DB30YEARS Page 7
Or how about what’s arguably the worst problem: Columbia’s tendency to treat each new suite-structured release as if no CDs existed prior, instead of placing proper emphasis on previously unreleased music? We do NOT need M817 on three completely different collections, not while there’s rarer material begging for disc space. If it’s a matter of reviving material from out-of-print CDs, why must each release be so far apart from one another as to merit this practice to begin with?
The vocal songs are generally unnecessary as well; there’s plenty of room for those on the deluge of albums that come out each year. In 1998 Sailor Moon received a complete release of BGM in a colossal 10-disc collection (the “Memorial Music Box”). This from the same company and music label that owns Dragon Ball, so why couldn’t we have been graced with the same miracle for our own favorite series? Did the Sailor Moon set sell poorly, making Columbia wary of large BGM compilations? (Proving the sad case that Sailor Moon fans get everything Dragon Ball fans want.)
To make matters even more depressing, our chances of getting more releases of Kikuchi’s scores for Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z have worsened over the years: the BGM Collection is still the latest Kikuchi release for the Dragon Ball series, and as of this writing, that was nearly nine years ago. Dragon Ball GT wasn’t even scored by Kikuchi; the reins for that project went to Akihito Tokunaga. Ever since Dragon Ball Kai first started airing in 2009 with a completely new and more modern-sounding score by Kenji Yamamoto, I’ve had the uneasy impression Toei’s been slowly phasing Kikuchi out of the picture entirely due to his “dated” sound. Even the incident where the scandal over the melodies Yamamoto stole gave rise to a return of the classic Kikuchi recordings was merely out of a last-minute necessity...and it proved to be a disaster, as the person in charge of music placement, possibly due to the pressures of short notice, made abysmally poor judgment calls as to which cue would fit each scene. Add to that the fact that placement was limited to cues on the BGM Collection (because those were the ones most recently remastered and therefore offered the best sound quality), and even then, apparently only the selections they had full rights to, causing massive repetition in the use of certain cues, and it’s no wonder this whole change went over with fans like a lead balloon. I shudder whenever it hits me that this was probably most of the more casual American fans’ introduction to Kikuchi.
Consider Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans, Episode of Bardock, Battle of Gods and the return of Dragon Ball Kai for the Majin Buu arc, all productions from recent years, none of which Kikuchi had anything to do with. It seems that Shunsuke Kikuchi has passed the baton on to composers less daring to be unique or to indulge in strong melodies, favoring instead shapeless atmosphere and superficial attempts to be “epic,” which in the end prove largely forgettable. I recognize that, at the age of 83, Kikuchi is no spring chicken, and that’s a laughable understatement. I can’t deny being sorely disappointed, though, when the composer for Battle of Gods was announced and it was someone else. In any case, new composers would be inevitable anyway, but I would have at least preferred one with a much more classic sound. Is that really so much to ask?
Sometimes, all these frustrations pile up and I just feel like throwing my hands up in the air in defeat. In the end, it all comes down to how much I wish the general public placed much more value on film and TV scores. If they did, there wouldn’t be any of this nonsense where amazing music sits rotting away in a vault instead of being commercially released, so that those of us who appreciate this powerful art form could have our Holy Grail. Of course, I was spoiled in my early youth by some truly phenomenal TV music, so perhaps that experience gave me a certain privilege everyone ought to have. I was barely five when Disney’s DuckTales premiered, with its gorgeous collection of leitmotifs and bombastic statements in brass by Ron Jones (yet another unreleased and criminally under-appreciated score), so I guess it’s no wonder it didn’t take much for Kikuchi’s equally bombastic musical voice to work its magic on me. I think it’s an egregious shame, as I write this in 2014, that this kind of orchestral score is a dying breed.
As is to be expected, not everyone is a fan of the Kikuchi score, an opinion they are of course entitled to. However, with the Dragon Ball series offering nearly a dozen different composers (which is outrageous, really), everyone has their own favorite.
What I always find whenever someone criticizes Kikuchi is that their argument unfailingly amounts to “but his style is so dated!” I might have been on board with this sentiment once upon a time, but it took getting the 5-CD set for me to realize that all this talk about “dated = bad” is hogwash, especially in these times, when film and TV scores have all but gone down the crapper. In fact, when I look at how all the composers since Kikuchi have been coming and going like clockwork (Norihito Sumitomo seems to be sticking around for a while, but it’s only a matter of time before he too packs his bags, as he’s not exactly Don Rosa to Kikuchi’s Carl Barks), I realize that “dated” is an outlandishly ignorant word to describe my favorite Dragon Ball score.
In all honesty, it’s timeless.
KENNETH (“kenisu3000”) documents Dragon Ball music at: kenisu.webs.com
The Inevitability of Filler
Garlic Jr. and the afterlife tournament…but…also the driving episode. So yeah. Filler.
Shonen fans more than anyone else are used to “filler” in their anime adaptations: material newly and usually exclusively added to the TV series to pad things out, stall for time, and generally wait for the manga to get further ahead.
By Heath Cutler
Whenever an anime adaptation of a concurrently produced manga series is being developed, it is almost inevitable that some anime-only material is created to “fill in” or buffer out specific manga events (hence it is often referred to as “filler”). For ages fans have questioned the necessity of filler material in the Dragon Ball anime series, especially when it comes in large doses, and the most consistent answer always given is that it was necessary to prevent the anime from catching up to the manga’s storyline. Considering that typically only one chapter was released per week and each weekly episode could cover material from multiple chapters, this answer makes sense.
However, unless you were lucky enough to follow the series during its serialization from 1984 to 1995 in Weekly Shonen Jump and the broadcast of its anime adaptation on Fuji TV, there has never been any solid evidence compiled to back up this response. Is it true? Is conceding to filler even a valid response? Did the anime adaptation of Dragon Ball really catch up with the manga’s storyline, and if it did, by how much and how quickly?
To get to the bottom of this quandary, we have to travel back to the very beginning of the anime, which debuted on 26 February 1986. At that point in time the manga had reached its 63rd chapter, having already been in serialization for over a year. Using each chapter’s sale date, it is possible to match up the manga chapter and anime episode released every week, comparing the difference in the amount of the manga’s storyline covered that given week.
The first true milestone reached by the anime series came in August 1987, just a year and a half after its premiere. At this point the anime staff had halved the initial backlog of available manga material from 62 chapters down to 31. Throughout the remainder of the anime series this gap never recovered much beyond this margin, remaining at either roughly equal to or less than 31 chapters. After September 1989, which marked the beginning of the Dragon Ball Z anime series, the chapter gap would never again come close to that and hovered somewhere between 10 to 20 chapters until the very end.
In June 1991 the series finally hit its smallest chapter gap between the manga and anime with only 10 chapters of material remaining. This coincidentally occurred with the broadcast of Dragon Ball Z episode 97, the now infamous episode where Freeza fires a blast into Planet Namek and declares it will explode within five minutes. Anyone familiar with the series will often make some sort of casual joke about it being the longest five minutes in h
istory and proceed to blame the anime for making it even worse by stretching it out so much. However, did the anime really stretch it out?
Up until this point the series had been moving along rather consistently at an average rate of 1.3 chapters per episode, but following Freeza’s aforementioned statement, the point that the series hit its lowest chapter gap, everything slowed down a bit to an average rate of a single chapter per episode. So while it did take 10 episodes (DBZ 97-106) to cover this material, it also originally took 10 chapters (DB 319-328) in the manga. This change was no doubt done to ensure that the anime would not catch up with the manga any more than it already had. Immediately following the conclusion of the battle with Freeza, an anime-only arc featuring Garlic Jr. was created (bringing back the big bad from DBZ Movie 1), extending the gap back up to 22 chapters, the largest margin seen for the remainder of the series.
While there were numerous instances of short filler story arcs being created at previous points in the series, at no other point was it so paramount to truly avoid catching up with the manga. If the Garlic Jr. story arc had not been inserted at this point, the anime storyline would have entirely closed the gap with the manga within at most two and a half months and the series would more than likely have gone on hiatus. Think of it from the anime staff’s perspective. There would have been no way for them to plan ahead, especially with an author like Akira Toriyama, who typically created the story on the fly, often the very week he drew the chapter. While Toriyama would draw a chapter two weeks prior to it being published, the anime staff would begin planning an episode at minimum a month ahead of time. As you can imagine, they had no other choice but to insert filler material and double up the amount of available manga material.
While this quite definitively answers our question about filler material playing an essential role in preventing the anime from catching up with the manga, there is another unsung hero that plays quite a significant role in preventing this: syndication breaks. While television series in Japan don’t run in season formats, at least not as typically seen in counties like the United States, they do sometimes take weeks off due to special broadcasts covering various sports, news, or national events. Believe it or not, even with the use of filler material as was originally produced for the series, the anime would have caught up to the manga by Dragon Ball Z episode 48 if not for having spent roughly 20 weeks on break by that point. Conversely, if not for these breaks, it is more than likely that even more filler material would have been produced for the series. We would not just have Garlic Jr. and the afterlife tournament, but something else entirely added into the mix!
This does also make one wonder how fast the anime would have actually caught up without the use of any filler material. To figure that out it is a simple matter of subtracting out the full episodes of filler material. Up until that point 31 filler episodes had been created between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Therefore one can assume that with no filler material and no syndication breaks, the series would have caught up to the manga by Dragon Ball Z episode 17, putting the series somewhere around Chiaotzu’s suicide attack against Nappa.
In the end, filler is an inevitable part of the anime industry that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. For the companies involved, it is their solution to avoiding the loss of syndication time and advertising revenue. For the fans, it helps ensure that a new episode of their favorite long-running series airs each week, whether they like it or not.
HEATH (“Hujio”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He documents a lot of stuff there.
Homages…in Filler?! Journey West!
Fan of Dragon Ball? You need to read the original journey!
By Mike LaBrie
Many fans are at least vaguely familiar with Journey to the West, if only in concept, Toriyama’s original inspiration for some of the characters in the Dragon Ball series. The 16th century novel tells the tale of a wandering priest accompanied by a collective of beastly disciples working to atone for their sins. Their ultimate goal is a series of holy scrolls located in India, and thus their journey westward from China.
Son Goku’s name is literally just the Japanese reading of the Chinese name “Sun Wukong,” and the other carryovers in the character should be obvious: he’s a monkey with an extending pole that uses his “somersault cloud” to transport himself far and wide through the sky. Zhu Bajie, or “Pigsy” as he is often called, should be another obvious parallel; the lecherous Oolong is his clear cousin. The priest Xuanzang is the last of the more obvious parallels; his search for the scrolls mirrors Bulma’s search for the Dragon Balls as she collects her own friends along the way.
Once we get past these surface level similarities (and the occasional other reference, such as the Ox Demon King taking his name directly from the early chapters of Journey to the West as well), Toriyama heads in his own story-telling direction with the Tenka’ichi Budokai, the Red Ribbon Army, and onward from there.
But that’s not it for Journey to the West in the Dragon Ball series. Enter: filler material.
The Original Story
Two monsters conspire to kidnap Xuanzang; eating his flesh will grant them long life. Silver Horn (the younger brother) heads off with thirty minions, but only ends up capturing Zhu Bajie after twenty rounds of fighting. Fifty minions are then sent out. Silver Horn eventually goes out in disguise as an injured monk to lead them back to their home cave. Xuanzang tells Wukong to carry him, which he does...but he can tell the injured monk is a monster. Silver Horn eventually uses magic to pin Wukong down, grabs the priest, and heads home. The brothers send out Sly Devil and Wily Worm with two of their treasures—the red gourd of purple gold and the pure mutton-jade vase—to help capture Wukong. With these items, if they call out his name and he answers, he will immediately get sucked in and they can trap him with some magic words; after an hour and three quarters, he will be reduced to pus.
Wukong disguises himself as they come looking for him. He says he hates that monkey guy, too, and has them tell him all about what they’re up to and what these two treasures do. He turns a piece of his hair into a gourd of his own, which he says can hold heaven! Theirs can only hold up to two people, so they should trade, but only if he can prove his gourd can actually contain heaven. After some secret talkings with deities, the Jade Emperor arranges for the sky to be blackened out, which the brothers take to mean heaven is now inside the gourd. They make a trade, and vow to be struck with a plague should they ever regret their decision.
When Wukong disappears, the minions realize they’ve been swindled and head back to the brothers. They’ve lost two treasures, but still have the Seven Star Sword and the palm-leaf fan. Their mom has the other treasure (the yellow-gold rope), so they send another two minions (Hill-Pawning Tiger and Sea-Lolling Dragon) off to get her and the treasure. Wukong follows and interrupts them saying he’s a member of their clan, which they don’t believe until he tells them exactly what they’re doing, and that he was sent to tell them to hurry up since they’re probably just going to goof off and take too long. They get there, he knocks them out, takes a hair out, and disguises himself and his hair into the two minions sent to get the mom. He eventually gets going with the mom and some of her minions, but kills them all along the way before they get back to the brothers, and assumes her form.
Zhu Bajie can tell it’s Wukong since he saw his tail; Wukong (as the mom) says he’s not too keen on eating the priest, but the ears of that pig dude sound tasty. Zhu Bajie lets it slip who’s who at this point. Wukong is then attacked by the brothers with the Seven Star Sword, but it’s all fun and games to him; with his rod, this fight is a piece of cake. Golden Horn wants to give up, but Silver Horn at least wants to fight a few rounds and tosses on his armor. Wukong knows the gourd won’t work (since Silver Horn simply won’t answer to his name), so he lassos his head with the rope. Silver Horn knows spells against his own treasure, however, and ends up capturing Wukong. He drags him back, but Wukong just ends up escaping and disg
uising himself again as a minion. He swaps the rope for a fake one and transforms himself into a made-up fake brother of himself. He has the evil brothers call out this fake name, and wonders for a bit...if he responds to his fake name, will he get sucked in? Yep. He does. Trapped inside, he thinks about pissing or spitting for them to swish around and make it sound like he’s dissolving, but he just starts calling out “Oh no! My such and such is gone!” instead. He takes out a hair and transforms it into a half-dissolved version of himself, and flies out when they check inside and see the fake body. He disguises himself yet again as a minion, watching the brothers drink and drink and drink in celebration of their victory. When they’re good and drunk, he swaps the gourd for a fake one, keeping the real one for good.
Wukong says he’s ANOTHER brother of his with a different name and with a gourd much like their own. He tricks Silver Horn into explaining the history of the gourd and matches the story himself. They decide to call out and answer each other’s names—Silver Horn still thinks he has the real one, so he ends up getting sucked inside the one Wukong stole earlier. Golden Horn asks which treasures are left; the vase is now useless and passed on to Wukong, but he still has the Seven Star Sword and the fan. He calls up 300 minions and heads off to fight. After twenty or so rounds the minions just gang up on Wukong. They actually get more ferocious as they fight, so Wukong is forced to pluck out some hairs and duplicate himself. They tear apart the competition until it’s just Golden Horn left standing. He swipes the fan facing south to produce fire, which Wukong simply jumps over; he heads to the cave to rescue everyone...but ends up just grabbing the vase and leaving. Golden Horn is left by himself surrounded by corpses, so he falls into a deep sleep. Wukong goes back again to rescue everyone, but tip-toes in and tries to steal the weapons off of Golden Horn. He grabs the fan, but gently brushes Golden Horn’s neck with it, waking him up. He’s attacked again with the Seven Star Sword, but Wukong wins and Golden Horn takes off. Wukong unties everyone, and they hole up there for the night with a nice vegetarian dinner.