The first shot of Dragonball Z is of a large mountain. Pretty apt, I’d say. I wonder how many episodes before somebody gets thrown through it, or a stray energy beam strikes it?
The narrator explains that it has been five years since King Piccolo’s very brief reign as, well, King. The world has recovered since that time, the healing process has begun, but now, the narrator intones, a new evil is about to arrive, bringing the short time of peace crashing to a halt. I can’t remember everything about the King Piccolo arc in the original Dragonball, but I would imagine having the world’s ruler replaced briefly by some horrible green monster man who, one day out of the year, would destroy a random city seems like a pretty damn history-changing event. And now, here comes (more) aliens. The human race never, ever catches a break in Dragonball Z.
As the first villain of the series, Raditz—joke he may become not too long afterwards—has the job of setting a tone for the entire Saiyan arc, and by extension everything that follows. The farmer (carrying a “pea shooter”) is his first confrontation, and he treats it as an amusing, cute little distraction, barely even regarding him as he voices his frustration that the Earth is still populated. He uses the device we will soon become familiar with as the scouter to gauge the human’s power level: 5. Smirking, he makes a step toward the farmer, who—already terrified at having seen this large, armor-clad man float out of a spaceship—fires a shot. Raditz catches the bullet with his bare hand and flicks it right back at the farmer, probably at a faster speed than the gun ejected it. And that gives us our first on-screen death in this series.
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