97 "Namek-sei Shoumetsu ka!? Daichi o Tsuranuku Ma no Senkou"
(The Destruction of Planet Namek!? The Ground is Penetrated by A Demonic Flash)		 99-6-26
82 "Namek's Destruction" 99-10-20

Gohan and Piccolo arrive at the spaceship and prepare to leave Namek. Realizing that Goku may just beat him after all, Freeza decides that he would rather kill them both than be defeated. He sends a a ball of energy into Namek's core, and tells Goku that the planet will explode in five minutes. On Earth, Kami telepathically contacts Kaiou and tells him that Mr. Popo is almost finished collecting the Dragon Balls.

In this episode, we are asked to simply "accept" one of the most ridiculous premises ever conceived for any work of fiction. Freeza throws an energy ball of some sort into the core of Namek, which, according to him, will cause the planet to explode in "five minutes." That's not the problem. We have learned to accept by now the ALREADY ridiculous premise that Dragon Ball characters can just kind of do things like that whenever they want. The problem is that it takes ten episodes from the time of Freeza's attack to the moment the explosion actually takes place. Ten episodes.

I have learned from doing FAR TOO MANY of these episode comparisons (someone please kill me now) that when you remove the opening and endings, recaps/previews, eyecatches and commercials, that the typical episode of Dragon Ball Z is about 18 minutes long. Ten episodes times 18 minutes equals 180 minutes. That's three hours.

There is a rather wide gulf between five minutes and three hours.

Basically, there really isn't any excuse for this. The most hilarious thing about the whole "five minutes controversy" is that there's actually a controversy. There are people out there, breathing the same air as you and I, who believe that this "five minutes" nonsense can be defended.. "Goku and Freeza are moving at light speed and everything is being slowed down so we can see them" they say. Even if we decided to succumb to the lowest depths of idiocy and accept THAT, there's still the fact that it takes a good TEN minutes just for everyone to call the various dragons and make their various wishes. And that doesn't even count the scenes on Kaiou-sei. Or Earth. OR THE FACT THAT YOU'RE GENERALLY NOT MOVING AT LIGHT SPEED WHEN YOU'RE STARING AT EACH OTHER FOR FIVE OF THE TEN EPISODES.

Even in the manga it seems unbearably stretched. But I know for a fact that Toriyama likes to be an asshole just because it gives him pleasure (read his interviews on toriyama.org if you want proof), so this is probably just something he did to give idiots like me something to waste time complaining about while he cashes his royalty checks. As for the anime, I think the meaning is essentially the same. Toei is making fun of their own ability to stretch out four pages of manga into ten minutes of animation and still get people around the world to watch and love the show.

See, this is exactly why I love Dragon Ball. And humanity.

Narrator: "POW! Right in the kisser! But wait... ho ho ho... I'd be shaking in my boots too, Freeza!"

"POW?" "Kisser?" "Shaking in my boots?" "HO HO HO????" It is of course clear that this line sucks. We can all plainly see that. The problem with it is that it sucks in really complicated ways that would take longer to discuss than the line is actually worth. Going into the suckosity of "ho ho ho" alone would take me the rest of the day.

Freeza: "This CUNT be!"

Hey, I didn't say it. Linda Chambers did. Chris Sabat either didn't hear it or he let her get away with it, and that's basically all I have to say about that. SHE DOES IT SEVERAL TIMES! Listen to it you guys, it's unmistakable.

Kaiou: "We're back in the saddle!"

Not so bad in itself, but it has the unfortunate side effect of hearkening back to one of the dub's blackest moments, which is of course Tenshinhan's death.

Freeza: "I can breathe in space, but you can't!"

Sure, this could just be my own wacky theories again, but I don't think there's any air in space to breathe. I believe Freeza may have been better suited to say that "I can SURVIVE in space, but you can't." There is a subtle difference between the two. Also, it's "cunt" not "can't." Silly voice actors cunt even keep their language consistent.

I wanted to bring up that one scene where that guy, who is of the same race as Kiwi, gets completely annihilated for talking smack about Freeza.

First of all, the guy who played him easily had the best voice in the entire dub, and I'm not exaggerating. Uh... why did they hire him to do a character with less than 20 seconds of screen time? I swear they just do that to tease us. THESE are the characters that Chris Sabat should be playing. The stupid, useless, instantly killed characters.

Second of all, his death is VERY, VERY GRAPHIC, and not altered by FUNimation in the least. He is killed by being shot so many times with beam weapons that he falls to the deck, burns to death, and literally disintegrates. Sure, they can show that, BUT THEY CAN'T SHOW A NAKED BUTT???

When Gohan is flying by the bodies of Rikuum, Bahta, and Gurudo, a head is added onto Gurudo's decapitated body. They must have been rushing on this one, because the head looks like crap, and isn't even close to the right shade of green. The really funny thing about this shot is that Rikuum's ass is hanging out just as it was in the Japanese version, something that FUNimation censored in the Season 2 episodes. It's a single picture that sums up all of Season 3, actually. While they're still censoring certain things, they are leaving others alone that would have been censored before.

I have two questions about this shot, though. Just who was it who came along and moved all of the corpses together? Gurudo fell considerably far away from where Rikuum fell, and likewise for Bahta. But in the shot, they are all lying right next to each other. Maybe it's one of those "symbolic" things that I just shouldn't ask questions about. Or maybe Buruma got really bored at some point and decided to "play."

My other question is... how the hell (NOT HFIL) did these guys have their bodies in the afterlife if their bodies were still on Namek? Only Goku and the other good guys were allowed to use their bodies there, and everyone else just becomes one of those little ghosts that you see scampering around in all the "afterlife" episodes. We could have just assumed that the Ginyu had been given their bodies after dying, but then the animators decided to add this shot. Oh well, BOTH of these bits are filler, so it doesn't count anyway.

(10 sec.) This is actually a cut from the PREVIEW for the next episode, which is a first. The cut is part of a scene that I will get to discussing in the next episode, so I'll go into more detail about it there.