Dark comedy: one of the series’ greatest strengths.
“Vegeta: Kills Bugs Dead” is a strange episode of Dragonball Z: Abridged. On the one hand, a lot of this episode helps solidify Team Four Star’s comedic style, with two of the most quotable jokes from the series being used for the first time here. On the other hand, most of the episode is spent on an “A-story” that is completely irrelevant to the plot, and the rest of the episode is too disjointed to clearly follow, jumping around between three different scenarios without no real thematic or tonal connection. And yet, the strangest thing about this episode is that despite its clear weaknesses, it works decently well.
Our “A-story” is with Vegeta and Nappa, who while traveling to earth, make a brief pit stop on Arlia, a planet home to a race of locust people. They’re imprisoned immediately on arrival, and discover that the people of Arlia are ruled by a terrible despot. Naturally, neither Nappa nor Vegeta care about their fate, and upon being propositioned by another prisoner, Vegeta breaks out and makes his way to the throne room. After Nappa instantaneously defeats their elite guards, he forces the king and queen to mate in front of him, which leads Vegeta to kill them, fly off of the planet, and destroy it entirely. This is a dark story, make no mistake, and Team Four Star doesn’t actually shy away from the darkness, letting the absolute tragedy of it all sink in on us as it does with Nappa.
Of course, Team Four Star is still making a comedy, and so the rest of this episode seems designed to counteract the darkness of Vegeta and Nappa’s story. We see more of Piccolo training Gohan, which is always a treat, and Gohan fails to dodge Piccolo’s attacks over and over again, to great comedic effects. Goku finishes traveling along Snake Way and meets King Kai, who immediately agrees to train him out of loneliness, and reveals that the secret to the increased gravity on his planet is not because it is small, but because there is the spirit of a powerful pirate residing in the core. And in a completely unexpected aside, we go to the Hall of Justice, where the Justice League attempts to find a solution to the threat of the approaching Saiyans, who all groan at Aquaman’s desperate suggestion to use whales.
Team Four Star doesn’t succeed at mixing comedy and dark drama as well here as they eventually do, but episode 5 of DBZA hints at their interest in doing so, and shows their ability to shine as storytellers when working with stories like this. The darkness clashes with the comedy more often than it meshes in this episode, and some of the jokes aren’t properly established, and therefore miss completely (I love Super Kami Guru, but he’s only funny if you know who he is), but the episode works well, on the whole, and out of the episodes I’ve reviewed, it is the strongest one yet.
Rating: 3.5/5
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