Dragonball Z: "Bardock, the Father of Goku"

It's not the original punchy-man-punches-the-bad-guys Shonen Jump franchise. That somewhat dubious honor probably belongs to Fist of the North Star, whose first issue came out the year before it, in 1983. But Akira Toriyama's long-running Dragonball was only slightly less foundational to the genre. Thanks to its (multiple) successful anime adaptations that received English localization relatively early on, it also enjoyed much greater exposure outside of Japan.

It also pretty much defined the late nineties/early two thousands Anglosphere memescape. Any other old fogey millennials here remember when you couldn't go three clicks without being told that a value was over 9,000 or having disasters attributed to something called kamehameya? Remember chargin' muh lazer? A little more recently, there's shit like "okay but why though" and "how do you know about the parts you weren't there for," kudos of the satirical Dragonball Z Abridged dub. Yeah. Early 2010's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure meme overload didn't have shit on Dragonball in the previous decade.

I'm not going to watch any episodes of the Dragonball anime series. Rather, this is a forty-five minute film that came out in 1990, and is about Bardock, the father of central protagonist figure Goku. Goku is basically anime superman, being an incredibly powerful humanoid alien, a saiyan, who was left on Earth as a baby and raised by locals. So, I guess that makes Bardock a rough analogue of anime Jor-El. Well. Sort of. I don't remember anything about Bardock from when I watched DBZ on Cartoon Network as a kid, but I do remember that Goku's species as a whole leaned much more heavily in the General Zod direction, and the circumstances of Goku's adoption suggested that his parents were not exceptions.

So, I saw a fair amount of this franchise, but it was a long time ago, and I don't remember anything at all being revealed about Goku's father, so this should be pretty fresh for me.


The movie opens from the first person perspective of a crying baby. He's sealed in a high tech pod, looking out the window at a pair of aliens. They're of different species, but wearing the same uniform. They go through the logs, and identify the noisy infant saiyan in their captivity as the son of Bardock, a common soldier with mediocre performance records. They're unsure if they want to stake their reputations on using his son, with probable inferior genetics compared to most saiyan warriors, but they decide to go through with it.

An important piece of context that I remember from the show is that the saiyans are basically a race of superpowered interstellar mercenaries, with a rich tradition of selling their own babies into slavery to be raised as child soldiers for other species. So, this is basically business as usual for them and their clients.

Like I said, the saiyans are real bastards.

They open the pod, and speak the baby's name aloud. It's not clear if they gave it to him just now, or if it was included in the data they were just reading. Anyway, its Kakarot, aka Goku. Kakarot = Kal-El, Goku = Clark Kent, basically. Babby protag.

Title drop. Then, cut to some other planet at night, where a group of humanoid warriors are desperately trying to contain a pack of rampaging saiyans and protect their city. There's a full moon up, which means that the saiyans have transformed into a giant, nigh-unstoppable beast thing.

...

The saiyans are werewolves. I forgot to mention that. The entire species are werewolves. The frequency of their transformation depends on whether the planet they're on has a moon and what it currently looks like, but any full moon anywhere in the galaxy will trigger the change if they're standing on a planetary surface under it. It's natural for them.

Dragonball is weird.

...

By dawn, the city is in ruins, its population slaughtered or fled. The quintet of saiyans have reverted to their more humanlike usual forms, and are discussing last night's rampage around a campfire in the middle of one of the giant craters they left.

The youngest of the group is musing over her first full moon rampage. Presumably, she hasn't been planetside under a full moon before, and doing so while on a mission was quite an experience. Her memories of last night's genocidal rampage are hazy and dreamlike, but exciting. One of their number, Bardock, is able to remember the events of his werewolf rages better than most, but he's too lazy to keep track of anything important with that exceptional memory of his. In fact, he probably couldn't even tell you the birth date of his own son. Even though the date in question was yesterday.

This prompts Bardock to sit upright and reveal himself. There's definitely a family resemblance between him and Goku/Kakarot, but it's not too heavyhanded.

The others ask him if he's even planning to see his son when they get back into orbit. Bardock shrugs the question off, saying that there's not much point considering that they're going to be spending most of their lives apart anyway and he might not get to again after this, so what even is the point. The others kinda shrug and nod.

The topic of conversation then turns to the mission, and why anyone would even bother hiring them to conquer this primitive backwater of a planet. Bardok, with his excellent memory for non-personal information, recalls that their employer had determined that this planet has some property that facilitates the development of telepathy. Said employer is Frieza, a galactic warlord in the Thanos/Darkseid vein and major antagonist of the latter series who hires saiyans on a frequent basis, and he intends to colonize this planet and research those mental powers for his own use. The other saiyans in the group gossip darkly about how scary a mind-reading Frieza would be, and idly wonder if they should even be helping with this. They don't seem to care enough about the future to actually stop, though.

As they chat, a surviving native soldier from last night's battle pulls himself out of the rubble and sneak attacks Bardock from behind.

Well, not really sneak attack. It's Dragonball, so characters are constitutionally incapable of not giving a speech before attacking. Instead, he announces his presence, promises vengeance, charges the saiyans openly, but then suddenly is behind Bardock and hitting him in the back of the neck with Bardock seeming surprised. So, it was a game mechanics sneak attack, but the fluff didn't match it. Fucking ludonarrative dissonance amirite?

Bardock goes down. One of the other saiyans hits the native with a finger-laser, but rather than dying he absorbs it and turns into this glowy crystalline state.

I'm thinking this guy is one of his homeworld's big names. A or B lister who also appears in the crossover/omnibus events with relative frequency. Lots of toys and lunchboxes and stuff.

...Dragonball maps even better to American superhero comics than I remembered. Like, seriously, I wonder if there was direct influence from Marvel and DC. How well known were those in 1970's-80's Japan?

As Bardock gets back up, the glowy fishman tells them that Frieza will never gain the power to read minds. However, as a parting curse, he has given that power to Bardock with his weird neck-strike thing. So, poke someone in the diaphragm to give them hamon, poke them in the back of the neck to give them telepathy, got it. Glowy fishman laughs fiendishly as he explains that now at least one of the saiyans - who he identifies by name as Bardock, proving that he is himself a telepath - will have to experience everything he does to his victims as he does it from now on, which is the greatest revenge he can imagine.

Bardock shoots a stronger energy blast, and kills him. But then, immediately afterward, before his fellows can even complement him on the nice shot, Bardock collapses. Presumably a sympathetic effect from the violent death he just caused.

From there, we jump to a space station somewhere, where an adoring pair of older men are watching their child prince beat up some biomechanoid training dummies. The prince is named as Vegeta, and one of the observers is his attendant Nappa. These two are - you guessed it - a major antagonist duo in the main story. Vegeta finishes destroying the group of synths, and then marches out and starts whining at his attendant about how bored he is. He wants to fight something stronger, and is starting to get tired of being on Frieza's retention.

Speak of the devil, elsewhere on the same space station Frieza is having a meeting with some of his underlings. They're discussing the performance of their saiyan mercs, including how each generation is getting stronger than the one before it thanks to the improved training and conditions they've supplied them with. Actually, it's starting to get worrisome. If this prince Vegeta turns out to be the new normal for young saiyans going forward, they might be at risk of a janissary revolt.

Just then, young Vegeta barges in uninvited and demands to speak with Lord Frieza. He's bored and wants something to do. Frieza's attendants make to eject (or worse) the young chief-to-be, but Frieza tells them to calm down. He can't fault the young prince his enthusiasm, even if his manners could use some work. He instructs them to find the most well-defended enemy stronghold on the frontier and throw Vegeta at it. Whether he wins or dies, the boredom issue will have been solved. Vegeta bows and thanks Frieza before hurrying off to prepare.

Frieza is the HR Giger type thing we can see a few of the limbs of in the foreground.

Frieza lets the boy go, and then smiles in a way that doesn't look remotely happy. Yeah, he's starting to think his underlings may be right about the saiyans slipping their leash and causing problems in the not too distant future.

Elsewhere on Starbase Frieza, the same doctors who were looking over baby Kakarot before are now inspecting his father, who was brought back from the mission still unconscious by his companions. Oh, so Bardock (and the mother? Where is she, I wonder?) didn't just pawn his kid off to a random warlord. Their whole clan is working for Frieza, and based in his fortress. Bardok's talk of Kakarot being sent away soon and there not being any point in bonding with his son suggests that either Frieza is planning to sell some of the excess births, or that Bardock is a really, really, REALLY shitty father who legitimately is just too lazy to see his newborn son. Anyway, they're looking at Bardock's biosigns, and find a minor anomaly in his brain activity.

Bardock's squadmates come in to ask after him, and the doctors tell them that they're still figuring this out, but it doesn't seem to be too serious. Then, they're abruptly called away on another mission, which they'll regretfully have to do without Bardock.

The other saiyans leave, and the doctors continue poring over Bardock's CAT scans. As they work, babby Kakarot cries a couple rooms away in the medbay. As he cries, ignored and unattended, Bardock has a telepathic experience. His mind apparently connecting with that of his neglected infant son.

As this takes place, Bardock has a vision of a possible future. His son, hovering over a dense metropolis full of saiyan-like bipeds that are just a bit smaller and less muscular than them and lack tails. Millions of screams from the denizens, as grown-up Kakarot incinerates them from the lower atmosphere. The look of cruel amusement and exhilaration on the young man's face as the human city and all its inhabitants are wiped off the map.

The doctors remark that there's something wrong; Bardock's brain activity just went crazy. The saiyan starts struggling in the bacta tank they've got him in, and they hurriedly empty it and let him out before he tears the damned thing apart by accident. Once released, he asks what happened. They tell him that he and his team cleared the mission beyond the boss' expectations, and that Bardock in particular distinguished himself during the fighting. However, rather than stick around and be poked at, he hurries off as soon as he's told his squadmates are en route to another mission site, ignoring the doctors' objections.

As he leaves the sickbay, the crying baby in a nursery room he passes by gets his attention. He looks at his son, and feels a sort of contorted disgust and disappointment as he feels the dying anguish of his future victims. The voice of the glowy fishman mocks him from nowhere. He realizes that, by virtue of his own unwanted telepathy and prophecy, his infant son is ALSO seeing this vision of his own future. And it's making him cry.

He quickly scans his infant son's power level with his eyepiece (it's a thing. don't ask), tells himself his son is weak and shouldn't be thought about overmuch, and runs on ahead to the hangar. Not wanting to think about this long enough for introspection to happen.

Flash ahead to the planet his squad was sent to. The natives have been decimated. So too, however, have the four saiyans. A group of Frieza's other elite soldiers stand over their broken bodies, laughing. They ambushed them as soon as they were exhausted from killing the natives, and quickly defeated them.

The last living squad member asks them why they're doing this. The spiky pink guy leading the black ops team just picks him up and chortles that Frieza has no further use for their kind. Especially when they grow so strong and willful in equal measures.

The saiyan tries to tell him that if Frieza kills anyone who gets too strong, pinky won't be safe forever either. However, pinky is unconvinced. I think he actually has the right of it here. Frieza's other minions don't seem to have a cultural identity and in-group loyalty that doesn't include Frieza. The saiyans' retaining their traditional social structure and semi-independence is what makes their strength a threat. Then, Pinky crushes him into the ground.

Bardock lands not long after this, and sees the ruins of the native civilization. He uses his eye-scanner thing to search for the "power levels" of his friends (it's a thing. don't ask). Finding a group of appropriately powerful beings some distance away, he closes. By the time he arrives, though, their bodies are already cooling on the ground.

Bardock is stunned. This is a possibility he was totally unprepared for.

It turns out that one of them isn't quite dead yet, though, and won't finish bleeding out until he gets to give his shonen death speech. Not wanting to prolong his friend's suffering, Bardock hurries over to let him give it.

He explains that they were betrayed by Frieza, who - fearing their strength - has repaid their hard work and loyal service with their own blood. He also names Bardock, personally, as the reason why Frieza got so antsy. Which is weird, because Frieza only mentioned Bardock in passing during that scene with his lieutenants, and not in a way that made him sound important. Vegeta was the object of his fear, with the other saiyans just being smaller parts of the problem. Weird.

The guy finishes dying in Bardock's arms, and Bardock is soon after approached by several of the assassins who came following the new signature. They'd been wondering where the fifth squad member had gotten to. I guess they left before the other four, and hadn't had a chance to get the memo about Bardock's medical situation.

The battle commences, and...somehow, it goes in Bardock's favor. Weird. I didn't get the impression that he was *that* much stronger than his squadmates. And, again, Frieza mentioned him in passing as having overperformed, but he didn't make it sound like he was head and shoulders above his top elites.

Although...hmm. There are a few points at which he seems to eliminate opponents by tricking or baiting them into each other's attacks. Which doesn't really fit with his experience, if he mostly wipes out weaker enemies with his team. I wonder if this is supposed to be the fruits of his new precognitive abilities? Predicting enemy movements and/or reading their minds to outmaneuver them like this? I feel like the story would be much more explicit about it, if that was the intent, but it would make a lot of sense.

He kills all four of them, and then wonders aloud at how much stronger than Frieza's other elites he and his kind must have been all along. Yeah, no combat precognition after all, then. Or if so, he's not aware of it.

...however, the real explanation comes a moment later, with the return of Pinky. He was seperated from his troops for some reason. It turns out that he was the main reason the other saiyans went down; his own squad were just there to support him. His battle against Bardock is completely one-sided, and ends with Bardock laying in a pile of rubble at the back end of a huge furrow blasted into the ground.

Pinky is standing over the prone and unmoving Bardock, when he receives a transmission. Frieza wants him back aboard the mothership ASAP, so rendezvous with it as it moves toward Vegeta. Pinky, now named as Didorya (I think he was named in the show as well? I remember Frieza's lieutenants being minor antagonists in their own right, but details beyond that escape me), hurries off to do so, without bothering to confirm Bardock's death. Smh.

Bardock, wounded but very much alive, gets up and looks over the bodies of his companions. The eulogy he gives for them is probably the saddest moment I can recall from this franchise. He looks sadly down at the corpses, and says the words "you were called common soldiers, but in truth you were stronger than most of Frieza's elites." Even now, the best thing he can think to say about his lost friends is "you were really good at fighting." It's like he wants to say how much about them he'll miss, but his culture hasn't equipped him with the tools he needs to express that, and the best he can do is say they were strong fighters.

Back on the mothership, some other henchmen have loaded baby Kakarot into a shuttle pod and are preparing to launch him at an unsuspecting planet of primitives.

Oh, right, I forgot about this. It's...one of the dumbest and most baffling details of Dragonball. Some of the baby saiyans that they sell/rent out are sent AS BABIES to subjugate low-powered planets. The expectation is that the full moon (assuming the planet in question has a moon with the appropriate tidal cycles) will do most of the work, and the baby will get its first taste of combat as a major developmental step.

Like I said, it's dumb.

They're sending him to a planet that they comically mispronounce as "Eeahrth." I forget what the sequence of events ends up being. Something about his tail getting cut off, which prevents him from transforming during the full moon? Whatever, the baby missile thing is dumb.

Anyway, they launch him. Meanwhile, Didorya reports back to Frieza, saying that his mission was accomplished. Frieza irritably informs him that no, his mission was not fucking accomplished, not only did he evidently fail to confirm all the kills but he also somehow FORGOT TO RETRIEVE THEIR DAMNED SHIPS. As in, he just left those saiyan shuttles on the planet's surface, intact and half-fueled, and didn't make sure Bardock was dead.

-_-

Anyway, Frieza's longrange sensors detected Bardock's shuttle fleeing the planet not long after Didorya's departure. He'll be dealing with him - and with stupid idiot Didorya - later. For now, Frieza has the tricky task of exterminating his entire saiyan population without alerting too many of them at once, and killing a lone runaway in a dinky little primitive (by Frieza's standards) saiyan-designed podship is low priority.

Actually, from the sound of things, Frieza might be planning to wipe out the entire species. Not sure how he plans to do that though, given the whole "widely dispersed race of interstellar thugs-for-higher" thing. Maybe I'm misinterpreting him here.

...and, damn, looks like I'm not. Bardock gets another of his very convenient and specific telepathic experiences, and reads Frieza's mind from however many light years away as his mothership approaches the saiyan homeworld.

Which is also called Vegeta. I forgot that detail, that the character was named after the planet.

Bardock approaches the planet. Luckily, either those little saiyan pods are faster than you'd think, or Frieza's mothership is much slower, as the two arrive simultaneously. As he approaches the planet, Bardock's pod passes closely by the one containing his son on its trajectory for Earth.

Bardock has another prophetic glimpse, of his son grown up to young adulthood. This time though, he's not wearing a saiyan battlesuit, but a strange orange jumpsuit, and his expression is placid and unaggressive. This is Goku, the version of Kakarot who actually ends up happening. Bardock isn't sure what to make of this vision, but he seems to find it calming.

It also makes him more sure than ever that he needs to ensure that his people have a future. And that said future would be better if it didn't involve Frieza in any capacity, as antagonist or as employer.

He lands just as Frieza's ship is entering orbit (likely a routine occurrence, given how much use he makes of their services) and ignores the medical orderlies at the landing pad who ask him about his severe injuries. He's told that he just missed his son; if only they'd let him know he was on the way back right this second, they'd have delayed launch a little.

Wait...so the scenes with the hospital, and nursery, and pod launch...those weren't on Frieza's ship? They were in a planetside Vegetan facility? The way it was intercut with Prince Vegeta aboard the mothership, and the way Frieza's other minions seemed to be interacting with different characters in turn, it SEEMED like they were supposed to be in the same place.

Maybe it's just a matter of me not having seen the show in literal decades. Recent watchers or manga readers might be reasonably expected to pick up on locations via visual cues. Not remembering what Frieza's ship or saiyan building interiors looked like may have screwed me up.

Anyway, Bardock runs to a bar that seems to be frequented by merc gang leaders like himself, and tries to warn everyone. On the way there, he nearly collapses due to his untreated injuries, but powers through. Along the way, he has another vision. Vegeta being destroyed by an alpha strike from Frieza's inbound mothership. And then his son being happily raised by members of that weak-looking saiyonoid species he saw another version of him slaughtering before.

The voice of the fishman gloats that this is what he meant to be Bardock's punishment. That he'd see his own people annihilated, and to be forced to understand that they deserved it. And to see his son being raised to love the species that he was supposed to lay low, and grow up to become the opposite of everything his father lived and died for. The sight of everything Bardock knows and believes in being slowly crushed before his mind's eye fills him with determination.

He finally arrives at the cantina, and finds it full of powerful and influential fighters and commanders who can lead the planet's defense.

When he tells them that their reliable longterm customer and patron Frieza has determined that they are a threat and is coming to wipe them all out, they are unfortunately less than credulous.

What's interesting about this is that they're simultaneously mocking Bardock for being an apparent weakling, and laughing at the idea of Frieza being afraid of them...despite how strong they consider themselves to be. There's a weird sort of cognitive dissonance going on here. I can see how it might have come about, though. How long have the saiyans prospered as unambitious hired killers? As practitioners of violence with no involvement in interstellar politics beyond their next paycheck?

This is probably more social commentary than DBZ was trying to shoot for, but I'm weirdly reminded of the lumpenproletariat concept, just with a mercenary rather than worker class. What Frieza fears, really, is the potential for them to form the equivalent of class consciousness and aspire to more than their current astropolitical plateau. I can also see why Prince Vegeta in particular would be making him worried, as he has the combination of noble blood and far-above-average strength that could make a large number of saiyans follow him, and already shows signs of the ambition and charisma needed to eventually become a populist leader.

...

An alternate DB timeline following Vegeta as the hero of the Saiyan Nationalist movement could be interesting, if profoundly silly.

...

As the others tell him that he should really go to the hospital and have whatever brain damage he's suffering from looked at, Bardock stumbles out of the building and looks up at the sky, where Frieza is now in stable orbit. He suddenly hears an unfamiliar voice calling to him, and a moment later sees a vision of grown up Kakarot/Goku.

He reaches out for the apparition, but Goku refuses to turn his face to his father. All he tells him is "It's not too late to be different from him," before vanishing. The "him" being accompanied by a quick flash of Frieza's semi-Gigeresque face.

Inspired into one last determined attempt, Bardock launches himself into space. I was reminded that in the show, before this came out, it was established that Saiyans get a strength boost if they recover from severe injuries, so I guess he powered through that beating long enough to get the boost. As he flies, he has visions of a possible future. Planet Vegeta's surface being scoured of all life. Pockets of saiyan resistance being hunted and exterminated throughout the galaxy. A grown up, bearded, and haggard-looking version of Prince Vegeta being finally dragged before Frieza and killed by him in person. Etc. Bardock grits his teeth and flies at the mothership.

Some of Frieza's own space-capable soldiers emerge from the ship and try to bar Bardock's approach, but he pushes through seemingly dozens of them until he gets close enough to see Frieza emerge from the hatch. Bardock is saying something, but we can't hear what it is. Either for drama's sake, or because DBZ suddenly remembered that there's no sound in space. Probably the former since, you know, they all appear to be breathing. And the charging energy blasts are making noise. So yeah. Bardock shoots an energy blast at Frieza. Frieza, without getting up from the little hoverchair he emerged from the hatch in, conjures a miniature sun that he blocks/absorbs it with.

He then, before Bardock's horrified face, flings the superheated fusion ball directly at him. Incinerating Bardock along with several of Frieza's own soldiers who couldn't get out of the way in time. And then moving onward to strike the planet behind him.

Fire spreads across Vegeta's surface from the miniature star's impact. The planetary crust cracks, and then melts. It's not totally clear if what happens next is entirely a product of Frieza's personal attack, or if his ship weapons play a role as well, but after a horrific lightshow the entire planet - and the majority of the saiyan population - is reduced to a rapidly expanding cloud of dust and plasma.

There's a quick shot of babby Kakarot's pod descending toward Earth. Then for some reason it replays the same footage as it did a few seconds ago, of Bardock rising to confront Frieza, pushing through his guards, and then being disintegrated along with his homeworld. It lets us hear what Bardock is saying this time but there's no big reveal here. It's all just the kind of stuff you'd expect. Righteous condemnation, regret at having ever served Frieza, accusing him of having played a role in the saiyans becoming what they've become (I distinctly remember from the show that Frieza wasn't their first client by a longshot, but he became their biggest one after their mercenary butcher gig got started. So, you could easily infer that he was heavily responsible for that initial evil within their culture growing to become their entire culture, via positive reinforcement. Let's just say that there are historical parallels that could be pointed out here).

Anyway, no shocking revelations here. Just Bardock having one last prophecy, of Kakarot/Goku eventually destroying Frieza in the latter arcs of Dragonball Z. The cackling fishman narration clearly intends for Bardock to see this as ultimate despair, as everything and everyone Bardock knows ends up destroying itself in an autocannibalizing parade of death. However, it seems that fishman didn't expect Bardock to actually undergo character development as a result of the last few visions. Bardock sees Goku being happy and living a peaceful life outside of his battles against galactic evil, and he is comforted in his moment of dying anguish.

I don't know if this counts as a redemption for Bardock, since he didn't get a chance to do anything differently than he otherwise would have. The movie seems to be treating it as one, but I think it needed to give him a chance to actually show regret for his past actions via more than inner monologues and fruitless challenges shouted at Frieza. And given him more time to progress from "my baby son doesn't like the future I've allowed to be given to him" to "oh my god I'm a mass murderer." That progression is implied to have happened internally, but it needed more attention. It would also be nice if it played a role in how Bardock makes his final stand, rather than just his thoughts while making it.

That would have been a better use of the few minutes it spent showing the same fight/destruction scene twice with and without dialogue.

Elsewhere in the galaxy, the child prince Vegeta is munching on the flash-fried body of one of the slaughtered insectoids surrounding him. He gets a communique informing him that his homeworld was struck by a large asteroid and destroyed, and that Lord Frieza is helping the survivors regroup aboard his ship.

He might just be a kid, and an impatient and overbearing one at that, but Vegeta's no fool. He shuts down his communication device, and lays low.

He'll next be seen a couple of decades later, reunited with some other survivors and launching an attack on Earth as part of a desperate plot to get ahold of cosmic magic and revive the others, with himself as their king and soon to be galactic conqueror. There's a nice parallel here, with the two saiyan children stranded on different planets at the end. One of them alone amid carnage wrought by himself, perfectly placed to learn the lesson that you need to be the strongest and most murderous in order to survive. The other landing on an uncontacted planet of primitives, too young to know anything yet, and poised to learn the value of life in and of itself.

The ending, naturally, is a short scene of Kakarot being found by the Kents, and given the name Goku.

End film.


The biggest flaw here is the one I pointed out above, with Bardock's personal development never getting a chance to actually effect his behavior. His desperate attempt to warn his people and then make a doomed solo attack against Frieza's ship seems like what he'd have done if he knew the attack was happening without any of the other visions or empathic pangs. So, on that very fundamental level, the story never really came together the way I feel like it wanted to.

Aside from that and some more minor annoyances that are endemic to the franchise as a whole (implausible stupid evil henchmen, poorly-justified power ups at dramatic moments, the even poorer sense of scale than most pop scifi with, eg, rampaging baby werewolves somehow managing to reduce entire planetary civilizations to ruins in a timeframe of just a few years, etc), though, this was surprisingly good. I had positive memories of DBZ from watching it on Toonami as a kid, but I really didn't think it would hold up this well. Maybe Bardock was exceptionally good by the franchise's standards, but even so. I don't think a forty-five minute JJBA special, for instance, would ever manage to come this close to quality.

One thing that I remembered from before, and which this special delivered in particular force, is Toriyama's skilled handling of antiheroes. Bardock and his friends were all genocidal monsters, but the story humanized them in a way that made it clear how much they were products of their environment, and that they could have been much better if they hadn't been raised in such a dismal culture. Enough so that you're actually able to root for them against Frieza's other henchmen, even before Bardock starts acknowledging anything like regret or self-awareness. Not every author can make monsters this sympathetic without downplaying or whitewashing their monstrosity.

The dorky voice acting might have helped with this, actually. The English dub I watched gives all the characters besides Frieza these very everyday, sometimes dissonantly dopey and nonchalant, humanlike voices. It ruined the attempted seriousness of some scenes, but it ultimately helped humanize these murderous aliens. This could have been done BETTER of course, and I don't think the effect was intentional, but it did ultimately help in that way.

As punchy-man anime goes, this really is surprisingly decent. I wouldn't quite say good, but definitely not bad either.