#leion

So these next four episodes deal with the Luud Cult.   I guess technically the Luud arc spans episodes 9-15, but 9 and 10 focus on the Para Bros, and 15 is basically an epilogue.  11-14 see the good guys fighting the cult on their home turf. 

As I got closer to these four episodes, I found it hard to remember everything that happened in them.  This is my first time watching GT since 2013, but I feel like I had a pretty good handle on the plots of each episode.  For instance, I remember Episode 15 pretty well, because Pan gets stuck in the desert and fights a centipede, and Giru rescues her. 

Episodes 11-14 felt like a blur, because I could only remember enough stuff to fill like two episodes.  They go to Planet Luud, Pan gets turned into a doll, they fight Mutchy Motchy, then he turns out to be a whip, then Dolltaki molests the Pan doll and activates Luud, then Dolltaki and Pan get trapped inside Luud and they have to do that stupid joint attack to hit Luud on the inside and outside at the same time.  But that couldn’t have been everything, could it? 

Turns out, yes, that’s pretty much it.  It felt like I had forgotten something, but then I watched Episode 11 and realized that barely anything happens.  I think the pace picks up near the end of this arc, but we’ve got a ways to go. 

So the entire first half of this episode is devoted to Pan and Giru being stuck aboard the Para Bros. spaceship as it automatically flies to Planet Luud.  They don’t know where they’re going or how to control the ship, so Pan browbeats Giru because all she’s good for is complaining that no one else is solving her problems. 

✨ “Good” “Ideas”, Poorly Executed✨

I want to go back to the 2005 interview with GT producer Kozo Morishita.  When discussing Pan, he refers to this episode:

“Dragon Ball GT has an episode where Pan is turned into a doll, but that episode established the pattern of ‘Pan sets the incident in motion while Goku resolves it’.”

And that sums of the depiction of Pan throughout the series.  Morishita had a very clear, very simple formula for Goku and Pan’s dynamic, and they pretty much stuck with it through the entire series. 

For me, this right here is one of the main reasons I hate GT so much.  People talk about whether or not it’s canon, or whether it goes “back-to-the-basics”, and whether it hearkens back to the “adventure focus” of early Dragon Ball, but that’s just avoids the central issue.  Forget the manga, forget the Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z anime.  For a moment, just consider GT in a vacuum, as a standalone anime.  You have one of the main characters, and her sole purpose in the series is to get in trouble so the other main character can rescue her.  And they just do that over and over.  She never gains any agency or development as the series progresses, she just stumbles into trouble so the formula can be preserved. 

Now think about the movie Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, where a different version of Pan is a minor character, but she still has a little character arc of her own.  At the start of the movie, she can’t fly yet, but then at the end, she finally figures it out, and then she happily shows it off to Gohan and Piccolo.  It’s great.   She didn’t get to do a lot in terms of fighting the bad guys, but she still had some personal growth to mirror Gohan and Piccolo’s development. 

The frustrating thing about the Kozo Morishita interview is how he basically confirms that GT kept shifting its premise and never found a proper direction, but the one thing they stuck to no matter what was the formula of Pan getting into trouble so Goku could save her.  The way he speaks of this in the interview, it’s like the bedrock of the series.  It’s the guiding principle of Dragon Ball GT.

Why?  Because I already grew up with the trope through characters like Jimmy Olsen.  In the 40s, Jimmy Olsen was literally a child, and they gradually aged him up over the years.  He would get in trouble and Superman would save him, and it was boring as fuck, because it was the same routine over and over.  By the 1950s, you had Jimmy doing the same bit on the Adventures of Superman TV series, only he was played by 24-year-old Jack Larson, so you had a grown man making the same idiot mistakes, and never learning anything.  

Eventually, Superman writers saw the light and began finding more original things to do with the character, so now we live in a world where Superman can save people besides his co-workers, but people like Kozo Morishita saw the formula and thought it was a feature instead of a cliche. 

And really, having Goku save Pan all the time isn’t the worst way to go, but you have to at least give Pan some redeeming qualities to make up for her helplessness.  She’s the least powerful of her team, she doesn’t know how to fix things or fly spaceships.  She’s too inexperienced to be a leader.  She seems to have sensible ideas from time to time, but she doesn’t know how to follow through on them. And whenever she gets stuck, she whines and takes it out on everyone around her.  If she can’t save herself, then her obnoxious personality just makes her that much more annoying.  Eventually you start to resent the character and wish that Goku would just abandon her to her fate. 

But GT is what it is, so we’re stuck with the version of Pan that we have. And yet, even if I accept GT Pan at face value, she’s still undermined by the slipshod writing.  Let’s review:

Q: How did Pan get stuck on the Para Brothers’ spaceship in the first place? 

A: In Episode 10, she was searching their ship for the Dragon Ball, and noticed some alien words on one of the computer terminals.  She asked Giru to translate for her, and when he told her that it said to launch the ship and return to Planet Luud, the ship heard Giru and interpreted it as a command.

Q: Then the ship is only going to Luud because Giru accidentally told it to do so?

A: According to Episode 10, yes.

Q: Okay, then in Episode 11 why don’t they just tell the ship to go back?   Why is Pan asking Giru to find a “switch” that will take control of the ship?   It’s all voice interface, so why don’t they just talk to it?

A: Because GT Logic.

It is this fucking bullshit that makes the show so terrible.   Not the saccharine tone, not the ugly color palettes, not the unlikable characters and piss-poor villains.  Those are all problems, sure, but I could forgive them if the series at least kept track of the simplest plot points from one episode to the next.  Instead, characters literally forget things like “you can talk to the ship” or “I can fly” or “I’m the Legendary Super Saiyan”.  And they always forget in such a way that serves to drag the story out and try my patience. 

Because they don’t forget to show Pan and Giru arriving on Planet Luud and disembarking from the ship.  No, they made sure to put that in there, and the part where the find Luud’s temple.  They could have just started the episode on this scene, and had Pan provide exposition to cover what happened between Episodes 10 and 11.  “This is terrible, Giru!  The Para Brothers’ ship took us all the way to their home planet, and we can’t get it to take us back!  But if there really is a Dragon Ball inside that weird castle, then maybe this can work out after all!” 

But no, we have to waste half an episode on a trip Pan can’t control.  

✨Is This Episode Worse than “The Roaming Lake”?✨

Yes, as dumb as “The Roaming Lake” was, at least they didn’t have Goku forget about the drought, or that he knows how to talk and fire energy blasts out of his hands. 

✨Positivity Page✨

I will give this one some credit for how Pan confronts Mutchy Motchy.  He starts monologuing about the Luud Cult, and how Lood is a “god of destruction” who will usher in a new order in the universe, and Pan just snatches the Dragon Ball and makes a run for it. 

She doesn’t get very far before the Luud idol zaps her and transforms her into a doll, just like those aliens from the last two episodes.  The thing is, though, even if this hadn’t happened, where was Pan planning to go?  She had no way off the planet, and she had no way of knowing Goku and Trunks were on their way to save her.  But I’ll give this episode some credit for this as well.  Pan’s still a little kid, so it makes sense for her to do things like boldly swiping a Dragon Ball from the bad guys without an exit strategy.  It’s the sort of thing I wish she got to do more of in this series.  Normally, she’d just whine about how Giru should steal the Dragon Ball for her, and then hit him when he doesn’t do it right.

Luckily for Pan, Goku and Trunks are already on Planet Luud, having interrogated the Para Brothers to find out where their ship went.  They storm the temple with the Para Brothers, so Mutchy-Motchy turns them into dolls too, and tosses them into Luud’s pot.  Then he fights Goku and Trunks at the same time, and doesn’t do too badly at first, thanks to his dirty tricks.   This shot looks like he’s firing a ki blast at Goku, but it’s actually a gun he was holding under his robes.

Then Mutchy Motchy summons a giant blue robot lion to finish the battle for him. Goku kills it in one shot.  He doesn’t even shoot at Leion, he blasts the wall, knocking off a big chunk of it that crushes Leion. 

While they all stare at the wreckage, Giru notices the Pan doll lying on the floor and detects life signs, so he realizes that this is actually Pan.  But before he can save her, another bad guy shows up and kicks him away, securing the doll for himself.   I’ll have more to say about this next time.

Back to the fight, Leion must have had some sort of secondary explosion, because several seconds after being crushed, he blows up and Mutchy Motchy is destroyed in the blast.  So Goku took both of them out in one shot?  Okay, this is dumb as hell.  We spent half the episode setting up Pan on this planet, and then we speedrun the battle?  They’ve spent three episodes introducing this guy and he dies like this?

Well, no, because his whip survived the blast, and then it starts TALKING to Goku and Trunks.  According to the whip, Mutchy Motchi was never the actual leader of the Luud Cult.  Oh, no.  The whip was the REAL boss all along.  And the whip’s name is also Mutchy, because that isn’t confusing or anything.

Then the whip transforms into this other jackass, and promises to give Goku and Trunks a much greater challenge.   Why the fuck didn’t he just do this in the first place?  If he’s in charge, why does he spend all day in whip form, having his servant flail him around and giving orders? 

And why is the audience supposed to care?  We barely had a chance to get invested in the last boss, and now we’re supposed to care about this guy?  It’d be like if Frieza showed up on Namek and then three episodes later he slips on a banana peel and dies, then his hoverchair turns into a robot and says “Ha ha! I was the real overlord all along!  And my name is also Frieza!”  It would fucking suck, and Dragon Ball GT went ahead and did it. 

What... what is wrong with this show? Like, why would anyone write this shit and think it was suitable for broadcast?  I just watched this episode and I promise I’m describing exactly what happened, and yet it reads like I’m telling a stupid joke.

“The bad guy summoned a robot lion, but Goku kills it in one hit and it kills the bad guy too, then his whip reveals that he was the secret real boss all along.”

And he’s not even the real boss!  There’s like three more rungs on the ladder, but forget that for now.   This is stupid enough on its own.  This is like something a four year old would say, and then they’d start giggling because they know they’re being silly.  But no, grown men in Japan came up with this in 1996, and they were like “Well, good enough, let’s put it on TV.”  

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

All right, I need to move on.  Blade Braxton (1975-2021) was a legend in the field of pro wrestling podcasts.   One of his many talents was to hit people with a Shake-weight so that his protege, Mr. Fitness II, could win his matches.   But also, he wrote haiku poems that summed up weeks’ worth of wrestling news and discourse in a succinct, soul-refreshing seventeen syllables.   My purpose here is to honor the memory of Mr. Brakestown-sensei by composing my own poems to save people the trouble of watching Dragon Ball GT. 

Folks, life is short.  Don’t waste your time watching terrible anime.  Don’t even look up episode summaries on the internet.  I know I just wrote a whole rant about this episode, but don’t even bother reading this post.  Just scroll straight down to this part at the end.  That’s all you need!  Seventeen syllables, and you’ll know everything you need to know about this episode.  Then you can use the free time you’ve saved to talk to a loved one, learn a new language, or spend a little more time in bed.  Whatever you want to do.  It’s your life, so make the most of it. 

Here we go. 

Ahem.

Here we go.

How does a talking

Whip know about Dragon Balls?