92 "Choutokudai no Genki Dama Kore ga Saigo no Kirifuda da!! "
(A Great Big Genkidama - This is My Last Trump Card!!)		 91-5-22
77 "Trump Card" 99-10-13

Although Goku's Kamehameha did next to nothing to damage Freeza, he is enraged that anyone could hurt him at all and begins to attack Goku ferociously. On Kaiou-sei, the Ginyu Tokusentai appear and challenge Tenshinhan, Chaozu, and Yamucha to a fight. Meanwhile, a desperate Goku raises his hands to gather energy for a Genkidama, hoping that this last-ditch effort will be effective.

If I remember correctly, a bunch of new names appeared under the cast list of the dub as of this episode's ending credits, which was a great relief to me when I first saw it. At first I thought this might mean that they had hired new voices to take over for Chris Sabat, who literally does a good third of the voice acting in this show. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case.

Sure, they'll hire a new guy to play Gurudo for three episodes, but they'll have the SAME guy play three principal characters (Vegeta, Piccolo, and Yamucha, along with literally dozens of minor characters) for the rest of the series. Does this make sense to anyone besides FUNimation? Do they have any idea how cheap this makes their production look? How much an object of ridicule it becomes when you hear the same actor's voice over and over again? It is such a slap in the face of this show that they supposedly "respect," and they do it for the sole reason that it's just "cheaper and more convenient" that way.

The scene where the Ginyu arrives on Kaiou-sei is rather amusing in this respect, since out of the 8 characters present, 3 of them (Rikuum, Yamucha, and Jiisu) are done by Sabat. None of them very well, I might add. Rikuum now sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger for some unfathomable reason, Jiisu still has that stupid not-quite-British-yet-not-quite-Australian accent, and Yamucha is just a disaster.

So, onto this episode. Not much in the way of alterations, except one VERY NOTABLE censored shot. Also, FUNimation saw fit to change the title card slightly, which they have never done before. The Japanese title card has a plain black background, but I suppose that FUNi thought this was too "boring" so they used a frame from the scenes where Goku is gathering ki for the Genkidama. Is it an important change? Not at all, and that's kind of my point. Why do they have such a lack of confidence in every little aspect of the way the show was originally presented? No one is going to start shrieking uncontrollably and change the channel if there isn't a pretty picture under the title card.

Actually this is more of a "stupid pronunciation alert." Notice that both the narrator and Kuririn incorrectly pronounce "Kamehameha" as "Kamayamaya." I don't know about the narrator, but Sonny Strait (Kuririn) has no excuse for making this error, since he's pronounced it correctly before.

You know, I just realized something... up until this episode, the only times that they've actually SAID the word "Kamehameha" during this season is when they're performing the attack - one syllable at a time. Perhaps when they mention it in conversation from now on, it will still be slurred the way they've been doing it since the beginning.

So maybe we didn't get the Kamehameha back from them after all...

In a shocking display of nudity, Vegeta is completely buck naked when Goku has his little "vision" of him. Booty, tail and all. I have no idea why Goku is imagining him that way, but it's probably not something we should be speculating on. Does anyone else find it odd that Dragon Ball has very little female nudity (none at all in DBZ, I believe), while at the same time having more male/child nudity than any other anime in history? Hmm...

In any case, FUNimation "corrects" these shots by putting an incredibly crappy looking pair of blue pants on Vegeta, and removing his tail entirely.

There's one last thing I should mention about this scene, although it really has nothing to do with the censoring. I'm just too lazy to start a whole new "side note" just for this. Anyway, when King Vegeta, Oozaru Vegeta, Bardok and Chibi Vegeta appear in the vision, they don't each speak with their own individual voices as they do in the dub. The voice of Vegeta himself speaks through all of them. Interesting how this changes the feel of the scene entirely, it's something you kind of have to see for yourself.