucked almost entirely by Turles via the Tree of Might, so the Spirit Bomb's strength was way lesser than that of the evil Saiyan.
  • Throughout the larger Dragon Ball mythos Turles has gained a somewhat unique distinction at this point as one of the only significant Saiyans who has yet to achieve the Super Saiyan form or any of the higher grades (it's really just him, King Vegeta, Paragus, and Tarble at this point). And yet, when one considers Turles's coldly controlled personality, it makes perfect sense that he would be extremely unlikely to ever reach the Super Saiyan form, which, after all, is unlocked by overwhelming surges of emotion.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A Saiyan with a Mysterious Past, who looks and speaks exactly like Goku, but with completely inverted morals? Are we talking about Turles or Goku Black?
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many fans watch this movie simply for Turles. Team Four Star in their ranking of all of the (by then released) Dragon Ball movies, even state that he's the reason why anyone even remembers the film.
• Magnificent Bastard: Turles is a Saiyan survivor who leads the Turles Crusher Corps. and intends to plant the Tree of Might, which absorbs the planet's energy then grows special fruit, which Turles hopes can make him strong enough to challenge Frieza for control of the universe. After planting the Tree on Earth and met with resistance from the Z Fighters, Turles offers to let Gohan join him and upon the boy's refusal he generates an Artificial Moon to turn Gohan into a Great Ape and pits him against Goku, before destroying the Artificial Moon so Turles himself won't transform and lose control. While evenly matched against Goku, Turles manages to eat one of the Tree's fruit and dominates the fight. A cunning Combat Pragmatist and surprisingly Benevolent Boss who revived two of his men, Turles is one of the most memorable movie villains.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Let that child alone." ^note An infamous line said by Piccolo aka "Big Green" in the AB Groupe dub.
  • "Take your hand off from Gohan!" ^note An equally infamous delivery of the above line from the equally infamous Malaysian dub.
  • That's right, everyoneofmyracecanbecomeagiantgorilla. ^note One particularly notorious example of the AB Groupe (or "Big Green") dub's tendency to let words run together.
• Moral Event Horizon: Even if Turles wasn't already on the wrong side of it due to him planting the Tree of Might on multiple planets (which would destroy most if not all of them) even before coming to Earth and doing the same to it, him forcing Gohan to go Oozaru to kill Goku sends him sailing right over it.
• Narm:
  • In the bowdlerized Ocean dub of the film, Turles grabs Gohan by the torso instead of his eyes in the aforementioned Oozaru scene. To compensate this, they redrew Gohan's head on top of his moved torso... very badly. The results are comparable to Turles holding an inflatable Gohan doll.
  • The Malaysian dub. Due to literal translation, Turles calls him "The Saiya-People", Goku telling the Crusher Corps "YOU DIE!", as well as other oddities.
  • The AB Group dub is notorious (and legendary) for this. It doesn't help that some of the memes and lines that originated from this movie was more memorable than their Dragon Ball Z: The World's Strongest or even Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone dubs.
    • It's very hard to ignore how badly dubbed the characters are (e.g. Tien sounding like Beavis with a sinus infection and Chiaotzu having an old man's voice), especially when Goku's friends try to motivate him and one of the voices sounds like a bad imitation of Yoda from Star Wars.
    • AB Group apparently mistook a scene of Krillin breathing heavily for intense yelling and dubbed it as such.
    • There are some very odd line deliveries. One of the most infamous examples is Turles suddenly switching from being a Motor Mouth to talking in a very slow and stilted way. The abrupt shift is widely mocked.
• Older Than They Think: Fans of Dragon Ball Super who think Goku Black is the best idea for a villain ever are often very surprised when they learn It's Been Done decades earlier than they thought with Turles.
• The Scrappy: Not a lot of people seem to like Icarus, the token Ridiculously Cute Critter of the series introduced in this film. Team Four Star even made a Running Gag out of it being killed and eaten. While KaiserNeko does admit he's cute, Lanipator admits Icarus drags the entire movie down just for existing, hence his Death by Adaptation in subsequent movies where he actually appears.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The movie takes a lot of time in introducing the token Ridiculously Cute Critter of Higher Dragon, or Icarus as he is known in the English Dub, which to many viewers just drags the movie to the point of making it boring to watch.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Piccolo, who has not yet fallen prey to Can't Catch Up (Turles is even surprised by his power, fittingly so as he's still the second strongest being on Earth at this point) yet his only role to show off how much a threat Turles is and get beaten by an Oozaru Gohan.
  • This can also apply to the Z-fighters, since they are quite overshadowed in screentime by Icarus and Gohan. Said screentime could have been focused on their fights with Turles' henchmen.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: More like, they wasted a good opportunity to tell the story, but as pointed out, Turles and his crews' respective backstories sound really interesting, and would easily make a compelling mini-series. Instead, they're only treated as All There in the Manual, and outside of one Japanese-only game and bit cameo roles in Fusion Reborn none of them have ever appeared again.
• Values Dissonance: In the Ocean/Saban TV English dub, Oolong says Gohan's large backpack makes him look like a "midget pack mule". While the word midget was seen as okay back then, today it's seen as a derogatory word for people with dwarfism. Ironically the Ocean/Saban TV, in general, is also infamous for random bits of censorship yet that line did not come from the original version, it was added by them.