Last week, I gave an update on the extremely slow progress for One Piece. Given my situation in the Army and routinely driving weekly to do a training exercise, it sounds like I wouldn’t be able to do anything entertaining even if I wasn’t on a training exercise, but there’s a hell of a lot of down time that gives me my pick of the litter. There were the usual series I still had listed for viewing as well as the occasional movie that YouTube lets me watch for the small price of a skippable advertisement for a product I care little about. One such movie:
The impact of budget is often lost on the audience. This movie’s lack of funding was why they used coconuts… no evidence though that it explains the sparrow.
Before we start, quick context: due to a technical issue with attempting to upgrade my computers, I was briefly unable to recover my files until I resynced everything with OneDrive, a service I have a love-hate relationship with. I’m still in the process of sorting the problem out with roughly 90% of my files saved due to OneDrive, one of those being my notes for this blog. Based on what I had scheduled next, it was supposed to be a review of the 2004 anime Genshiken. But due to work presenting me with some interesting surprises, I haven’t been able to relax and set aside some time to view it. I’m still looking for an ideal site to view anime and its a toss-up between Aniwatch, 9animetv, and Hianime, joined up by whatever no-name YouTube channel is brave enough to upload full episodes of insert 20-year-old anime here. I’ll try my best to get at least a few episodes in before I put my opinions down, so for now, have a supplementary post: classic anime!
I know I could’ve put up a picture of the actual anime, but with 25 years on air, I couldn’t resist. One Piece is very memeable. See r/MemePiece for more details. Also, I’ve gotta say that unlike most blogs where I review part, most, or whole series, I wanna make this an opportunity to announce a personal campaign of sorts. That is, to watch a majority of several classic anime that are known the world over. Two of them so far are One Piece and the remaining episodes of Dragon Ball Z, the Kai dub.
Others are in the running to join this grouping, but those are the two that come to mind for now.
There’s no deep reason for wanting to do this, although lately I’d been reading my usual pick of manga on MangaDex, and I thought I’d find Toriyama’s magnum opus. Sure enough, I did. I’m not sure if it’s well-known in the west, but the original manga isn’t exactly split from Dragon Ball. We acknowledge Z as a continuation of the original manga, but it’s all rolled into a giant series unlike the anime.
It might be due to how it was licensed in the west, but although Z is seen as a sequel to the original Dragon Ball manga, Toriyama and his assistants put subtle hints that Z might as well be a part two of sorts, like Naruto: Shippuden or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure dividing into different parts. Keeping this in mind made it easy for me to go straight to my favorite saga in Dragon Ball, the Namek saga.
When I was a kid and the series was redubbed in Kai for the twentieth anniversary of the anime adaptation in 2009, most of my exposure to Dragon Ball was through the video games and anyone who was a kid/pre-teen, etc. at the time can attest that a fighting manga like Dragon Ball has a Library of Alexandria’s worth of video games. Some are faithful adaptations of the series, others put their own spin on the same story, the rest worked with what they got and a fourth category got creative, for example, making a card game out of the series.
There exists a ROM of this somewhere, and I want to at least get to the first fight between Goku and Vegeta.
I owned a few of the games myself and with more and more getting released long after the Final Chapters, GT, and Super have all gotten their fifteen minutes of (screaming) fame, Dragon Ball has a hold on the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1990s and beyond. When I was a kid, the Namek saga felt like the home stretch. One more push and the remaining Z fighters will have achieved their goals of recovering the original dragon balls and reviving the others. The only things standing in their way was Vegeta and the forces of Frieza. Both men hate each other and wanted each other dead, Frieza certainly wanted Vegeta out of the picture with his rebellious streak and them both wishing for immortality.
From a writing standpoint, it of course has some of the usual tropes found in other anime of the time and unique to Dragon Ball, but if you’ll excuse the comparison, let me know if this sounds familiar: three parties happen upon a treasure said to bring untold riches and get in each others way to have it, dealing with the consequences that follow the acquisition of this wealth. Pick your favorite story arc from media to fill in the blank; I’m going with a specific plot point from Grand Theft Auto IV and it’s expansion packs: The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony.
I make this comparison because like the Namekian dragon balls, competing forces within GTA IV’s storyline are after another prize which all things considered also bring bad luck. It’s not uncommon for crossover events in the GTA series, in fact the series is famous for it. Vic Vance and Tommy Vercetti nearly close a deal before Riccardo Diaz sends gunmen to snuff them out; CJ wins a race against Claude the Silent before getting some property in San Fierro and in GTA IV’s case, Niko Bellic, Johnny Klebitz, and Luis Lopez all cross paths over one simple thing: blood diamonds. Going by the name it took a funeral pyre to dig them up and the rocks aren’t done taking bodies. Also, blood diamonds are a real thing, with West and Southwest African countries being the most likely to have this problem.
Like their real-life counterpart, in the games, the diamonds were smuggled into Liberty City where the main employers of the three protagonists unknowingly compete with each other to get their hands on them for their own ends. In a somewhat similar circumstance, three foreign parties land on a distant planet to uncover a set of dragon balls for their own ends. But unlike GTA where the trio are all antiheroes, there’s a clear line of good and evil in Dragon Ball, though Vegeta’s convenient alliance with Gohan and Krillin complicates things for him.
I told you these shows were memeable.
Favorite saga it may be, I admit I’ve had trouble keeping up with Dragon Ball ever since Super was on Toonami and without meaning to disparage the network, while it’s done wonders to bring anime to the west, more than once I’ve had a few conflicts with their scheduling in the past. Yes, I know outside circumstances can interfere with schedules, but come on. At least try to fight to keep it consistent at least for the season. And while we’re on the topic of Toonami, will they ever be allowed to air Mob Psycho 100 Season II? Ever?
Anyway, while I’ve been getting my fill of Dragon Ball once again, One Piece, like the titular treasure, surprisingly is difficult to view. Of all the anime I’ve pirated, One Piece hasn’t been it. Most of its western publishers have done a bang up job to host the series, but Crunchyroll proves to be the only one capable of lousing it up. All that time spent bringing your site to the 21st-century, buying up the competition, and nabbing bigoted localizers with an activist mindset, but what do you have to show for it, Crunchyroll-hime?
I highly doubt these afflictions are in One Piece since there is no ruining peak fiction, but the most recent shows that they host on their site do nothing to boost their reputation as of late.
For One Piece though, like Dragon Ball it was a show that made the rounds at school and among my friends in the neighborhood, especially with 4kids telling us without telling us how inexperienced they were with anime, but to their credit, anime was still a niche in the early 2000s. Everyone knew who Naruto was and is these days, but who at the time in the U.S. could name anyone in Azumanga Daioh?
In all seriousness, One Piece is definitely not hard to watch. Toonami had been airing it since it first debuted, bar a few breaks in screen time. Guess it’s only fitting now that I pirate the pirate anime. It’s been yonks since I’ve seen it, but from what I remember of it (a mix of the actual show and memes) moss-haired swordsman gets lost all the time (probably looking for more minorities to hunt), Nami disappeared for a bit before returning to the crew, Chopper is the series cowardly lion, Nico Robin has a dark and complicated past, Boa Hancock wants Luffy but he’s not about that life, and Brook is the tallest skeleton on Earth. Forget a 3-meter statue of the guy, just bronze his bones when he’s dead, put up a sign and call it a day.
That paragraph there is gonna piss off all the One Piece fans. With so many episodes and so little time left in the Year of Our Lord 2024, even if I speedrun, I’m not gonna get through all the episodes. And yes, I know One Pace takes care of the Shonen Recap Syndrome problem it has, similar to how Kai shortens Dragon Ball Z substantially. I think before I sit down and watch Genshiken, I’ll test which is the better way for me to watch One Piece.
Been missing these, this week’s YouTube recommendation is Preston Stewart.
Similar to Ryan McBeth or William Spaniel, Preston Stewart is another channel run by the man who lends his name to the channel. An Army officer in the Reserve, his channel covers national security, world affairs, and the military in as unbiased a manner as possible. He doesn’t focus on cybersecurity like Ryan does, but there is overlap in their respective coverage of world events, especially with disinformation and overseas conflicts like Israel, Ukraine, or Taiwan. Consider this a completed trifecta, considering I recommended the other two in posts from last year. Factual, in-context reporting on real-world events. Need I elaborate further?
I had been in Army basic training from January ’til the ides of March, so I didn’t learn of Akira Toriyama’s passing until a couple weeks after it had happened. Of course, everybody would’ve gotten their honors and tributes out to the late author by then so my words are coming later than normal, but I’d still like to remember and recount some of his work.
My introduction to his magnum opus was similar to a lot of kids in the early 2000s. There wasn’t a distinction between anime and regular cartoons back then, so anime fans young and old accepted them with open arms as more cartoons to watch every Saturday morning, further bolstered by programming blocks like 4KidsTV. Seeing a golden legacy ahead of them, many notable programming blocks acquired the rights to air anime in the west. No doubt you or someone you know remembers the ham-fisted attempts at censorship or cultural adjustments because “no westerner has ever heard of rice balls,” or “think of the kids when depicting cigarettes.”
Obviously, Dragon Ball was no different when it came to censorship. Swearing (however slight) was edited out, scenes were edited or cut, and numerous references from the original Japanese were lost in translation due to how tough it was back then to research a lot of the cultural and historical references considering Dragon Ball’s source material is the Chinese classic Journey to the West. This video can better explain the history of censorship in the Dragon Ball franchise.
Credit: Nerdstalgic
Nevertheless, Dragon Ball or more popularly it’s better known successor Dragon Ball Z gained the lion’s share of the fame in the west, albeit with a much wider reception in Latin America. Once Toriyama’s crazy diamond got an English dub, there was nowhere else to go but up.
My DBZ collection of media was a bit more miniscule compared to my Naruto diet, but it was still fairly noticeable. A few puzzle and DS games, the console fighting games, memes and image macros, fan-made projects featuring some of the characters or the whole cast; an entire production company based in Texas has Toriyama to thank for their success, and they started as a series of parodies.
In 2008, Team Four Star blessed us with an abridged parodical take on Dragon Ball Z, movies included. Covering the original major sagas, they rewrote and jokingly recontextualized all of DBZ over the course of a decade on YouTube and on their own website.
Other programming blocks like Toonami, have also owed their success to Toriyama’s star franchise. They began with re-runs back in the summer of 1998, but even so, the English cast never left the project. For decades now, VAs like Sean Schemmel, Christopher Sabat, and Kyle Hebert have gotten their recognition from the English dub and have since lent their talents to other anime ever since. I think it’s safe to say that Dragon Ball has been the connecting element to a lot of media worldwide. You could trip on a Dragon Ball reference and it doesn’t even need to be animated.
Credit: iiAFX
But Toriyama was more than just the creator of a manga inspired by Chinese literature. Away from his studio, he worked on other series like Dr. Slump and video games like Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger. His distinctive art style has even been emulated by his fans over the years. Sites that are hubs for artists, classical and digital alike, are guaranteed to have some attempt at drawing at least one character. Even professional artists and other mangaka have redrawn entire scenes or individual characters, either while working with Toriyama or to honor him in his lifetime. Some of these other mangaka grew up watching or reading his work too.
What makes Toriyama’s passing especially sad is that, like Kentaro Miura before him, he also left behind unfinished work. Miura never finished Berserk after two decades plus and it felt as if even though Goku’s original story had concluded so long ago, there was a lot of fun to have with the Z fighters, especially with all the video games, references, and spin-offs that have come out ever since. The direction of the Dragon Ball Super manga and the newest installment in the franchise, DAIMA, are likely going to be put on hold for a while until an announcement is made.
Whatever the case, Dragon Ball fans, numerous anime fans, artists and many more have paid their tributes to a prolific and influential artist since his passing. This post is one of them having found out so late and being away from technology during training. And on that note, the block that was made famous for airing and helping perpetuate the Dragon Ball series also made a tribute complete with a marathon in his honor.
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