DRAGON BALL: The Red Ribbon Army Saga -- Does It Hold Up?

This one didn’t play out like I was expecting it to, at all. Call an arc “the Red Ribbon Army saga” and you expect to see Goku fighting waves and waves of footsoldiers and war machines, no? Instead, this is basically a second tournament arc, with our plucky young hero squaring off against colorful (and almost totally unrelated?) opponents, one by one, as he basically ascends a match pyramid. Tower levels separate the bouts, not tourney brackets, and that’s really the only major difference.

Not that I mind that, necessarily -- it just puts a real point on how plotting really is secondary to character here. Hell, Goku fights a fat, pink monster that might as well be an unfinished conceptual sketch for Majin Buu. I might remark on how the Frankenstein monster being named “Android 8” surprised me (having not realized there was such a lineage in this mythos), but I doubt there’s much connecting him to Android 18 beyond Toriyama simply not wanting to let some perfectly adequate alliteration go to waste.

== TEASER ==

Honestly, the guy’s thought process is only barely hidden under the surface of the show. When you watch JOJO’S, it’s fun to speculate on which “video nasty” horror movies probably inspired Araki. Or to wonder if Togashi got the idea for the “Chimera Ant” arc of HUNTER X HUNTER after watching ALIENS. With Toriyama, there’s much less room for speculation. He got the idea for the “Saiyan Saga” after watching SUPERMAN II, and he’s clearly plucking these characters from whatever was on TV while he was working at his drawing board. Is the station re-running TERMINATOR? There’s Sergeant Metallic. There you go.

The whole bout with Sergeant Purple totally has the vibe of a classic Loony Toon, too. Goku vs. a pompous ninja might as well be Bugs Bunny against Yosemite Sam, no?

As much as I pick apart the show, I’ll be the first to admit that the show remains genuinely funny, however many decades after the fact. I have to think, though, that there’s an added level of comedy in realizing how scatterbrain Toriyama was when he was cooking this up. It’s almost like he was aiming to craft a true epic with a fearsome threat, then got distracted by a butterfly flitting by and thought, "Hey... why don't we throw a bubblegum monster in here?".

from Anime Vice Site Mashup http://www.animevice.com/news/dragon-ball-the-red-ribbon-army-saga-does-it-hold-up/7902/