Your best friend has just been shot and killed by a power-mad, authoritarian maniac. That same authoritarian maniac is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of practically your entire race and the destruction of your ancestral homeland. He also killed your father personally, watching him die and laughing as he did so. You, your son, and more of your friends are probably next. And you’re not nearly strong enough to stop him.
So you’re the hero Goku, in this situation, and you do what you’ve always done: you get stronger. But before you get stronger, you get fucking mad. This scene of Dragon Ball Z is called the “Explosion of Anger” because it comes after the evil Frieza has just killed Goku’s best friend Krillin, and Goku’s had it. I can’t really emphasize how effective and memorable this scene was—in practically every iteration of Dragon Ball Z, whether you’re watching the original Japanese dub, the first English uncut dub that was released in the ’90s, or the more recent Funimation English dub that was written to hew more closely to the original Japanese.
The ensuing scene and speech is up there with those great moments in TV history like Sam Malone’s final “Sorry, we’re closed” on Cheers, or Bill Haverchuck’s solitary laughter at a television in Freaks and Geeks, or the F-word-fueled analysis of a crime scene on The Wire. The “Explosion of Anger” is a snap that anyone who’s ever been beaten down and had enough can identify with—whether you’ve been bullied by punks on the schoolyard, hassled by cops for no good reason other than the color of your skin, dealt with an insipidly smarmy coworker, or known something was rotten and couldn’t do anything about it. It’s wish fulfillment in the pursuit of justice, and after a full 96(!!!) episodes of the original DBZ’s run that were filled with hints, this brought sweet, sweet release. Finally, we knew what would happen if a Saiyan like Goku finally snapped. The entire, sprawling, seemingly endless Dragon Ball saga has been filled with transformations since, but not one of them has ever felt this transformative.
And Goku’s speech in all of its iterations hammers home why. Take the original English dub—notable for its imperfections in translation and the ways, obvious and subtle, that it edited and changed the interpretation of the original themes of the show. This speech—as it first aired in the U.S. on Toonami on October 19, 1999—is still a banger:
Goku: You can destroy planets, but you can never destroy what I am, friend.
Frieza: What? What are you?
Goku: I am the hope of the universe. I am the answer to all living things that cry out for peace. I am protector of the innocent. I am the light in the darkness. I am truth. Ally to good! Nightmare to you!
It could be how old I was when I watched it, or the fact that I had never seen a serial show quite like it, or the fact that Goku finally going Super Saiyan had been hinted at for what felt like an eternity, but this was a lightning-in-a-bottle power shift in a series (in)famous for them. And this version that conveys a sense of Goku as a messianic beacon of hope, akin to a superhero, seems tailor-made for Western audiences. It’s great, earned character writing, even if it feels a little hammy. You kinda want something like this after 96 episodes the same way you wanted Jim Gordon’s hammy lines—“He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A Dark Knight.”—at the end of a movie titled The Dark Knight.
And for what it’s worth, the newer Funimation dub, made for Dragon Ball Z Kai’s redux of the show, which brings it more in line with the original Japanese, is even better, for different reasons. It hammers home Frieza’s evil as a genocidal oppressor. It does away with the notion of Goku as a “protector of the innocent” but tethers him inextricably to the messianic nature of his role as the first Super Saiyan and the rage he has at seeing Frieza hurt his friends and slaughter his people. It’s powerful in a different way. Here’s that version’s full text:
Goku: What’s the matter, Frieza? I can’t be harder to destroy than a planet, right?
Frieza: You- You- What are you?
Goku: You haven’t figured it out yet? I’m the Saiyan who came all the way from Earth for the sole purpose of beating you. I am the warrior you’ve heard of in legends, pure of heart and awakened by fury. That’s what I am. I am the Super Saiyan! Son Goku!
So, look, I get it. The saga of Dragon Ball is an absurd, massive media franchise with idiotically large amounts of influence and foolishly long stretches of episodes where characters do nothing but “power up.” It’s a silly sci-fi fantasy about ‘roided out bros beating the hell of each other when they’re not turning into literal giant monkeys. But the next time someone brings up this dumb show in derision, remember that there’s a beating heart to it, and that at that heart, there is hope.
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