This is a post from Mar 19, 2024 on Cohost!
I’ve made a couple TikToks about this, but something I find fascinating is the concept of “canon” when it comes to Dragon Ball, and specifically when it revolves around the pre-Super movies. There’s a subset of the fandom that tries very hard to fit it the DBZ movies in with the rest of the anime, and I’m not entirely sure why they do it. And I think it’s because there’s not a consideration for why the movies were made and what purpose they serve.
Let’s start by looking at the first Cooler movie, Dragon Ball Z: Cooler’s Revenge. This movie comes out July 20, 1991 at the Toei Anime Fair and tells a story of Frieza’s brother, Cooler, who has his sights set on revenge against Goku for beating Freiza during the Namek saga. Goku and pals fight Cooler’s goons and Cooler, Goku goes Super Saiyan, Goku saves the day. If we look at the movie, the big thing that happens here is the Cooler transformations and Goku’s Super Saiyan transformations, and it really does feel like a beat-for-beat retread of what happens in the anime and in the manga during the Frieza arc. Feels a bit odd, don’t you think?
If we look at what was happening in the manga between March 9, 1991 when the previous movie, Lord Slug, released and July 20, 1991 we see something interesting. Kanzenshuu notes:
Son Goku first transformed into a Super Saiyan in Chapter 317 of the manga on 19 March 1991, just 10 days after this movie premiered. The “Super Saiyan” transformation seen in this movie was conceived by the anime staff prior to this, and is different from what Akira Toriyama eventually solidified.
So it seems like the previous movie was made during a period of time when the Super Saiyan transformation was being teased and talked about in the manga, but before it was shown on the page, meaning they just went and did their own thing when making this movie. By the time Cooler’s Revenge comes out on July 20, 1991, the last manga chapter “Son Goku Comes Home” is released, which is 4 chapters into the then-current Artificial Human arc. The team has seen the Super Saiyan transformation and Toriyama has provided designs for Super Saiyan Goku, Cooler, and Cooler’s goons (according to Kanzenshuu), so it looks like this movie exists partially to take one more stab at depicting the Super Saiyan transfortmation in a movie.
As noted above, this movie is released during the 1991 Summer Toei Anime Fair. Kanzenshuu describes the fair as such:
The event originated from the “Toei Manga Festival” that was established by Toei in 1969 as a way to showcase their popular children’s series as theatrical films during seasonal breaks in the school year. In Japan, almost all schools below the university level run a three-term school year (trimester system) with a vacation period of several weeks to a month at the end of each trimester: spring vacation, summer vacation, and winter vacation. The movies were screened together back-to-back in various cities across Japan, with a typical total running time of roughly three hours. Most festivals would last roughly one month, or as long as the seasonal vacation allowed.
Putting all this together, here’s what I see:
A movie was made attempting to recapture lightning in a bottle. Goku turning Super Saiyan during the Frieza fight was a huge deal, and happened just around the time a new movie would be made by Toei to take advantage of nationwide school holidays. They’d already tried to depict a Super Saiyan transformation earlier in the year, but because the manga hadn’t shown off the transformation by the time Lord Slug finished production, their version differed greatly from what would show up in the manga. Now that they had the official transformation, and the exact story beats that would lead up to that transformation, they could try and do the whole thing again.
If this movie is canon or not doesn’t really matter, because that’s not what the movie is there for. Nothing that happens in these movies really impacts the ongoing story being told in the manga, as it’s not like Goku and the gang are talking about Cooler in the lead up to the Cell Games. While Daizenshuu 6 “classifies this movie as an event that fits within the continuity of the original story” (Kanzenshuu), it’s reasoning is based on one line in the whole movie and doesn’t take into account all the other weird inconsistencies about the movie. It’s not there to flesh anything out, it’s there to be another adventure with Goku and friends that could be sold to kids in the summer of 1991.
This is something pretty clear when you look at other Dragon Ball Z movies, as well. The next movie, The Return of Cooler is released March 7, 1992 and features a Super Saiyan Vegeta with Super Saiyan Goku, Super Android 13! is released July 11, 1992 and plays off of having Trunks and the Artificial Humans introduced, and Bojak Unbound is released July 10, 1993 and capitalized heavily on Gohan’s Super Saiyan 2 transformation and Gohan’s defeat of Cell.
These stories aren’t meant to be part of the overall narrative, and that’s completely fine. They don’t need to fit ’cause they’re not meant to fit, and that’s completely fine.