Ryland Staples | Staff Writer
Editor’s note: This article contains movie spoilers.
The Dragon Ball franchise has been a part of countless people’s lives for decades: from the original Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super and even the not-so-talked-about Dragon Ball GT. It has been here for decades, and with the release of the new movie, Dragon Ball Super: Broly, we were all reminded of why Dragon Ball still has a special place in people’s hearts to this day.
The character of Broly is not actually new to the Dragon Ball fanbase; he actually came from a movie that was released in 1993, Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan. This recent movie that came out was a retelling of the story in order to make him a part of the main storyline of Dragon Ball in the future.
With the popularity of anime rising by the day, it is easy to suspect anime movies would have such good success in the box office. According to Funimation Films, the film opened at No. 1 in the U.S. on opening day, a Wednesday. With more than $7 million earned on opening day, the film far surpassed the $1.97 million set by the previous Dragon Ball movie, Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’.
Personally, I loved how the movie started out in the past on planet Vegeta. It did a good job giving us further backstory on how the home planet of the Saiyan race came to its dramatic demise, as well as the mistakes of the past that live on through the present. It goes into how King Cold was the one who was originally took control of the planet and when he went into “retirement,” he made his son, Frieza, in charge of the planets that he took over.
King Vegeta (yes, both the planet and his son are named after him) was looking at his son, Vegeta, in his development pod. He was so excited about his son’s amazing power level.
However, another baby in a development pod, Broly, had a power level twice as powerful as Vegeta’s level. King Vegeta did not like that, so he sends baby Broly to a vacant planet to essentially be killed.
Paragus, Broly’s father confronted King Vegeta about this and was exiled from planet Vegeta. Paragus finds Broly on the vacant planet, and they are both stranded on the vacant planet for more than 40 years.
Five years after that, Bardock, Goku’s father gets called back to planet Vegeta by Frieza along with every other Saiyan. He then sent his son to a faraway planet called Earth. Soon after that, Frieza destroyed the entire planet with just a flick of his finger.
Frieza finds both Paragus and Broly and convinces them to join his army. They all go to Earth to get the Dragon Balls, and Broly fights against Goku and Vegeta.
With the intensity of the fight and how Broly seems to adapt to everything Goku and Vegeta are throwing at him, they fuse and became Gogeta.
The movie was a masterpiece, and, in my opinion, it is one of the best Dragon Ball movies to date. I can’t wait for what Akira Toriyama has in store for us in the future.
The Hampton Script 