Dragon Ball: Not a Power Level in Sight

Hey Vegeta, what's the scouter say about this chump's blog?

                             It's overr 9 Follooowerssssss!











Over 9 followers? That can't be right! Can iiiittttt?


Well actually that intro, although obligatory, is somewhat deceiving as I'm mostly going to be talking about the original Dragon Ball series which I recently finished watching all the way through. Not in one sitting, thank God. It was 153 episodes long and probably contained like 172 kamehameha waves. I wouldn't be so furious about this but if you consider that Goku draws out each of the 5 syllables for 7+ seconds to charge, I would guess that about 8% of this series is pure kamehameha waves. This isn't even counting every damn "Wolf-Fang-Fist" and "Dodon Ray"

Here is a basic ingredients for a 22 min Episode of Dragon Ball

2-5 mins for kamehameha wave(s), Dodon Rays, Wolf Fang Fists, or the occasional Tri Beam
3 mins spent marveling at how powerful that Kamehameha was
OR at how the enemy was able to block/ be unnafected by said Kamehameha
5 mins of Roshi trying to feel up Bulma or Launch and getting his shit slapped
2 mins of Goku being hungry and commenting on it/eating ridiculous amounts of food
3 mins of Krillin or Yamcha being an ass-hat
Or Krillin and Yamcha getting their asses kicked
 subtract final number from 22 minutes and get your allotted time for actual content

Okay so despite all that I still love this show to no end, and not even for the sake of nostalgia. Back when I first got into DBZ I watched one episode of Dragon Ball and was like "What the hell? Not a single person charged up this episode, or even commented on a person's power level! Eff that noise!" But I finally sat down and really enjoyed it just for the fact that I finally figured out the origins of all the DBZ characters. Shockingly pretty much all of them started out as villains and were pulled over to the good side by Goku's winning personality and shiny kamehamehas. The surprising thing to me is that while supposedly Goku fights the best fighters in the world at the 21st WMA tournament he still manages to find opponents that are significantly more powerful for the remaining 126 episodes of the series.

The real depressing thing I have to say about Original Dragon Ball is that at the end of the series Goku's power level is like... 300. After all that 153 episodes turtle shell training, fighting the strongest known opponents, Korin training, mystical water bullshit, defeating King Piccolo... then it takes about five episodes of DBZ for him to get to oh... 10,000 or so. In one series Goku makes maybe 275 points of progress, then he proceeds to go about 499,999,700 in the next. (Sidenote, Piccolo trained his as some kind of badass to reach his 302 power level and then every jackoff Namek had a PL of 3000)

Also, NOBODY EVER TEACHES GOKU ANY DAMN MARTIAL ARTS THAT WE SEE. His grandpa seems to taught him how to throw a punch when he is like three and from then on all of his teachers just strap friggin weights to his back, make him wear heavy shirts, and put him in gravity chambers. Nobody teaches him the Kamehameha, because the big secret to mastering that technique is to cup your damn hands and say "Kamehameha," Honestly Roshi is a mongoloid if it took him 50 years to learn that junk. Then later he learns the Kaioken and Spirit Bomb, one of which just involves robbing everyone else of their energy and hocking it as an attack that I think only every killed one enemy it hit. The Kaioken technique was only ever a crutch to justify Goku fighting enemies he was vastly inferior to. And then it was made useless by the Super Saiyan transformation a few months after he learned it.


I say this all with love, as to this day I still can't pull myself away from this show at the ripe old age of 21. It's retarded. I thought at this point in my life I'd be watching the news or something. This show continues to waste my life, and that's not even counting the hours on Dragon Ball Wiki trying to figure out what the pho is going on, or the time spent on YouTube watching countless DBZ Episodes mixed up to Linkin Park and expecting one of them to be made with a lick of sense or timing.

And that's not all I have to say about that, but I'm gonna cut it off there

You're all a bunch of bastards!

~Taylor Bonzer