Ahem

But we’re not here to talk about television shows that help adults have active sex lives, we’re talking about Dragon Ball. Take a look at these two scenes, which are loaded with motif and very clearly presented in relation to one another – although they ran on TV a couple of years apart. In each of these scenes, the hero of Dragon Ball, Goku (a powerful kung-fu fighter loosely based on the monkey king of the classic Chinese novel Journey into the West) has been incapacitated, and his son, Gohan, steps up to fight a powerful alien who happens to be a distant blood relation with very nasty intentions.

Gohan vs. Raditz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MApFNNeZhAk

Gohan vs. Vegeta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qss9df_bSY

Appropriately enough, I’ve written about repetition in Dragon Ball before — my first post in this series was about it. I’m not bringing them up just to point out the motifs (I’ll quickly define motif as “a meme created on purpose and used for a reason”), but some of them are trickier than others. Coming into his battle, Vegeta’s chest plate has been damaged in a very similar way to how Raditz’s chest plate was damaged in the much earlier fight. Gohan ends the second fight in the same position where his father was in the first fight – incapacitated and about to be finished off. The Demon King Piccolo – one of the series’ early antagonists, is a bystander observing both fights, albeit in different capacities.

But the point here isn’t that these repetitions exist, but that they create a palpable sense for the time that has passed between the two encounters. We see how Gohan has changed, and how he hasn’t. We feel how much he has grown up, and how much growing he still has left to go. The show ran in two heavily serialized parts, from 1986 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1996 (and I’m not including the bastard spin-off that ran from 1996 to 1997), with more than one considerable time skip — characters are born, grow up, and die during the series (and are then brought back to life again, die again and brought back to life again, but that’s not important right now).

The passage of time is important — a lot of the show is essentially about the passage of generations — about youth and age; fathers and sons; wives, husbands and children; vigor, wisdom and the imperatives, and values people ascribe to as they try to live their lives well. There is a lot of ground to cover, so it is important that these events feel like they are occurring over years and decades — they can’t just be suspended in space like a fight between Carrie and Aidan. Plus, since it is fundamentally a comedy in which almost every character is capable of flight, it can’t show the passage of time with the heavy-hearted sighs and creaking joints, like a Victorian parlor drama or a Chekhov play.

Moan of Arc

Dragon Ball uses the bouncing ball to show the passage of the time. It repeats motifs and situations, recalling the same basic relationship people have with the rising and setting sun and the passing of the seasons. Speaking of seasons, like people’s relationship with time, the Dragon Ball model for the passage of time has many small cycles and arcs (the days, hours, months, holidays, etc.), but also has what are called sagas – large, sweeping story arcs, each of which (with a few exceptions) are typically named for a villain attempting to destroy the world or universe or do something else similarly nefarious.

In the early years of Dragon Ball, time is marked by the “Tenka’ichi Budōkai” – alternatively translated as the “Greatest Martial Arts Tournament on Earth” or the “Strongest Under the Heavens Tournament.” One Tenka’ichi Budōkai happens first every five years, then every three years, and we watch Goku grow from a child into a man, periodically competing in this tournament against his various friends and rivals. Each tournament arc is pretty similar – the characters realize who they are going to have to fight in the tournament, there is some sort of major problem they have to solve, but they aren’t strong enough to do it, so they have to train or find some other way to get stronger, all while sometimes searching for the mystically eponymous “dragon balls” that have the power to grant wishes for reasons that become more and more of a formality as the seasons progress. Eventually, all roads lead to the tournament, where rivalries are settled and the fate of the world is decided.

Once Dragon Ball takes its giant leap over the shark and becomes about space aliens (although at this point, rather than splash into the water embarrassed, jumping the shark is where Dragon Ball learns to fly – it then jumps the shark in earnest a few years later), the tournament pretty much stops being the way time is marked, and instead time is marked by the emergence of villains who are deliberately similar to one another – they are similar because the similarity reinforces that time is passing and lets the differences show what that means.

The Sagas

The macro arcs of the major Dragon Ball villains, leaving out some minor ones and others that are important, but don’t get fully realized narrative arcs in the same way the major ones do, are as such:

The Red Ribbon Army – These guys – a combination of martial arts masters and highly trained paramilitary special forces soldiers with advanced technology are bumbling, comedic villains at this part in the series, but they set the pace for how the story arcs are going to be conducted. The Red Ribbon Army has a succession of generals named after colors – General Black is, well, appalling (there are parts of Dragon Ball, especially early Dragon Ball, that are very racist by today’s standards – mostly because of culturally insensitive visual character design. But it’s hard to gauge how much you can really hold a Japanese guy in the late 80s to today’s American cultural sensitivity standards).

Tenshinhan and the Crane School – This is a rival kung fu school to the protagonists’ “Turtle School.” The Crane School believes in strength, obedience, being ruthless and killing your enemies, while the Turtle School believes in enjoying your life and drawing strength from your desire to have fun. Tenshinhan starts out as a rival but then becomes a close ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. It is a pattern that will repeat.

Demon King Piccolo – This ancient warrior exists in two halves – the good one is the Guardian of the Earth, a peaceful, contemplative dude who lives in a floating island and watches the planet far below, interceding on its behalf with other, more powerful celestial entities. The bad one is a wicked, sadistic monster who at one point ruled the planet below and begins his story arc by escaping from a magical rice cooker. After he is defeated, he is reborn again as a child. That child grows up quickly, becomes the new villain, and then he becomes a close ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. See? The two halves eventually unite again, just for good measure.

Raditz – This is the hero’s long-lost brother, who reveals the hero is actually a space alien, and has come to recruit the hero into a band of cruel genocidal mercenaries. He is killed by the hero and Piccolo, but the hero dies in the process (he gets better).

Vegeta – This is the prince of the alien planet the hero comes from who comes to Earth to avenge Raditz’s death, find and retrieve the hero, and kill everybody on Earth. He takes over from Piccolo as the hero’s main rival through the series. After he is defeated, he becomes a powerful but vain and often unreliable ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. Vegeta is probably the most interesting character in the series for a whole bunch of reasons – he’s the “Over 9,000 guy,” too, but that’s not why I say it.

Frieza – This guy is basically the Emperor of the Galaxy. He is a horrible, horrible genocidal tyrant and the Big Bad behind many of the bad things that have happened up until this point in the series. In the end, he loses a kung fu fight (yeah, they don’t solve their problems through negotiation or anything), and he is spared, but he refuses mercy and it looks like he dies anyway. Then it turns out he isn’t dead and comes back as a cyborg, and then he is killed one more time, but that whole return thing is kind of silly and not really part of his saga. Frieza’s saga is the most straightforward beginning-middle-end in Dragonball, and probably the best part of the series when considered on its own.

Cell (and the androids) – Cell is an artificial life form created by the Red Ribbon Army’s remnants based on a combination of genetic material from the heroes and villains of the series. You can add that process to the list of things in fiction that give people super-powers but in real life would probably just give them cancer. There is an initial sort of “half-saga,” in which the heroes fight a series of other powerful androids, but then Cell shows up, absorbs those androids, becomes supremely powerful, and challenges everybody in the world to a martial arts fight, with the intention of exterminating the planet. He is killed, then it turns out he isn’t dead, and then he is killed one more time. Familiar?

Majin Buu – By the time Buu rolls around, Toriyama is kind of tired of Dragon Ball being so serious and has begun to parody himself, leading to some amazingly bizarre story developments and tonal modulations. Buu is a primordial monster from the ancient history of creation — an enemy and destroyer of the Dragon Ball universe’s original and supreme gods. He is also, at least at first, fat, childish and silly. His plotline is ludicrously complicated and goes on for a very long time in lots of twists and turns until he is killed, but then reincarnated, bested at the Strongest Under the Heavens tournament by the protagonist, made an ally, and taken away to train and be made stronger.