YMMV / Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler

• Ass Pull:
  • Goku and Vegeta managing to overload the Big Gete Star when they were barely stronger together than a single Meta-Cooler. It stands to reason that they shouldn't have enough power to overload it when it could produce thousands of copies with the same power.
  • Cooler's resurrection in the first place. He claims that a small part of him survived his defeat to fuse with the Big Gete Star, but the problem here is that Goku blasted him into the freaking Sun. Not even Frieza showed that much resilience.
  • Vegeta finding and crushing the original computer chip of the Big Gete Star. The last time we see him, he crashes onto New Namek after the Big Gete Star blows up. There is no hint of him looking for the chip, nor is there any indication that he knows what it looks like.
• Complete Monster: Cooler returns.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Cooler's poorly explained and retcon filled return brings to mind the infamous "Somehow, Palpatine returned." line from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
• Narm:
  • The Off-Model animation leads to a lot of instances of Goku having a very tiny face, which naturally creates a lot of giggles.
  • Piccolo's Big Damn Heroes moment where he saves the others from the Meta-Cooler clones, while an awesome moment, is off-set by the Off-Model animation giving him a lazy eye.
  • This movie is AB Groupe's (creator of the "Big Green" dub) first attempt at dubbing Vegeta, and they gave him a voice that is clearly too low for the voice actor to project with properly. The end result is that he is making weird moaning or grunting noises when Vegeta is clearly screaming in the scene. It's no wonder Vegeta was recast in the dub's later movies.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Big Gete Star is an incredibly frightening planet destroyer, and the fact that someone as vile as Cooler is in charge of such a monstrosity makes it an incredibly intimidating force of science gone wrong. (Of course, the name "Big Gete Star" does provoke some giggles.)
• Sequelitis: Return of Cooler is considered to be a much weaker follow-up to Cooler's Revenge. It is usually seen as one of the worst DBZ films, due to poor animation, a weak plot, and tossing Cooler the Villain Ball. Meta-Cooler is also considered one of the lazier villain designs, especially after the great design of Cooler's fifth form—which Meta-Cooler inexplicably never uses, and doesn't seem have access to—was what earned him a ton of popularity.
• Signature Scene: The Meta-Cooler Army's introduction is considered the film's one redeeming factor. For context, Goku and Vegeta work together for the first time and barely scrape a win against Meta-Cooler, but only after blasting his circuits into atoms. After slumping back into their base forms from exhaustion, Goku then sees the entire nearby cliffside covered in Meta-Coolers, each exactly as strong as the one they barely defeated. Rarely have the Saiyans looked so utterly screwed by the odds. The scene was iconic enough to be referenced in the Dragon Ball Super manga by Toyotaro, in which the Fusion Zamasu hoard surrounds the battered Goku and Vegeta in a similar fashion.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Cooler fuses with a Mechanical Abomination and essentially becomes a Planet Eater himself, giving him an identity completely separate from Frieza. So he immediately goes to New Namek to essentially redo the Namek saga with less happening. Hell, Frieza isn't mentioned period in this film i.e. Cooler's initial motivation for attacking Goku in the last movie, so those who were introduced to Cooler via this installment would have been confused.
• Woolseyism: The Funimation dub adds in a few neat lines that weren't in the original Japanese.
  (Once the Meta-Cooler Army starts charging at them)
  Goku: Well, it's been nice knowing you, Vegeta.
  Vegeta: Oh, shut up!

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