So now that I have proper spoiler tags, I wanted to test them out on something that, in and of itself, requires no spoilers at all.
Dragonball Z Kai is a remake of the original. “Kai” – Japanese: 改 – is a marker indicating that the original is modified in some way. I have endeavored to understand how this would be translated in a perfect world. I think that there is no one, true way here, but “plus” might work well. At any rate, that’s not how it would be known to people watching the show from overseas, so it is not how I represent it here.
There are mainly two ways in which this version differs from the original.
The first is the limited use of brand-new animation, beyond cleaning up the old. Certain special effects have more vibrant colors used for them, for instance. Also, the opening and ending themes have glossy, HDTV-friendly animation to them.
As a result, episode 71 is quite far into a run of 100 episodes that will complete the entire original “Dragonball Z” series.
Time compression, through the use of tasteful and widespread editing, makes watching this show far more enjoyable. There is hardly an episode that does not have meaningful action, and many have a rather considerable amount of it thanks to wiping out a lot of the “suspense-building” and so on.
In the last few episodes,
Cell has finally made his appearance. (That is, he went from a “ghost” to getting on the screen, facing the Super-ized Piccolo who’s merged with “Kami-sama,” and has now escaped.) Seeking to stop Cell from absorbing Android #17 and becoming “a complete being” at all costs, Piccolo and others on, well, let’s call it
Team Goku to keep it short, continue their search while looking into Cell’s origins.
So, we get a brief scene with Trunks and Kurilin finding Cell’s birthplace, a further hidden lab of Dr. Gero’s where a computer was “growing” the android Cell from cells plucked from various fighters that have graced Earth with their presence over the previous arcs. This long process would be completed in the future, where Cell grabs a time machine and comes back to become “complete” rather than rule a broken world in his incomplete form because, well, he’s an ass.
The voice actor for Cell is, I believe – I haven’t read the credits and looked quite that far – the same one who plays the diabolical Oda Nobunaga in the first season of the Sengoku Basara anime. At any rate, he does the “I’m Just That Evil” stuff well.
So, Cell’s agenda is now draining as many humans as possible – and he is now very quick and efficient about it – with that stinger of his to gain their life energy and become powerful enough to wipe the floor with even the “new” Androids, the ones more powerful than the ones Trunks faced (that still managed to wipe out his future Earth). So far, Cell’s agenda has been going rather well.
Before destroying Cell’s birthplace, Trunks and Kurilin find design plans for Android #17 that they hand over to Bulma and her father for analysis, hoping to find some kind of defining weakness so that they can take out #17 and prevent an apocalyptic situation.
When returning from this, Kurilin flies across Cell during one of his rampages and manages to, for a time, save a woman and her child from Cell, but is only saved from certain death himself because Piccolo and Tien Shinhan show up at the last moment, both hunting Cell themselves. But Cell, being very proficient at hiding his energy, leaps away and hides from them once again, going off to gain more strength at their expense.
By the end of the show, Team Goku is using one of the Capsule Corp’s machines – I can’t help but think of it as a flying van, but it’s an aircraft I suppose – to find Cell without using their “ki” to fly around, which tips him off to their own locations, an actual intelligent plan, even while the other Androids are getting closer to Goku’s house (not that Goku’s there, he’s been relocated to Kame House).
Finally, Goku is fully revived and fully cured of his heart illness that “should” have killed him. You know, he really should have taken the darned medicine during the 3 years since he’d had it, but that wouldn’t have been enough Drama, I guess.
Anyway, that’s where it is. I was absolutely not a watcher of Dragonball Z during its US airings for a wide variety of reasons, so I personally have no way to understand just how many original eps were crammed into this single one.
I reiterate that this makes watching the show much less of a chore. I have actually been able to enjoy the source material through this show, which I could never have said for the original, purely because it took too long.
