So this episode is pretty slow. Really, all that happens is the draw for the tournament brackets, which really shouldn’t take up a whole episode, but here we are. Also, Gohan is still struggling to keep Videl from finding out all his friends and family are alien superheroes.
Meanwhile, Trunks has a scheme to infiltrate the tournament: He and Goten will ambush one of the competitors and they’ll wear his gear together.
So yeah, this is Mighty Mask, a pretty unremarkable character. For some reason he wears a monk robe when he fights, and also a cape with a pointy cowl.
Trunks lures him away from the group by talking about a pretty girl who wants to meet him, and then he knocks him out cold. So Trunks is now 3-0 today.
Unmasked, Mighty Mask looks a lot like Danny Devito, only buff.
And this is the result of Trunks brilliant plan. Perfect? No, not quite. Goten can’t see where he’s going, and he’s the legs of this outfit.
Now it’s perfect.
The Tournament Announcer starts caling people up to draw numbers, and Kibito... hahaha what the fuck?
Dude, what happened?
I thought something was weird in this shot, so I did a frame-by-frame to figure out which frame had the bad eye placement, but it turns out it was all of them. How did this happen?
Trunks’ plan starts out okay, except he never learned Mighty Mask’s name, so he doesn’t know when to go over to draw his number. When Spopovitch’s name is called several times, Trunks assumes that he and Goten must be impersonating him, but when they try to draw, the real Spopovitch finally answers and yanks them away.
The only really cool moment here is when Vegeta draws his number, and he gets #12, which means he’s seeded against #11 in the first round, and that’s Goku.
So fuck yeah, Vegeta not only gets to fight Goku in this tournament, but it’s going to happen in the opening round.
So, just to make this official, the brackets are: Krillin vs. Punter.
Shin vs. Piccolo.
Videl vs. Spopovitch.
Kibito vs. Great Saiyaman.
18 vs. Mr. Satan.
Goku vs. Vegeta.
Mighty Mask vs. Killa.
Yamu vs. Jewel.
Not that it really matters, since this tournament goes haywire pretty early on, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The announcer goes over the rules, but we’ve all seen this before. The only new twists on the tournament are that there’s 16 competitors instead of 8, and now there’s a thirty-minute time limit. If the time expires, the match goes to a judge’s decision. So yeah, that’s pretty much it for this episode. I wouldn’t say that it’s bad, but it probably deserves a place on the ten worst Dragon Ball episodes, just for how badly it drags along. This could have easily been one third of a better episode.
