Dragon Ball/Headscratchers/Original Series: Difference between revisions

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== Emperor Pilaf Saga ==

*** Very, very loosely based on, and quite rapidly abandoned.

*** Goku still shapeshifts. Take a look at the moon. Hell, he does it "at the finale" of the introductory first arc.

** It was definitely based on Journey To The West (originally), but by no means was it a retelling. In fact, in the Chinese version of Dragonball, Son Goku is actually called "Son Wu Kong". Some more similarities include the flying cloud and the extending rod, 2 of the Monkey King's SIGNATURE items, not to mention super strength. Further more, lots of the story elements are borrowed from the Chinese legend, such as the story of the Ox King and the Bansho fan (not named so, but still in the legends). Rabbits living on the moon is also borrowed from a classic Chinese legend. In DBZ, they quickly changed Goku's story so that he was actually an alien, and ditched his cloud and rod, removing his connections to Chinese folklore.

** Oolong is clearly Zhū Bājiè (pig, requiring tributes from commoners, several vices). Yamcha could be Sha Wujing, but it's less similar. What strikes more is that no one is searching to atone their vices.

** Simple math. Goku was a little bit better than Tao, which is why Tao was resorting to the trickery with the grenade. Why would Tao expect a grenade that can't even kill him to kill someone even better? So obviously he had one hell of a grenade. Plus, Tao is totally [[Immune to Bullets]].

*** Dragon Ball tech is all over the place, with police in hover-cars equipped with energy guns who carry around apparently normal revolvers and a military that flattens a mountain using a short bombardment of artillery and hand held weapons fire. Besides, Tao has access to someone who can turn him into a super-powerful cyborg (maybe Dr. Gero, if they met before Red Ribbon had hired him?), so its quite plausible for him to know where to buy a sickeningly powerful grenade. And Goku was almost immune to bullets in his first appearance, and Tao (in addition to casually throwing pillars across continents and brainstabbing a guy who was barely scratched from crashing a jet into a mountain at full speed ''with his tongue'') easily punked a Goku who was orders of magnitudes stronger and tanked a Kamehameha as well.

 

* What happened to Arale and company before the Saiyans arrived? When she first meets Goku she's stronger than him, and I'm sure she's been training since then. Surely she'd put up some kind of a fight.