DB30YEARS: Special Dragon Ball 30th Anniversary Magazine

by Michael LaBrie

a story that ever needed to be told, but it adds enough to the world and is cute the whole way through. You can feel the author having fun in every single chapter, and you will have a smile on your face right there with him. In my book, that is a “win.”

  You might just want to conveniently happen to skip over most of “Dragon Ball Minus.”

  MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He aims to own every piece of Jaco literature.

  Jaco: One Last Look

  Jaco works as a stand-alone story, but when viewed through another lens…

  By Julian Grybowski

  Akira Toriyama originally never meant for Jaco the Galactic Patrolman to be a Dragon Ball story at all. It began life as a draft for another Galactic Patrol manga in the vein of Jiya, for Toriyama to script and Masakazu Katsura to draw. But when Toriyama’s planned series for the 45th anniversary of Weekly Shonen Jump began to look a little too much like Battle of Gods, he reworked his unfinished draft into something he could do himself, and almost as an afterthought, linked it up to his most popular series with the final chapter.

  All of which is quite the surprise, really, because it seems to work so well. Viewed through the lens of Dragon Ball, Jaco is transformed from a low-key, odd-couple comedy with moments of high action into a profoundly melancholy meditation on the nature of fate and unintended consequences.

  Consider for a moment: we already know that Omori’s time-travel research will not be completed by him. Moreover, even if he had succeeded in traveling back in time and preventing the disaster that killed his wife and assistants, the nature of time-travel in this world means that they would still be dead when he returned to his own time. Would Omori have known that beforehand? And would he have been satisfied knowing that at least one incarnation of himself could live happily, or would it have simply embittered him further? Ultimately, he is destined never to find out, as we know Tights’ sister Bulma must be the one to finally complete the time-machine, and perhaps Omori is even a better person for this failure.

  We also know that, despite Jaco saving East City from a brush with disaster, it is doomed to be obliterated by Vegeta and Nappa as a long-term consequence of failing his primary objective, which is to stop a young Saiyan from arriving on Earth. The city and its inhabitants are never restored with the use of the Dragon Balls, but this event is also necessary for the Earth as a whole to be saved countless times by that same Saiyan. Son Gohan, too, is ultimately rewarded for his selfless choice to take in the child who fell from the sky with a death-by-origin-story, but that’s how it has to be.

  Even “Dragon Ball Minus,” while not perfectly executed, has a similar air of subdued inevitability. We know that Bardock is right to suspect Freeza, and that whatever his or Gine’s misgivings, they must part with Kakarrot in order to ensure his survival. But we also know that Bardock’s last stand against Freeza is doomed from the start, and his message to Raditz will set his sons against each other. Would Bardock have still done this, had he known? We never get to find out. Young Kakarrot, with his look of pure anguish as he sees his mother and father for the last time, is fated to forget them, and himself, as he is set on the path to becoming the carefree boy, and eventual hero, we meet in Dragon Ball. Freeza’s genocide of the Saiyans has to sow the seeds of his own destruction. It cannot happen any other way, or the series we know cannot be.

  Viewed in this fashion, Jaco the Galactic Patrolman is less about the apparent plot—an alien policeman stranded on Earth, with an important mission—and more about how the Dragon Ball world, which appears as a given, is subtly but crucially shaped by the actions of “unknowns,” who have no inkling as to their importance to the story. One wrong move, and everything would simply come apart. Is all this simply the convergence of random events, or is there some unseen force, like fate, shaping things as necessary? That much seems to be the reader’s to decide, but the fact that Jaco is imbued with this (perhaps unintentional!) question makes this the author’s most mature work yet.

  Some have maligned Jaco for its apparent lack of action and its dry humor, but to my eye, it’s all by design. Toriyama has bigger sharks to punch here. By showing just how improbable everything in the Dragon Ball is from the outset, we gain a new respect for its unsung, unnoticed heroes, and see that it’s more than just strong guys firing energy beams at each other. Everyone has their role to play in the story of life, whether it be heroic, comedic...or tragic.

  JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) lives in Japan and provides translations for Kanzenshuu. He has extensively documented Jaco’s serialization, other releases, and impact.

  Dragon Ball Z Fandom in Ye Olden Days

  The true confessions of a flea market junkie

  Before Crunchyroll, before BitTorrent, before YouTube, before Hotline servers, before (well, at the same time as) IRC, if you wanted to watch anime subtitled, it had better have been licensed by someone cool. If not? VHS fansubs were your joint.

  By Meri LaBrie

  Imagine waking up at 6:00 a.m., before the morning sun has even crept into your bedroom, just to watch cartoons. In a groggy state, you stumble downstairs toward the tiny television kept in your family’s living room. It’s time for a before-school ritual, armed with a bowl of cereal of dubious nutritional value in one hand, and a remote control in another. This setting can only mean one thing: it’s anime time! Suddenly, I’m wide awake!

  The year is 1996, and my 15-year-old self had recently discovered Sailor Moon that fall. One fateful morning, a TV ad for an equally exotic “japanimation” appeared during a Sailor Moon commercial break. There was some little kid who looked like a monkey, but there was fighting, a blue-haired chick with a gun, some giant robots, gorillas, and lord-knows what else.

  “Dragon Ball? MUST FIND OUT WHAT IT IS!” Thanks to the ad, I found Dragon Ball’s local listing time and finally watched an episode (at an even earlier time than Sailor Moon, no less).

  Unlike Sailor Moon, which aired every morning in syndication, Dragon Ball aired only one weekday and one weekend morning per week. That said, I admit it wasn’t love-at-first-sight when I had a chance to watch an episode of Dragon Ball. However, the more I watched Dragon Ball week after week, the more I started to “get it.” However, it didn’t reach the level of sheer obsession Sailor Moon caused within me. That soon began to change once I discovered a certain “underground” (I use the term loosely for dramatic effect) scene in my high school.

  As anime started to become ever-so-slightly more popular in school, the kids drawn to it began coming out of the woodwork. I was in Spanish class reading a copy of Animerica magazine (THE go-to anime mag of the day) when a friend happened to notice I was reading a Dragon Ball article. I exclaimed over a drawing of “Goku.” That was when my friend said those fateful words to me: “That’s not Goku. That’s his SON.”

  Wait. WHAT?! Goku, that wacky kid with the tail, has a SON!

  Well, color me intrigued.

  My pal then explained to me (thanks to the wonders of his growing up in Korea) that Dragon Ball continued into Dragon Ball Z, with a cast of older characters and even more of their offspring! And aliens, no less!

  Needless to say, I HAD to learn more. DBZ soon aired on North American television not too long after. By growing my pool of anime friends at school, my knowledge of the Dragon Ball universe expanded. And with it, as did my knowledge on where to get my fix.

  Like the mythical land of Valhalla or El Dorado, some pals at school clued me into a flea market off a local highway. A flea market? Really? That dirty, dingy place next to the Sam’s Club that I’ve always known was there, but never stepped foot in? Why is this a magical place?

  Simple: piles upon piles upon PILES of fansubs. It was a glorious sight to behold! I essentially had nearly the entire library of DBZ at my fingertips. So much time, not enough money.

  A few friends had loaned me fansubs from other series in prior months, but never before had I ventured out to obtain tapes of my own. I had a bit of money saved up,
and I found that by age 16-17, I spent any and all disposable income on anime products (legal or otherwise). Fansubs soon joined the list of “must-have” anime items.

  Every weekend was like a treasure hunt. I had only just gotten “online,” so my knowledge of the DBZ timeline was spotty at best. There were “sagas” or “arcs,” and the nice (if not somewhat shifty) folks at the fansub shop in the flea market did a good enough job of labeling their tapes.

  This particular shop sold three VHS tapes for $15, and I considered this a deal. Sometimes the tapes had either no packaging or inaccurate graphical treatments if one was lucky enough to get a tape with a clamshell case. As for the content, the number of episodes per tapes ranged anywhere from three to four (FOUR?! What a bargain!), and the visual quality varied wildly. Some tapes were so horribly garbly that I had to return them to the shop. I eventually wised-up and tested the tapes while still in the shop before handing over my hard-earned money.

  In this age of high-definition media, it’s frankly hard to imagine media’s visual quality as anything less than perfect. Fansubs back then (or at least, the ones I obtained) were several generations removed from the original master tapes, which themselves were derived from TV broadcasts...or LaserDiscs for the