Dragon Ball Z Abridged

They peaked in the Frieza arc in my opinion.

edited 21st Jul '17 9:01:46 PM by LordVatek

I always thought they never should have even tried to placate people like that.

All the requests of "DO MORE A YEAR!" always just seemed like defeating the purpose of it to me. And then once they finish they're inevitably going to have people bitching about picking something else right away, in which they will also inevitably start bitching about how they should do more a year.

edited 21st Jul '17 9:02:34 PM by LSBK

Namek was the best of DBZA, I think. It helped that Frieza and his goons all had pretty amusing quirks.

The Androids and early Cell stuff was the best to me, but that's because it's probably my favorite part of the real series.

"But don't worry about me folks. Because Jimmy Firecrack-corn and he DON'T GIVE A F'CK. He'll take the job. He'll take any job. He'll take YOUR JOB!"

"Every word you just said has made me VIOLENTLY angry. OH GREAT, now I'M AGREEING WITH VEGETA! LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!"

...this has been the best arc, hands down. Everything they've done with Jimmy Firecracker and Perfect Cell has been fantastic.

edited 21st Jul '17 9:50:43 PM by Soble

I'm going obligatory middle man and say from around the time the Ginyu Force came into the picture up until early Imperfect Cell was all really stellar.

I still enjoy it but I'll admit the humor more recently seems to rely more and more heavily on Call Backs. Not bad in and of itself, but it makes it easier to predict what the punchline will be.

edited 21st Jul '17 9:50:32 PM by Lionheart0

The Frieza arc is my favorite, largely because it took my favorite arc of the actual series and made it better by humanizing the villains. Namek is the only time in the post-Raditz series that the story captures the adventurous feel of the early Dragon Ball era, while still mixing it with the dire atmosphere of the later stuff.

It's the only time that there's actually a goal. For the Saiyans, Androids, and Buu, the goal is, "Bad dudes exist. Defeat the bad dudes." Basic fighting manga stuff. Here is a new villain, let's you and him fight.

Namek is the Red Ribbon Army arc if our heroes were the Army. Three factions competing for the Dragon Balls and our heroes have to find a way to get them despite being woefully, thoroughly outclassed. Frieza is the "Goku" of the arc; the indisputable, unstoppable, impossible to defeat person of mass destruction who you'd better not f*ck with because he will end you before you even know what happened.

And goddamn does he live up to it. Frieza casually wading through every gun ever placed into Chekhov's Armory is still one of my absolute favorite parts of the show. The prolonged Humiliation Conga where he justifies every warning that's ever been handed out about him as one thing after another that usually at least does some damage instead fails miserably. Combining both the best lead-up in the series with the best execution once he takes the stage is what makes him Dragon Ball's greatest villain.

edited 21st Jul '17 9:58:13 PM by TobiasDrake

For the most part, I agree with that, but I'd put the start of TFS's best material a bit earlier than the Ginyu Force- specifically, the episode where Vegeta blasts his way out of Frieza's spaceship with the Dragon Balls and kills Zarbon when he comes after him. One of my favorite episodes in the entire series. "I'VE GOT A LOVELY BUNCH OF DRAGON BALLS, DO DO DO DO DO~"

That is a rather impressive wall of analysis. Nice.

Ginyu Force arc and the entire Android arc pre-Cell Games were the best for me. The Cell Games episodes have honestly been faltering.

I don' think things have been bad, but it has been a bit meandering.

I think TFS has been getting better, but the material they're working with has been getting worse. The Saiyan arc and early Namek were fun plots, but late Namek was kind of slog and the android/Cell arc is sorta meandering. So the overall quality of DBZA hasn't really changed that much, for me

On the one hand, I love their characterization of Cell. On the other hand, I'm not sure Cell as the sole antagonist works for as long as it's been drawn out for.

I guess if I could point out a flaw with the newer episodes it's that they're not so much "abridged" anymore, it's almost just a straight gag dub at this point. It doesn't really bother me any, but most of the time they're more like a 5 minutes shorter DBZ episode with wittier dialogue. And sometimes they're almost as long as a full episode.

Or put another way, the abridged series title is probably limiting what they can do at this point.

When it started the abridged series was about summarizing an episode in about half the usual run time with a barrage of rapid meta humor and facetiousness. It was basically the youtube equivalent to fast food. Now it's trying to be fine cuisine, but because it's limiting itself to stay true to its genre it can't take itself as far as it wants to so it just ends up being somewhere in-between instead.

edited 22nd Jul '17 4:26:29 AM by xanderiskander

Yah know, maybe I'm silly, but wasn't the original series hundreds of episodes long at this point in the story?

Of course it was...if you count the original DB as well.

If just Z, it would've still just been around the mid-hundreds.

Well, then since DBZA still hasn't gone past episode sixty, I'd say they're doing just fine abridging.

I know what you mean. DBZA used to just be that great joke we DBZ fans could share. That's all it was - a joke. There was clearly no serious thought put into it insofar as giving it a plot with characterization. It was just a spoof that we all came into because we know what the original was.

But now people who have only seen DBZA is a semi-common thing.TFS are clearly putting more effort into crafting a whole new narrative with some inspiration from the original but a lot of it is now straight-up serious fanfiction. Which isn't a problem but it is noticeably a different approach and "spirit" compard to how things began.

edited 22nd Jul '17 4:54:04 AM by Nikkolas

Dragon Ball Z Abridged underwent a similar shift in tone to The Venture Brothers.

Heh. I suppose the only difference is that with Goku, the army didn't realize what they were up against, or how badly outclassed they were until it was far too late, and they continually refused to bow out gracefully.

The heroes know they're fucked from the get go, with a few moments where maybe they think they can turn things around, only for Frieza to beat them over the head with the fact that No, we really are fucked! Frieza too stronk!

This means Goku would actually be Tao Pai Pai. The super strong crazy dude who seems like he can take on Frieza's Goku, right up until the latter just busts out an even greater power. Hell, Frieza even tanks and no sells Goku's best attack, the same way Goku himself survived Tao's Dodon-pa.

It's a bit of a stretch, but I can kinda see it, though I can see others disagreeing.

I would also say the series has picked up since just before the Ginyu's showed up on Namek and been good since then.

Now I'm imagining an alternate Dragonball where Tao Pai Pai unlocked some kind of blonde super-assassin transformation and defeated Goku in the eleventh hour.

SSSSSSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOO...Trunks has blue hair, now.

As in, he became a blueper saiyan? Or did he just dye his hair again?

The original anime is plagued by miscolors due to the inherent nature of translating a black-and-white medium to color. One of those is Trunks's hair. It was always supposed to be blue like his mother's.

Apparently they decided Super would be a fine time to quietly rectify this. Maybe they thought nobody would notice.

edited 24th Jul '17 4:51:27 PM by TobiasDrake

Wasn't it that Bulma's hair is purple(ish) in the manga, but was changed to blue, and that Trunk's hair was supposed to be like hers?