English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “A Run-Through for the Competition – Who Are the Last Two Members?!”

Settle in, everyone. It’s a clip show.

Spoilers Below

Courtesy: Adult Swim

With the tournament in four days, Goku and Vegeta still have to find two more members of their team. The leader, and supposedly strongest fighter in the universe, is an acquaintance of Beerus’ by the name of Monaka. The two Saiyans fly off to Mr. Satan’s house to recruit their first member when Krillin arrives. He’s been informed through the grapevine that the two of them were headed off to a space picnic, and he’s planning on joining them. Since Chichi is still being a stickler for Goku getting involved in anything in the ballpark of fighting, he had to give her an excuse. Vegeta explains what is going down, and Krillin comes along to help recruit. At Mr. Satan’s place, they recruit Buu. The fat one, not the evil one. The evil one has only now been reincarnated as a human boy. Buu joins up, wanting to make a wish on the Super Dragon Balls. Not for himself, but for Mr. Satan, who has always treated him so well.

In the meantime, Beerus and Whis reminisce over their experience with Goku while enjoying cup ramen. Apparently, both have mysterious and unrevealed agendas behind their actions. Whis seems to have some goals behind the order in which he brought the Saiyans to Beerus’ planet. He was giving Vegeta the chance to catch up to his rival. And Beerus? Well, who knows what he’s thinking anyway? Goku, Vegeta, and Krillin arrive at their next recruit. Piccolo and Gohan are out in the wilderness, training the young half-breed from the ground up. At first, Gohan volunteers, hoping to put all his retraining to good use. Unfortunately, the tournament happens when he has an important scholarly conference to go to, and Videl is counting on his paycheck. Piccolo agrees to stand in. With arrangements made, all that is left is to get everyone trained to the next level. Piccolo heads off for private meditation, while the two saiyans leave for Dende’s Lookout to spend three days in the hyperbolic time chamber.

Okay, I left it out of my summary above, but literally every turn of this episode brought in at least two minutes of stock footage from previous episodes. I don’t know how you feel about review episodes, but I am not a fan. Unless that episode has the review woven into the plot, it isn’t all that interesting. This one kind made an attempt to weave it in, but a halfway one. They got far enough to bring up the subject, then dived into the clips. The great part about the English dub was that they were fully aware of the lackluster writing, and kicked it up a notch with their own changes. Krillin narrates his own bit, mimicking the girls’ voices as best he can. Then, as the narrator is explaining the rules of the tournament, he actually gets angry and argues with Goku over who should be doing the narration. The humor lifts up the rather bland clip show and keeps it interesting.

Because of the alterations to the writing, the voice actors were able to shine a lot better than their Japanese counterparts. Sonny Straight was really fun to listen to as Krillin mocking the girls. Sean Schemmel (Goku) and Christopher Sabat (Vegeta) were much more engaging than I remember them being in previous episodes, possibly because the script was a bit more lax than usual. The only place where I really dock the episode on its technicals was in the animation. There weren’t any errors that I could see, but there was some laziness in the cycled frames of speech. There was more effort put into this than I would have expected for a clip episode, but not enough to make the episode worth watching. When you look at it, the original Japanese episode was a throwaway. You could have skipped it and never known the difference. The English Dub doesn’t make the episode necessary, but it at least makes it more entertaining. Because of that, I give the episode seven stock footage sequences out of ten.

SCORE
7.0/10