Popo’s lips in the manga they distributed in the US. Popo to be a jarring blue color and Viz Media tried to reduce the size of Mr. It’s something even the companies behind Dragon Ball recognized as the 4Kids broadcast of Dragon Ball Z Kai changed Mr. Popo ever managed to make it onto a syndicated television show, even in the 90s. Blackface carried on in Japan and the wider Asian world, especially in manga and animation, long after it became unacceptable in the US in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Popo was heavily modeled after the blackface popularized by American entertainers and animators during the early 1900s. Popo recurs throughout Dragon Ball Z and he’s divisive to say the least. All of that came to a head with the introduction of Mr. Frankly, race has always been one of the issues that Dragon Ball struggled with even in its early days (see Staff Officer Black). That driving energy carries the viewer through barrages of jokes and action at such a pace that, while not every joke works, enough of them land to keep the series fun while covering the necessary narrative beats to remain recognizably Dragon Ball.ĭragon Ball Z has certainly aged with time, too. Keeping the tense action of the animation as well as the biggest story beats intact means that Dragon Ball Abridged keeps up a nonstop momentum with both humor and action. A very brief theoretical work overviewing Dragon Ball Z Abridged handling Buu. On top of that, fights can be shortened down to their critical moments without losing much of the dramatic tension. ![]() ![]() An example of this occurs in Episode 4 of Dragon Ball Abridged when they lampoon the events of the Princess Snake episode of Dragon Ball Z in an extended reference Metal Gear Solid that lasts only a couple of minutes. This means that many of the miscellaneous plot threads that might take an entire episode or more to wrap up in the main series can be finished in a two-minute gag or skipped entirely. To put it another way, you could watch Dragon Ball Abridged and get all of the important information in Dragon Ball Z up until the end of the Cell Games Saga in less than half the time it would take you to get to the same point in Dragon Ball Z Kai and less than a quarter of the time it would take to watch Dragon Ball Z until that point.ĭragon Ball Abridged accomplishes its shortened parody by doing what Dragon Ball Z Kai did but without the need to pace episodes in 22-minute increments. ![]() Each of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Z Kai’s episodes run for about 22 minutes apiece, almost ten minutes longer than the average Dragon Ball Abridged episode. Even in the updated and drastically cut down version of Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Z Kai, the Cell Games Saga ends on episode 98. In Dragon Ball Z, the Cell Games Saga concludes with episode 194. Even if you count all of the special and multi-part episodes as their own programs, Dragon Ball Abridged spans 70 episodes to reach the conclusion of the Cell Games Saga. However, the extent to which that’s true really staggers the imagination. With the name of the series including the word “abridged,” it makes sense that Dragon Ball Abridged would be shorter than Dragon Ball Z.
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