Being purely mechanical should make it easier to resurrect him. Just have Shenron reconstruct 16's AI chip thing that controlled his personality and then repair his body. That's gotta be easier than raising the dead.
A broken machine is a hell of a lot easier to repair than a broken human.
edited 3rd May '13 6:19:46 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Oh, it almost certainly did. He's not a living thing, they can't bring him "back to life". I'm talking about making a separate wish to reconstruct 16 specifically.
The reason it would have to be a wish, rather than just rebuilding him, is that without that critical chip thing that his personality and memories and everything is stored on, you can't rebuild him, you can just build a new 16. Making a wish upon a magic dragon to get 16's actual control chip back seems like the best way to restore 16 himself, rather than just building "the new Android 16, hopefully as good as the original?"
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
Note that again, when a similar wish is made to Porunga (revive all the people who died since the day of the 26th Martial Arts Tournament, except the very ones) he doesn't exclude 8. And AFAIK, 8 is not mechanical.
Guessing Shenron's just a dick or he hates robots.
edited 3rd May '13 6:54:47 AM by CobraPrime
The difficulty and near-impossibility in successfully reconstructing 16's chip is why the reconstruction would be a wish being made to magical dragon, rather than just Bulma rebuilding it. I'm sure Shenron could just will the pieces to reassemble themselves, whereas Bulma would actually have to find all of them and then figure out some way of bonding them back together, which probably isn't actually possible.
edited 3rd May '13 3:15:14 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I dunno, I should think it's easier to reassemble a purely mechanical being than transforming mechanical parts back into flesh, which is presumably what Shenron would've had to do to turn 17 and 18 back to normal.
Well, either that, or locate their missing biological parts, restore them to previous condition (because they're probably decaying something awful by this point), and then replace the mechanical components with the mechanical ones.
I'd go with the idea that 16 just couldn't be brought back by the wish that brought everyone else back because of the way it was worded, and that when it didn't work everyone just thought bringing him back would be completely impossible.
@Cobra
Keep in mind that that's filler, and they were trying to shove in as many cameos as they could.

He's purely mechanical, he doesn't have a soul. Typical, the one time someone dies permanently in DBZ, and it's only because there's no means of resurrecting him.
Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great