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  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Pan's bratty behavior and complete disrespect for her grandpa a consequence of Goku leaving his family to train Uub and driving her to tears at the end of Z?
  • Accidental Innuendo: For the scene where Trunks encounters Baby Vegeta for the first time, the Blue Water dub changes the latter's lines from the original and made it less explicit on how he mind controls the former, leading to this exchange.
    Baby: Do you recall how I was inside of your body on Pitaru?
    Trunks: What?!
    Baby: I see by the fear on your face that you remember, but what you didn't realize is that while I was inside of you, I left a little something behind.
  • Americans Hate Tingle: It's more like a Broken Base as its detractors do reach hatedom level in the English-speaking fandom. Some people in the fanbase suggests the unpopularity of the series is due to Funimation's questionable decisions in both adapting the script and marketing the series, which to many it came as a downgrade from the original series. In Japan, however, it's generally fairly decently-regarded. Its ratings weren't that great, but looking at how it compares to the end of Dragon Ball Z, the ratings were falling off at about the same rate, and in retrospect, it seems time has been rather kind to GT in Japan.
  • Angst? What Angst?: Baby invades Earth and makes slaves of the entire population. Both Bulma and Vegeta confirm that they do at least somewhat retain their memories of the whole experience. It turned brother against brother, any ally could have just been another one of Baby's victims and Pan is nearly killed by her own parents. But no one actually reflects on this or even talks about it for more than a passing comment, despite the Paranoia Fuel that would've undoubtedly come with it.
  • Ass Pull:
    • The Black Star Dragon Balls have absolutely no foreshadowing in either the original Dragon Ball or Z, make barely any sense as to how they still exist and their planet-destroying capacities are also completely out of the blue for any previous Dragon Ball set's power. That Pilaf also somehow learned of the Nameless Namek and his creations, when the Nameless Namek arrived and split himself on Earth long before any humans met him or even got around to writing even the vaguest records of his existence is just as illogical and given that Pilaf is irrelevant to the series beyond the first episode his whole storyline and random new knowledge comes across as a forced narrative device.
    • Dr. Myuu turning out to be Baby's creation and not the other way around, Baby was only shown as a non-active embryo and only really activated AFTER Myuu absorbed enough energy; that the show never bothers to explain how a non-complete Baby even made Myuu unlike how Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans depicted Hatchiyack and Dr. Lychee makes the reveal all the more headaching.
    • General Rilldo's death. After being established as being stronger than Goku as a Super Saiyan, even winning their fight, Rilldo is killed in one hit by Goku, Pan, and Trunks launching a joint beam attack at him, despite being far stronger than them at the time and being borderline unkillable. To top it off, he was somehow possessed by Baby when this happened, meaning not only was his death an Ass Pull, him being possessed is one too, given it isn't shown until after Rilldo is killed.
    • Hell Fighter 17's entire existence, as Doctors Myuu and Gero somehow got away with building a new Android 17 that was stronger than the original while in Hell with not a single ogre guard or King Enma noticing even once, plus the impossibility of building anything in a landscape like Hell where there is no visible technology to even canibalize at least.
    • The power of the Shadow Dragons, considering how the Dragon Balls' dragon can't be stronger than its creator and both Kami and Dende were/are nowhere near the level of even the Ginyu Force, the fact that the Shadow Dragons are of comparable or superior powers to foes like Cell or Majin Buu can be utterly egregious as there's not even an attempt to explain or show that Shenron got stronger in the years between Z and GT given the Dragon Balls were not used in the 15 years between Buu's defeat and GT. Additionally the time gap between their usage also makes the argument of their "overuse" all the more illogical. And these are two different sets of Dragon Balls and any negative energy built up in Kami's dragon balls should've been extinguished upon Kami's fusing with Piccolo and Dende's Shenron had barely granted any wishes at that point.
    • Goku's defeat of Omega Shenron, which suddenly makes Goku unable to be harmed in the slightest against a foe that had thoroughly thrashed everyone who wasn't at the level of Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta, just happens with no explanation and is generally seen as a way to wrap up the conflict quickly after all other options were exhausted and rush to the finale of the series an episode later.
  • Awesome Music:
    • The theme song's Canadian and original Japanese counterparts are equally awesome.
    • The Italian intro theme has also reached this status due to the insanely catchy rave beat, combined with Giorgio Vanni's energetic singing.
    • "Blue Velvet" resembles something you'd hear in a James Bond movie.
    • The various ending songs are all also highly praised, as is the incidental music in the series, composed and arranged by Akihito Tokunaga.
  • Awesome Ego: Gogeta, who takes a page out of Vegito's book and spends his entire fight with Omega Shenron toying with the Shadow Dragon. It helps that, for a long time, he was the strongest character in the series.
  • Badass Decay: Because of the extremely increased focus on Goku at the expense of the entire cast besides Pan, several characters are much weaker or incompetent than they were before and never recover at any point:
    • Vegeta in this series doesn't fights much and what fights he does participate in have him getting bodied at all turns. It's telling that he needs a machine to reach Super Saiyan 4 in the last arc of the series, and even that power boost doesn't helps him fair any better against Syn Shenron than he would've if he hadn't boosted himself at all. The only time Vegeta somewhat steps back up as a powerhouse is when Baby possesses him to become stronger. It's telling that one of his few ever kills is a revived Nappa in the Super 17 arc who not only had been completely outclassed by every threat that showed up after him, but he hadn't even gotten any stronger after his resurrection.
    • Gohan is said to have kept up his training, yet his fights don't reflect that at all, as he loses all his relevant battles onscreen and even by the Super 17 arc he can't keep up with General Rildo, despite Gohan being stronger than Goku in Z and Goku himself being far above Rildo; the most he does afterwards is assist Goku from afar but nothing else.
    • Oob was built up as Goku's successor and potentially the strongest Z-Fighter due to being the reincarnation of Majin Buu, Z's strongest villain; here, however, he is pretty uninvolved in the plot even after merging with Fat Buu, loses to Baby Vegeta easily and only manages to defeat a few Saibamen and a revived General Rildo later on, after which he never wins a single battle he takes in and is taken out of said fights with ease.
    • Frieza and Cell, two of the original series' greatest threats who were already victims to this in the Toei anime adaptation and movies, are also reduced to comic relief that Kid Goku in base form takes on with ease and rely entirely on a freezing machine to pose any threat. Even then they are beaten in a single episode by Goku turning said machine on them, all with the same fanfare that a Red Ribbon mook would get when defeated.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Pan, either a Badass Adorable who also doubles as The Heart for Goku or a selfish Bratty Half-Pint who should really keep her nose out of things she shouldn't be in.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Toward the end of the battle with Super 17, Android 18 appears and challenges him to kill her. She then proceeds to rip off part of her shirt, exposing her bra and telling him that it should be an easier target, just as the camera zooms in on her breast. It appears to be a Call-Back to the Cell saga when Android 18 did the same to Cell, but back then she had a bomb in her chest. Without the bomb, this moment just comes as a tone-deaf fanservice.
  • Broken Base: The ending. Its fans call it the best part of the series, a Tear Jerker that wraps up the whole series on a bittersweet but triumphant note. Its detractors, with equal conviction, call it the worst part of the series, arguing that it doesn't make a bit of sense and doesn't let Goku get the happy ending with his family he deserves after all the hardships he's endured.
  • Complete Monster: Dr. Myuu was apparently a brilliant scientist and native of Planet M-2. Deciding the M-2 natives were an inferior species, Myuu proceeded to wipe them out and replace them with Machine Mutants he created as the dominant species. Intending to spread his influence even further, Myuu intended to finish his ultimate Machine Mutant creation, Baby, and use him to subjugate the galaxy. To acquire enough energy for Baby, Myuu created a cult centering around the worship of his fake god creation, Luud, then having having pilgrims who came to worship be turned into dolls and absorbed by Luud, while executing his loyal minion Dolltaki. Noticing the powerful Saiyans, Myuu desires to capture them so he could perform experimental "reconstructive surgery" upon them that involves dissection of still-living subjects. In spite of Myuu being revealed to be programmed by Baby himself, Myuu shows full agency as he continues his genocidal plans long after Baby's influence has ended. Myuu would later return from Hell, in league with Dr. Gero, with their newest Machine Mutant creation, Super 17. Betraying Gero for being too limited in ambition, Myuu intended to use 17 to resume his galactic conquest.
  • Contested Sequel: For Dragon Ball fans. It does have its strengths, such as better pacing compared with DBZ's frequent Arc Fatigue and genuinely good ideas for continuing the series. On the other hand, the decreasing relevance in fights of everyone not named Goku and the poor execution of the plot are points against it.
  • Continuity Lock-Out: Relies heavily on the backstories of both Dragon Ball Z and the original anime. It also occasionally treats DBZ filler and the Non Serial Movies as canon (the Garlic Jr. Arc's Sacred Water, the filler's depiction of Hell, Cooler's cameo), which can be confusing if one goes from reading the manga or watching Dragon Ball Z Kai to watching GT.
  • Damsel Scrappy: Pan, in addition to her inability to accomplish much in the series, spends a majority of her screen time either berating other characters, complaining about her situation, constantly having Too Dumb to Live ideas, being a constant Damsel in Distress and begging Goku to save her, and never really taking a level in badass like many viewers hoped she would. Admittedly, she does get a few wins, but none of them have any real impact and are undermined by her role as a damsel time and time again.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: See here.
  • Fandom Rivalry: A very odd example since they are fans of the same franchise, but fans of GT have rivalries against Dragon Ball Online and Super since they're all sequels to DBZ. The first rivalry happened because manga purists jumped on the fact Online had no anime inventions aside from Bardock (who made a cameo into the manga), which naturally included the entirety of GT. The second happened because the events of Super cannot correlate with the events of GT, leading to the general assumption that GT and Super are alternate continuities. Fans of GT call Super the inferior sequel to DBZ since they feel GT has a better pacing and animation. Super fans, naturally, brings up the old laundry list of GT's well-known flaws (ironically including the animation and pacing themselves), and many argue that since it didn't have Akira Toriyama's involvement outside of some concept and character artwork, it deserves to be exiled from canon according to them, though this perception isn't entirely true, since he was heavily involved in the series' conception, and was on the story team for at least the first 10 or 15 episodes. There is also another group of fans who maintain that Super and GT can work in the same timeline, like at some point Goku and Vegeta lose their god powers, and memories of everything that happened during Super. Although, that wouldn't explain why Hell in GT is very different from the Hell in Super, why Frieza is much weaker, why the Pilaf Gang are elderly in GT, rather than being much younger as in Super, and why Kibito and Supreme Kai are still fused together. Online and Super fans on the other hand largely didn't care they also didn't go together...likely because the Online fans had by this point seen both Dragon Ball Heroes and Dragon Ball Xenoverse radically reinterpret various elements of Online.
  • Fan Nickname: "Dragon Ball: Goku Time". Named for the common perception that Goku has a disproportionately large presence in this anime.
  • Fashion-Victim Villain: Baby is probably the most widely-regarded as this, between the wraparound shades, Pajama Sam skin, weird flesh-pompadour, and primary-colored spandex. At least he spends most of his arc fused with someone else.
  • Growing the Beard: For both its fans and detractors, most agree that the series really picked up once the gang went to planet M-2; the more episodic adventure storytelling from before was dropped, in favor of a more arc-based, villain-centric style, with the villain of that moment being General Rilldo, which fairly quickly leads into the Baby storyline. Though some would point out that this progression began quite a bit earlier, in Episode 9, with the Luud cult. Though it's generally agreed the M-2 material is the actual moment when the series found its feet.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: See here.
  • Informed Wrongness: Bulma being chastised by the Old Kai for inventing the Dragon Radar only makes sense if you ignore that if it weren't for her, either Pilaf or the Red Ribbon Army, both of which have radars of their own, would eventually abuse the power of the Dragon Balls and make infinitely more nefarious wishes than the ones the team had been using them for and probably far more often than them.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Years after the series has ended, the most iconic element of the series to really stick out for the franchise as a whole was the Super Saiyan 4 form. Especially with all the hypothetical fan art on further evolutions based on this idea.
  • Macekre: When Funimation made their dub of the series, they decided to make the tone Darker and Edgier than it actually is, which is more like the tone of Z. The dialogue and music were changed to reflect this (which makes for a dissonant experience when watching the Funimation dub with the original Japanese music), and even the marketing at the time made it look like a more "mature" sequel to Z. This may be one of the main reasons why GT isn't liked very much in the West.
  • Memetic Badass:
    • GT's infamous issues with consistent power levels combined with Goku defeating major villains more easily in his base form while having more trouble with them in any of his various Super Saiyan forms created the idea of Base Kid Goku being more powerful than anyone else in the franchise.
    • The fact that an elderly Krillin was able to land a hit on Goku during their friendly fight at the end of GT (Goku was obviously not fighting at full power) has prompted a meme that Old Man Krillin is the biggest Badass ever who could defeat anyone with ease.
    • Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta. Long before Super, this guy was the undisputed strongest character in the series. Imagine Super Vegito's strength multiplied times 10,000. And even years later after other powerful characters like Beerus, Whis, Super Saiyan Blue Vegito and even Jiren were introduced, various producers of other Dragon Ball media all still treat him as one of the strongest beings in the whole franchise. Special mention goes to his inclusion in Dragon Ball Fighterz, where out of the numerous characters added to the game, he's the only one given a distinct attack that will end ANY opponent regardless of how much health they still have.
  • Memetic Loser: See here.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • If Dr. Myuu hadn't crossed it several times over by forcefully converting entire planetary populations into his mechanical slaves prior to the series, he definitely crossed it when he has Dr. Gero betrayed with Super 17; all so he can hog all the glory of conquering Earth and the Universe. Unlike any of his actions in the previous arcs, this one can't be attributed to programming by Baby, so this is all Myuu's actions.
    • Baby attacking his own mind controlled citizens for fun and trying to destroy the Earth simply because he knows it'd hurt Goku. And even mind-controlled they weren't willing to die for Baby's cause; they were crying and quivering with fear.
    • Naturon crosses it when he uses a mole he had absorbed as a meat shield from Goku's and Pan's attacks, then follows by absorbing Pan and using her power to try and kill Goku then bargaining with her life to keep Goku from killing him all while gloating about it.
    • Syn/Omega Shenron crosses it when he murders Nuova, twice, all because he decided to be a good guy instead of causing aimless destruction like the other Shadow Dragons even mocking him for his honorable ways.
  • Never Live It Down: You'd think the only thing that happens with Vegeta in this series is growing a moustache. In actuality, he had it onscreen for all of about three episodes before Bulla yelled at him to shave it off. But because the moustache itself was ridiculous and a considerably huge change to his design, it's never leaving any talks of the series anytime soon.
  • No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: In a meta-sense, it was used deliberately by Funimation when marketing the series in North America. At first, they started their releases with the 17th episode and made their own recap of the first 16 ("A Grand Problem"), ostensibly to jump straight into the more action-oriented part of the series. The heat they took was intense. Once the first 16 episodes were being put out as "Lost Episodes", however, the goal they'd had all along became apparent: to generate demand for the less-appreciated earlier episodes through fan outrage. Mission accomplished.
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: While Toriyama was involved to a degree (he named the series, drew the logo, acted as a consultant for plot ideas in the first episodes, designed some of the settings, equipment, and vehicles, and designed the aged characters. So, yes, Toriyama was the one who gave Vegeta a flat-top and mustache), his lack of actual creative control over the series made many fans feel the series to be a downgrade story-wise and animation-wise from the original anime series and Z which while not without their faults had Toriyama much more directly involved. Furthermore, the battles in this series are seen as being too repetitive on reusing frames or spamming ki blasts over actual martial arts or diverse physical brawls, a problem not present in the first two animes for the previously mentioned reasons.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Baby is extremely dangerous and took metric tons of effort to actually put down...but the Tuffles explicitly made multiple parasites they shipped out into the universe. Baby might be dead, but there's who knows how many more parasites like him out there in the universe, just waiting to mature and activate...
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout is an awful fighting game with shoddy controls, awful visuals and animation, Camera Screw, little to no character variety, and a dub so bad that even Steve Blum's portrayal of Goku isn't redeemable. The only thing really notable about it is that it's the first Dragon Ball game to come to the West with the license intact, albeit as a very limited release, and there's some mileage to get out of Cell's Accidental Innuendo-filled dub lines.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • Old lady Pan from Episode 64 and the TV special, due to having out-grown her whiny attitude.
    • Bra also goes from an annoying young girl to awesome just by getting Vegeta to shave off that stupid mustache.
  • Retroactive Recognition: GT features Hiroshi Kamiya voicing two bit characters, specifically Pan's date Poperu in Episode 1 and Ronge in Episode 25, this was pretty early in his career and his career eventually took off in the late 2000s cementing him as one of the current biggest names in the industry. Kamiya would return to the DB franchise 26 years later to voice Gamma #1 in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.
  • The Scrappy:
    • When it comes to Arc Villains in the franchise as a whole, Super 17 is among the few villains to be widely disliked. The circumstances that led to his creation don't make much sense and his motives are very unclear, seemingly being just destroying everything after he kills both of his creators. The fights with him are also not very impressive compared to the fights before and after his arc, as he somehow goes from being pushed back by Goku in his weaker forms to suddenly being able to match Super Saiyan 4 Goku before his energy absorption ability. As such, many fans tend to skip his arc altogether, and despite being put into many games that feature GT characters, he remains very unpopular. It doesn't help that the Universe Survival Saga of Super turned Android 17 into an Ensemble Dark Horse and even had him win the Tournament of Power the saga is centered around, leading even fans more open to GT to prefer the 17 from Super over Super 17.
    • Out of all the minor villains of the show, you're not likely to find many people who like Dolltaki, even among fans who like GT. Completely lacking the charm and good humour of most other non-combatant Dragon Ball villains like the Pilaf Gang, most fans found Dolltaki more annoying than anything, and his paedophilic tendencies towards Pan up to turning her into a doll and attempting to undress her (While she's conscious of this happening and mentally distressed about it) especially revolted viewers. Most fans were quite happy when Rilldo offed him at the end of his arc.
  • Seasonal Rot: To some viewers, the Super 17 and Shadow Dragons arcs are less compelling to them than the Baby arc, citing the former's rather rushed pacing and the latter a big case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot.
  • So Okay, It's Average:
    • Most fans seem to view GT as having some good ideas that were poorly executed and overshadowed by some of the less savory decisions and designs, and that the series as a whole is fine enough even if it never really lives up to its full potential.
    • The Blue Water dub is much more accurate to the original Japanese script than the Funimation dub. However, the voice acting performances range from average to incredibly wooden at worst.
  • Squick:
    • Bulla looks and acts like a teenager, and has multiple fanservice moments thanks to her attire showing off her legs and stomach, as well as being a tease to the multiple men in the series who vary from early teens to full grown adults. Sounds normal for a '90s anime right? Well, keep in mind that she's 10, making her younger than Marron and just as old as Pan. This makes all the scenes where she's being hit on extremely hard to watch, but it does make Vegeta's Papa Wolf tendencies seem a lot more reasonable considering her age.
    • The scene where Dolltaki takes Pan to his room after turning her into a doll and excitedly prepares to undress her, while Pan is fully aware of everything going on and we hear her mentally expressing distress over the situation, is known to make many fans skin crawl.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Funimation infamously produced a rap song for their theme and skipped the first 16 episodes, expecting the audience to catch up using a Recap Episode. Thankfully, they backtracked on this and later released the series in full, and the "Season" DVDs don't include the rap song at all.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Some would argue everyone who wasn't Goku was this, though GT's fans argue that because the cast is so large, instead of having everyone appear together and not be able to do anything noteworthy individually, in GT, each character got their moment in the spotlight for at least an episode or two.
    • Uub is the entire reason Goku was in the right place to kick off the events of GT, but only has two fight scenes worth remembering and a cavalry moment before becoming irrelevant.
    • Ledgic has a fairly memorable design and powers similar to Dabura, back when powers similar to Dabura hadn't been played out yet. He works for a greedy tyrant, but not eagerly, seeming to be a Noble Top Enforcer looking for an excuse to quit his job. He has some sort of connection to saiyans, which can go any number of ways, and takes up Goku on his challenge to train for a rematch. Of course he's never seen again.
    • General Rilldo. One of the first characters introduced in GT who can truly challenge Goku. He is stronger than Majin Buu in his base form and can regenerate as long as there's metal around, which is the entire planet, making him close to invincible. He is also only the second Benevolent Boss villain introduced in the series and has the Story-Breaker Power of turning anyone hit with his mouth beam into metal. He's sort of like a cross between Buu and Dabura. He would have been an interesting villain on his own, but he has a bridge dropped on him to make room for Baby. Worse, when he briefly returns in the Super 17 arc, he is fighting Gohan and giving him a hard time, managing to turn Gohan's arm into metal. He is one-shotted by Uub with no fanfare.
    • Nappa. He gets resurrected and is quickly killed off with little fanfare. Nappa could have been used to make Vegeta really confront his Space Pirate past and show just how far the latter has come from those days. However, he doesn't even have any proper lines, just a bunch of angry grunts before Vegeta disintegrates him with an energy blast.
    • Super 17. After a good amount of emphasis is put on brainwashing the original 17 and having him fuse with Hell Fighter 17, he largely remains The Dragon to Gero and Myuu, as they do all the talking while Super 17 casually beats up anyone they want him to. He shows a bit more of a deranged personality as time goes on, and a bit of free will when spurred by 18, but overall does not flesh himself out before his destruction not long after he starts to develop. It really says something when most of his known attributes are a result of his appearances in games rather than the show itself.
    • Many feel most of the Shadow Dragons were wasted as characters, being varying degrees of Generic Doomsday Villains that are compelled by doing things For the Evulz. In particular, Oceanus and Nuova Shenron are considered more interesting for their Hidden Evil and Token Good Teammate aspects that makes them a departure from the rest of their fellow dragons. There's also a minority of fans that felt this applies to Syn/Omega, as he's arguably the least fleshed out, and yet is the Final Boss that fails to differentiate himself from many other villains in DB's history.
    • Despite Fusion being used in the last arc and Goten and Trunks being the first people in the series to successfully use it in Z, they don't fuse into Gotenks for whatever reason, just settling to watch their dads do it alone. Even if they wouldn't be able to defeat Omega Shenron, Gotenks could've provided decent back-up for Gogeta. It would've been awesome seeing an adult Gotenks, seeing him fight Omega Shenron, seeing him fight alongside Gogeta, and seeing him back in action.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • There are lots of good ideas for epic story arcs, like a Tuffle experiment trying to avenge their race by taking over Earthlings to convert them into its own kind, including strange Tsurifian variations on the Super Saiyan forms, a new form of the Great Ape based on the Super Saiyan transformation and a new form of Super Saiyan based on the Great Ape form, the return of every previous villain in the series as they jailbreak hell, including a souped-up super android created as an instrument of Gero's vengeance from beyond the grave, and fighting evil manifestations of a negative Shenron while finally having consequences for overusing the Dragon Balls to provide a Reset Button in previous stories. However, many argue that characters are wasted, and the plotting is iffy, leading to this potential being wasted.
    • Earlier in the Baby Saga, Baby contemplated possessing Goku, even saying if he had Goku's power he would be invincible. He never follows through with this. Even when he has Goku on the ropes, instead of possessing him, he tries to kill him with a Revenge Ball. This is despite Goku being the strongest character, even stuck in a child's body, and thus a better would-be host than Vegeta. After being defeated by Goku, instead of trying to possess Goku, he instead runs away, though one could argue that since Goku was curbstomping him by that point, an attempt to possess him would be met by a max-power Kamehameha, leading to his death anyway.
    • The machine mutants, an emergent artificial species largely designed for combat that are cusp of becoming an interstellar terror. They were indirectly created by Baby, and are in fact based on him. For some disliking the Shadow Dragons, they were the best thing GT created. Not only because there are so many potential character designs and stories that can come from, but because a Tuffle revenge project producing something similar to the Saiyans his creators despised, and not even realizing the irony, is humorous. And while a timid noncombat drone was a good way to ease viewers into the concept, showing that they had individual personalities and moral agency, said drone is the only one viewers get to know before Baby enters the plot. Then all machine mutants are left behind. The concept comes back in the next arc, but only in the form of an Android 17 lookalike that serves as plot device to kick off an otherwise unrelated conflict, and in the return of a quickly defeated General Rilldo.
    • The Shadow Dragons, and the nature of their birth. Each of the seven dragons are born from one of the major wishes from Dragon Ball history, with the more selfless wishes supposedly creating more powerful dragons, and each one having different powers. The arc easily could have had the heroes split up and confront them, especially since four out of seven of the dragons aren't much of a match for even Base Kid Goku, giving both spotlight for the other characters, but also use the concept of the karma built up by the Dragon Balls to explore the past of the heroes or give the villains intriguing motivations. Instead, the arc involves Goku and Pan traveling around Earth and fighting them, and all but Syn, Nuova, and Eis are extremely weak foes that only use the wish that created them as a cheap Call-Back. The only reason the fights with all but the last three end up lasting as long as they do is thanks to Goku or Pan holding the Idiot Ball and creating unnecessary drama. Furthermore, with the exception of Nuova, none of them have anything going on besides For the Evulz. This extends to Omega Shenron, who is the Master of All version of the Shadow Dragons, and is the strongest villain pre-Battle of Gods era, but his overall motivations and connection to the idea of karma punishment to the heroes is just tossed aside in favor of him being a Generic Doomsday Villain.
  • Tough Act to Follow: The Baby Saga is often considered the best saga of GT due to a compelling villain, greater stakes than the previous arc, and the introduction of Super Saiyan 4. The next two arcs aren't nearly as liked; the Super 17 Arc is seen as a lackluster continuation with a very weak villain in the form of Super 17, and while the Shadow Dragon Saga is often seen as better, it still suffers from wasted potential in its villains and for adopting a more generic Monster of the Week format until the final battle.
  • Vindicated by History:
    • The Super Saiyan 4 transformation was originally seen as a bit weird, and perhaps too much of a departure from the traditional Super Saiyan "look." After Battle of Gods and Resurrection 'F' revealed the divisive Super Saiyan God and Super Saiyan Blue, Super Saiyan 4 has gained back several fans who used to dislike the form due to it being both visually distinctive and harkening back to the old associations between Saiyans and apes.
    • Back in the day, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would so much as admit that they even liked GT. Nowadays, there are a lot more fans who can look fondly back on GT and consider that it got more hate than it deserved. Even a lot of its detractors find that there were aspects to GT that weren't awful, just executed poorly.
  • WTH, Costuming Department?
    • Toriyama's initial design for Vegeta, which gives him a flattop haircut, a mustache, and the dorkiest '90s dad clothes ever. Thankfully, the mustache was shaved off, his hair became spiky again (though still shorter than it was in Z), and the clothes were changed to '90s punk clothes.
    • Trunks' outfit, consisting of a black turtleneck, gray sports coat, blue bandana, and khaki shorts. The idea seemed to try and be a call-back to his Future incarnation while incorporating Bulma's design as well, but the overall design looks far more silly than it should have.

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