Dragon Ball Z: Goku, o Super Saiyajin

This is the fourth Dragon Ball Z movie released during the series Japanese TV run. A planetoid is averted by Goku and Krillin and later explodes and descending upon it is a band of sun-sensitive alien nomads led by an aging Super Namek named Slug, who uses the Dragon Balls to regain his youth and plans to terrafreeze Earth into a starship. Defending the planet are Goku, Krillin, Piccolo, and Gohan. This movie suffers from an extremely shallow and ill-conceived plot. It seems that this movie's screenwriter did this movie's story in a very hurried and half-hearted effort (which made a lot of sense, considering that by this point, Toei Animation called for 2 Dragon Ball Z movies to be released annually in March and July to be screened at Toei's annual anime fairs and in theaters). Nearly ever aspect of this movie looked like it was put together without much thought, including the villains, the plot, the animation (from time to time), and in many of the scenes such as how Slug is stopped. The plot often repeats elements found in the previous DBZ movie, Earth's Ultimate Deciding Battle a.k.a. The Tree Of Might. This DBZ movie, purely seen as a regular movie, is one of the worst. If you are a hardcore Dragon Ball Z fan, I'm sure you will find it at least watchable.

GRADE: 1 out of 5 stars

As a huge "Dragonball Z" fan, I thought this wasn't that good. It was just typical of the movies. It did seem like just a long episode of the show, albeit not that long. I'll never understand how these movies got released in theaters with such short running times. Anyway, this movie features a villain named Lord Slug coming to Earth and...that's about it. It's not bad.

It's just that there's nothing unique about it. Villains like Cooler and Broly were much more interesting. Cooler was uh, cooler, hee hee. Still, there are some twists and storytelling and it's a completely harmless movie. If you want a better DBZ movie, you probably are better off watching the other films. Of course, it's no "Dragonball: Evolution"... **1/2

I have watched the kiddy American version of Dbz and I have to say that the original Japanese versions are much better (of course the Japanese created Dbz).

Not only that, the one American writer should have pointed out that the dubbed version of Dbz and their movies cut out several scenes, and insert their own corny and kiddy dialouge instead of the original Japanese language.

Goku, Kuririn , Mr. Piccolo are at the super best when you watch them subtitled.

The movie rocks.

Oh yeah, I have all dbz from 1-13 all uncut. Eat your heart out all English dbz fans, because Cartoon Network has still showed the same mediocre English for 5 years now.

I watched the dubbed version of this movie first, so I'll begin with it. First of all I would like to state that the music in the American version was simply atrocious and even a bit insulting for DBZ. The dub voices are slightly better than the ones from Ocean Group but still aren't very good. At least none of them are as annoying as most of the Ocean voices were.

The thing I most liked about the original version was the music. Superb, as always. The Japanese voices are really cool (also as always), although Goku's voice is quite annoying and too feminine. I think they should have replaced Masako Nozawa with a male actor for DBZ.

Anyway, on to the plot - certainly not as nice as the ones of the previous movies, but still better than the plots of most animes and since it's DBZ it's pretty good. But they used an almost totally different definition for the term "Super Namekian" than they did in the series.

I recommend the previous three movies more than this one - not only because they have better plots, also because the dubbed versions have the original music score in them, because of which I'm willing to put up with the annoying voices.

"Lord Slug" is a very middle of the road DBZ movie. This one doesn't hold the same nostalgia for me that the first three movies do. Those were all aired on Toonami and that is where I watched and recorded them. This one I didn't get around to watching until much later.

On the plus side, where most DBZ movies are just rehashes of DBZ storylines, this one is a rehash of an original DB storyline. Lord Slug makes the same wish as King Piccolo did back in the original Dragon Ball.

On the positive side, the villain is able to transform and give us a new varied fight set up. The villain has a unique weakness to be exploited.

Other than that, all the other positives are mainly just beats that happen in a lot of DBZ movies. Piccolo and Goku teaming up, a spirit bomb, Gohan and other Z fighters helping at first but then being useless towards the end. All stuff that we have seen in the other DBZ movies.

On its own, the movie is pretty good. But because it falls in the middle of a film/anime franchise that does so much of the same thing, this one comes across as just that, middling.