I spent summer going through it! I hadn’t watched it since the 90s.
I remembered the song when Trunks arrives, it was dope to hear it again so long after the first time.
I had totally given up on the Cell arc, beyond stupid and not making sense at all after Freeza (robots? Really???). Listen, it made sense to go from a kid who can drill a hole in a car with a Kamehameha, to fighting a destroyer of planets. After that Cell and Buu simply don’t have the drama and sense of urgency that Freeza’s arc has. It just drags on forever and the added humor with Mr. Satan is foul to me. But OK!
The sound design triggers nostalgia. When I didn’t know how to make those sounds. Now I do! “filtered slap on a slab of meat + filtered kick drum + filtered white noise through delay and a slight synth (probably MS-20) layer with pitch-bend.” And there you have your fist impact in the enemy’s face. I wouldn’t have enough of those sound effects growing up. Big subconscious sound design career push, right there.
Even though I felt like having a wide variety of settings in hands (European, 70s 80s and 90s comic books) in my fictional worlds, Dragon Ball still brought something different and still does today. I think it’s the Big Asia’s influence designed by Akira. Brown and black bystanders, beaches with palm trees, high technology and traditions. Akira drew his inspiration from the East of this planet; Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Korea of course Japan. It is still fresh to a Westerner like me. Love that.