The Garlic Jr. Saga

I am writing this editorial to put forward my opinion on the Garlic JR saga. It was to be vain, a filler saga. This means that it was made purely to take up a few episodes. This saga did not feature Goku nor Vegeta, which I think that detracted from the viewing pleasure a little. Without these two guys, then the story will never be as interesting, no matter how cunning and complex it is, and no matter how well written, you need good characters, and Goku and Vegeta are the two best that there are. Whilst Piccolo is seriously cool, he cannot compete with a Super Saiyan, or a pride-stricken warrior with a hard posterior, and a cocky attitude. Gohan took up the role fairly well, although they were very limited for what they could do with him, as he managed only to get beat up, get mad, then kill the bad guys. Simple as that. If they would have used Piccolo a bit better, then it would have improved no end.

The part with Kami and Mr. Popo has got to be the world’s most boring collection of scene. It is almost as though it was composed by a small child, telling the animators what to draw. All that they did was take up about 10 minutes of every episode running like fools, and jumping away from the blasts. Maybe this could have been made to look remotely interesting, but they were running in a straight line, with the same clips being used, and then overused, over and over again. With these two featuring so strongly, and phasing Piccolo out of the fighting, it made for boring viewing. Whereas I am usually thoroughly excited to see the next intriguing episode of DBZ, with the Garlic JR saga, I was just hoping that it would all come to an end soon, so that it would go on to better things, such as the arrival of Trunks, and the androids.

Garlic JR himself was a bit stupid. He was beaten up by Kami at the start, yet Piccolo had a hard time defeating him. And is it just me, or did Piccolo’s struggle become a lot easier when Garlic JR transformed? To top that off, they knew about the Machio star all along, so why didn’t they just blow the humongous thing up? It took up half of the look out, and it was incredibly obvious where everyone was getting their power from.

There was one positive point from the mediocre saga though. Krillen got to feature in it a lot more than usual! True, he got beat senseless constantly as always, but that’s not the point. He managed to hurt people for once, and I must say, he was actually looking pretty cool in the clothes he was wearing for battle! I particularly liked the way that he gave that chap a good old headbutt into the spike.

On that subject, why is that the Machio star suddenly revived Garlic JR’s henchmen? Shouldn’t it have bought the other ones back to life too? It just doesn’t make sense does it now? Another thing is that they could have transformed straight away, and gained that increased muscle mass, killing everyone once and for all, but they didn’t. Whilst this may be traditional for the fights, I found it a little stupid, seeing how they weren’t strong enough in the first place to be messing around. Not even one of them had Frieza’s power in his first form, so it was a little stupid.

Speaking of comparing, if you compare Garlic JR’s power to Frieza’s by using Piccolo’s fighting skills against them, then you will realize that Garlic JR had a power level of around 700,000 in his second state. How could a single star make his level improve that much? Before it must have been 1,000 at the most. So what they are saying that this star can make his level go up so much? Another question that I would like to pose is where his henchmen came from. Garlic JR had only just escaped from the Dead Zone, so how would he have employed a group of followers so quickly? I believe that it was stupid.

The Gohan thing has been so overused too, as it will no doubt be for the rest of the ‘Z’ series. Gohan gets mad, kills bad guys, calms down, becomes weak again. Simple as that. That was the main thing implemented in this saga, and to be truthful, that was the high point of it. Personally, I quite like Gohan, and he is extremely cool in the way that he can take such a beating. The only problem is that he does the same thing in every battle.

_{In case you haven’t yet realized, I really didn’t like the Garlic JR saga, and I think it was a complete waste of time.}