A preview of doom to come

I’m scared. I’m so scared. Have you ever seen a movie poster or preview and known deep in your heart of hearts that the film is going to be a complete waste of popcorn?

No? Well then take a look at THIS:



That’s right, they’re making a live action dragon ball movie. This is going to suck.

Dragonball, for those of you who don’t know, is a classic Japanese manga and anime series that draws its initial influence heavily from Journey to the West, only set in a SF/Fantasy world. The dragon balls in question are 7 orange spheres that, if brought together, will summon a dragon who grants wishes. This eventually (d)evolved into a martial arts action show that became famous for large muscle bound men screaming at each other, politely waiting for the other to power up their energy attacks, and for “5 minute” battles that went on for 30 freaking episodes. There was a third series that was made after the original author quit over creative differences (Read: He was creative, they weren’t), but most fans try to forget about this.

Creative immorality aside, Dragonball became one of the biggest cash cows in the history of Japanese popular culture. New merchandise comes out every few months despite the series ending more than ten years ago. And the desperate shilling gets absolutely overwhelming. Even today, I saw a minimart that was selling Dragonball branded chicken nuggets.

Now let’s examine that poster. First of all, this is obviously the Japanese version of the poster so I will provide a little translation. The main words written in stone are Katakana (one of the 2 phonetic Japanese alphabets, used for foreign/borrowed words) and read Dragonball. The sentence written in the sky means:The legend becomes reality. The smaller writing at the bottom simply says that the world premier is Friday March 13th 2009 (Friday the 13th doesn’t mean anything in Japan). This is smart planning as that is the weekend leading into Spring Break. The large Kanji on the main character’s back is kame (亀), means turtle, and refers to the main character’s martial arts style.

Analysis time. At first glance, this doesn’t look too bad the costume is accurate to the main character, Goku:



The dragonball in the poster actually looks cooler than the ones in the anime. And the hair is the closest you can realistically expect a human being to have to the real thing. So far so good. The only questions left are logistical. But I’m sure that, with modern CGI for the famous fireball attacks, Toei (makers of Godzilla, Ultraman, Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, etc) will be able to pull this off.

Wait a sec, what’s that? Takes out a magnifying glass and examines the icon in the lower right hand corner.
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20th . . .century . . . F…O…X.
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.*blink* *blink*
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And it gets even worse, check out the American version of the poster:



He’s white? What in the name of God’s glorious golden gallbladder is that about? They couldn’t find an Asian guy to star in a martial arts film based on a Japanese cartoon? Or are they just assuming the audience is that stupi-do I even want to know the answer to that?

This is going to be horrible. It’s going to bomb in the states and whoever it was at Shonen Jump who decided to green light this is going to end up committing ritual suicide if the fans don’t get to him first.

All that means nothing, I’m going to see the film. If for no other reason than the pleasure I will draw from mocking it.

Next time, I get to those anime reviews I mentioned last time. Unless I get distracted by something shiny.