A Retrospective on Dragonball Evolution

A long time ago, Dragonball was pretty damn popular.  I watched it, and likely whoever is reading this did too.  It was so popular in fact that it got turned into a live action movie.  This just seems crazy to me.  Anyone who has seen it would probably think it couldn't be done.  Sadly they were right. When this movie came out, I used to see most big action summer movies at midnight.  I have since stopped doing that as the crowd tends to make my experience pretty bad.  But in the case of Dragonball Evolution, I was glad to be there.

No one going to see the movie expected it to be good.  The theater seemed to be impressed that anyone was going to see it.  The theater didn't fill up, but it had a lot of people in it.  The crowd was just a bunch of fans of a franchise that only a few years prior ended it's run with Dragonball GT in the US.  We were all fans, going to see a bad live action version of something we were all fans of, and plenty of us grew up with.  It was a celebration of the show, and its fans.  I was an event more than a movie. The weird thing is it felt like more of a tombstone than a movie.  It was like we were remembering a fallen friend and having a little party to celebrate their life.  This was the end of an era.  Anime was about to have it's big overload and finally fall back into its niche crowd where it belonged (Though admittedly it is a large crowd.)  Much of the fans were becoming or already had become adults.  But mostly we were about to be assaulted with the onslaught of a different beast of summer blockbuster. This beast was a continuous record crushing, season after season super hero event that is still going on.  Before all that, movies were a bit more like this one, or the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat movies when it came to summer action flicks.  Now one could argue that we have a much better breed of film in our modern times.  But the event was like a send off to days past, a last film in a series of movies like it.  We were here to celebrate.

Now people don't even remember this movie exists.  I sometimes think on it and realize that for me, summer action ended after this movie's arrival.  We had so much fun in the theater for this though. People dressed up, there were staged fights, we all talked about our favorite moments, and we watched it's death.  Dragonball is hardly gone however.  I have a DBZ shirt, there have been a couple of new animated movies, and a new series is happening.  This is where a lot of us jumped off not only the Dragonball train, but the train of being young and getting into things like anime.  I decided to re-watch this cinematic tombstone with fresh eyes and just let it happen, with bias in check, but the problem is those feelings of old kept coming back.

This is the story of not so ordinary high school student Goku who is training with his Grandfather, and on his 18th birthday Grandpa is supposed to reveal some secret to him.  Instead Goku goes to a castle mansion place where there is a high school party and his classmate Chi Chi is there.  Anyway, a green guy named Piccolo comes and destroys Goku's house, killing Grandpa in the process.

With his dying breath, Grandpa tells Goku to seek out Master Roshi and get his help to defeat Piccolo and save the world.  Pretty heavy stuff for a high school student who is a bit on the low IQ side.  Not long after, the girl from Phantom of the Opera points a gun at his head, looking to grab his Dragon Ball.  Well she is named Bulma and she wants them to do science stuff with.  Goku informs her that they are mystical wish granting orbs and informs her of his recent quest.  So she accepts this new found discovery and follows him to Chow Yun-fat's house which is on a small island in the middle of a big city.

Goku trains, and in the mean time Piccolo and his gun toting assassin make bug creatures of Piccolo's blood to fight them.  The group gets trapped by desert con man Yamcha.  Seeing they could have gotten out anyway and discovering they are looking for some balls, Yamcha follows them.  There's also the plot where Goku finds out Chi Chi is a fighter and is joining some tournament which is largely brushed over.

They go to a volcano to get a Dragonball and fight the weird bug things Piccolo made.  Does this sound like Dragonball to you?  Other than the names and what not, it really isn't.  According to the movie's lore Piccolo was sealed away by seven masters after he and Oozaru attacked earth.  We all know Goku is Oozaru, so does that mean he is 2,000 years old?  The answer is no.  Goku is not the same Oozaru that was under Piccolo's control, I think.  The movie doesn't at all explain this stuff, it just happens.

There is a scene where Chi Chi helps Goku learn his Kamehameha thing and then they bang.  A very short time later Chi Chi is apparently stealing the Dragon Balls, but it isn't Chi Chi.  It is that assassin of Piccolo's who is a shape shifting person and she gets away.

Then Piccolo has the Dragonballs and tries to summon Shenlong, Goku turns into Oozaru who is only a few feet taller than everyone, and somehow fights off Oozaru to become Goku and win against Piccolo.  All these things in the movie happen by the hour and sixteen minute mark when the credits roll.  A couple minutes after the credits start, we find out that Piccolo is still alive!  I never expected a sequel spoiler at the end of this, but it did happen, just like the Super Mario Bros Movie.

This movie is very short.  Getting through it takes an hour and twenty five minutes, and about seven of those are credits.  That is sort of a good thing because the movie isn't very good.  It also isn't boring however.  There is always something going on.  So much so that we learn very little about any of the characters before it ends.  I think the pacing is a little too fast.  The movie needed another fifteen minutes honestly, or just to be two movies with lots of character development.  Luckily they did not have the budget for that and kind of knew ahead of time that it would suck, so they kept it short.

I think years down the road people might appreciate this movie a little more.  Usually people talk about it with hatred.  I think of it with fond memories of a time that has now past.  This is the kind of movie you watch with some friends on a night where you watch bad movies.  However this one will be pretty fun because you can then all talk about a thing you used to love.  I used to buy shirts, videos, card games, trading cards, action figures, and video games of the Dragonball franchise.  It was part of who I was when I was young.  This movie is also part of that.  Part of it's explosion into pop culture, just as much as the Super Mario Bros movie, Spawn, or even the Double Dragon movie was.  It fits in with those sorts of movies and even isn't the worst example of that type of movie.  Enjoy it with some friends down the road, make fun of it, and talk about one of the things you loved when you were young.

Video Game Ads of the 90s

One of my favorite things ever was advertisements in magazines and such as a kid.  Being a kid/teen in the 90s, I remember them quite well.  Video games sort of exploded in the 90's.  Kids at school were talking about them on the playground.  I think they are so common now that kids don't even really talk about them, but back then you were cool if you did.  Kids had their favorite games or systems and were almost violent in their defense of these products.  I almost got punched so many times for liking Street Fighter 2 over Mortal Kombat 2.  There were movies coming out based on games too, it was everywhere.  So today we are going to look at some of these advertisements and talk about them a bit.  Prepare thy selves mortals, it's gonna get weird.

It might be hard to read this one, but it is for a game called A Fork In The Tale.  It is an FMV game and the ad claims to give seamless 15 frames per second video, even on a 2x drive.  Wow, youngsters would probably not be able to play this game then.  The game claims to be funny as they hired comedians for the roles in it as evidenced by the smiling disembodied head in the lower left corner.  Also it claims to have beautiful babes in fur bikinis trying to kill you.  I like FMV games in a way, but I am not interested.  Moving on.

This has a cute dog and video games on it.  When I was a kid, I didn't have a portable gaming device, but I played both of them.  I liked the Game Boy because it had Yoshi's Cookie.  So I guess dogs are cool because they like Nintendo Game Boys?  Or maybe dogs are lame because color doesn't matter to them.

This ad says that there's only one thing more torturous than playing Deathtrap Dungeon, and that's not playing it.  I agree that there is only one thing more torturous, actual torture.  This looks like a man is chained to a wall and forced to continually watch the opening and demo game play of the game while a dominatrix woman does kinky things to him.  Well at least there is a distraction.

So the Godzilla game on Game Boy has the King of Monsters destroying rocks to get to the next stage, exciting.  More importantly, somewhere among 64 screens, Minilla is confined.  That is a good enough reason not to play.  Isn't Godzilla always telling him he should fight his own battles?  So just don't save him.

What?  I don't even get it.  What the hell is going on here.  This is an ad for Virtua Cop 2.  Fun game but I feel like a serial killer is just staring at me and asking me to tell me I love him.  I don't think that happens in the game.

This ad leads us to believe that Ice Cube's head is like Saturn and that he is some sort of Cosmic God that created his own solar system entirely based on the Sega Saturn.  One of the planets is Virtua Fighter 2 though, so I guess it's well worth visiting.

In this ad we see that Patrick Bateman has stopped sleeping with prostitutes and torturing them, and instead become obsessed with Neo Geo.  I guess the Neo Geo is pretty cool.  She has cool undergarments though.  I would not have a hard time deciding between the two myself.  Blonde girls aren't really my thing, but I love King of Fighters.

I love this ad and I really want one now, especially the yellow one.  I never had a Game Boy as a kid and now I feel pretty sad.  Clearly I was missing out on the most extreme thing next to Surge.  Where is that bottle of whiskey again?

I guess in the 90's, people of every creed played basketball, especially punks.  The woman with the ball is on roller blades.  I am not sure if that is cheating, or a huge detriment.  Here is a question, if you are gliding around on wheels and don't dribble, is it still travelling?  I know technically you are travelling faster, but what if you take no steps?

Double Dragon 2 claims that it is a Martial Arts Explosion.  It is right too, this game is awesome.  Look at how cool this is.  Billy is beating some punk on the ground and Jimmy is following him down the stairs with a woman in his arm and grabbing a whip that has just attacked him.  A helicopter is also chasing them down.  Man this is some intense stuff.

Anyway, game advertisements were pretty awesome back in the day.  I love all the crazy stuff going on.  I barely scratched the surface of these ads too.  Maybe some time in the future I will do another of these.  Certainly some of these are good at grabbing your attention.  I am more into older gaming than new, so maybe I will go get one of those yellow Game Boys and save Minilla.

Laser swords are cool!

I admit it, I love glowing laser swords.  They are awesome.  In fact I am certain that this is the reason Star Wars is so popular.  Who doesn't love laser swords?

Hell yeah, look at how cool that is.  Not only do they glow, but they are swords!  SWORDS!!!  I think what I am trying to get at is that swords are cool, and so are lasers.  The lightsaber was the original Sharknado!  Any movie with a glowing sword in it is instantly a much better movie.  Everyone knows that.  Even anime creators knew that.

This is Tenchi, with a laser sword.  You know what I love about Tenchi Muyo?  It seems that everyone in that show can summon laser swords at will.  In fact it is likely the most used weapon in the known universe according to Tenchi Muyo.  All I can say about that is Hell Yes!

You know what was lacking in Mad Max Fury Road?  Laser Swords!  Robocop is one of my favorite movies ever, but it would have been sweet of Murphy also had a glowing sword.  I love John Wayne, but The Searchers really needed some laser swords in it.  To Kill a Mockingbird would have been much cooler if Atticus Finch suddenly pulled out a light saber in court.  Now that is justice.  Speaking of which, you know what else had laser swords?

Yeah, Mobile Suit Gundam!  That's what.  There is literally nothing cooler than a mech with a laser sword.  Unless the mech also fought a ninja with a laser sword who happened to be a witch.  You know what else had laser swords?

Starcrash!  The classic Star Wars rip off not only had laser swords, but it also had David Hasselhoff.  So take that Star Wars.  Yeah I know this is all a bit much.  The thing is, people rip off things all the time.  The thing they don't rip off enough is laser swords however.  Other than The Force Awakens, or some parody of Star Wars, when was the last time you saw one?  I think they are due for a resurgence.  We need a movie of Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series.  David Starr has a laser sword, and way before Star Wars did too.  Hollywood needs to take a crack at ruining that franchise.  At least it will have laser swords in it.

Enemy Mine

This is a film I grew up with.  For the most part I think anyone who had cable or satellite in the 1990's also remembers this movie pretty fondly.  It is the strange tale of Humans vs Drac.  Willis Davidge (played by Dennis Quaid) and Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.) or Jerry as they often call him, are rivals in space combat. They damage their ships and are both marooned on an alien planet together.  You see in the future these two races do not get along and wage a violent war in space.  This is a weird thing for Wolfgang Petersen to have directed just four years after Das Boot.

Anyway, in order to survive this alien land Willis and Jerry must work together.  This proves difficult as both species hate each other and neither can speak the others language.  Eventually they find a strange kinship in each other however and learn to speak to one another.  Survival makes them friends and the enemies they once were fade away.

Things get a bit complicated when it is discovered that Jerry is pregnant and will die when the child is born.  Willis must come to terms with his new friend's death, and raise the Drac child without Jerry's help.  This is a pretty serious subject for what amounts to a weird Sci-Fi movie.  The early portion of the film deals with racism, albeit in the most over the top fashion imaginable.  Then the latter part of the film deals with Willis becoming the parent of a child that is not his.  To make matters a bit more complicated, Willis discovers the presence of other humans and decides not to meet them for the safety of Jerry, and later Jerry's child.  But perhaps the most challenging thing for Willis is teaching the child to play football without any other team members.

I have seen this movie quite a few times, because it just happened to be on, sort of like most people's relationship with the Beastmaster films.  My parents had a VHS of it as well and friends would occasionally want to watch it if I mentioned it.  This led me to being way too familiar with the movie, to the point where I had a decent amount of it memorized.  I admit I have only seen it a few times since I became older than twenty and most of the time because other people wanted to see it.  I once made my wife watch it and she rather enjoyed it.

That's the thing with this movie, for the most part everyone enjoys it.  Not many people love it or think it is their favorite movie however.  I can understand this.  Overall it is very good at getting its story to you in a speedy manner, and the effects are usually pretty decent.  I like practical effects so I would even prefer bad practicals over great CGI.  That is just a personal opinion though.  There isn't really anything wrong with CGI unless it is too in your face.  I think that is what makes this movie work.  It really isn't all that in your face.  The racial tones are pretty in your face, but it manages to make the characters so much more interesting.  I like this film, but love it would be a strong word.  This is one of those movies that you put in when you've been sitting around for an hour with nothing to do and it happens to be on a shelf somewhere.  Enemy Mine is a good movie, with good acting that is for sure.  It is not where I go for a Sci-Fi fix on a normal day however.  That honor will always go to Flash Gordon.

Jane Got a Gun, and Shot Her Eye Out

After a tumultuous production, Jane Got a Gun finally came out.  Though people weren't exactly waiting for it, I did sometimes hear whispers about this film coming out.  Many thought that the January release meant it was awful, and rightfully so.  Jane Got a Gun not only has a stupid name, but it was released in the same month as such classics as Dirty Grandpa and Norm of the North.  Until this movie came out, The 5th Wave was the best movie I had seen in January, and that is pretty sad.  That doesn't mean that this movie is bad in any way though.  This is the best movie to come out this month, and I am going to go out on a limb here and say it will be at least as good as anything coming up in February.

Let's be realistic.  No one cares about this movie.  Just minutes before the lights went down, I took a picture of the audience for this showing.

Sadly there was no change.  As I sat through the beginning, I began to wonder where the hell everyone else was.  It felt like the apocalypse, and I had just grabbed an old dusty western of the shelf and put it into the projector.  There was a feeling of both complete satisfaction that I was able to see it in the theater, and mild depression that there was no one there to share it with me.  But once the movie started I really didn't care whether or not someone else was there.

The movie looks good by the way.  It was shot well with scenes reminding me of classic American Westerns, and scenes right out of a Spaghetti Western.  A good mixture of classic cinema and exploitation.  Violence and swearing happened, but great acting moments were spread around as well.  The movie and the trailers took me less than two hours to sit through.  At a time when even bad comedies are just over two hours, this was a welcome change.  Not only was I watching a good movie, but it was appropriate in run time, if a little short.

Apparently that is Ewan McGregor.  He plays the main bad guy in this movie.  He is accompanied by Natalie Portman as Jane, and Joel Edgerton as Dan Frost.  These two protect Jane's home from the bad guys that are out to kill her.  It is a very basic story that is mostly there for us to get the acting and action out of the characters.  That is fine with me though.  Since when did every movie have to be a 10 out of 10?  Can't a movie simply be good anymore?  A 6 out of 10 is still better than average you know.  That means that a movie is better than more than half the movies you've seen, and if you've seen as many movies as I have, that is a hell of an effort.  Not that this movie would rate that.  I don't know what to rate it honestly.  I was just glad I finally saw something good in the theater again.

It seems that everyone just ignores a movie unless it is 2 hours of superheroes flying around and hitting stuff with the help of CGI.  That is too bad because Joel Edgerton is on a roll as far as I am concerned.  He was in one of my favorite movies last year, The Gift, and yes I mean to say that The Gift was better than Star Wars The Force Awakens.  Jane Got a Gun may not make anyone's top ten, or even anyone's top ten of the year, but what the hell else are you going to watch in the theater right now?  Daddy's Home?  Kung Fu Panda 3?  Yeah I thought so.  Go support movies that are not all the same and see this one instead.  It isn't going to make a person who dislikes westerns suddenly like them, but genre fans will love it.

I enjoyed sitting all by myself with some Raisinets and watching a movie of appropriate length, then leaving the theater satisfied.  It's like regular sex, but with that feeling of really wanting it.  Pretty damn cool if you ask me.  It is way better than no sex.  That is this movie, regular sex.  If I had one complaint, I wished there was a bit more going on in the end as it felt rushed.  Or maybe the plot twist element should have come half way through the movie to drive the characters forward and add weight.  Just a thought, but there certainly isn't anything wrong with the way in ended.  So go watch this movie dammit!