One of the BDs I bought last time was a collection of two of the movies. They're both real downers, but unlike most of the movies, these are both part of the series canon. Which, I guess, is why they're called "Specials" and not "Movies". (Well, except that the "movie" about Garlic Junior is also part of canon. But never mind that.)

The first is "History of Trunks" and I'd already seen it. It's about the alternate time line from which Mirai no Trunks comes and shows how it was that he ended up alone against 17 and 18. It starts with Goku dying of the heart virus, and it ends just as Trunks is about to enter the time machine for his first visit to the past.

The other I hadn't seen before and was quite curious about. It's titled "Bardock, Father of Goku". More, including frame grabs and spoilers, below the fold.

When Raditz first shows up on Earth at the beginning of DBZ looking for Goku (or Kakkarot, Goku's name among the Saiyajin), when he first lays eyes on Goku he mentions that Goku looks just like their father.

That's Bardock, and he does look almost exactly like Goku, except for the scar on his face. It's the same voice, too. But it's sure not the same character, and that's what makes this story particularly interesting.

The Saiyajin are black hearted bastards. They work for Frieza doing genocide for hire. And I mean that literally. There are a lot of planets that Frieza wants depopulated, and the Saiyajin are among the best of his minions at the job. And they enjoy it, too.

Bardock is part of a team of five Saiyajins, and our first view of them is on a planet, committing genocide, with all five of them as ouzaru.

The one on the left there, wearing red, is a woman. Apparently Saiyajin women in Ouzaru form have breasts.

I've long been curious what Saiyajin women look like. Apparently they look like Videl, or at least this one does, at least in broad daylight. Anyway, this particular team has been getting a lot of work, and they've been getting hurt, and that being the way of it with Saiyajins, they've been getting stronger. At one point, a medtech mentions that with all the damage Bardock has been getting, his power is above 10,000. For comparison purposes, at the beginning of DBZ, Goku's power was 416. Raditz was 1200. Vegita was about 18,000. Frieza, eventually, in his final form is supposed to have a power level of about 4 million. (Goku as a super-Saiyajin was a bit more than that.)

Bardock is the nominal hero of this story. But he's not a very admirable guy. It's not just that he and the other four just committed genocide. Back home, his second son has been born. The five of them are hanging out after their big night. The others ask him if he wants to go back to see Kakkarot, but it's been reported that Kakkarot has a power level of just 2, which makes him complete scum. Bardock isn't interested in seeing scum, even if it's his own son.

One of the reasons Frieza wants this particular planet is that it has a reputation for being a source of a peculiar kind of energy. Turns out that's true. One survivor jumps out of some rubble and manages to hit Bardock. Turns out he struck a special "pressure point" while full of that same special energy. He has given Bardock the ability to see the future. Why? Because he himself has that power, and he knows what's coming for the Saiyajin, and he wants Bardock to suffer in that knowledge.

This is referring to the fact that Frieza has decided that the Saiyajin are too powerful and could eventually become a threat to him. (It's actually Zarbon who convinces Frieza of this, but Dodoria helps. Which makes their eventual fates that much more deserved and satisfying: Vegita eventually killed them both. And he wasn't gentle about it, either.)

After blasting the guy, Bardock (in front) collapses. The other four get him back home and into medical care. And he heals up physically, but the doctor detects strange things happening in his nervous system. Bardock is starting to have visions.

The other four get sent on another mission, and decide they can't wait for Bardock. So they leave. Eventually, when Bardock gets released from medical care, he goes after them. And what he finds is that Dodoria and some henchmen have killed his friends. Dodoria almost kills Bardock, too. He thinks he has, but before he can make sure he receives a summons from Zarbon, and leaves.

Bardock is pretty badly hurt. And he has learned that Frieza intends to destroy planet Vegita, home of the Saiyajins. He's seen it in his visions, and Dodoria confirmed it. So he heads back to planet Vegita, and gets there just before Frieza's ship.

He limps, crawls, and forces his way to what looks like a bar, and tries to tell the other Saiyajins there that Frieza is coming to kill them all. They don't believe him, and laugh it off.

He cusses them out and drags himself up to the top of the building, and then summons up his power and flies off into space to meet Frieza's ship.

Frieza's ship dumps out about a gazillion fighters to take Bardock on, but even hurt he's too much for them. He fights his way through them.

Frieza exits the ship on top. Bardock fires his best energy blast at Frieza, expecting it to kill him, but it is nothing to Frieza. Frieza creates a huge energy ball and shoots it at the planet, which blows up. Bardock is in the line of fire and is the first to die. But before he does, he gets one more vision, of Goku defeating Frieza, and knows that at least the Saiyajins will have the last laugh.

I didn't mention that the medical staff on Vegita decided that the only thing to be done with someone as weak as Kakkarot was to send him, as a baby, to a distant world to destroy the place. The capsule containing him is shown flying away from planet Vegita just as Bardock arrives.

The special ends with baby Kakkarot being found by grampa Gohan.

One of the more interesting things in the show is seeing Prince Vegita and Nappa. Looks like Nappa is a man-servant assigned to Vegita, and Vegita shows no sign of particularly liking him. In fact, Nappa seems to be something of a suck-up.

Of course, Vegita doesn't seem to like anyone anyway. At the very end, he's shown receiving a radio message that the home planet has been destroyed by an asteroid, and nearly all the Saiyajin are dead. And he doesn't seem very interested.

I had always wondered about their relative ages. What this seems to imply is that Vegita is about ten years older than Goku at the time they meet. (Between time spent in the Room of Spirit and Time and time spent by Goku in otherworld during which he didn't age, the difference would have been considerably greater by the end of DBZ. And then in DBGT Goku was reduced to a child by a wish.)

The source material (i.e. the original film that Funimation used to digitize this) really isn't good enough to justify HD, but Funi did their best on it. And it's a good transfer. Here's a full-size frame grab.

But the story itself is one of the better ones in the canon, and it makes sense to pair it with the History of Trunks. That's because Bardock, like Trunks, is trying to challenge fate.

Trunks travels into the past in hopes of preventing TEOTWAWKI. It doesn't turn out the way he hoped, and for a while it looks like his attempt at meddling may have made things even worse. But it turns out OK in the end, with the new timeline free of killer androids. And when he returns to the future for the last time, he is so much stronger and faster than before that he is able to make short work of 17 and 18, and later of Imperfect Cell. Trunks is a good person, and a very sympathetic character, and he gets a happy ending.

Bardock is also trying to challenge fate. He knows that Frieza is going to destroy planet Vegita, and he hopes to stop that. Only he fails.

The other reason it's interesting to watch is because the Saiyajins are such evil bastards. Bardock has to be considered an anti-hero. He is a violent murderer, after all, glorying in destroying innocent peoples on far planets, for fun and for pay. Every single one of the Saiyajins who died that day will end up in Hell; there's not a good soul among them.

Yet they come across as rather likeable people. The other four that Bardock hangs out with are friends of his, and you can feel the loyalty, and the concern when he collapses.

That said, the universe is a better place with almost all of the Saiyajins gone, even if it was Frieza who did it. So it's a pretty neat story, morally very ambiguous. Watching it gave me interesting feelings, because deep down I knew that Bardock was a black hearted bastard, and yet there was a level on which I admired him and respected him.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1591 words, total size 10 kb.