Dragonball Z: "History of Trunks"

Another 45 minute DBZ special, this one about the backstory of a character who only joined the cast considerably later than the parts of the anime I saw as a kid. He's the son of one of the earlier main characters, I forget which one. He was involved in some weird plot arc involving time traveling robots and a green Frieza-wannabe named Cell that I saw bits and pieces of but couldn't get into.

So, let's see what this Trunks person is all about. Like I said, I barely even remember the name.


Start with all the main characters from the later half of the series - including Vegeta, who ended up giving up his saiyan-centric ambitions and allying with Goku and Co against Frieza if memory serves - standing around making surprised noises at each other. The animation and voice acting are both *way* lower quality than those of the last DBZ special I watched. I don't know if I happened into a bad dub, or if "Bardock" just had unusually good production values for the franchise. We see Goku laying in bed, looking unwell.

And then, a narrator only slightly less obnoxious than the JoJo one cuts in to tell us what could have very, very easily been relayed through dialogue. Goku has fallen ill to an unknown virus that even his hardy saiyan physiology doesn't seem able to combat. Which is why everyone, of his own species and others, is crowding around him without wearing masks or anything, the dumb fucks. Then, the narrator just announces that Goku dies of the disease, and then - in the space of two sentences - explains that time traveling androids subsequently appeared on a densely populated island and started genociding it.

I remember this intrusive narrator from the show. He never gets AS bad as a certain fuckass I might name, but that's not saying much. His presence here makes this special feel much more like just an episode of the Dragonball Z show than like a standalone feature.

So, the super best friends try to fight the mystery robots, and suffer casualties right off the bat. Multiple named characters killed off in the intro. Might as well hang giant neon letters on this that say "short lived timeline that will be prevented from ever happening by the end of the special." Also, I forgot just how bad those androids looked. There might be some intentionality to this by the artist, but...gah, just look at these eyesores:

It's like someone took Alita's fucked up giant robo-eyes and went "now, what kind of face would match these better." And also invited the Marvel Mangaverse guy over to do the foreheads.

Title drop. Then, flash thirteen years ahead, to the androids appearing in another country and beginning a second rampage, presumably having wiped out everyone on that island they hit first. The people recognize the androids on sight, and commence the panicking even before the first row of buildings collapses to their built-in laser guns. The androids laugh among themselves at how pathetic their human victims are, in a way that feels very, very recycled from Vegeta and Nappa's earthfall scene from much earlier in the series. Just with shittier voice acting. Think "kid trying to do a robot voice" shitty. Finally, they give their lasers a rest and trigger a nuclear explosion that cores the city in a single blast.

It kind of makes you wonder why they even bother with the lasers in the first place. Maybe just boredom/sadism.

Flash to Goku's adoptive father figure, Master Roshi, and some extras, driving their submarine to Roshi's island home. It's...just a thing. They live on this tiny island with barely room for a house on it, and they use a submarine to get to the mainland. Just, because. They pick up the screaming and explosions from the new android attack on radio, and Roshi declares that they're going to try and save what's left of the city. Despite the androids having wiped the floor with much more powerful entities last time someone tried to fight them. Well, it's a nice thought if nothing else.

It takes all of the others' begging to convince Roshi to not commit suicide by terminator.

Cut to one of the terminators in question taking time off from the genocidal rampage to rob a clothing store.

She tells the proprietor that his high quality wares and willingness to part with them just saved his life. She tells him that while she is an android, she is still a woman.

Oh FUCK YOU, movie.

"I'm an android, but I'm still a woman?" Seriously? Fucking seriously?

...

It's GYNOID for a female one you knuckle-dragging halfwitted degenerate fucks! Androids are CATEGORICALLY MALE. I'm willing to turn a blind eye to this rancid filth as long as you don't go out of your way to call attention to it, but when you contrast "android" with "woman" in the same goddamned sentence you have absolutely no excuses left you stupid piece of shit. Fuck DBZ, fuck anime, and fuck you. I declare war against existence itself.

...

She leaves the store, and the other android destroys it. She's annoyed at him for killing the owner when she'd decided to spare him, but they get over it quickly with some badly voice acted back-and-forth. And then start running down fleeing refugees in a hovercar thing while making badly voice acted quips about scoring points by hitting pedestrians. These two are an unconventional approach to terminator synths. Unconventional, and very, very visually and auditorily unappealing.

Fuck, I'm just going to find a subbed version. These voices are insufferable.

...fuck, can't find one that's available in my country. Guess I'll just do my best to make sure you all suffer with me.

Cut to a car driving through a vaguely New Mexico looking desert area. Bulma - that's an iridescent-haired scientist lady who ended up marrying Vegeta after he switched sides - and her son who looks like Vegeta with iridescent hair are riding in it. This is Trunks. Right, he's Vegeta's half-human son, I knew that at one point.

They hear the breaking news about the new terminator attack, and Trunks wants to go and fight them. Bulma tries to get him to not do it, but her voice acting is so awful that he would rather face certain death by android than listen to one more minute of it. Up up and away!

Cut back to Terminator Carmaggedon. Android 17 has just run down a small crowd of civilians in his hovercar thingy. Gynoid 18 is judging him for his juvenile taste in destructive techniques. Meanwhile, Trunks arrives and hovers over the burning ruins. The central downtown area is flattened by that multi-kiloton blast they released early on, and the rest looks like its been raining artillery shells for a good few hours. Trunks makes one of those patented DBZ constipated faces at the devastation.

Trunks lands. It's evidently too late to intercept the synths, who have flown or time traveled away. So, he just walks helplessly through the ruins. Pausing occasionally to do the shonen grief thing where you grab one of your arms and tremble while your face twitches. Just to go all in on disaster cliches, he picks up a slightly scorched stuffed animal dropped by a presumably vaporized kid.

Much sad. So bunny.​

After a few minutes of this, Gohan shows up. He's the son of Goku, making him another human-saiyan hybrid, and about a decade older than Trunks if I remember correctly. He doesn't look any happier to see this than Trunks is, but as an experienced veteran who helped take down Frieza he's much more stoic about it.

Flash ahead about to the two hybrids moping around in the bombed out remains of an R&D facility. Trunks crying about how angry he is, and how helpless he feels watching the terminators slowly eat his world away bit by little bit. He begs Gohan to train him to fight them, though if Gohan knew a way of beating them you'd think he'd have done it already. The camera makes a bit show of Gohan's turned back and hard expression as Trunks begs.

Then he just says "okay," and it's not even shot in a way that makes it a funny subverted expectation or anything.

Jump ahead a bit to Bulma coming home. Apparently they LIVE in this bombed out lab complex. I'm guessing this is just an established location from the later series, since it now seems that it's nowhere near the ruined city, and presumably half-destroyed due to some earlier event. She passive aggressives at Trunks for risking his life for nothing, and loudly suspects Gohan of encouraging him to play hero. Still, she makes dinner for the unexpected houseguest as well as herself and her son.

It's also sort of implied that Gohan has been fighting a not-that-successful guerilla campaign against the androids for a while now.

Bulma and Gohan reminisce about their dead saiyan husband and father, respectively. I guess Vegeta also bit it at some time since Goku's anticlimactic and transparently soon to be undone death by disease. She tries to convince Gohan to convince Trunks to not try to fight the androids, not knowing that he's already agreed to train him for just that purpose. Her voice acting is annoying. Then we jump into a training montage.

Trunks learning to trigger the Super Saiyan ultrapowered mode. Yes, they have two ultrapowered modes that are wholly unrelated to each other, with this and also the full moon werewolf thing. Yes, learning to trigger werewolf mode at will and retain self-control while in it would have made more sense and been more interesting than introducing this whole other stupid thing. Trunks sparring with Goku. Trunks being knocked off a cliff and into a whirlpool, which he struggles to escape from...despite being capable of high acceleration levitation, flight, and superstrength. Somehow.

It's pretty baffling.

After some training montage, Trunks asks Gohan to tell him more about his father, who I guess died pretty shortly after Goku did. Gohan tells him that Vegeta was strong and determined like few others, but also prideful and reckless to a fault.

Gohan is sanitizing Vegeta pretty heavily for his son's benefit; this guy was the main antagonist for a big chunk of the early series, and a pretty bloodthirsty one at that. Given the fact that they have these terminators to deal with and that Trunks needs to stay motivated and focused though, I don't blame Gohan for this.

Some time later, the androids are destroying a theme park while riding one of the roller coasters in it. You know, this whole childish destruction thing the terminators have going on could maybe be at least kind of effective if it weren't for the awful animation and voice acting. Though even then, they'd still be really boring antagonists compared to many of the earlier ones. Gohan and Trunk land in front of the synths as they get off one ride and start climbing onto another. I guess the training has been going on for a while then. Weeks? Months? Years? No idea, but they're at the point where Gohan is bringing Trunks into battle now I guess. The hybrids and the synths quip at each other a little, and then Gohan goes Super-Saiyan.

And...tells Trunk to hang back while he fights the androids.

Um. Okay?

Android 17 says that he'll fend the tenacious little interloper this time, and tells Gynoid 18 to just keep having fun in the meantime. Pretty effective demonstration of how little of a threat they consider Gohan to be. Given how many times he's implied to have tried to kill them until now and his visible lack of success, I suppose they have every reason to not take him seriously.

So, Trunks and 18 hang back, while Gohan and 17 fight. Gohan actually, to the latter's surprise, starts getting the better of 17 for a moment, but that just prompts 18 to join the battle as well. Once both terminators are attacking him, Gohan has no chance.

Seeing his mentor who brought him here for some reason get the snot beat out of him, and hearing the androids discuss their intent to make this defeat of Gohan a permanent one, Trunks charges. He manages to blast 18 away from the melee with a surprise hit, and isolate her from the other combatants. And, for a couple minutes following this, Trunks and 18 fight aboard a Ferris wheel, with her blocking his attacks as if either playing with him, or assessing his abilities. Possibly both.

This lasts until he actually manages to land a blow on her. At which point she knocks him senseless and prepares to coup de grace him with a point blank laser blast to the face.

Gohan manages to pull himself away from 17 in time to yoink Trunks out of 18's hand before she can disintegrate him. He tries to fly away, but the androids force him and the kinda-sorta awake again Trunks down into cover by filling the sky with seeker missiles. Then, after briefly attempting a ground based search, the androids get bored and decide to just detonate one of those nukes of theirs.

With the theme park flattened, the androids have some banter about whether they should bother checking to see if the enemy survived. This is the only time so far that their childishness has actually been amusing for me. Their back and forth and not-quite-logical arguments are pretty funny, and the pettiness and laziness underlying all of it is some decent lowbrow comedy. Eventually, they decide to go home for now, and that if Gohan and his new friend survived they'll just beat them again next time just like always.

Hmm. They say they're going "home" before shooting off into the clouds. Do they mean a location that they've claimed in the current world, or are they time traveling to their native era between attacks? Unclear.

The camera pans down to reveal Gohan and Trunks laying out in the open in the blasted area, where the androids could have spotted them with even a bare minimum of effort. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be down to the synths actually being just that lazy, or if it's just the animators who were the lazy ones.

Given the characterization that the androids just received, I think I can be charitable here and assume the former.

Also, it looks like Gohan got one of his arms blasted clear off. No bleeding though, so at least it seems to be cauterized.

Gohan uses his remaining arm to drag himself over to Trunks, and then to pull out some sort of magic healing thingy. He only has one of these left. He deliberates for a moment; should he take it himself, and preserve the strongest fighter of the two to increase the chances of beating the androids in the future? Or, should he give it to Trunks, since he took responsibility for his safety, and was the one who stupidly brought him into this battle before he was ready.

He wonders aloud what his father would have chosen, before biting the bullet and pushing the healing thingy down the unconscious Trunks' throat. Having done that, he loses consciousness as well.

Next scene has Trunks carrying the maimed Gohan back to his laboratory home. Bulma, who was poring over some schematics for what I think is supposed to be a time machine for striking back against the androids' creators, gets up and sees the state of them.

She had apparently been told that Gohan would NOT be bringing Trunks into battle yet. Why did he, really?

They quickly bind Gohan's wounds. Cut forward a bit to him unconscious and bandaged up, laying unconscious in bed in the lab house place. Bulma is bitching Trunks out for what's implied to be the eight or ninth time for trying to fight the androids without telling her about it. Personally, I'm STILL not sure why Gohan brought him to that fight at all if his training wasn't yet complete. Suddenly, Gohan wakes up, to the other two's surprise. Bulma exclaims that the doctor said he should be out for at least a week.

Okay, first of all, if he's expected to be unconscious for a week why aren't we seeing any IV's?

Second, how the hell is the doctor supposed to have any idea how long a superpowered alien/human hybrid will take to regain consciousness in the first place?

Cut to Gohan being back on his feet, and resuming Trunks' training. Trunks making constipated faces as he tries to activate super saiyan mode again. Gohan stands back and psychologically tortures him by reminding him of how loathsome the androids are, how there's no shame in giving in to his hatred, fear, and rage at them, that he must embrace his state of being hurt and use the power it grants him to hurt back.

Holy shit, I'd love to see a philosophical debate between Akira Toriyama and George Lucas. Assuming either of them were even remotely sincere or cogent when writing their respective mind-magic bullshit, of course. This is almost literally the speech that Emperor Palpatine gives to Luke in "Jedi," but it's the good guys.

Also, the whole "give in to your rage" thing is yet another reminder that the super-saiyan mode and werewolf moon mode are completely redundant and should have been the same thing.

As Gohan explains about his unresolved grief at the loss of most of the main cast to the androids a decade ago and how that fuels his transformation, an explosion lights up the horizon. The androids are hitting another, seemingly nearby, city. Gohan enters super saiyan mode and tells Trunks to stay back this time.

Trunks insists that Gohan is in no condition to fight alone yet, as his wounds still aren't quite healed. And also that he, himself, is much stronger now than he was a few...I don't know, days? weeks?...ago. Not really buying that, Trunks. Anyway, he wants Gohan to bring him against the androids again. Gohan refuses. Trunks refuses to not follow him.

I normally hate the "knock the other person out to stop them from endangering themselves fruitlessly" trope with a passion. In this case though, I think it works. Or, rather, it WOULD work.

Unfortunately, it's undermined by the question of why Gohan is going into battle, with or without Trunks.

He's not fully healed yet, and he's been serially unable to stop the androids even when he's in peak condition. All he'll accomplish here, AT BEST, is getting beat up and having to flee again, and they finish destroying their current target either way. At worst, they manage to kill him this time, and then Trunks and the rest of the world are all equally fucked. The smart solution is to stay out of their way until Trunks is fully trained, and then attack them with two fully powered super-saiyans, but that's not what he's doing.

So, he's doing something stupid and reckless. And he just knocked Trunks unconscious for wanting to do the same stupid and reckless thing as himself. So, yay? Very heroic of you?

Maybe we're supposed to dislike Gohan at this point after all, and to see his Palpatine speech as double edged.

The androids are being their not-as-quirky-and-entertaining-as-the-writer-thinks selves as they wreck the city, when Gohan comes rocketing over and slams into 17. 18 does some bad robot voice laughing at him for getting his shirt torn. I guess she's just kind of fixated on clothes in general, idk. The androids decide to have a little competition over who can land the killing blow on Gohan. Gohan makes a terrible shonen speech about how even if they kill him, someone stronger will come and avenge him sooner or later. Lol, that's just a slight modification of "everyone dies eventually." Do villains tend to die younger than heroes in your world, Gohan? Think about this. Really think about this.

I never thought this would happen, after rooting for his child-self as my own child-self, but I've come to hate Gohan.

A long, flashy fight between a hero I don't care about and a pair of villains I don't care about happens. There are a lot of colors and sound effects and stuff. It is exciting or something. For some reason, Gohan is stronger this time and able to fight both of them on even-ish footing. Is this supposed to be the powered-up-after-recovering-from-injuries thing? Um...if Gohan has that ability, why wouldn't he have mentioned that when telling Trunks about his plan? Although, also...he's been fighting these guys for years, right? Can this really be the first time he's fought them while injury-boosted? The androids are acting like he's never been this strong before, so that wouldn't fit. Anyway it doesn't matter because they beat him anyway. At least partly due to him still being missing an arm.

Unexplained massive power boost that doesn't actually make a difference in the end lol. Okay. Sure. I don't know if that cancels out to become less annoying, or compounds itself to become moreso. Maybe both.

Anyway, terminators beat Gohan to the ground and then rain laser strikes on him while he's down and unable to dodge.

We don't actually see him die, but we hear his screams, and then everything goes quiet. Good thing this is going to be timeline reset.

Trunks awakens, and ventures out into the silent ruins, where he finds Gohan's corpse. No shonen post-death speech this time, at least, thank god for small mercies.

He mourns the guy who just beat him unconscious for no reason, and then manages to go Super-Saiyan.

Then we cut to three years later.

-__-

So much for pacing.

A three years older and significantly buffer Trunks is bringing home the groceries to his mother, who's just about finished that timeship she was designing before.

The "capsule corp" logo on each of the engine pods suggests that she's repurposed at least many of these components from the ruined company R&D facility they live in. Which I believe was her family's to begin with, so that makes sense. I wonder if time travel was on the drawing board even before the terminator problem began. Suddenly, there's a newscast reporting another android attack, and Trunks declares that he's going to go fight them.

The framing suggests that there hasn't been a peep out of the androids since the death of Gohan. I guess they do another mass destruction spree every few years and vanish (to a hiding place or back to their own era) in between. The latter would make more sense. It could be that they're just returning home to recharge their batteries for a day or two before returning for the next attack, but their timing for the returns is less perfect, so they show up again a few years later in the timeline.

Or else they're deliberately staggering their temporal expeditions. Like they're waiting for something. Scanning for it every few years to see if it's appeared yet. Hmm.

Anyway, Trunks says he's going to go fight them. Bulma asks him how the fuck he thinks he's going to be able to make a difference when no one else could. He simply says that he can into Super-Saiyan now, and shrugs her off when she reminds him that that was also true of Gohan when they killed him. She says that what they need to do is just lay low until she finishes work on the time machine, and then they can go back, deliver a cure that they've developed to Goku before he dies of that mystery virus, and prepare him and the rest of the team for dealing with the androids. Trunks says that no, he doesn't want help from people in the past, he wants to punch them right now by himself. He grabs a magic sword, and off he goes. This time with some magic sword or something in hand.

I guess that puts the lie to his desire to actually save the people the androids have been slaughtering, if he'd pass up an opportunity to prevent it from having ever happened.

So, he goes and attacks the androids. There's another long and stupid fight. They show some extra sadism this time by imitating the voices of dead people who he knows, but other than that it's just more of the same. The sword doesn't make a difference, and neither (as Gohan's example already demonstrated) does Super-Saiyan mode.

Battered and bleeding, Trunks asks the androids why they're doing all this. They explain that they were created for world domination purposes by someone named Dr. Girou, but since then they've abandoned their creator's purpose and are motivated purely by their contempt and hatred for his species. Well that's not lazy or anything. They knock him out, coup de grace him just like they did to Gohan, and then he wakes up in a hospital bed with no explanation for how he survived that.

Literally. It's never explained.

His mother has finished building the timeship, and she's been waiting for him to recover so that he can take it back with the vaccine. I guess baseline humans can't survive the rigors of time travel, if this is something he specifically needs to do. He expresses skepticism that Goku and Co can make a difference, and she reminds him that he's a stupid idiot whose ideas are all worthless so he should follow hers instead. He can't really argue with that. He also mentions that he's eager to meet his father, and she warns him not to expect too much from Vegeta. Off he goes. The end.


I guess there was a nice subversion here, with shonen punchy-man logic actually NOT being the solution to this problem at all no matter how melodramatic and monologue-y the punchy-men are about it and how many nonsense power ups they get. That's something I wish this genre would do more often. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the ONLY good thing about this special, and it's not enough to carry it.

Maybe I'd have liked this a little more if I were better familiar with the part of the series it connects to, but I doubt it would help *that* much. If the characters are boring here, then they were probably boring in the show too. Adult Gohan is lame. The androids are lame. Trunks is just a repeat of Child Gohan with an inferior supporting cast. And of course, no amount of context would help these godawful production values.

Bardock managed to capture most of the best aspects of DBZ while circumventing most of the worsts. Trunks, I feel, did the opposite. Aside from that one interesting subversion, everything in it felt like a weaker, reprocessed version of earlier arcs.