I hadn't been watching this, but the 20th episode came out and I got curious. So I downloaded all 20 eps and watched it in one sitting. The first 15 episodes tell approximately the same story as the first recent movie "Battle of the Gods".

In brief, there is a new character named Beerus (or Bills, depending on how you romanize it). He's the God of Destruction and he spend most of his time sleeping, for decades at a time. But once in a while he wakes up, and then he goes out and destroys a few or a lot of planets, for no obvious reason except that it's his job, or his role. He has a servant named Whis, and they both are millions of years old, if not older than that. Beerus is reputed to be the strongest person in the universe, and he terrifies the Supreme Kai, not to mention North Kai.

Anyway, during his last sleep he had a dream about a "super saiyajin God", who was able to give him a good fight. The Oracle Fish (one of his servants) confirmed that there was going to be a very strong opponent for him at this time, which is why he set his alarms to wake up.

So Whis informs him that nearly all the Saiyajin died when Frieza blew up their planet, but a handful survive on Earth. Goku is on North Kai's planet training, and Whis and Beerus show up there, and it ends up with Goku begging Beerus for a match. Beerus creams Goku.

Eventually, back on Earth, they summon Shenlong and he tells them the story about the Super Saiyajin God. It requires five saiyajin of good temper to push their power into a sixth -- which is a problem because there are only five: Goku, Gohan, Goten, Vegita, and Trunks. Well, actually there is a sixth: Videl is pregnant (with Pan). So they try it with Videl and it works. Goku becomes a super saiyajin God, and he fights Beerus and doesn't win.

But he gives Beerus a credible fight, and Beerus decides not to destroy the earth. End of story.

In the movie, that's about an hour and a half. In DBSuper it takes 14 episodes. DBS inherits the feature of DBZ of dragging out the fights to an insufferable degree.

In the movie, the process of making Goku a super saiyajin God takes two minutes. In episode 9 of DBS it takes 6 minutes. It just goes on and on and on. I thought the shorter version worked better.

Goku's fight with Beerus takes 15 minutes in the movie and takes fully five episodes in DBS. They took a 15 minute movie battle and stretched it to an hour and a half in the TV series. It drags. I started skipping.

I've noticed before that movies are often far better than original series. The Nanoha A's movie was a lot better than the A's TV series, for instance. Not that the TV series was bad, of course, but the movie was drastically better. (For one thing, they completely eliminated the "masked men" subplot, and the story was better for it.) And in this case the "Battle of the Gods" movie was a lot better than the DBS retelling of the same story.

And I thought the first Nanoha movie was better than the first TV series. (That movie was also a retelling.)

Of course, a movie has a larger budget per minute, and it doesn't have as rushed a schedule, and they can spend more time in preproduction doing planning and plotting and script writing, and all those things show.

It was interesting that the Mouretsu Pirates movie deliberately changed some of the continuity. In particular, they redesigned the bridge of the Benten Maru. The original bridge really didn't make sense; the new one is drastically better. But you can also see the advantages of more money, more time, and more care as well. It just looks cleaner and better, and the story telling is tight.

There's a Girls und Panzer movie. (It hit the theaters in Japan last weekend.) It isn't a retelling; what we've heard is that it happens two years after the TV series. Which means all the members of Anko team will have graduated from Hakuo Academy. They've taken their time with it, again, and I assume it has a bigger budget. I wonder what story they're telling? Has anyone seen anything about it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 752 words, total size 4 kb.